Next, he directed that the two Porta-vator T-bars be brought over. He slipped the lower bars under the tops of the handles and used some durastress cable he also had requested to bind them to the handles.
A simple press of the UP buttons caused the two lifts to rise. As they did, the others put their backs into the task and soon the hatch had been lifted up and shoved to the side.
Tom stopped the lifts and reversed them lowering everything to the ground.
“Okay. Bud and Zimby are with me. Duanne you stay out here just for safety. Be ready to get out of the cone if we get into trouble. Red’ll know what to do once you report to him.”
The three who would enter turned on their helmet lights to full strength and looked down into the hole.
“Okay,” Tom stated with a little surprise mixed with happiness, “that answers the question of how we get down inside.”
In the lights they all saw the platform about twelve feet down with the wide and deep stairs leading to their right. The low gravity made the drop down feel like only about two feet which they managed to handle with ease.
With great caution they began to descend the stairs, obviously meant for some beings larger than man. They went around a curving corner about thirty feet down and kept moving in a wide circle another hundred feet or about seventy steps.
At the bottom was a room with only the stairs at one end and a second hatch—this one open about half way—twenty feet away.
“This area must have been some sort of airlock. Not much good now,” Bud stated.
Tom asked Zimby to stand guard at the open door while he and Bud moved forward.
They stepped out and into a pitch black cavern. Once Tom activated a small pod he’d brought out of his suit pocket, the immediate area was bathed in bright light. Now they could see it was more than a cavern, it was an enormous hall so wide and deep their lights could not penetrate. Tom looked up and could see the roof was easily fifty or more feet above them.
“Can you tell if this place was natural and only used by some aliens or did they carve it out?” Bud asked.
“Flat floor says this isn’t natural. Whatever they were, the aliens sure appear to have put this to some good use. Look around. There are signs this place was once filled with… things!”
“Do you think these aliens had anything to do with your Space Friends?” Bud asked, a shudder running through his body.
Tom could only shake his head slowly. “I don’t know, Bud. They might not be the beings we have called our friends; we met them a couple years back. But, they have alluded to larger and more powerful beings as their ‘masters’. Maybe…” His voice trailed off.
The two men looked around at the vast cavern before they began walking in the direction away from where they had entered. They passed dozens of pieces of deteriorating equipment, none of which made sense to them.
Bud shivered. “This place gives me the willies. It has to be a half mile across and curved just like the surface. Nothing looks like it has seen a service or an oil job in about ten-thousand years and everything we’ve touched sort of disintegrates. All except for that!” and he swung his arm around to point to an object that had just come into view as they passed something that must have been a building at one time.
Tom stopped to activate another light, and Bud walked into his back.
It was a statue some twenty feet tall and it was definitely something out of most people’s nightmares.
“They must have worshiped dinosaurs, don’t you think?” When Bud received no answer, he added, “Right?”
“I honestly don’t know, flyboy. That is, with leeway for Earth artists’ renditions based solely on bones that have been found over the decades, this statue appears surprisingly like a tyrannosaurus. Remember that as man progressed we stopped putting up statues to our gods and changed to ones of ourselves.”
Bud gulped finding his throat had gone quite dry. “Lucky us…”
The statue represented an upright lizard about twenty feet tall with small arms just below the up-stretched neck and huge, powerful-looking hind legs. The differences between what people had believed for decades and this was the tail was longer by at least three feet and the snout was longer with a thicker lip structure.
If there had been teeth in the statue they had fallen victim to time, but there was certainly enough room in the mouth for many dozens of long and probably exceptionally sharp teeth.
Tom found his courage and stepped toward the stone figure while Bud preferred to hang back a little. He would be the first to jump forward it Tom got into trouble, but he had a little problem with snakes and lizards. They gave him, what he called, the heebie-jeebies!
Now that he looked closer, the inventor could tell these lizard beings had had terrible claws possibly capable of ripping open their chosen dinner—or an opponent for territory—with a single swipe of their hind feet. The arm—and one was mostly broken off and missing from the statue—would have only been effective at very close range, probably for pulling chunks of flesh to consume rather than for fighting.
All in all, if this were a true representation of the former occupants of the cavern and of Phobos, Tom was happy they were long gone.
“If I could only get our friends to answer a simple message, Bud,” he said turning to face the still-nervous man who had been inching forward, “they likely could tell us who these being were.” He sighed.
After walking around the icon he commented, “I think this must be a twice size representation. The entryway we came through and the few items still in partially recognizable condition would indicate our visitors—and I have to believe they were not native to this chunk of rock—were about ten feet tall as I originally said.”
“Or,” Bud said feeling a shiver traveling up and down his spine, “they were this big and ducked when they came in.” Tom turned to look at his friend. He was thinking about Bud’s words a moment before nodding.
“You could very well be right, flyboy.”
With both their helmets taking detailed measurements and high-definition videos of all they encountered, they only paused another few seconds before traveling on.
The floor was even more strewn with what likely had been buildings the more they explored the cavern. It made seeing what might lay a hundred feet in front of them difficult.
As they rounded a fallen-in structure both Tom and Bud skidded to a halt, their blood draining from their faces. In front of them was a raised platform some five feet above the ground level, and atop it was an altar along with the thing that had nearly stopped their hearts.
Inside what appeared to be a glass-enclosed box were the preserved remains of one of the lizards. Although damaged by time, reptilian skin was still covering nearly all the skeletal structure and the face—the spookiest things about it—lay facing them, its eyes (probably synthetic, Tom thought) were open as if the final thing the being inside had wanted to do was to see anyone coming by.
“We’re all seeing the videos,” Red radioed. “What a find! Do you intend to explore the entire place?”
Tom fought with himself over the forthcoming decision.
“No. We’ll look around for another hour or so and then come back out. This is going to need a large team of experts and archeologists to properly explore. All I think I want to do is get a couple samples of some of the materials down here.”
He and Bud moved farther into the cavern eventually coming to a stone structure that had mostly survived. It was more like an exhibition hall than a storage building. Inside, on the side walls, were carvings of symbols.
The same symbols his Space Friends used!
Bud took the left wall and Tom the right and they got video of all the symbols. As he turned to head back to the doorway the inventor spotted what must have been a table. On it were three small cubes, or boxes. He gingerly touched the first one. When it failed to fall into a pile of dust he carefully picked it up. It was made of some sort of plastic and had stood the test of time. It wa
s impossible to see how or where it might open but he knew it had to have some significance. He placed it into the padded samples case attached to his chest.
He and Bud met up and the flyer grinned. “Guess what I found.”
“Some boxes?”
With a shake of his head, he replied, “Nope! Something that looks like a video headset. Meant for a big head… kinda like one of those dinos out there,” he said, pointing.
Walking out of the hall they made a wide sweep to their left around the hall and several other buildings—none of which were in as good a shape—before deciding to go back to see how Zimby was faring.
“Mostly bored,” was his answer, “except that I did step over to the right and found a sort of library. All their books or whatever were so much dust but on what might have been a cover was one of those symbols your little gray friends use. I’ll guess you also found some of that sort of stuff.”
Tom nodded and told him of the treasures of the hall.
As they left the cavern, mostly unexplored, Tom made up his mind.
He would do everything he could to ensure Phobos continued orbiting Mars. It would not be destroyed; it would be moved back… and permanently!
CHAPTER 18 /
“YOU’RE IN FOR A BUMPY RIDE”
TRANSPACE DART made the trip back to Earth in near record time. The orientation of both planets was still relatively close for the trip.
Before leaving Tom had set up a series of sensors—for gravity and side-to-side/up-and-down acceleration for the most part—to manage the power and use of the reconfigured Goliath to shove Phobos back up into its regular position whenever it strayed by more than one-quarter of a mile, but it was going to take the combined power of the three power pods to provide energy to shove and keep it there.
Repositioning shoves were going to be taking place twice or even three time per Martian day.
For an unknown reason the gravity had been climbing steadily over eight days. It stabilized and reduced for a week after that.
Now the inventor was back at his desk he set out to calculate the energy available from his power sources along with current drain and was satisfied that unless the gravity stone was capable of greater that 56% Earth normal, the large ship would have sufficient power to do the job.
To date it had not surpassed 49%.
“The really frustrating thing,” he told Haz Sampson, “is that we have to find a final solution. I’m going to need Goliath someday and you need the safety of a Phobos that behaves, so I think on my next trip I’m digging into that cavern and taking the gravity stone out!”
The large man looked at his friend’s face on the video link. “Are you going to do that rather that investigate the treasure trove that is the giant cavern of those lizard beings?”
Tom grinned. “Nope. My intent is to pack the Dart with a team of experts and give them enough supplies to live outside your domes until the two planets come back into close orientation to do whatever it takes to look at, catalog and save anything they can.”
As he was leaving his office that late evening Tom detoured to the Communications building and sent a message to the Space Friends:
To Space Friends from Later Swift.
If you are near your outpost close to
planet Mars, please try to contact me.
We are still at a loss to access the
gravity stone inside the small Mars
moon, Phobos. It is often sets to a very
powerful level and may cause moon
to fall from orbit.
We may need to destroy Phobos to
safeguard our colony, but would rather
just turn stone down to low setting
if possible. Or remove it to a new
location.
Have entered large cavern with many
items that seem to be from a race
of lizards or reptiles. Your Masters?
Were they seed life for our Earth
dinosaur lifeforms?
If you have anything you can tell me
or do to change this unnatural gravity
or anything about the lizards, please
contact me as soon as possible. Again,
if we receive no indication from you that
you might help, we will remove Phobos
from orbit and destroy it.
“Any chance they’ll answer?” Hank asked the next morning when he and Tom were discussing options for the Phobos dig.
“I tend to doubt it, Hank, but you never know. Perhaps just them knowing we’ve found the lizard race may make a difference. If not directly to them, perhaps their Masters will read that message and realize we now know a lot more than we did a week ago and let the Space Friends call us.”
“You didn’t tell them much about the big cavern. On purpose?”
“Yes. If they know about it I want them to come forward with information. If it is all news to them, there is no use in giving them info they likely will have to provide to their Masters who might decide to come see for themselves. We aren’t ready for that sort of intergalactic guest.”
“Do you believe they might come with bad intentions?”
Tom shook his head, but changed that to a slight nod and a shrug. “We just don’t know. The former Masters, at least the one I interacted with, Garl, was unpleasant, dictatorial and brusk, but saw reason once it was pointed out to him. They also honored our desire to not have them come here. I have no idea what these new ones want or might do.”
“Right. No good inviting potential trouble. Back to the cavern, what happens if this group of diggers finds something, well, incredible or even dangerous?”
“Then, even if we are on the opposite side of the sun, it will be back to Mars and Phobos with whoever we might need.”
* * * * *
“You know something, Dad? I now believe that gravity stone may not be malfunctioning after all,” Tom stated that afternoon as the two Swifts sat having coffee. “I’ve studied everything we have from the incident logs and there is a pattern. I’m thinking someone is directing that stone to turn up and down. Or, set it to do that.”
“Okay. Let us suppose you are correct. Why?”
“You may laugh, but I’m thinking whoever they might be, they want us to leave Phobos alone. We get too close and they turn up the power. We retreat and down it goes. The only problem with that theory is that I can’t see a pattern in where we have been or done before the gravity increases.”
Damon was shaking his head. “I have to tell you I don’t agree with the basic theory, or not with it as a blanket answer. Think about your sailing up off the moon and crashing back down seconds later. If this is a series of ‘Keep Off’ attacks, that would mean someone is watching Phobos all the time, and I have to believe, given the delay you had in speaking with those Masters years ago, that they can’t instantly see what is taking place. I’d be more inclined to think the idea you had before of a malfunction is more likely.”
“Okay. I can be convinced, Dad. But I still haven’t figured why the stone was put down in that small cavern when the lizard remains are in a giant cavern half-way through the moon. Not even exactly on the opposite side. If they excavated a cavern for it, why not directly on the other side? It would seem to be for their gravity comfort, but also why not in the main cavern? Those stones seem to universally affect whatever body they are placed in, even if that is on the surface, but their influence has limitations.”
It was true. The stone of Nestria was in a small cave a few feet up a very small hill and not deep below the surface. The small stone they gave Tom for their visit was mounted in the middle of the living space in the airship he’d constructed to pilot them around many points on the Earth. Anyone could touch it, but its influence was strongest inside of three feet and only extended fifty feet in all directions.
The Space Friends had explained that even the small stone could affect a much larger area; it was all a matter of how it was set and how much power it ha
d available.
An idea came to Tom. “If that gravity stone is like the others we’ve seen, why has it not run down after all these years or centuries?”
Damon spun around to look at his son. “An incredibly insightful question, Son. Why, indeed? Where might it be getting power, and can you interrupt it? And, can the source be dangerous and that is why the distant placement?”
“That is something I intend to find out.”
“What are your feelings about the lizard creatures?”
Tom had to think a moment before carefully answering, “Not lizards. Dinosaurs. I’ve compared the structure of the statue with many, many examples of what scientists believe Earth’s T-Rex dinos looked like. And, while these are smaller, by at least fifty percent, they are that same dinosaur.”
Damon was stunned. He’d seen the basic statue picture and the reclining preserved body in the case, but hadn’t tried to compare those with Earth saurians.
Seeing his father’s consternation, Tom stated, “I’ll go one further. I believe those beings were one of the Master races for our Space Friends at one time in the past. Perhaps even the ones most recently displaced. It’s going to take getting our friends to answer a lot of questions, but I think the reason our friends were sent here was because their Masters had failed to find a way to get to Earth for more than a brief time to check out mankind themselves.”
Damon snorted. “Next, you’ll be saying you think our ancient dinosaurs were the result of them trying to seed this planet.”
Tom shook his head. “No. I don’t believe that. Not until I have some proof or an answer from our friends. But, I do believe that the saurian form would be the best suited for survival on a new planet. Hardy and vicious, as any survivor needs to be. If ours had not perished all those millions of years ago, with room inside their craniums for brain development, perhaps they might have developed intelligence and civilizations and ancestors of man as we know it would have died off because we would make a great food source.”
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 20
