Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement

by Victor Appleton II

  “I found a few things that give me some hope you won’t shatter this rock conglomeration out from under us,” she stated. “Those striations even Professor Heller thinks might be indications of cracking points don’t look like they have moved for, hmmmm, maybe a million years.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Bud said.

  “And, with that, I’m ready to go down and knock out the old seal,” the inventor announced.

  He eased a new tool he’d built down until it was just above the new seal. At a command, a wireless signal irised open the top of the seal allowing the tool to enter part way. Next the top iris constricted, its pliable ends providing a near seal around the tool and opening the bottom iris. The tool slipped down and bumped against the lower seal just two feet below.

  From the bottom of the tool came a dribble of a yellowish liquid that immediately got to work softening the sealant around the physical seal. Then with a little shove down courtesy of the tool being able to extend, the lower seal fell away and down into the cavern.

  Tom pulled the tool up closing the iris seals on the way and soon was sending down the new camera a light.

  Everyone watched with bated breath as it approached the seal, entered the first iris and then the second one.

  The only sound from any of them was Stefanie on seeing what lay on the floor directly below the shaft.

  “Crapsticks!” she swore. “If that isn’t a skeleton, I’ll give up my Princess of Mars title!”

  CHAPTER 15 /

  THE ATTACK

  TOM FELT sick to his stomach. While it definitely was not a human skeleton, it was a collection of what had to be bones from a creature that must have stood under five feet tall, had two legs and two arms, and an oversized cranium.

  “Tom? Could that be…” Deke whispered. Although he’d come to the Swifts several years after the space beings visited the planet he had seen many of the pictures and videos of them.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It looks like it might have been one of our Space Friends, or one of their ancestors.” He turned from the scene on the monitor suddenly afraid that this might be a sign his friends had not left the solar system but had perished… or been executed!

  Taking a deep breath he directed the camera all around the cavern. To his relief there were no further skeletons or even signs any beings had ever been inside this space.

  “How long would it take a body to decompose to just the skeleton in the Martian atmosphere?” Stefanie asked.

  Tom had to shift mental gears to answer that. “With the incredibly low oxygen and high CO2, any aerobic bacteria would have troubles, but anaerobic bacteria would thrive and decomp could take just a matter of a week or two. We didn’t find any bacteria of any kind in the air sample we took so I can’t really say.”

  After giving Stefanie ample time to investigate the walls and floor and even the roof of the cavern he withdrew the camera probe and sealed the shaft.

  They returned to the ship and rested while they talked about the possible reasons for the skeleton in the cavern.

  Several possibilities were discussed including: accident; sacrifice; execution as punishment; a trapped/forgotten individual; and others.

  Tom really didn’t care for any of the scenarios. He wanted answers and so he moved to the communications board and typed out a brief and rather curt message:

  From Later Swift to Space Friends.

  Have discovered an internal bone

  structure we believe to be one of your

  people at bottom of small cavern. Why.

  Communicate soonest to advise why

  gravity stone is on Phobos.

  After sending it he almost regretted the tone, but he was severely shocked at the discovery. He was also getting angry at the supposed “friends” who, even if their Masters might be pressuring them to remain silent, had earlier found ways to get messages to Tom and Damon.

  When he spoke to his father that afternoon from back at the colony, Damon agreed the message might have been better worded, but he also agreed it was something that needed an answer.

  “In the meantime I’d advise that you do not disturb it. Who knows what sort of toxins it might have within it. Besides, Son, if it is very old even touching it might cause it to crumble to dust.”

  “Not to worry, Dad. We’re heading for the larger cavern and giving Stefanie a good look down the shaft we’ve dug and that metal block in the way. Hopefully, she can tell us it is safe to dig around it enough to dislodge it without causing a catastrophe.”

  “Just be very careful, Tom,” his father warned. “I’d much rather you just left things alone and had to continue the series of scheduled pushes than to cause Phobos to fall apart!”

  They soon signed off.

  Sitting back at Enterprises, Damon knew his son was sitting up there grinning and probably thinking, “I’m not that reckless.” It made him grin to himself.

  Once Bud had the saucer sitting on the surface within walking distance of the earth blaster and its hole, they all got back out and headed for the bore site.

  Stefanie carefully watched as the camera was lowered foot-by-foot. At the point where solid rocks gave way to the more powdery materials, and even though a good coat of a polymer had been sprayed on it all, the fact it was clear gave her a reasonable look at how it was laid out.

  Standing back up from her bent-over position looking at the monitor she asked Tom if they could get on a private radio link.

  “Is it that bad?” he asked once they were speaking on the special frequency.

  “It isn’t good… but on the other hand it may not be that bad. Have you given any thought to sinking a second or third or fourth hole in other locations around the perimeter of that giant air space?”

  “Oh. The easy answer is that we haven’t gotten that far, but the harder answer is that I am not certain we would have done that until we got you up here anyway. I hope you and Deke feel strongly enough about your babysitters to be away for another five or six days. I promise to take you back in the TranSpace Dart so we can get you home as quickly as possible once this is sorted out.”

  “Gee, Tom. That’s at least three weeks earlier than we planned to get home. We figured we’d be going back in the same saucer. That will be more than wonderful!” She hugged him even though their suits made it difficult.

  Tom gave the order to locate a point for another dig approximately a quarter of the way around the perimeter of the cavern below them.

  With Bud carrying the launching tripod and Tom and Deke handling the earth blaster, it was left to Stefanie to carry the trio of anchor bolts and the camera rig which she slung over her right shoulder.

  They made the trek in only eleven minutes and had things set back up—and anchored down—thirty-two minutes after that.

  “I believe you can go a little faster than a foot a minute this time,” Stefanie told them. “With me keeping a close watch I’d say up to three times that speed will be fine.”

  Tom made the necessary adjustments and soon they moved back to the safe position and the blaster was eased against the surface, turned on, and it soon began to disappear into the lunar surface.

  Twenty minutes later Stefanie asked, “So, at what depth did you run into the loose stuff?”

  “Around eighty feet. The blaster is only at fifty-seven feet right now so you’ve got a few more minutes to wait until we see if that loose materials is a continuous strata all around this area.”

  “Well, I can tell you this location looks a bit different from the other, and I don’t mean the coating inside the bore hole,” she said. “To begin with the rock is much more dense and contains a lot more carbon than over there,” and she hooked her thumb back toward to first drill site.

  The inventor looked over at the spectra-analyzer readouts and could see that along with nearly quadruple the carbon, this rock and soil contained higher levels of nickel and silicon.

  Even at ninety-five feet there was no sign of the crumbly structu
re found in the first bore.

  “Unless we meet up with another metal block,” Tom told the others, “I say we go for breakthrough into this cavern. Of course, I need to get back to Challenger and build us another easy pass-through plug. This time I believe I’ll also bring up a couple of our mini-searchbots.”

  These ball-shaped robots were just four inches wide, could roll around at up to one-hundred feet per minute, had a camera mounted to a central ring that remained pointed straight out—unless it was ordered to focus on something higher or lower—and were able to be autonomous as well as could be controlled wirelessly for their four hour runtime.

  “What are you hoping to find with those?” Deke inquired.

  “I want to get an all-around look at the gravity stone,” was the simple answer. “They give us the best chance at getting close enough that if the stone has some sort of security system, it will be the robots and not any of us that takes the brunt of whatever happens.”

  Deke, after receiving a look of understanding from his wife, offered to accompany Tom down for the four hours it would require to land, fabricate the plug and return.

  “Okay, but first let’s get one of the larger survival tents out and set up so you two can take a break and get out of the elements,” Tom told Bud and Stefanie.

  He and Bud were the most experience with the tents and had this one out, set up and supplied with the necessary tanks and water in under eleven minutes.

  The flyer and his female companion announced they were taking an hour break once Tom and Deke left.

  “If you come back and we’re asleep it’s only because having a large planet dangling above you is very tiring,” he announced.

  Tom timed takeoff so the trip down to the colony took just seven minutes. When they landed a team came aboard as they were leaving to ensure all normal supplies were replenished.

  Deke assisted the inventor by finding and bringing out a trio of the small reconnaissance robots from their storage crate in the Challenger’s hangar along with their control remote which, truth to tell, looked more like a complex television remote than something able to control up to six of the small robots at a time.

  He then watched Tom complete the assembly of the new seal device. It was about an inch less wide than the hole and about two feet tall.

  “I’ve made a couple enhancements to the basic design based on what I saw happening with the first one. For starters, this one will spin out a rubberize outer ring at the top and bottom to seal things and not require any sticky goo.”

  “Ahh, so you can reposition it if desired?”

  “Right. The other thing I’ve changed is in adding a small pressure cylinder of Xenon to fill and flush out the inner chamber. Now, before your next question, I’m using a gas that never appears, even in minute quantities, in Martian air so if we do find any in a sample from the chamber, we can pretty much assume it came from the seal.”

  “Makes complete sense to this former military pilot. This might still be classified, but I trust you, skipper. I was part of some fairly brief monopropellant experiments for a year and we used Xenon and Argon to flush out the tanks before refueling.”

  Tom smiled. “And that, in return, makes all sorts of sense to me. I’ll keep the confidence, Deke.”

  When they arrived back at the dig site, Bud and Stefanie were out at the bore.

  “We’re within about two feet of the curved roof down there,” Bud stated. “No sign of any metal cube, so we both think we can just go for it and get in without any problems.”

  “Did this small and redheaded one try to get you to just go ahead and punch through?” Deke said indicating his wife with a tilt of his head.

  “I offered him money and he said no. I upped the offer for my body and he just laughed. Makes a girl feel unloved,” she said putting on a rather outlandish pout.

  “I’m glad you didn’t give in, flyboy. I do see you got the blaster back out and in its rack. Uhhh, should I ask how you did it? It’s a two-man job.”

  “Stefanie can muster the strength of a man when she feels she is not pulling her weight,” offered the tall man.

  “You’re darned tootin’!” she declared putting her fists on her hips.

  “Steff really was great, skipper,” Bud stated. “Not sure if she could have done the same down on Mars or back home, but up here, and with the gravity stone behaving, she was a champ!”

  The new seal was lowered into the hole and carefully positioned before it was expanded to completely close off the bore.

  * * * * *

  Minutes before Tom was planning on calling for the final drill through into the cavern, his radio announced a call coming from the distant Earth. He headed into the saucer, took off his helmet and took a seat before answering.

  “It’s Tom.”

  “Tom, this is Marylynn Dick at Enterprises. Sorry to bother you but I have to say this near instant radio technology is absolutely great. Of course, that isn’t what I called to tell you. I’m afraid I have a disappointment to relate.”

  When she didn’t continue he prompted her. “Go ahead. We’re having some good news up here so I guess it is about time it got tempered with a dose of reality. What’s the matter?”

  “We finished the repelatron/Attractatron antennas and got them perfectly aligned and the whole of the superstructure built and attached. We thought we had all the stresses computed and handled, but when we put it to the test—oh, I forgot to tell you your father suggested using the Moon as our anchor and trying to move Nestria around a little. Well, we tried that and… well, the thing is when the repelatron moved slightly to get the aim correct the entire interconnecting structure torque-twisted and practically pulled itself apart.” Her voice was now vibrating with the nervousness she obviously was experiencing.

  “Calm down, Marylynn,” he requested. “Did we lose the entire rig?”

  He heard her take a deep breath before answering. “No, but it is badly compromised. That was three days ago and my team has just finished breaking the thing apart. Some of the main struts are now bent by more than twenty degrees.”

  Tom thought a moment. “Is there anything you can do to fix it and reinforce things?”

  “That has also taken the past three days,” she admitted. “We believe our only viable solution is to make a one-inch-thick durastress tube and mount one antenna to one end, flush and completely sealed, and the other at the opposite end. Obviously this leaves little or no space for the power pods so they will need to be mounted outside the tube. Even then we aren’t certain of the structural stability.”

  He knew he had to make an executive decision. “Okay. Get the pieces staged on the Moon and I’ll try to make some decision once I see things. Ought to be back in under six days, by the way.”

  He signed off with his own deep sigh. It had been a good idea let down by the physics of having two opposing forces trying to fight with each other while doing their intended jobs. He was fairly certain it was a matter of scale, and that the enormous size of both antennas and the need to allow one of them to move around had meant it was difficult to impossible to brace them together using normal means.

  Tom went back outside and loped over to the trio who had just placed the camera probe into the seal.

  “Waiting for your go ahead, skipper,” Bud told him.

  “Then, go ahead,” Tom directed.

  He and Stefanie took the primary positions at the monitor looking for anything the camera system picked up.

  What they saw at first was the same sort of foggy conditions encountered in the smaller cavern. That began to clear as they went deeper until the picture cleared and both took deep intakes of breath.

  The cavern floor was almost architecturally flat and clear of any debris, but the real shock was the nearest wall that showed scraped and digging marks telling them this was a constructed cavern.

  “Or,” Stefanie said before Tom could voice his opinion, “it was much smaller and they dug it out like this.”

 
; “Mind reading, Steff?” he asked with a wry grin.

  “Have to. I’ve given up asking the Beast what he wants for dinner. All I get is, ‘I dunno. Whatever you want,’ but half the time he really doesn’t want what I do. So, I mind read and now hit the ball seventy percent of the time, But, seriously, it was logical that you were thinking what I was.”

  They made a complete sweep of the cavern, some of the farthest areas were lost to darkness the strong LED lights just could not reach.

  With Bud’s assistance, he lowered two of the three mini robots down to the seal. With the camera temporarily pulled up above them, the robots were lowered through the seal and to the floor of the cavern where they released their tethers.

  Both began sending video immediately, and the people above watched them scoot forward toward the only item sitting on the floor. While one took up a position about fifteen feet away, the other one began to slowly roll around the stone. As the first robot got within seven feet of the very visible gravity stone it bumped into something invisible. Vaguely pyramid-shaped and standing nearly four feet tall, the stone—and they could see that it appeared to be made from carved stone—looked almost exactly like the three-foot stone in the small cave on Nestria that gave the non-natural moon enough gravity to hold people down and to allow an atmosphere to be developed to support them.

  It also looked like the smaller, fifteen-inch version the Space Friends supplied to Tom prior to his being able to finally get them safely down to the ground on the Earth.

  The robot was backed up and sent forward again. It bumped into the invisible field again, but this time seemed to have pierced it by about half its body thickness. A third try had it inside the field.

  “I guess that answers the question about what we saw on the Deep Peek scans,” Bud muttered.

  “Look!” Deke said in a stage whisper as he pointed at the visuals coming from the second robot. One face of the stone had been formed or carved to be flatter than the rest.