Tom Swift and His Space Solartron (16 page)

The
Challenger
hove about and began to retrace its route, covering the many hundreds of miles that lay between them and the Rima Ariadaeus region in minutes.

Bob Jeffers, in the communications compartment below, continued to try to establish contact with the two. There was no response, even after the ship had halted some seventy miles above the desolate surface.

"You sure this here’s the right place?" Chow demanded. "Ever’place on this ol’ moon looks purty much alike!"

"That’s the region they went to explore," Hank Sterling replied.

"But they may have found a lead and gone further," cautioned Ted.

The intercom buzzed. "Got something down here!" called out Bob Jeffers excitedly. "It’s not their transiphones, but—"

"What is it, Bob?" asked Arv.

"It’s that signal Tom picked up," Jeffers explained. "But now it’s more or less continuous. Listen!" He piped the received tone up to the command compartment so all could hear it—a regular but interrupted beeping, with longer and shorter pauses between the pulses.

Chow’s brow creased deeply as he concentrated on the sound. "Brand my transistorizers! What’s that, some kind o’ code?"

Hank Sterling laughed suddenly. "Sure is—one I know mighty well! It’s morse code!"

"Sure!" exclaimed Ted. "It’s an S.O.S. signal!"

"We’re getting enough of it for triangulation," intercommed Jeffers. "Give me a sec and I’ll tell you where it’s coming from."

Below, eastward, and some hundred feet beneath ground level, Tom Swift paused for a moment. He had been rhythmically pressing a control button that alternately activated and cut-off his suit transiphone, which was producing an unmodulated tone signal at a preset frequency.

"You really think they can hear it?" Bud asked skeptically. "I mean,
we
do—but we’re right next to the capsule and the
Challenger
could be halfway around the moon by now."

Tom shrugged, a movement barely visible inside the pressurized material of his reflective scarlet space-garb. "We picked up the capsule’s beeping before, from a distance. It has a more sophisticated kind of antenna than our suits do. Just pray we don’t wear down its power source." The young inventor resumed sending transiphone pulses to the Brungarian probe, which robotically responded each time in its own, more powerful voice.

Five minutes later a movement caught their eyes—a shadow swinging across the side of the chasm. Looking upward the boys broke into hoarse cheers as the gleaming form of the
Challenger
came sailing across the field of stars!

"I spy!"
came the welcome voice of Arvid Hanson.

"Thank goodness!" Tom replied. "Can you see us?"

"Can now—at first we could only see your Donkeys crumpled up in the boulder field next to the fissure. What kind of mess did you two get yourselves into?"

Tom and Bud quickly explained. Bud added: "Now get us out of here!"

"Will do," Hanson replied. "I’ll bring her down right over the opening and lower the rope ladder from the vehicular stage."

The
Challenger
slowly grew against the ragged piece of sky as it descended toward them. "Hey, what’s up?" Arv radioed suddenly. "We’re losing ground thrust on half the repelatrons!"

"It’s that phenomenon I told you about, Arv," Tom declared, "the one that shipwrecked us! There’s some kind of unusual mineral or compound in this vicinity that the telespectrometers can’t handle."

"I’ll aim the beams on a wider spread —that should do it."

But as the ship descended another thousand feet, the command deck speaker erupted with twin cries of alarm.
"Stop! Go back!"

At almost the same moment Chow bellowed out, "Hanson! Don’t go no closer!
It’s makin’ th’ ground cave in on ’em!"

Instantly the modelmaker’s trained hands flew at the controls. The ship rebounded toward space as if shot from a sling!

Far below Tom and Bud had scurried for cover next to the Brungarian capsule as pebbles, rocks, and lava-sand rained down on them from all directions. One whole section of the crevasse wall had shifted, bulging outward as if on the verge of disintegrating. Tom warned:
"Challenger,
your repulsion force is too much for the surface around here—it’s fragile and full of hollow spaces! If you get too close or try to land, you’ll bring down the sides on top of us!"

"Understood!" radioed Arv. "We’ll head off a mile or more and hike over. But how’s your air holding up?"

"Less than an hour left," replied Bud. "Make like jackrabbits and get over here fast!"

The spaceship set down without incident and three suited figures—one noticeably broader than his companions—hastened across the stark dead landscape to the edge of the crevasse. Chow was first to arrive, rope in hand. But as he approached the edge and peered over, the ground began to collapse beneath him!

"Jump, Chow!"
Bud yelled. The range cook was barely able to fling himself backward to safety!

The three rescuers now stood a few yards back from the edge and braced themselves, linking arms together as Ted Spring tossed the long rope into the crack. Finally Tom and Bud were hauled up and out.

"Hmm," remarked Bud, "not bad. Eleven minutes to spare!"

"Let’s not waste them here!" urged the third of the rescuers, Bob Jeffers.

As soon as the five had trudged a safe distance from the crevice, the
Challenger
appeared overhead and landed nearby. They took the elevator up to the cabin-cube, and soon Tom and Bud were besieged by questions from the other members of the crew. They described the lost Brungarian capsule and how Tom had used it to produce a detectable signal. Tom concluded by expressing disappointment that the mystery beep had turned out to be unrelated to the missing outpost. "All we know is that, for a time, the station was moving very rapidly in the direction of the moon," he said. "We don’t know what happened after that."

"Then we’ll jest have t’ keep on lookin’, son," Chow said, placing an arm across the back of his young friend. "You others kin go on back to Earth if’n you want, but as fer me, I reckon I’ll be a rovin’ space ranger till we track ’em down and bring ’em home safe."

"Thanks, pardner," Tom murmured. There were tears in his eyes.

Suddenly Arv Hanson’s voice blared out over the loudspeaker. "Tom, come down to communications on the double!"

Tom and the others exchanged glances of exhilaration.
Had they received a message from the lost space station?

Not waiting for the inter-deck elevator, Tom scrambled down the rungs of a metal ladder to the level below, bursting into the compartment where the communications equipment was based. "What’s wrong?" he demanded of Arv. "Have you received something?"

"Still coming in," was the reply. "Take a look!"

One by one, complex mathematical symbols were materializing on the imaging oscilloscope—a message from Tom’s space friends!

"At last!" he cried joyously. Perhaps the mystery was finally on the verge of solution!

Bud and the others had come crowding in behind him. "Is it an answer to your question, Tom?" asked Bob Jeffers. "Do they know where the outpost is?"

The young inventor frowned. "The translating computer is having a problem—many of these symbols are unfamiliar. They must be trying to express some difficult concepts."

When the incoming message stopped, Tom printed out the complicated array of symbols and hurried to his lab to work on them, asking Hank Sterling to assist him. "Something tells me we’ve got to hurry," muttered Tom grimly.

An hour passed, then a second, as a disturbing, almost unbelievable message took shape in bits and pieces. "Holy Mack!" gasped Sterling as he read the finished product over the shoulder of his young employer.

TO TOM SWIFT. WE ARE FRIENDS. OTHERS OF OUR PLANET OF ORIGIN HAVE MOVED SWIFT ORBIT HABITAT FROM PLANET-THIRD TO PLANET-SECOND. PURPOSE IS TO STUDY EARTH INTELLIGENCES IN CONDITIONS OF ISOLATION AND DEPRIVATION. WE OPPOSE THIS METHOD BUT CAN NOT REVERSE ACTION TAKEN. HABITAT POSITION PARAMETERS FOLLOW.

There was a string of numerical information, after which the main message resumed.

WE FRIENDS ARE PREVENTED FROM INTERFERING BUT HAVE EXCEEDED LIMITS TO TRANSMIT THIS DATA TO TOM SWIFT. HABITAT OCCUPANTS ARE SAFE BUT LIFE FUNCTIONS WILL CEASE IN 18.5 EARTH ROTATIONS. DESTROY TRANSPOSITION TOOL OF ALTERNATE SOLVERS TO REVERSE THEIR ACTION. NO FURTHER CONTACT IS POSSIBLE.

"Planet-Second,"
Tom murmured. "The second planet from the sun. The space beings have moved the outpost to Venus!"

IN THE command deck of the mighty
Challenger
, Tom stood and grimly, but almost pleadingly, faced his loyal crew. "Let me give you the gist of the message in my own words," he said. "The space friends have alluded before to some problem between them and the authorities that control their home planet, which we call Planet X. In our translation they call them
alternate solvers;
the symbols imply that they follow a different method in finding a solution to what you might call the basic equations of life and existence."

"In other words, the meaning of life," remarked Arv.

"Apparently so. It seems the folks back home have little regard for Earth humans—they only want to study us and our reactions, as we might do with some newly discovered animal species."

"From that message, they don’t sound like
‘folks’
at all," muttered Bob Jeffers angrily. "More like computers!"

Tom nodded. "You could be right, Bob—we really know nothing about them or how they think. But the ones we’ve come to call our friends, the scientists at the local base in this solar system who have contacted us directly, appear to have some understanding and sympathy for our poor little species. In any event, I think they took a great risk, leaking this information to us as they did."

Bud Barclay suggested an explanation. "Maybe they understand
gratitude.
After all, you saved their whole planet from that disease, Tom. They owe us one!" Bud was referring to the encounter with a capsule of diseased animal life that had been the main goal of the
Challenger
’s recently-completed moon expedition.

"But cain’t th’ nice ones jest move the outpost back t’ Earth?" demanded Chow. "I mean, they went an’ sent us that there asteroid, Little Luna, didn’t they?"

"They sure did, Chow," the young inventor replied soberly. "But they seem to be telling us that something prevents them from interfering with the projects undertaken by their ‘masters,’ if that’s what they are. Remember, they couldn’t affect the course of the animal saucer after it had been launched from Planet X."

"Okay, T-man, we all get the picture," declared Ted brusquely. "The outpost is in orbit around Venus, and we have to rescue the crew in 18 days. Can we do it?"

"Yes! Hank, Arv, and I have worked out a plan to rendezvous with the station."

"Let’s see," said Bud. "How far away from the earth
is
Venus?"

"It can be as close as twenty-six million miles, or as far as a hundred and nineteen million, depending on just where the two planets are in their orbits. Right now the straight-line distance is about ninety-eight million miles."

"Jetz!
S-Some trip we’re about to make!" Bud commented in awe.

"It’s all right, pal." Tom face shone with grim determination as he slapped his friend on his muscular back. "With our matter maker aboard to give us the extra air and water we’ll require, we can chase the outpost clear across the solar system if we have to! But," he added, "there are some complications."

"Such as?"

Hank responded to Bud’s inquiry. "To reach Venus in time, we’ll have to accelerate constantly—accelerate to the halfway point, that is, then decelerate again. We plan to accelerate faster than 1-G. It will be tolerable, but maybe a bit uncomfortable; you’ll feel like somebody tied a lead weight to your back!"

Everyone carefully avoided glancing at Chow, who blushed nevertheless.

"The problem is, we
can’t
actually accelerate continuously," Hank went on. "If we tried to, we’d basically be dragging Tom’s atom-snatchers along behind the ship like four-acres of dead weight, and they’d just fall to pieces. So if we’re to use the solartron, we’ll have to stop accelerating and coast, on momentum, every few hours. During those intervals we’ll deploy the lattices and use the solartron to replenish our air supply."

"But it costs us time," Tom said. "All in all, we calculate we’ll arrive in the vicinity of the outpost in fifteen days, twenty-one hours, six minutes from our departure time. Which doesn’t leave much of a margin for the rescue operation."

"Wa-aal, let’s not jaw about it!" exclaimed Chow with a snort. "We know what we gotta do, you hombres, so let’s get goin’!"

Tom held up a hand. "Wait, pard. I have no right to draft the group of you for this mission. It’s not what you signed up for, and it involves real danger. We don’t know what we’ll be facing out there, and—I can’t promise you that we’ll make it back. Each one of you is a good friend and a loyal employee, and you will remain so even if you decide not to continue on. If anyone wants to be let off on Nestria, I’ll understand completely. You don’t have to give a reason."

The crew looked at one another, and Hank Sterling finally spoke up. "Tom, I have a wife and two kids back home in Shopton. But I’ve faced death before for you and your father, and I never leave my house without realizing that I might not see my loved ones again. It’s a risk we’ve chosen to accept. It’s the way we want to live our lives, the way
we
‘solve the equation.’ Count me in!"

"And besides," Bud joked, "it’s just two weeks out and two weeks back—I’ve taken longer vacations plenty of times!"

Tom shook each man’s hand in solemn gratitude, and announced: "all right then—next stop Venus!"

A burst of repulsion energy heralded the commencement of the daring voyage. The
Challenger
bounded away from the moon and set its course for the inner solar system, aiming its concentrated beams of force at both moon and Earth. Hour by hour the two space beacons dwindled in size and brilliance. By the end of the third day of travel the moon had been reduced to a tiny, pale bead. Earth, still blue and radiant, seemed no bigger than a fingernail on an outstretched hand.