Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon

THE TOM SWIFT INVENTION ADVENTURES

TOM SWIFT

IN THE RACE TO

THE MOON

BY VICTOR APPLETON II

This unauthorized tribute is based upon the original TOM SWIFT JR. characters.

As of this printing, copyright to The New TOM SWIFT Jr. Adventures is owned by SIMON & SCHUSTER

This edition privately printed by RUNABOUT © 2011
www.tomswiftlives.com

"TOM! What’s wrong with your machine? We’re going into a dive!" Fighting the controls, pilot Bud Barclay risked a brief sideways glance at his cockpit companion, who was also his best friend.

"I don’t know what’s wrong," replied Tom Swift, his keen eyes tensely focused on the instrument panel before him. "The repelatron’s still operating at full power, but we’re losing force!" The blond-haired young inventor stretched forward a hand and adjusted a control dial, once, twice, three times. "Not working—no change."

Forcing himself to remain calm as their aircraft, a Pigeon Special, began to nose down, Bud again flicked the ignition switch to restart the compact but powerful motor that normally drove the plane’s rear-mounted propeller. The youths had deliberately silenced the motor in order to give Tom’s invention the workout that was the reason for their flight. Now the motor refused to come back to life! "The instruments are still okay," grated the young pilot in desperation, a lock of dark hair creeping down over his forehead. "But the electronics toward the tail are stone dead. I can’t budge the rudder."

As the ground slowly rolled before their eyes at a steepening angle, drawing frighteningly near, Bud suddenly yanked on Tom’s shirtsleeve. "Squeeze over to my side, Tom, all the way to the wall—hurry!"

Tom burst free of his safety straps and scrambled across the top of Bud’s seat-back, flattening himself against the wall just behind and to the left of his pal. Bud also half-rose and pressed leftward as far as possible. The tiny, lightweight Special, uniquely designed to maintain aerial stability during sharp maneuvers and unusual conditions, responded as sensitively as a trained palomino, slightly dipping its wings and sliding into a corkscrew turn to port. For a moment the curve made the situation even worse—they were diving straight groundward! But then, terrifyingly close to disaster, they swung through the low point of the arc and began to regain altitude. The plane had now reversed course and was heading back the way it came.

Tom made his way back to his seat as Bud continued to try to start the prop motor. Both young men were breathing hard.

"We’re through the worst," said Bud. "We’ll be able to reach the lake."

Tom nodded. "Plan to ditch her?"

"No choice."

As the glittering crescent of Lake Carlopa drew close ahead, Tom radioed the Swift Enterprises airfield. Though located in Shopton at the far end of the lake, the Swift invention facility was nevertheless the closest site equipped for rescue. "Roger, Special," replied tower control. "I’m dispatching a water crash team. We’re tracking you—won’t be long."

Signing off, Tom groaned in frustration. "Thanks for the ace flying, Bud. Believe it or not, I’m more worried about my repelatron going to the bottom than I am about our scrawny necks."

Bud managed a ragged grin. "Oh, I believe it!"

The repelatron was perhaps the young prodigy’s most revolutionary invention, a device which generated an invisible beam of force that could repel any material it was attuned to. Some months before, while constructing his deep-sea hydrodome on the floor of the mid-Atlantic, the young inventor had used the machine to push back the ocean waters, creating a bubble-like airspace for workers to live in.

Since that peril-fraught success, Tom had labored to overcome certain features of the repelatron that limited its practical capacity to switch rapidly from one substance to another. His goal was to develop a super-repelatron that could utilize its recoil-thrust for propulsion—specifically to propel a radically new kind of spacecraft into the stark vacuum above the earth’s atmosphere. Tom conceived this step as a key to interplanetary exploration, and had made well-publicized plans to make the moon his first port of call.

Having finally hit upon a version of the repelatron that promised the sort of performance Tom required, the young inventor had anxiously had the new test model bolted into the cargo compartment of the Pigeon Special, a popular line of two-seat aircraft manufactured by the Swift Construction Company, which was owned, like Swift Enterprises, by the Swift family. Soaring out over Lake Carlopa, Tom had had Bud cut the engines, phasing in the repelatron as substitute thrust. The boys had been thrilled as the device seemed to function perfectly, keeping them smoothly and silently airborne as they traversed the length of the long, narrow lake.

But trouble had cropped up almost immediately upon crossing the shoreline and heading on out over farmland. With no warning or evident cause the repelatron seemed to become powerless, sending the Special into its dive.

Now they recrossed the lakeshore at a low, faltering altitude, preparing to bail out just before the Special hit the water. Suddenly Tom and Bud reacted with surprise as the whole plane give a violent shake and surged forward, putting on speed and altitude. The acceleration pressed the boys back into their seats.

"What’s going on?" gasped Bud. "Tom!—the repelatron’s working again!"

"Water," Tom muttered. "That must be it. It’s repelling the water—nothing else."

The boys relaxed as the plane mounted higher and higher above the lake. Tom contacted Enterprises again and explained the situation. "Have the crash team on standby," he advised. "We may still have a problem getting back to the airfield."

"You’re right about that," said Bud. "I still can’t start the motor or work the flaps or the rudder. The best we can hope for is a pancake landing, and that’ll be rough."

"Let’s try something, flyboy. Get ready to flip the switch again. I’m going to kill the repelatron."

Bud gave his friend a look of wide-eyed skepticism, but poised his hands above the controls as Tom switched off the power feed to his invention. Instantly the Special slowed and wavered, gliding along unpowered. Bud flicked the ignition.

The motor jerked to life! The plane shot forward under full power and control.

"Jetz! Everything’s back on line, skipper," Bud declared gratefully.

"I
think
I know where the problem is," commented Tom in a musing voice. "When the repulsion ray doesn’t find anything to interact with, there’s some kind of back-surge across the space-wave field with electromagnetic induction as a side effect. All the power cables that pass through the fuselage near the machine were affected. But if I focus the field more narrowly, it won’t—"

Bud interrupted his friend with a laugh. "Please, genius boy, do your inventing on the ground—after we’ve landed!"

They proceeded on to Enterprises without incident, and Bud, an expert pilot, brought them down in a perfect landing, taxiing into a waiting hangar. Disembarking, Tom directed the ground crew to unbolt the test repelatron and convey it to one of his laboratories on a handtruck as he and Bud ambled along beside.

Reaching the lab they were surprised to find a small crowd of unfamiliar faces gathered in the hallway next to the slowly-moving ridewalk ramp. Tom recognized one face among them: the round, somewhat rumpled, perpetually harried face of George Dilling, longtime head of the plant’s Office of Communications and Public Interest.

"Hi, George," said Tom, curiosity on his brow and in his voice. "A tour?"

"Ah, Tom! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, you’re in luck! Here’s Tom Swift himself!" An unconvincing grin firmly in place, Dilling led the crowd in a wave of applause, accented by
ooo
-ing and
ahh
-ing. Dilling approached Tom and Bud and said softly, "It’s that Brungarian student group, two days early.
Imagine
my surprise."

I can just imagine,
thought Tom.

Swift Enterprises actively encouraged young people to explore their interest in science and invention, and to consider careers in that area. To that end Dilling’s office frequently set up special tours of the installation, usually for high school students. He considered it good public relations; Tom and his father valued it for its own sake and enjoyed meeting the students and answering their questions.

This tour was unique. The students, some as young as fifteen, others in their later twenties, were visiting the United States from Brungaria, a newly democratic nation that in decades past had been unfriendly to the U.S. and its allies. The students, all carefully screened and selected for native ability, attended the Academy for Advanced Scientific Studies in Volkonis, the Brungarian capital.

"I’m very pleased to meet you all," said Tom with a warm smile. "Welcome to Swift Enterprises! What have you seen so far?"

The students looked at one another shyly, and for a moment Tom wondered if they had understood him. Then a young girl stepped forward and said, "Already we have seen your cowboy man."

The students all nodded vigorously.

"He was most cool!" a boy piped up. "Do you sell the shirts?"

Bud broke out laughing. "You’ll have to go to Texas if you want one of those
Chow Winkler Brand
shirts! Shopton has a city ordinance against selling loud colors like that!"

Seeing that the students didn’t know what to make of Bud’s joke, Tom quickly explained. "The man you met is my friend Chow. He prepares our meals and travels with us around the world. He’s from Texas, where real cowboys live. Those colorful shirts of his are—sort of a hobby. We don’t sell them here."

"Not as of yet!" Dilling rushed to say. "But we
do
have Swift Enterprises souvenir shirts in the Visitor Center gift shop. If you want to impress the folks back home and show that you’re a
real American inventor,
pick up one of the blue-striped white tees, like Tom himself wears."

Tom answered a few questions and shook a few hands. Then the middle-aged man who appeared to be the tour leader and supervisor, a sour-faced type, said: "We have now seen the hangars and the great airship underground. The students were hoping to see one of the laboratories where you, as one might say, put together the inventions. This one, perhaps?"

Tom nodded. "Why not? I’ll show you the machine I have that makes water fly!"

"And soup, too," Bud added.

Inside the lab Tom demonstrated a small hand-held model of his repelatron and explained how he had used it to outwit
some bad men
who had tried to take over his undersea hydrodome. The students were wide-eyed with wonder at these American marvels.

Suddenly a sharp, splintering crash caused Tom to whirl about. One of the young men, who had drifted somewhat away from the group, was bending down and holding his hand, a tray of shattered microscope slides on the floor by his feet.

"Ow!"
he cried. "I am bleeding, I—I think I—" His face was white and he seemed about to topple over. Tom rushed up to support him, and the student leaned close against him.

"I’ll call the infirmary," Tom said reassuringly. "Dr. Simpson will take care of your cut."

The young man bent his head down low to his chest. His back, and Tom’s, were turned to the rest of the group.
"Tom, listen!"
he whispered, almost inaudibly. "I must speak to you. Something horrible is going to happen! But the others can’t know that I’ve talked to you!"

His voice was desperate—and terrified!

"IS PETAR all right?" demanded the tour leader worriedly. "Is he ill?"

"He’ll be fine," said Tom, thinking furiously.

"Shall I call Doc over?" Bud asked.

"No, Bud. Listen, why don’t you go on with George and the tour—show them the observatory. I’ll take Petar over to the infirmary myself. We’ll join up with you."

"Sure, skipper," replied Bud. He sensed something in his pal’s voice that warned him not to ask any questions.

Before the group could leave, Tom guided the student out into the hall and on to the ridewalk, which whisked them out into the sunlight. "Are you really hurt?" the scientist-inventor asked.

The young man, who appeared to be about 20 years old, stood up straight. "No. I apologize for the glass things—it was necessary."

"I thought Brungaria was over all that thought-control, cloak-and-dagger stuff," commented Tom wryly.

"Brungaria has changed much," said the student; "some things—they are slower to change. Mr. Atkossov watches over us carefully. If he reported I was talking to you secretly, the state police would ask me what we talked about, and it would not go so well."

Tom led Petar into an employee lounge, deserted for the moment. "We can talk here."

They sat down on a sofa and the young man fixed Tom in a serious gaze. "My name is Petar Nevolyan. I am in—you would call it the graduate level of instruction, in electrical technology. At the Academy."

"Is there something wrong at the Academy?" asked Tom.