Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon (10 page)

"Well, there was one voice sayin’
‘Rocket due at Sky Haven—Horton to spoke module four.’
Then there was some gibble-gibble about a cosmic radiator report from Wright Field Arrow-medical Lab. And this mornin’ my big stew kettle starts reeling off some stuff about lox-zinc an’ Ethel’s solid fuel propellants or some such foolishness."

"Foolishness!" Tom had bolted up out of his chair. "Chow, do you realize what all that stuff was?"

"Shucks, no. Nuthin’ t’do with cookin’, though."

"Those were top-secret radio messages coming into or out of Fearing!" Tom asserted. "They’re supposed to be encrypted—coded!"

The bald-headed chef was thunderstruck. "R-r-radio messages?" Chow stuttered. "But I didn’t hear this stuff over the radio. Like I told you, my pots an’ pans was speakin’ it out loud! Kind of a tinny voice, but what’d you expect a metal pan to sound like?"

"They must have been functioning as loud-speakers, somehow," Tom said urgently. "And if they’re coming through uncoded—! Come on, pard, show me where all this happened."

"Okey-doke, boss!"

Bouncing along as fast as his paunch and high-heeled cowboy boots would permit, Chow led the way to his private white-tiled kitchen, adjacent to the cottage used by Tom and his family.

"They was sittin’ right there, Tom," he said, pointing to his electronic range.

"No wonder!" Tom made a quick examination of the stove and the pans. "The electronic circuits here in your range must have picked up the output signal from our receiving station by inductive resonance. Then the pans, sitting on the burner elements, acted as detectors and broadcast the messages just as if they were coming through a speaker."

Chow stared at the young inventor, open-mouthed. "Brand my skillet, I don’t savvy a word you’re sayin’, but it sure sounds bad!"

"It could be
very
bad," Tom replied. "If your stove could pick up those secret messages, our enemies might do the same thing!"

Dashing to the island communications building, he reported the trouble to the radio crew. "The stuff Chow heard was already decoded, so the source-signal must have been coming either from our decoder output or the audio output amplifier," Tom said. "And it must be powerful!"

"Dave Bogard installed a new decoder system for us two days ago," one of the radio staffers reported. "It may have some bugs in it."

On Tom’s orders, the staffer phoned Dave, one of the Swifts’ electrical engineers, to scan the system immediately. Meanwhile, Tom himself began to check the whole receiver system.

Working together they pinpointed the transmission leak. "There’s your trouble, Dave," Tom announced twenty minutes later. "The decoder output is overdriving—putting out entirely too much voltage. Induction is pumping the analog frequencies right into the base’s power setup."

"Sure am sorry, skipper," Bogard replied, somewhat red-faced. "Man alive, sometimes I think I must be jinxed! I’ll fix it right away."

Tom reassured him, but inwardly he was worried that his enemies might have picked up some valuable information. But he was thankful that through Chow he had discovered what was going on. "Good old Chow!" he said to himself. "This rates a reward."

Later that morning, when Tom returned to Fearing from a quick trip over the waters to the mainland, he was carrying three western-style shirts in a clothing store bag.

"I didn’t know which of these to give Chow, so I bought all three and told the store I’d be returning two of ’em," Tom said, showing his purchases to Sandy and Bashalli. "What do you two think?"

"You want the feminine point of view? Very wise," said Sandy smugly. "Well, this gold one is nice, but either of these two is better than that awful blue thing."

Bashalli nodded. "I slightly incline toward the red one, but I do agree that the blue one is simply impossible—who could wear such a gaudy thing in public?"

"Just as I thought. Thanks, ladies." Tom picked up one shirt and began to fold it into a box for wrapping. "The blue one it is!"

He headed for the kitchen and handed the giftwrapped package to his big friend. "A little present to you for helping me discover that radio leak," he told the surprised cook.

Chow opened the package and took out the deep blue shirt embroidered with gold threads and silver crescent moons. "Great jumpin’ Jehoshephat!" the old chef gasped. "If that ain’t the most bee-yoo-tiful thing I ever laid eyes on!"

Gaudy shirts were Chow’s great weakness. With trembling fingers, he tried on his new prize. Then the stout, grizzled old cowpoke eyed the result, using a polished skillet as a mirror and preening himself like a fat peacock.

"By jingo, I could pass for a movie cowboy in this getup, if’n I do say so myself!" Chow declared. "Tom, I don’t know how to thank you. I’m plumb touched by your thoughtfulness."

"Forget it, Chow. I figured you’d like it. It’s just your style—and that suits me just fine!"

Thoroughly exhausted, Tom went to his quarters and fell into bed, sleeping until sundown. Arising, Tom checked with Hank Sterling and the machine shop tech crew and found that the new repelatron radiators would be ready, tested, and installed by first light of morning. The news pleased him—the project was back on track.

But his good feelings lasted only as long as it took him to call Harlan Ames in Shopton. "You don’t dare let up the pace, Tom. Government sources are telling me that the country supposedly in authority over that Sahara site is spreading word that they’ll be testing what they call an ‘unarmed experimental defensive missile’ sometime during the next forty-eight hours. They don’t want anyone going on nuclear rapid-response. I’ll bet it’s the Brungarian moonship."

"I’m sure you’re right, Harlan," Tom commented glumly. "That means we’ve got to get going!"

Tom ate dinner with the large group that had accompanied him from Shopton aboard the
Sky Queen,
and announced that departure for the moon was immanent. "Are you sure you won’t blast the whole rocket base apart this time?" Sandy asked with a mischievous twinkle in her blue eyes.

"Now stop teasing," Mrs. Swift reproved her.

Bashalli added, "Yes, it isn’t often these manly astronauts ask us out on a date that doesn’t self-destruct midway through, so don’t spoil it."

"Thanks, Bash," Tom said, grinning. "I know Bud and I had to break our promise to let you throw us a big going-away party—the least we could do was actually let you
see
us going away."

"You’ll take a test flight before leaving for space, I presume," said Mr. Swift.

"Tomorrow morning, Dad—early as possible."

Early was early indeed. The first rays of the Atlantic sun caught the gyroscope-shaped vehicle rising majestically from the island. This time the performance of the
Challenger
was flawless. Emboldened, Tom took her all the way to the black edge of space, where the ship hovered, silent and motionless. As Bud and Hank clapped their leader on the back, Tom grinned at them and said, "There’s no reason to wait any longer. We leave for the moon at one this afternoon!" He pointed through the viewport at the pale, beaming lunar disk. "Be seeing you soon!"

Back on the ground after a perfect landing, Tom was greeted by his family and an excited mob of island employees and Enterprises technicians. They rushed out en masse to congratulate Tom as he and the others disembarked. His radio reports had already indicated that the test had proven successful.

"What’s the verdict?" asked Dr. Glennon of the young inventor. "As good as the second-hand reports?"

"Even better than I’d hoped," Tom replied. He described the shakedown flight briefly, and grinned as the men crowded around to slap him on the back and shake hands. Bud, Bashalli, and Sandy all beamed with reflected pride at Tom’s latest achievement. Tom’s parents, and Mrs. Kesey, were fully as excited as the others.

After hours of loading the ship and making the final preparations, the fateful moment arrived. A small ceremony had been planned. The selected crew, seventeen in all, filed aboard. They took their places in various compartments and adjusted their safety belts.

"Ready for take-off!" Tom’s voice on the radio was relayed over the loud-speaker.

The count-down began. Blushing and a trifle nervous, Tom’s mother and Maureen Kesey stepped forward on the special platform which had been erected for the occasion. Each held a champagne bottle wrapped in silver foil.

As the count reached one, Mrs. Kesey said clearly, "I christen thee
Challenger!"
Together the two women swung their bottles against the spaceship’s outer frame. Mrs. Kesey’s cracked in half, neatly, and champagne came fizzing out of the gaps in the foil.

But Mrs. Swift’s bottle exploded in her hand, splintering into a thousand pieces and showering her with glass!

WITH a gasp of unbelieving dismay, Anne Swift staggered back, holding her face. Blood oozed from her fingers and neck!

"She’s hurt!" Mrs. Kesey cried out, rushing to her side to keep Tom’s mother from falling. Fortunately, she herself had escaped most of the flying glass. She supported Mrs. Swift as shocked workers scrambled up on the platform to assist, pushed aside almost at once by Mr. Swift and Sandy.

"We’ll take her to the infirmary at once," Damon Swift directed, hoping that his wife’s eyes had not been affected.

"Oh,
Mom!"
gasped Sandy tearfully. She could not go on.

Meanwhile, Tom and his crew were soaring high above the island, unaware of the accident. As different selector lights flashed on and faded on the master control board, indicating changing dominant mixtures of compounds and elements in the receding ground far below, Tom manipulated the controls, seeking the most efficient combination. He cautiously opened the power feed, gradually switching from the storage reservoirs to the energy converters as the atmosphere dropped away around them. The ship rose into blackness like a huge majestic visitor from another planet.

The ground fell away below them. In minutes the whole of Fearing Island was no more than a speck on the waters lapping the Atlantic coast. Higher and higher they zoomed till the earth’s curvature became noticeable.

"My word," Dr. Faber murmured in an awe-struck voice, "All the things I’ve seen, yet I never in my life imagined I’d see anything like this!"

Tom smiled, ecstatic with the performance of his new invention. For a time he remained busy at the controls, always trying to produce the maximum lift with the least amount of power consumption. As the ship got above the blanket of atmosphere, Tom reduced the force on the rock-silicates, iron, and aluminum of the crust of the planet, and retuned the repelatrons for sea water, atmospheric nitrogen, and oxygen.

"At this height we’re starting to be able to select Earth’s general, overall mix of frequencies," Hank Sterling explained. "The effect becomes more pronounced the farther we travel from the repulsion focus."

"Let’s try a little globe-trotting," Bud suggested to Tom, and his pal readily agreed.

The
Challenger
arced eastward. Soon they could make out, on the eastern rim, the shores of Europe, clouded by drifting blankets of evening mist. Tom grinned in triumph as he swiveled the radiating antennas to enhance forward motion. Like a circling comet, they glided further eastward over the face of Europe, then down across Africa, and back into full view of the continents of North and South America.

"Good way to learn geography, eh?" Bud quipped. But the young pilot was almost left speechless by the ease and smoothness of the ship’s action. "Tom, this has rocket flight beat to a frazzle!"

"What a fantastic shape the ship has!" murmured a senior crew member, a veteran of the construction of the space outpost. Staring out the viewport at the great, arching metal beams, he added doubtfully, "It isn’t exactly streamlined, is it?"

"Doesn’t have to be for traveling through the space void," Tom explained. "As for the earth’s atmosphere, we can get clear of that easily enough with our repelatrons, slowly as we choose."

"We could even get through a brick wall," Bud put in jokingly.

Meanwhile, the spaceship having long since dwindled into the blue, an ambulance from the Fearing Island infirmary came rushing to the scene of the accident. Mrs. Swift was helped aboard with Sandy and Mr. Swift comforting her.

The ambulance sped back to the infirmary. Here the base physician, Dr. Carman, made an examination and cleaned and dressed the patient’s cuts. Then she was put to bed.

As the injured woman sank into a restful slumber, Sandy turned to the doctor. "How bad are the cuts?" she asked anxiously. "Will she—will she be all right?"

Carman nodded briskly. "Oh yes, I’m quite sure they’ll heal without scars. Fairly superficial. Fortunately, none of the splinters went into Mrs. Swift’s eyes. But what was in the bottle?"

Mrs. Kesey looked surprised and troubled. "It was supposed to be water. Why?"

At that moment a white-jacketed chemist walked in from the laboratory, holding a fragment of glass and a test printout, which Damon Swift examined. "We’re running some tests on the stuff," he reported, "but it certainly wasn’t water."

The worried onlookers were stunned. Had one of the Swifts’ enemies done this? Had the lunar race become so fierce that the Sentimentalists were retaliating against the families of the participants?

Later, Harlan Ames called Mr. Swift at the infirmary from Shopton. "We’ve traced that liquid, Damon," he reported. "The whole thing was an unfortunate mistake by a young stockroom helper working for our supplier. He got his orders crossed and filled one of the bottles with an unstable liquid used in cleaning. The company will dismiss the boy, of course."

"No, please," said Anne Swift weakly from her bed, listening to the phone speaker. "It was just an accident, and I’m sure he feels terrible enough. Harlan, please tell the supplier that we’d like to see them treat the boy leniently." Ames agreed to do so.

By this time the space communications center on Fearing had made contact with the
Challenger,
which was then returning from its quick excursion and was readying itself for the plunge into deep space. Tom and the others were horrified to learn of the mishap on the ground, but relieved by Mrs. Swift’s prognosis for recovery. "Tell Mom she’s as much a hero as anyone here," Tom radioed, "and tell her I’ll send my love from the moon!"