Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon (15 page)

Whatever the answer, his space suit was no longer needed. Tom took off his helmet, glad to be free of the bulky gear, removing Nicky’s helmet as well. The little rhesus chattered his thanks. Tom noticed that the monkey seemed strangely calm, looking at Tom with big dark eyes that were questioning and almost intelligent.

Tom continued his search. Still the secret of manually opening, or de-materializing, the ark’s wall eluded him. He could feel beads of sweat on his forehead.
I assumed this was all deliberate on the part of the space people,
Tom thought;
what if I’m wrong? What if it’s a malfunction—or what if the Brungarians are responsible for it?
He waited anxiously, thinking his friends surely would figure how to outwit the Brungarians if they were responsible for the trouble. Minutes went by, but there was nothing but deadly stillness.

Despite his best efforts a claustrophobic panic finally took him over. In its grip he began to wildly claw and hammer at the walls of the ark.

He was a prisoner in a spaceship from a strange planet, full of diseased animals!

Outside, the desolate moon had become a dangerous place. As anticipated, the
Dyaune
launched a new missile barrage—this time directly at the
Challenger,
waiting on the valley floor like a sitting duck. The crew flinched back as the missiles converged on their target.

"Any second now!" choked Arvid Hanson, eyeing the tracking monitor.

"You, er, might try turning your equipment on!" gasped Dr. Glennon. "A bit close for comfort—!"

"Closer… closer…" Bud murmured.
"Now!"
Hank’s finger stabbed a red button.

To the enemy’s amazement, the swarm of small projectiles came to a stop a hundred feet from the
Challenger!
They hung suspended for a moment, quivering and straining against unseen forces, then rebounded violently in the direction of those who had fired them!

"Oh, brother!" Bud roared as the swarm scattered in all directions and the missiles plunged into the far corners of the valley, some barely missing the
Dyaune.
"I can just see those guys’ faces!"

The entire crew rocked with laughter.

"That’ll hold ’em fer a stretch, th’ dang idjits!" boomed Chow scornfully.

Sterling grinned as he swiveled the radiators for a quick take-off. A few seconds later the
Challenger
was speeding toward the moon’s umbra—its moving zone of shadow.

"We’re not running away," Bud declared. "We’ll be back for Tom a lot sooner than those Brungarians think!"

REALIZING that panic would only make his plight worse, Tom stopped his frantic pounding. As always, when in trouble, he asked himself,
What would Dad do in this situation?

"He’d try to collect his wits, that’s for sure!" Tom muttered ruefully. He looked at Nicky, who obligingly crawled down onto his forearm and regarded him coolly. "Right, buddy?" In a moment he felt calmer. "Now that I’m in here, I may as well take a look at those animals," he decided. "Assuming I can find my way in!"

Suddenly, as if his thoughts had been overheard, a change came over the corridor. The inner wall began to glow, softly at first and then more brilliantly, as if lit by some inner radiance. But in fact it was not becoming luminous, but becoming transparent. Tom did not touch the wall, thinking that its transition back and forth might be triggered by a current passing through it.

Tom gasped at the sight revealed beyond the wall. A huge zoo garden lay spread out before his eyes—a garden from the distant planet of his space friends!

The young inventor had set eyes on some of this interplanetary life before, in the capsule recovered by the seacopter. Here again were curious plants glistening with a red metallic sheen and seeming to grow directly out of rocks. Some looked like honeycombed tulips or inverted mushrooms. Others bore flowers with long spikes, dripping an oily liquid. Here and there were the mobile plant-forms he had seen previously, rodent-sized pods slowly crawling about in search of nutrition.

"But those animals!" Tom gasped as he gazed at the animals in the ark’s fantastic "space zoo." The creatures lay among the rocks, basking in the strange blue-tinged light, or moved about in slow, sickly fashion, scarcely turning their heads to look at Tom.

Though even the biggest were no larger than horses, they resembled the primeval monsters of earth’s dim past. Tom saw what looked like a miniature edition of an alosaurus, with its clumsy body, long neck, and tiny head. Near it was an animal which looked like a glyptodon or ancient armadillo. A small tyrannosaur squatted on its hind legs, slowly opening and closing its bone-crusher jaws. And there were other creatures too that earthly words were inadequate to describe. Yet none seemed to be mammalian, and though feathers and scales were plentiful, there was not a sign of fur.

As Tom stared in amazement, a triceratops-like beast, the size of a Shetland pony, waddled a few paces toward him. Its horned head made it look something like a rhinoceros, with a frilled bony plate around the neck. It gazed at him with alien eyes that seemed almost kindly.

It’s strange,
Tom thought, utterly lost in wonder,
that the animals of Planet X are so primitive in form, while their masters are so highly advanced in science.
Suddenly it struck him that, for all he knew, some of these creatures might be the space beings themselves! Yet none gave a hint of any humanlike intelligence.

He cautiously stretched forward a gloved hand to touch the wall of the zoo. Other than a very slight resistance, as if penetrating the surface of a fluid, he felt nothing. Like the Inertite envelope around Nestria, the containing barrier enclosing the zoo was permeable to solid objects, at least in its transparent state.
And,
the worrisome thought called out to Tom,
at least going inward!

Tom resealed his and Nicky’s spacesuits for protection. Then, gathering his courage, he stepped through the barrier, Nicky in his arms, lying docilely. Inside Tom checked the atmosphere meter built into his suit. Now it showed a very different atmosphere, presumably the air of the space friends’ distant star-world. The pressure was low, like that on a high mountain-top, and the air was very dry. Yet Tom decided earthlings might be able to breathe it, with perhaps a bit of help: though low in nitrogen, it was very rich in oxygen. "Hmm," he muttered to himself, "lots of argon; helium too." The temperature would feel sultry at 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

He jumped back, startled, as something nudged his leg. One of the tiny tyrannosaurs, dog-sized, was nuzzling his knee with its snout. Amazed at the creature’s friendliness, he rubbed his hand between its eyes. It seemed to react with pleasure!

"Good night!" Tom said wonderingly. "I’ve made a friend!"

Outside, as the
Challenger
rounded out of the dazzling sunshine into the area of lunar night, Hank Sterling powered-down the energy converters, using barely enough power to keep the ship aloft.

"What’s next?" Dr. Wohl asked.

Her inquiry overlapped one from Anton Faber: "How long will Tom be safe inside that vessel?"

"Not sure on either question," was Bud Barclay’s terse reply. "What we do depends on whether the Brungarians act as Hank and I think they will. But people can surprise you, right?—I’m surprising myself by not going over to the
Dyaune
and taking it apart with my bare hands!"

"Aye,
Bud bach,
you and me both!" declared Dr. Glennon. "I’ll gladly blow a bit of smoke up their fancy tailpipe!"

"As for Tom, wherever he is, for now we’ll have to rely on the space friends to keep him well," Hank added.

The
Dyaune
was momentarily out of sight below the horizon, which still blazed with sunlight like a burning crescent of white. Suddenly one of the crewmen sang out, "Here they come again!"

"At least we’re protected against their missiles," murmured Arv.

"Ye-ah, but who know what else they got in their holsters!" retorted Chow nervously.

"Hang tight," Bud said.

The
Dyaune
approached slowly, its form turning into a silhouette as it passed into the shadow zone. "Okay, let’s get moving!" Hank exclaimed. As he and Bud worked the controls, the
Challenger
leapt spaceward and sped further into the shadows only a few hundred feet above the surface. The Brungarian ship gave chase, its ion corona flaring brightly!

The crew huddled onto the control deck said nothing, but watched the enemy ship intently and with growing alarm. The miles that separated the two ships dissolved away.

"C-can’t we go any faster?" demanded one young astronaut.

"We could," said Bud. "But we’re not gonna."

"Hey, them sneaks must be tryin’ to pull a fast one!" Chow exclaimed. "They turned off their tail lights!"

The ion-drive flare behind the
Dyaune
had abruptly dwindled away to the faintest of sparks. Bud gave a sharp cry. "They’re in trouble!"

Something had happened for sure. The Brungarian ship had ceased to accelerate, gliding along on momentum alone. "Just what we’ve been waiting for!" Hank proclaimed. Swiveling the repelatron array to a pre-programmed setting, he again stabbed the master control. The converging beams of invisible force had an immediate effect. The
Dyaune
markedly slackened its speed. Then, moving too slowly to remain in orbit, it began to arc down toward the moon’s surface!

"They’ll crash!" Glennon muttered.

"This is what we were banking on—the chance that they might lose power," Bud said with a whoop of pleasure.

Chow stared at him in amazement. "How come?"

Sterling answered for Bud. "Since we doped out that their ship operates on solar energy, they can’t use their main drive here in the umbra," he explained with a broad grin. "And apparently their auxiliary power supply isn’t enough to allow the smaller thrusters to resist our repelatron—something they didn’t anticipate as we lured ’em into the shadow."

"We rope-a-doped and sucker-punched ’em," Bud chortled.

As he spoke, Bud was gunning ahead full speed, seeking to maneuver the
Challenger
between the falling craft and the moon’s surface.

"Buddy boy, you gone loco?" Chow gasped. "They’ll crash right plumb on top of us!"

"Not if our repelatrons work properly," the dark-haired pilot replied. "We’re adjusting for the changing angles as we go."

The others held their breaths as Bud and Hank, daring pilot and cool engineer, put their bold plan to the test. The other ship, completely out of control, was plunging straight toward the
Challenger
which by now had come to rest on the surface of the moon. In seconds would come the crash!

But the bank of repelatrons proved their worth and held steady. Gasps and cheers sounded from the
Challenger
’s crew as the Brungarian rocket ship slowed and then froze motionless. The repelatron beams were holding them off successfully!

"Message coming in, control deck!" intercommed Dinah Ingraham.

"Now
we’ll see some fast and fancy verbal footwork, I’ll wager," noted Dr. Faber.

Inside the space saucer, the head of the moon expedition found himself communing with the stricken animals almost as an equal. They reacted to Tom not with self-protective fear, but with a friendly curiosity touched with only a trace of shyness. One by one they gathered near him, regarding him calmly.

"This is something, isn’t it, Nicky?" Tom said, astonished yet somehow moved. "These folks aren’t like most animals back home—they’re
thinkers,
just like you and I! Maybe they’ve been bred that way by the space friends, or maybe they’ve been altered or genetically engineered. It’s as if they understand who I am and why I’m here." He looked down at his tiny charge. "So what d’you think, pal?"

Suddenly the rhesus monkey reached up and tapped Tom on his helmet in front of his mouth, then jumped from the young inventor’s arms. As Tom watched in bewilderment, Nicky scrambled about in the alien soil, trailing a gauntleted arm behind him.

Then the monkey stood aside, as if waiting. Tom’s jaw dropped.

Nicky had drawn one of the alien space symbols on the ground of the zoo!

As the monkey clambered back up on Tom’s shoulder, Tom again gazed into the creature’s eyes. "Nicky, what’s happening to us? What’s the space ark doing to us?" He looked up and turned slowly around, trying to make some sort of visual contact with each of the beasts that encircled him.
I know you’re sick and in pain,
he thought with all his force.
We’ll do what we can for you. Please trust me.

Acting together, almost as one, the mob of animals bowed their grotesque heads or lowered their strange-shaped bodies down onto the ground, as if doing honor to their rescuer from Earth!

HOLDING the captive
Dyaune
high above the American ship like a prize, Hank Sterling began to gently maneuver the
Challenger
back toward the space ark, while Bud engaged Professor Volj in a surreal conversation.

"I do think we have gotten off on the wrong feet, as you say," radioed Volj. "Perhaps you mistook our monitor probes as weapons, eh?"

"Perhaps we did," Bud agreed. "And perhaps we feel like doing a little probing of our own."

"Let us resolve these matters in peaceful amity."

"Let us not use diplomatic terms like
amity
and try talking turkey instead."

"And what sort of turkey do you have in mind?" asked Volj.

"Haven’t decided yet," was Bud’s reply. "I'll send over a gobble when I do. Meanwhile, you’re not going anywhere, so I’d suggest starting a good book."

He signed off. Violet Wohl asked him what he would do when they arrived in the sunlit area. "Won’t the
Dyaune
regain its power?"

"It would if we allowed it to," Hank said. "But the edge of the umbra is close to the valley where the ark is. We’ll park where we can see the ark while keeping our enemies in the dark."

"Ah, such a poetic flow of words!" chuckled Glennon. "Part Welsh, I’d say."