Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon (3 page)

"Thirty rotations," Bud repeated. "Doesn’t
rotation
mean a rotation of the earth—a day?"

Tom nodded. "That’s right. And
the mass in orbital period of thirty days
has to be the moon—Earth’s moon!"

Bud gaped in amazement. "Then—they’re landing that animal capsule on the moon!"

"Precisely, seventeen days from now. Which shows considerable wisdom and foresight," noted Mr. Swift. "The sterile, airless lunar environment is a perfect place to land a vessel of animals bearing an unknown infectious agent."

"But—but—!" For a moment Bud’s excited thoughts outraced his voice. "So we take a trip to the moon. No big deal! But how do we find the capsule? They didn’t give a location!"

"Which is also pretty clever of them," Tom mused. "They understand now—the local scientists, at least—that the gang that responded to their first message may not be helpful contactees after all. So they’re not broadcasting the precise location of the landing, assuming that
we
will be able to get up there first and can use our own technology to find the craft."

"I get it now," said Bud. "It’s the seacopter hunt all over again—but on the moon this time!"

Not long after the construction of the Swift space outpost, the space friends had transported a sealed capsule of plantlife specimens to Earth for Tom and his associates to study. As in the present situation, a rival communicator had interfered, and the vessel had been brought down in the Atlantic ocean. It had been up to Tom to search out the location of the lost rocket in his diving seacopter.

The animated discussion continued as the two Swifts and Bud had supper in Tom’s nearby electronics lab, a meal provided by Chow Winkler—who listened in as a welcome participant.

"So them space folks have got sick animals on their hands?" Chow said with a frown across his broad, billowy face. "When we had sick cattle back in Texas, we’d pull ’em out—quarantine ’em."

"This situation sounds a lot more serious, Chow, if we’re interpreting the message correctly," Tom responded. "It seems this ‘disease,’ if that’s even the right word for it, is a sort of phenomenon we’ve never seen here on Earth—something very general that can pass from organism to organism without regard for species."

"There seems to be a suggestion that the phenomenon acts on living cells internally," commented Damon Swift thoughtfully; "perhaps on the nucleotide chains of the cell nucleus itself. Even alien life would probably be based upon some such structuring element."

Bud gulped down a swallow of soda during the grim silence that followed, breaking it with: "Then what you’re saying is—the disease could affect life on Earth—animals and humans, too!"

"Brand my cosmic cough drops!" gasped Chow. "It could be the gol-sarned end o’ the world!"

"Especially if this renegade Brungarian faction gets their hands on it," Tom declared. "Even if they intend to use it only as a threat, who knows if they’ll be able to contain and control it?"

"Who knows if
we
will!" Bud pointed out.

As Chow began to clear the plates, Mr. Swift noted that a number of issues remained completely unresolved. "To name just one thing, where exactly is the container-vessel coming from? The message implies that it’s coming from the space friends’ home planet, but that’s surely in another star system light years distant. How could it be directed across interstellar space in the brief span of time since communication has been established with the Brungarians?"

Tom snorted. "Dad, you might as well ask how the Mars station communicates with ‘home’ so quickly! All we know is the same thing we’ve known all along—these beings have some sort of technology that allows them to manipulate space and time, matter and energy."

"Well," Bud said, "us earthlings can do a little manipulating of our own—especially earthlings named Swift! But do you really think you can get your Gyro-Jumper up and running for a moon trip before those secret scientists beat you to the capsule?"

Chow, tray in hand, shifted a puzzled gaze between Bud and Tom. "Gyro-Jumper! What in tarnation’s that?"

Despite the grave situation Tom and his father couldn’t resist some soft laughter. "You know Bud, Chow," Mr. Swift said. "He has a weakness for puns and nicknames."

Tom crossed the room and picked up a lightweight plastic model, holding it for Chow to see. "It’s the new spaceship, pard. I know you’ve seen photos of it in the papers."

The model consisted of a cube-shaped central cabin that gleamed like whitish chrome, suspended in the middle of a set of circling ringlike rail-beams. There were two vertical rings at right-angles to one another, which connected at the top and bottom, and another horizontal ring of equal size which girdled the "equator" of the strange craft. The overall configuration resembled a sort of gyroscope—hence Bud’s nickname for it.

"Oh, you mean that there repelly-tron rocket you’re buildin’ out on Fearing Island," Chow nodded. "But ya still don’t have a real name fer it, do you."

"Not so far," Tom agreed. "But we’ve sure been getting a load of suggestions."

To promote interest in space exploration, George Dilling had come up with the notion of inviting the public to send in ideas for the name of the new Swift space vehicle, under construction at the Enterprises rocket and sub-craft base on tiny Fearing Island off the coast of Georgia. There was nothing secret about the huge, oddly-shaped vehicle; photos of it had appeared in world publications for weeks, and letters and emails from the public had flooded Swift Enterprises.

"She’s officially named the XRTV-1, you know—the Experimental Repelatron Thrust Vehicle," noted Bud. "That’s too much of a mouthful for me."

"Fer me too, buddy boy," Chow agreed.

Damon Swift picked up the thread of the conversation. "To go back to your question, Bud, the spaceship is already virtually finished. The last remaining problems have to do with—"

"These!" Tom concluded, pointing at one of a number of parabolic dish-antennas that were fastened to the circular rails. "We won’t be going anywhere soon unless I can figure out how to get the repelatrons to change their settings rapidly. Otherwise we’ll have the same sort of problem we ran into this morning in the Special—the mix of compounds and substances on the ground beneath the ship varies from place to place in such a complex way that the repelatron can’t re-tune itself with sufficient precision."

"And then down she goes!" Chow declared. "And
down
’s a might long way!"

Mr. Swift drew the tense discussion to a close by observing that it would be prudent to add some specialists in life-science fields to the roster of personnel already selected for the planned moon voyage. "Tom, your mother has often mentioned one of her old professors—Glennon’s his name—who’s the world expert in the application of quantum physics methodologies to molecular biochemistry. And given the gravity of the threat, I’m sure our government would have no objection to lending us Dr. Faber." Tom agreed enthusiastically. Anton Faber, who had accompanied the Swift expedition to Antarctica during the atomic earth blaster mission, was a renowned zoologist who had become a good friend.

"It’ll be great to see him again," said Tom. To which Bud added:

"Let’s just hope scoping out outer-space animals isn’t a little too far out of his league!"

By the next day plans to speed the preparations for the completion of the repelatron spaceship and the journey to the moon were proceeding apace. When Bud returned from an early-morning test flight of a new plane under study at Swift Construction, he was told by Munford Trent, the Swifts’ shared secretary, that Tom was already at work in the shielded high-energy test complex. Bud, an athletic youth, felt a need to stretch his muscles, so he avoided the cross-facility ridewalk and walked over to the building the old-fashioned way: by muscle power.

It was a warm but overcast morning. "Hardly seems like the sun came up," he murmured to himself as he approached the big, square building.

Suddenly Bud stopped short—then broke into a run. A flash of brilliant blue-white light had burst through the row of small windows just beneath the line of the roof. At the same moment came a cry of fear from within—the voice of Tom Swift!

BUD BARCLAY exploded through the unlocked double-doors of the test complex like the footballer he had been, not slackening his speed. His best friend was in danger!
"Tom! Tom! Answer me!"

It took only an instant to discover which room Tom occupied. Blazing light poured through the open door. Bud skidded to a stop, a hand shielding his eyes. The blue-white glare seemed as formidable as a solid object.

He called out Tom’s name again, and this time was rewarded.
"I’m here, Bud—next to the wall!"

Bud spied a pair of heavily tinted work goggles hanging from the wall and hastily slipped them on. Now he could see. But what he saw was hard to understand!

Tom, clad in a bulky protective suit with a helmet, was pressed against the far wall next to a complicated assemblage of equipment that Bud could barely make out. Between Bud and Tom the way was blocked by a weird floating object, a rounded mass of pure blinding light, crackling like a faulty electrical transformer and filling the air with the pungent smell of ozone.

The object did not hang stably in the air, but bobbed and weaved in violent, jagged motion, like a toy balloon caught in a windstorm. Its shape seemed to be constantly changing, elongating, flattening out, twisting into a crescent shape with no rhyme or reason. Brilliant flashes pulsed from it each time it changed direction, bolts of electrical fire lashing any grounded piece of metal in the area.

"Stay back!" Tom shouted desperately. "It’s unstable—it’ll fry you!"

But Bud was not inclined to stay back, or even hesitate. He could see that the vicious-looking electrical effects were writhing agonizingly close to Tom. They seemed to be closing in on him! Bud’s eyes searched his surroundings, frantic to discover something that could help him rescue his friend. Finally he made out a broad coil of thick, uninsulated wire lying on a nearby workbench. It was the matter of a moment to clip the free end of the wire to a metal bar protruding up from the cement floor which he knew, from previous experiments, was well-grounded.

Bud’s powerful arms sent the coil spinning through the air directly toward the ball of lightning, the coil smoothly unreeling as it arced across the big lab space. As the wire came within two feet of the phenomenon, there came a deafening bang and a blast of hot wind that almost knocked Bud off his feet.

Dazed and dazzled, he steadied himself. The sphere of light had vanished completely, dissolved into nothingness!

Bud ran up to his friend, but the young inventor lurched back. "No!" he warned in tones muffled by his helmet, which seemed to have turned almost opaque. "The suit’s hot and may have picked up a residual static charge. Give me a second—I’m all right."

Tom staggered a few yards and grasped one of the grounding-bars firmly. After a half-minute or so, he let go and began to shakily strip off the protective suit.
"Good night!"
he panted.

"Didn’t look like any
night
I’ve ever seen!" Bud retorted. "What in space was it—some kind of weapon?"

Tom shook his head. "No, chum. Call it a sign of success."

"Huh?"

"That’s right." Tom gestured vaguely toward the equipment heaped next to the lab wall. "My new radiation converter—power for the spaceship."

"Just about powered
you
to a cinder!"

"It created a self-sustaining high-voltage plasma, bottled-up in its own magnetic field, which is what prevented it from dissipating. Basically, ball lightning!"

"I’ve heard of that," Bud said. "And that’s what you were aiming for in your experiment?"

A weak grin spread across Tom’s face. "Not exactly. But the power produced by my machine was an order of magnitude higher than I’d expected. That great pass of yours really saved my bacon, flyboy—or maybe I should say, kept my bacon from frying!"

Bud shook his head. "What’re we gonna do with you, genius boy? But anyway, does this mean your converter is ready for the flight?"

"It’ll need some adjustment," replied Tom ruefully. "But it sure looks like it’ll produce enough power to run the Gyro-Jumper’s big repelatrons."

"Uh-huh. You couldn’t just stick with those solar batteries that almost vaporized us both a few adventures ago?"

"It’d take a thousand of ’em," the young scientist-inventor explained. "The converters—there’ll be a pair of them—will be mounted outside the hull of the ship. What they do is capture and focus high-energy cosmic particles in a way that separates the charges by polarity, creating a voltage gradient that—"

"I’ll take your word for it, skipper!" Bud interrupted.

Later that day Tom and Bud drove to Shopton’s small, but rapidly growing, commercial airport to pick up Drs. Faber and Glennon. It had been arranged for the two scientists to fly in together so that they might become acquainted.

Dr. Faber was first off the plane. The tall, keen-eyed scientist beamed at Tom and Bud through his thick-lensed spectacles. "How delightful to see the two of you again," he exclaimed, shaking the boys’ hands with gentle warmth. "Such a great deal has happened in, and
to,
our little world since the polar trip! And I do thank you for seating me next to Evan here, who turns out to be quite as voluble a talker as I myself." Then he added humorously: "Though I fear one cannot always make out what he is trying to say—eh, Evan?"

"Nonsense!" chuckled the other man good naturedly.
"Sut hwyl,
Tom Swift! And you too, friend of Tom! What cheer?" The professor greeted them heartily, seizing their hands in turn in a meaty grip. He was a short, thick-set, jovial Welshman with a shock of gray hair still streaked with traces of red, thatched above a pair of twinkling blue eyes.

Tom, who had looked up a few words in Welsh, grinned back at him.
"Do iawn, diotch!
Very good, thanks. This is my friend, Bud Barclay."

Bud wincingly regained ownership of his hand. "Glad to know you, Professor."