Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon (9 page)

Relieved, Tom went back to bed and slept soundly, exhausted by the excitement and emotional strain of the night’s adventure.

The next morning, as he showered and dressed, Tom decided to report the matter to Harlan Ames immediately. When he phoned the security office, Ames listened to the story in silence, then broke into a chuckle. "Tom Swift, inventor and actor! But you sure pulled it off."

In high good humor over the outcome of the whole incident, Tom ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs and drove off to the plant. Here he plunged into work at his desk. Last-minute parts, supplies, and equipment had to be ordered and checked. After conferring with his father and Hank Sterling, he had decided to test the
Challenger
on Fearing the day following, and—with luck—to take off for the moon forty-eight hours thereafter.

Early the next morning the dawn was pierced by the mighty Flying Lab roaring its way southward toward Fearing Island. Experienced pilot Slim Davis had the controls, and the entire moon crew from Shopton was aboard—Tom and Bud, Chow, Hank Sterling, Arv Hanson, Drs. Glennon and Faber, and several others.

Also aboard were some who would not be traveling into space, but were to play a role in the launching of the spaceship. These included Mr. and Mrs. Swift, Sandy, Bashalli, and, by last-minute special arrangement, Maureen Kesey.

"This is such an incredible thrill, Tom," gasped Mrs. Kesey as she gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the
Sky Queen
’s top deck lounge. He expression suddenly sobered. "I just realized… I’m now higher in the sky than… than my husband reached that day."

"He’d be proud," Tom said gently.

The Flying Lab crossed the Georgia coastline and in minutes was slowly circling the tiny, thumb-shaped island that served as a base for Enterprises space efforts as well as most of its fantastic undersea fleet of jetmarines and seacopters.

But the attention of the group was attracted like iron to a magnet by the strange object that towered in the middle of the island’s complex of buildings and airstrips.

"Great space snakes!" gulped Chow. "That there
Challenger
don’t look like nothin’ these ol’ eyes have ever seen!"

"Hey, cowpoke, you saw Tom’s model, didn’t you?" joked Bud.

"Shor did. But thet was a mite smaller!"

The lifesize
Challenger
looked like a world unto itself. The gleaming central cube was a good fifty feet in every direction, its smooth face interrupted by a pair of big rectangular picture-windows that slightly protruded out into space. Strong, curving struts above and below connected the cabin module to the hooplike rails, horizontal and vertical, that completely encircled it. Each rail had an outer diameter of 92 feet, according to Tom. A large number of parabolic repelatron reflector dishes were attached to the rails. "The gripping brackets are motorized and fit into recessed tracks in the rail-rings," Tom explained proudly. "That way we can move the radiator dishes wherever we need them, depending on what we need to repel in order to go in our chosen direction. We can also make smaller adjustments of angle at the base of the dish."

"Those reflectors look about eight feet across, and the metal isn’t terribly thick," remarked Tom’s mother. "Even working all together it’s hard to imagine them being able to lift such a huge mass of metal into space."

"The rails, struts, and braces do have to be especially strong," agreed Tom. "But the ship isn’t really as heavy as it looks. It’s primarily Tomasite plastic over a magtritanium mesh, which is pretty light in weight." He added that the spaceship was coated with transparent Inertite for protection against solar and cosmic radiation.

"Thomas, if it would not brand me as an old-fashioned
girl,
I would tell you just what this ship looks like to me," said Bashalli.

"What, Bash?"

"An enormous earring," she replied with half a giggle, "looking for its mate!"

Upon landing, the members of the party had lunch with the base personnel, and then were shown to their quarters.

The flight test of the
Challenger,
newly outfitted with the revamped repelatrons, was set for late afternoon. Tom, Bud, and Hank Sterling boarded the vast ship by means of a pressurized elevator that dropped down from the underside of the cabin-cube. As Hank went to the control deck to check on various preparations, Tom showed Bud around.

The pilot’s eyes were wide. "Four floors in this thing!—man, that beats the old
Sky Queen."

Tom shrugged. "Guess that’s progress, flyboy. The
Challenger
also has plenty of storage and engine space above and below the crew levels—which are connected by both elevators and emergency ladders, by the way."

"What’s that thing in front, down below the view windows? It looked kinda like a front porch."

"You’re nearly right, chum. It’s a staging area for other, smaller craft that we’ll be carrying in the hangar—on this trip, that’s the six Repelatron Donkeys we’re bringing along." Tom continued his tour, pointing out other features of the giant craft—the mess hall, private sleeping cabins, a recreation room, a fully-equipped workshop, and one entire level devoted to lab cubicles and scientific work.

"What about the power plant?" Bud asked. "That’d have to be a big one."

Tom laughed. "Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten about my cosmic-ray energy converters! That’s those two round things that look like searchlights at the opposite ends of the ‘porch’." Amplifying on the point, Tom noted that within the earth’s atmosphere, where the cosmic rays were weakened and blocked, the
Challenger
would be able to use stored power. "But we’ll only have enough to get us up into space. Up there we’ll not only tap the rays directly, but replenish the storage reservoirs."

"I take it you’re pretty sure you’ve solved the repelatron problem."

"As sure as I
can
be without a real-time test flight," was the answer. "One thing that helps is using multiple repelatrons at the same time instead of just one, as we did in the Special. Each one can be tuned slightly differently, to more efficiently repel differing mixtures and concentrations down below."

A voice erupted from a nearby intercom. "Tom, Hank here. Ready when you are in Main Control."

The boys elevatored to the broad but shallow control deck behind the twin view windows. Tom briefly pointed out the various instruments to his pal. "As you can see, these dials are labeled for the earth, moon, sun, Mars, Venus, and so on—output from a new-model Spacelane Brain, plus data piped in from the long-range telespectrometers in the various repelatrons. The meters tell the distance and relative angle of each body to our spaceship. In other words, they give us an exact reading of how much power we have to feed to the radiators for any desired acceleration," Tom explained. "See how the bottom of this screen is solid red? It’ll look that way whenever we’re sitting down flat on a surface."

A warning buzzer sounded in the compartment. "There’s the launch blockhouse giving us the green light," said Hank. "Radar’s clear in all directions, and the robot drones have been told to ignore this big birdie."

Tom gave a muted cheer of pure excitement. "Let’s take ’er up, Spaceman Barclay! You have the copilot’s chair."

Quickly Hank and the boys strapped themselves into their seats. "Speaking of chairs," Bud murmured, "these upright seats aren’t much like acceleration cots."

"No need for big, eyeball-popping accelerations in the
Challenger,"
Tom replied as he set the controls. "We’ll rise smoothly into space in a continuous, mild acceleration. This time, though, we won’t even do that—we’ll just take a jaunt up to the ionosphere, then loop back down. If the repelatrons give us enough power for that, we’ll know they can deliver enough thrust for space travel."

Through the view windows the three-person crew could see that the various watchers and ground crew had retreated from the launching area for a bit of extra safety, even though the ship produced no conventional blast of heat and exploding gases. They would be immune to the repelatron force rays, which had been carefully attuned to various materials in the solid ground beneath them. But they were sensibly cautious.

Tom switched on the spectron-wave detector and analyzer circuits. As lights lit up on the materials selector panel, his hands flew busily over the track-location and angle controls for the individual repelatron radiators. Bud and Hank could see the parabolic reflectors sliding smoothly into position along the rails. When most had moved into arrangement for maximum ground thrust, Tom glanced at his friends, gulped, and fed power to the repelatrons.

Tom had promised them a smooth liftoff, but such was not the case. With an audible
whoo-o-osh,
the multistory spaceship shot upward like a ricocheting bullet!

"Leapin’ rockets!" Bud choked. The boys had been jarred almost senseless by the shock of takeoff! In a matter of seconds the accelerating
Challenger
had climbed miles, and another minute would bring them across the lower borders of the stratosphere.

Tom was aghast. "Something’s gone haywire!" he cried out. "Take-off should be smooth as silk!"

As Torn maneuvered the ship hastily, the voice from the control blockhouse came over the radio in a restrained shriek. "Tom Swift, this is Fearing space control. Return to base immediately! Come back! Emergency situation! But land
gently!"

The three exchanged startled glances. What was wrong?

The answer was instantly revealed as Tom brought the ship down and climbed out onto the porch area. The buildings near the launching pad looked as though they had just undergone a blitz attack! Roofs and walls were crumpled, windows shattered, airstrips shredded by cracks, and the ground nearby strewn with bricks and hunks of concrete.

"Good night!" Tom gasped.
"We
did this! The
Challenger
’s liftoff just about leveled the whole base!"

AS TOM, Bud, and Hank stood boggling at the disaster, emergency vehicles with blaring sirens came charging out onto the airstrips and launch areas—firetrucks and ambulances. All about, stunned ground crewmen stood gaping at the damage.

"What happened?" Bud demanded faintly, horrified.

"This flying powerhouse of ours practically flattened everything in sight," Hank replied.

Shocked by the sight, Tom said dolefully, "No doubt about the cause. When we rose, the buildings took a massive blast of repulsion force—an even stronger thrust from the repelatrons than the ground did, because they were closer."

"But weren’t the repelatrons tuned to repel only the elements in the ground?" Bud asked.

Tom nodded unhappily. "Right, but those same elements are present in the building materials, asphalt, concrete, glass—almost everything around us. The computer was supposed to have adjusted each repelatron radiator to exclude the waveforms of specific combinations we didn’t want to repel—"

Hank sighed, dismayed and disgusted. "We thought we’d overcome this problem with the new circuitry, but the interference from such a huge number of sources must’ve overwhelmed the analyzers. Now, the repelatrons aren’t being selective
enough—
the space-wave pattern is too general."

"Does this mean—the trip’s off?" asked Bud. "Do the Brungarians win this one?"

"We can’t allow them to," stated Tom firmly. "This damage here on Fearing is
nothing
compared to the catastrophe an alien contagion could cause!"

"Then I’m putting all bets on my pal!" Bud declared with a reassuring grin.

"Any way to correct the problem?" Hank asked Tom. "I’m stumped."

The young inventor shrugged. "I’ll have to redesign the radiators, so they’ll direct the repulsion wave downward in a much narrower, focused beam. But it’ll take time and we may not have much time left." Tom leaned over the edge and yelled down to one of the employees he knew, "Anyone hurt, Narsa?"

"I think not, Tom. Nearly everyone was outside watching the take-off when the walls started to crumble."

Fortunately, the only injuries were minor cuts and bruises from falling fragments, and the damage to the buildings mostly involved the older structures left from the island’s earlier use by the United States military. A work crew was promptly organized to clear away the debris.

Meanwhile, Tom gave orders for the repelatron radiators to be removed from the ship. One was carted to Tom’s private laboratory, where the young scientist-inventor worked the night through, determined to correct the radiator design as quickly as possible.

By morning he had worked out an improved antenna-reflector design and turned it over to Fearing’s large machine shop facility for immediate production and substitution onto all the repelatron units. Yawning, Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched his weary muscles. Suddenly a voice behind him said:

"How about a nice juicy steak to warm up your innards, pardner?"

Looking around, Tom saw Chow Winkler waddling into the laboratory.

"Sounds mighty tempting, Chow, but I still have some things to attend to."

"Now don’t argue, son," the old Westerner protested. "Besides, I got a mystery fer you to clear up. I kinda think it might be important."

"A mystery?" Tom frowned, thinking:
just what I need!

"That’s sure what I’d call ’er, boss. First off I thought Bud was playin’ another one o’ his jokes on me. But it’s happened more’n once since we got here on Fearin’ Island. So I figure somethin’
mighty
queer is goin’ on."

"What do you mean, Chow?" Tom asked.

"Wa-aal, doggone, it’s my pots an’ pans—
they talk to me!"

Tom had to take Chow’s statement as a joke. "Are you kidding, Chow?"

The stout old cook looked indignant. "Brand my coyote stew, o’ course I ain’t kiddin’! You think I’d joke about th’ tools of m’ trade? I tell you my pots an’ pans have been spoutin’ all kinds o’ funny lingo. Had me thinkin’ I was goin’ plumb loco for a while!"

Tom grinned sympathetically. "Okay, I believe you, Chow. So what did they say? More salt, please?"