Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite (9 page)

"Hey, what’s happening?" Bud gulped as he grabbed for support. "What is that stuff?"

"Powder ash!" Tom cried. "We’ve run into a crater full of it!"

MONITORING the
Titan
’s communication link, Ron Corey heard the boys’ cries of alarm. Then the signal went dead!

"Tom, can you read me?" he shouted into the mike. Repeated calls brought no response!

Frantic with anxiety, Corey called Hank Sterling on his suit transiphone. The blond, square-jawed engineer, in charge of a work crew outside, listened as Corey poured out news of the boys’ plight. "I had just finished making my latest report to Jim Stevens at Enterprises and was about to switch off when the signal came in," he explained. "I don’t know just where they are, but their situation sounds dire!"

"Great space!" Hank cried out in dismay. "Ron, we’ll take the derrick tank and go pull ’em out!"

Under the engineer’s directions, the crane bucket was removed from the work tank Hank had been using outside. Huge grappling hooks were rigged in its place.

News of the disaster spread quickly among the crew. As Hank and Ron were about to board the tank, Kent Rockland rushed up.

"Let me go with you!" he urged. "I’ve handled bulldozers and all kinds of construction equipment."

"All right. Hop in!"

"Me too!"
Chow demanded, but Hank waved him off.

"Not enough room!" he yelled.

Kent took the controls and the tank rumbled off. The trail was not hard to follow. The rescue party was able to make out the treadmarks of Tom’s vehicle here and there among the rocky debris.

The trail wound among jagged hills and along the rim of a rocky canyon. Off to the right, a range of pink and blue crags stood out in sharp detail under the pitiless sunlight.

"Good thing these tanks are temperature-controlled!" Hank remarked grimly. The exterior temperature stood at 231 degrees in the sunlight!

"How long have the boys been gone?" Kent asked.

Ron Corey glanced at his watch. "About three hours."

"Which means they have only an hour’s supply of oxygen left," Hank muttered. "They wouldn’t be able to drive their tank back even if they got it free."

With desperate urgency, Kent gunned the derrick tank forward. Finally, after clawing their way through a narrow defile, the rescuers emerged onto a barren plain. Ahead rose the streaky yellow walls of several craters. Corey pointed them out excitedly. "Those must be the volcanoes I heard Bud talking about just before they got trapped!"

Hopeful that they were now nearing their goal, the rescuers advanced as fast as possible toward the craters. Here the tire marks were unmistakable. Suddenly Kent felt the tank treads losing their traction. The hard ground was dropping away! "This is it!" he cried as the tank’s nose dipped downward toward the crater directly before them.

Slamming the engine into reverse, Kent barely managed to back away safely. Hank scrambled out through the tank’s airlock hatch to survey the situation.

"Tom and Bud have vanished!" he radioed. "They’ve sunk into the chasm without a trace!"

Hank’s face was grave as he reentered the tank. "We’ll have to fish for them blind with the grappling hooks!" he told his companions.

Hank himself operated the crane. Foot by foot, he swung the hooks like feelers into the gritty gray depths, hoping to hit metal.

After a few moments of the awful suspense, the men’s faces were streaked with sweat. Kent clenched his hands nervously.
Would they find Tom and Bud in time?

Suddenly Hank broke the silence. "I’ve hit their tank!"

Relieved, Kent and Corey uttered words of encouragement. They watched as Hank maneuvered the hooks delicately, seeking to get a grip on the sunken vehicle.

At last he threw in the clutch and fed power to the winch. Groaning, it started to reel in, then pulled taut under the resistance of a heavy weight! "We’ve hooked ‘em!" Hank exclaimed jubilantly.

Slowly the engineer hoisted the little tank upward. Moments later, it broke through the top layer of ash, smeared with a gray-brown substance from top to bottom. Swiveling the crane around, Hank deposited the vehicle on solid ground.

Kent grinned. "Swell fishing, Hank! This is one time the big one didn’t get away!"

The smiles faded as the three tried to contact Tom and Bud by radio. Even now, with the signals no longer blotted out by layers of ash, there was no response!

Had the boys’ oxygen supply given out?

"Come on!" Rockland urged. "Maybe there’s still a chance to revive them!"

The trio were about to clamber out when Ron noticed movement—dislodged dust was streaming from the edges of the rescued tank’s hatch! Then the hatch popped open and two figures emerged from the tank.

"They’re alive!" Kent yelled joyously. In a minute Tom and Bud were safely aboard the derrick tank, exchanging hugs and thumps with their rescuers.

"Man alive, are we glad to see you!" Tom said enthusiastically.

"A little longer and that tank would have been our coffin," Bud added. "Our oxygen was almost gone. When we map this place, I vote we call it ‘Devil’s Hole’!"

"Why didn’t you answer our radio signal just now?" Hank wanted to know. The boys replied that they had heard nothing over their receivers.

"Interesting," murmured Kent. "Some substance in these rocks must effectively block radio signals, even when only a thin layer covers the transmitter." He turned to Bud. "Oh, and just for the record, these are
not
volcanic craters in the usual sense; they are caused by newly-melted materials being squeezed out through the crust by the impact of nearby meteor strikes. That ‘quicksand’ you got yourselves into is pyroclastic material that—"

"Whoa!"
exclaimed Ron Corey and Bud at the same moment, followed by laughter.

Kent grinned. "
Pyroclastic
is my fancy word for
ash
. As a matter of fact, this particular kind of ash is made of—ready?—
glass!
You fell into a pit of tiny glass beads, prepared for you by Mother Nature."

"I knew Mother Nature had it in for me!" Bud groaned.

"Let’s get back to camp pronto," Tom said. "We’ll need some kind of safety device to prevent any more accidents like this. I have an idea for an invention that may take care of it."

The boys’ tank proved to be fully operational after it had been dragged free. After recharging its air reservoir from the extra supply brought by the derrick tank, the two vehicles returned to base, where they were greeted warmly by the rest of the team.

"Of course it’s wonderful news that you boys made it back safely," said Jason Graves. "But you would’ve done well to take me along in the rescue tank, Sterling. In my younger days I had quite a bit of practical experience with excavation and crane work."

"Well, Graves, if this incident had happened back in your ‘younger days,’ I’m sure I would have called on you." Hank smiled and walked away; the other onlookers didn’t dare do either.

Graves frowned and, after a silence, barked, "Okay, back to work!"

Entering the spaceship, Tom hurried to his laboratory-workshop cubicle. An hour later Bud found his friend hunched over a flatscreen design board under a xenon lamp, sketching out electronic circuit diagrams.

"That the new ground-tester gadget, skipper?" Bud inquired.

Tom pushed back his green eyeshade. "Nothing very new about it. We simply shoot out a signal in advance of the tank treads and wait for the echo to bounce off solid rock. By timing the interval, we can tell whether the ground drops away."

"Like a ship’s fathometer, eh?"

"More or less, except that we can’t use sound waves when there’s no atmosphere. It’ll really be more like ground-penetrating radar, and in fact I’m calling it a penetradar system. The trick is to generate a beam that’ll pierce the ash deposits without causing a lot of false echoes. And it’s a real
tricky
trick thanks to the wave-canceling properties of the crust materials."

Bud grinned. "That shouldn’t be too tough for a wonder boy who’s already conquered space."

"Your confidence is touching, chum," Tom retorted, then yawned and took a hearty stretch.

After relaxing for fifteen minutes over a cup of hot chicken soup, brewed from a cube, Tom went back to work. Soon he had the plans for his new invention drawn up, and called in Sterling and Franzenberg to assign them the tasks of helping him construct and install the units in the several vehicles used by the expedition.

With both the earth and the sun dipping low on the horizon and the day ending, the task was finally finished. Tom took a break in the recreation compartment. But he had only begun to use the exercise equipment when he was interrupted. Gabriel Knorff burst into the compartment, followed by Jess Northrup.

"Tom—!"
began Knorff.

"Problem?"

"Naw, Tommy, not a
problem,"
put in Northrup before Gabe could answer. "If you call something a problem, it turns into one. Let’s call this a challenge."

Exasperated, Tom sighed and sat down on the bench of the machine.
"Whatever
you want to call it, what’s the issue?"

"It’s Graves!" exploded Gabe. He paced back and forth angrily. "Everybody’s had about all they can take from that big blowhard! The guy never saw a rocket launch until a few days ago, but now he acts like the galaxy expert on space colonization, telling everyone exactly how to do their jobs, detail by detail!"

"He’s a bit bossy, I agree," Tom replied mildly, trying to defuse the situation.

"Bossy?
The guy’s a tyrant—no, a Tyranosaurus Rex!"

"He wouldn’t let Red here take photos over at the atmos-maker site," explained Col. Northrup with a slight smile. "Didn’t take too kindly to it. As you can see."

Gabe looked as though he were about to redirect his fury in the direction of Northrup. "Now listen, Colonel, I’m a legit member of this expedition and my photographic record is as—"

"Mm-hmm," said Northrup languidly.

Blocked, the photographer turned back to Tom. "I’m telling you, that man will wreck the whole expedition!"

"Matter of fact," added Northrup, "there
is
just a little grain of somethin’ in what this young fella is saying. Morale’s pretty important on a mission, I’ve found."

This was not the first complaint Tom had received about the high-powered executive. Somehow Graves’s noisy energy had to be piped into useful channels. After Knorff and Northrup had left, Tom mulled over the problem as he finished exercising.

Presently, as the crew were gathering for supper, Tom called Jason Graves aside. "I suppose that young pup Knorff went crying to you about not being able to take his fool snapshots!" stormed Graves, already on the offense. "Well, setting up that air machine is delicate work requiring everyone’s full concentration."

"I’m not concerned about Gabe at the moment," interrupted Tom. "I wanted to thank you for the great work you’ve been doing—and see if you had the energy to take on a problem."

His mood suddenly changing, Graves plumped himself into a chair. "What’s on your mind, son?"

Tom explained that the task of setting up the two atmosphere-making machines, one at each pole of Little Luna, had a high priority and required his constant attention. "But I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting some of the scientific and surveying work that’ll pay off for later expeditions. I know Kent Rockland needs to put together some sort of plan to do his geological exploring, and Ron Corey is afraid of falling behind in searching for areas that might be developed for farming."

"Now you’re talking my language, Tom," responded Graves. "You want me to help ’em get organized, maybe ride herd on ’em a little. That it?"

"If you’ll take that load off my shoulders," the young scientist-inventor said, "it will leave me free to make the final adjustments on my atmosphere machines."

"Just leave everything to me!" Graves boomed, and promptly went to work.

By nightfall of the day following, survey teams under the pressure of Graves’s powerful inspiration had begun making sorties into the craggy wilderness of the satellite, while Dr. Jatczak and Rafe Franzenberg, freed from the industrialist’s intrusive oversight, had begun assembly of a package of instruments to be used in making delicate astrophysical measurements. Violet Wohl busied herself with her rats. Tom assigned Jess Northrup the job of examining the
Titan
to ensure that no potential malfunctions had developed during the flight; he had become familiar with the craft during its secret construction phase at NASA, which had been under his general supervision.

As for Chow Winkler, Tom was content to leave him to the important responsibility of turning the bland, dehydrated food rations into three square meals a day—plus snacks!

Meanwhile Tom, with a team consisting of Bud, Hank, Gabe, and Teodor Kutan, had made significant progress in setting up the first of the two atmos-makers. "This baby’s right on schedule! All we need now are the rock samples Kent was going to gather from the south pole region," Tom commented to Bud. "If they’re as rich in oxides as the rocks around here, we’ll be churning out a breathable atmosphere in no time!"

"I don’t envy Kent and Ron, having to hang out with Graves on those survey trips," Bud declared. "Especially this overnight one. It’s a good thing they’re using the biggest tank, with lots of air—Big Jake will probably suck up most of it himself!"

As Tom laughed, Kutan added: "Allow me to commend you, Tom, for your skill in handling the problem of Mr. Graves. You found a way to tap his talents without paying a stiff price. When you can’t get a difficult person out of e
veryone’s
hair, it often proves best to concentrate him on, er, just a
few
hairs!"

Bud snorted. "Ron and Kent are probably
losing
theirs."

The round trip from the
Titan
base camp to Little Luna’s opposite pole was fully 129 miles, a two-day journey that would be the longest such trip yet attempted. As anticipated, when the large tank passed below the horizon of the moonlet, which was only a few miles distant, all regular radio communication was cut off. Tom was relieved when, late the following afternoon, the tank reappeared over the horizon and signaled that all was well.