Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (4 page)

In the Enterprises control tower Tom kept a keen eye on the instrument readouts and radar returns tracking the progress of the rocket.

"Tom, something’s wrong!" said the flight manager, Daylene McMurdo. She gestured toward one of the instrument dials. "The main chute didn’t deploy!"

"What about the reserve chute?" asked Tom.

"It took over automatically. But I don’t think I can correct for the change in trajectory—not with those high-altitude winds crossing our path." She did some fast calculations. "No, it can’t be brought back to the runway. Shall I send the detonator signal?" This emergency feature would blow the rocket to tiny fragments, which would rain harmlessly over the sparsely inhabited hills to the north of Shopton.

Tom studied the readouts with a grim expression on his face. "No, that’s not necessary."

"But Tom, if we—"

"I said
no,"
interrupted the young inventor brusquely. "Switch to manual. I’m taking over the controls." Daylene moved aside and Tom sat down in her place. He reactivated the small maneuvering thrusters, which usually played no role after deployment of the parachute, and used them to gradually force the rocket onto a new heading.

"What do you have in mind?" asked Daylene with hesitation. Tom’s mood struck her as odd.

He took a moment to respond. "I’ll bring her down in Lake Carlopa, near Rickman Dunes. No one’s down there this time of year." Ten minutes later he stood up. "Okay, she’s down, and the signal beacon is still running, so everything should be fine."

"Great job, boss," declared Daylene. But Tom left the tower without replying.

Tom located Bud, and the two of them headed out to the nearby lake in one of the large Swift transport trucks. Using the triangulator equipment built into the vehicle’s dashboard they quickly zeroed in on the rocket.

"Is she floating in the lake?" asked Bud.

"I don’t think so," was Tom’s answer. "The location of the beacon hasn’t moved for several minutes now. I’d say the rocket has beached itself somewhere near the Dunes." They drove into the deserted Rickman Dunes recreation area, leaving the road for the sandy beach.

"I see her tail fins!" Bud cried.

In a moment the two youths had pulled up next to the streamlined hull, its chrome sheen now mottled with sooty black from reentry. The secondary parachute was spread out along the beach; the winds from the lake had caught the chute and pushed the rocket up onto the shore, just out of the water.

They got out of the truck and Bud pointed. "Looks like the dome visor opened all right. I can see the battery."

But as Tom neared the rocket, he was stunned to see a strange glow through the special glass of the dome. Instantly he dropped to the earth, yelling:

"Bud! Hit the ground and cover your eyes!"

BUD FLUNG HIMSELF headlong in the sand after Tom. Both boys shielded their eyes with their arms. A split second later came a blinding flash of light from the rocket!

Even with their eyelids squeezed shut, they saw the dazzling brilliance of the glare. As the light faded away, Tom opened his eyes cautiously and saw Bud scrambling to his feet. "What in the name of aerodynamics was that?" gasped the athletic young pilot.

Tom half-smiled wryly and said, "Crazy as it may sound, that flash of light proved our experiment is a big success.

"How so?"

"Come here, pal. I’ll show you." Tom led the way to the burned-out rocket and pointed to the now-blackened dome porthole. "Notice what’s happened to the metal frame around the quartz window!" he remarked.

"Wow!" Bud exclaimed. "Fused solid to the metal shell of the rocket! The heat from that flash must have been terrific."

"Right," Tom agreed. "Which means our battery picked up a sizable charge out there in space."

Bud responded enthusiastically. "Then this foil you developed is going to work?"

"Well, the sol-alloy
did
become energized by the solar radiation," Tom explained. "In other words, a big percentage of its free electrons were energized to a highly excited state and trapped at the surface of the metal foil. But the trouble is that they didn’t
stay
trapped."

"You mean the battery is still shorting out somehow?"

Tom nodded. "That’s what caused the discharge flash. Apparently even this alternate formulation of sol-alloy is very unstable when it’s in a charged state. So now the problem is to figure out a desensitizer for the stuff—something to keep it from discharging all of a sudden as it did just now."

"Sort of a tranquilizer, huh? I see."

Using the small crane attached to the long truckbed, Tom and Bud loaded the rocket fuselage onto the truck and ferried it back to Swift Enterprises, to the laboratory building. Tom and Bud stood by, watching through goggles, as a welder used an acetylene torch to cut apart the fused sections. Then Tom removed the sol-alloy from the battery inside the rocket and held it up to the light. The once-shiny metal foil was covered with a dull-gray coating.

"It oxidized completely when that flash occurred," Tom muttered.

"Cheer up, pal," Bud said, clapping him on the back. "Just be glad you didn’t oxidize along with it."

Tom pulled away from his pal. "What do you mean,
cheer up?
I feel fine." Startled by this response, Bud was silent for a moment, his eyebrows raised. Then Tom seemed to pass on to another thought completely. "If a commercial battery ever failed that way," he said, "no buyer would touch another with a ten-foot pole. It could ruin our whole market overnight."

During the next few days, Tom used the advanced facilities of Swift Enterprises to work on a desensitizer, which proved a surprisingly daunting task. As the weekend approached, the skies a dull gray and snow threatening, the young inventor struggled over his problem. But at last he felt that he had it licked. Late Saturday night, Bud came to watch him complete the assembly of a battery to be used in the new test.

"Hey, what happened to the color of your sol-alloy?" he asked with a puzzled look. "It’s darker than it was."

"That’s because of the desensitizer I’ve mixed with it, so that the stuff won’t pop off like an old flash bulb the second it gets exposed to air," Tom replied.

The young inventor explained that he had used as a desensitizing agent a trace amount of a transition metal sulfide, incorporating it in the sol-alloy when it was smelted. "And now we’ll put together a four-cell battery," he said.

"What happens if the sol-alloy oxidizes again?" Bud asked.

"Back to the proverbial drawing board. But I don’t think that will happen this time."

Tom rolled up four sheets of the sol-alloy and inserted them into cylindrical cells along with granules of a substance he had invented which he called catalium. Then he filled the cells with liquid ammonia under pressure. As each cell was filled, Tom sealed it off. Finally, when all the cells were ready, he assembled them in a battery case made of Herculesium, a lightweight malleable material with amazing electrical-conduction properties.

He handed it to Bud who gave a surprised whistle. "Genius boy, this is so light a child could lift it easily. Man, wait until the automobile makers get wind of this!"

At noon Monday, Tom and Bud eagerly watched from the control tower as the second experimental rocket took off, carrying the new battery. Tom glanced at his wrist watch. "Well, here’s hoping," he muttered to Bud. "This time we gave the parachute an extra checkout. If this test—"

He was interrupted by a voice shouting his name. "Tom! Come in here quick!"

The boys whirled around to see Nels Gachter beckoning to them from another room, an excited look on his face. Gachter was Enterprises’ chief of communications science.

"What’s up, Nels? Anything wrong?" Tom asked as he and Bud made a dash to investigate.

"Nothing to do with the rocket. It’s the space video-oscillograph! A message is coming through from your space friends!"

Tom and Bud looked at one another excitedly. Gachter referred to the mysterious beings from another planet who had been communicating with the Swifts by mathematical symbols, intermittently, for many months now. The first message had arrived on a strange missile, invisible to radar, which had plunged into the grounds of Swift Enterprises like an oversize meteor. Since then several communications had been received and decoded by Tom and his father, and responses had been successfully transmitted back. The two Swifts had kept a record of all the symbols and had compiled a computerized dictionary. The messages indicated that the senders were intelligent beings who had mastered the problems of space travel—except one. They wished to visit the earth but were unable to endure some unexplained feature of our planetary environment.

When Tom and Bud reached the video-oscillograph, they saw a series of weird symbols appearing on the screen. The earlier parts of the message had already been recorded automatically for extended study.

"Howlin’ headwinds!" Bud cried out. "That machine’s going crazy!" The impulses were coming through stronger and faster than ever before. Tom recognized many of them at a glance from previous messages.

Suddenly an odd symbol which Tom had never seen before began to take shape on the scope. But before his eyes could fully register its shape, the screen went dead!

Tom groaned as he and Gachter checked the instrument hastily. "It’s not the oscillograph itself—the pulses were coming through with so much power that they burned out the limiters in the magnifying antenna!"

"At least you got the first part of the message. What does it say?" Bud asked impatiently.

"Give me time," replied the young inventor. "There are many new configurations in the symbols, so it may take awhile to translate this." He made a digital disk of the received symbols for later study.

As Tom and Bud left the room, Daylene McMurdo called over, "Tom, that rocket just touched down on runway two. Where do you want it?"

"The big test lab, please," responded Tom. "I’ll head there right now."

At the lab, Tom made sure the rocket was grounded against any dangerous electrical emissions, then unsealed the dome and hooked-up the test instruments. Heart pounding, he stepped back to the readout board and closed a switch. Instantly the voltmeter needle swung around to the right—and kept moving further and further around the dial!

"Good night, look at that!" Bud cried.

When the needle came to rest, the pair could hardly believe their eyes. Tom himself gave a whistle of amazement. "Hang on to your space hat, Bud! The voltage is almost fifty percent higher than what I’d hoped for!"

Bud gave a whoop of triumph and threw his arms around his friend in a bear hug. Tom laughed—but then, to Bud’s shock, he seemed to sag in Bud’s arms, as if he were about to fall to the floor.

"Tom?"

Tom straightened up, regaining his feet. "Just lost my balance for a sec, pal. That’s all."

Bud nodded, hoping his doubt and concern didn’t appear on his face, and glanced at his wristwatch. "What say we knock off early? We could round up Sandy and Bash and head out to—"

"Flyboy, you’ve got to be kidding!" Tom said in a strained voice. "Too much to be done—the figures for the space outpost, the launch schedule problem—I, I can’t—"

As Tom seemed to be becoming agitated, Bud quickly said, "Oh, it was just an idea, Tom—you know, to celebrate your success."

"Sure…" murmured Tom. "But now…I’m going to take the battery up in one of the Pigeon Specials."

"What for?"

"To see whether it picks up any charge at all under lower atmospheric conditions—but I’ll have to get above the cloud deck, to where the sun’s shining."

Bud said evenly, "Okay then, meet you out at the hangar in ten minutes."

Tom gazed at his pal blankly. "At the hangar?"

"I’m your pilot. Right?"

"No," Tom responded in a soft voice. "I think I’ll fly her myself this time." He shook his head slightly, as if too clear it. "Look, Bud, I’ll meet you for dinner. Okay?"

Not waiting for an answer, Tom climbed up the ladder and began to unclamp the battery.

Forty minutes latter Tom sat in the cockpit of a Pigeon Special, the small commuter prop-plane developed by the Swift Construction Company for mass production. As Bud watched from the control tower, a frown creasing his face, Tom taxied out to his assigned runway and parked, awaiting final clearance for takeoff.

"Pigeon Special TSE-59, you are cleared for takeoff," Bud heard the traffic control operator say—and then repeat twice.

Bud glanced back over his shoulder. "Didn’t Tom answer, Fred?"

Fred shook his head negatively, repeating his call again. Bud looked back out the tower’s high view window. The Pigeon Special was still sitting in place.

The hairs prickled on the back of Bud’s neck, and he abruptly made for the tower elevator.

What had happened to Tom?

BUD RAN TOWARD the silent, unmoving Pigeon Special at a frantic pace. Through the forward window of the strange, loop-winged craft he could see Tom Swift sitting rigidly, eyes wide open.

"Tom! What’s wrong?"
Bud cried as he ran up to the plane. But Tom neither answered nor moved. In a single athletic motion Bud leapt up to the cabin door, grasped the handle and half-stood for a moment with his feet pressed against the side of the fuselage.
"Tom!"
he cried again.

His eyes glazed and glassy, Tom slowly turned in his seat to face his pal, then leaned forward to unseal the door and allow Bud inside.

"What’s up, Bud?" inquired Tom calmly.

"What’s
up?"
returned Bud incredulously. "Tom, don’t you realize—?"

Tom looked at Bud, his brow furrowed deeply. "I—I couldn’t start up…"

"You mean something’s wrong with the plane?"

"No. Something’s wrong with me!"

Bud sat down quietly next to Tom. His expression told the young inventor that Bud wanted to hear anything and everything his best friend had to say.

Tom swallowed hard and said, "The other day…the problem with the glidewing in the Flying Lab…something
happened,
didn’t it."