Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector (4 page)

"Pretty obvious," declared Hank Sterling. "It’s the Orb!"

"My former employer has some little saying about causes and consequences," mused Dr. Grimsey. "Judging by the consequence, I would say the asteroid, or cloud—whatever it is—has issues with being probed."

"I’ll say!" Tom agreed. "The megascope conveys its image data instantaneously once the terminus is established, so we saw the glow effect and the turbulence in real time. Then some seconds
later
the ‘recoil’ pulse wrecked the scope."

Sterling nodded. "Which implies it came back to Earth from space along the microwave tube."

"A reaction set off by the
presence
of the beam terminal—the mere presence." The young inventor’s blue eyes glinted at the trace of a scientific mystery. "As we all know, the megascope conveyor beam stops at the terminus. It gets cut off by fractal phase inversion and never touches the object under observation."

"And so one must ask, how could this celestial body react to something that has no contact with it in the first place?" wondered Grimsey. "As if, somehow, it is reacting to our purpose, not the actuality."

"No point speculating, fellows," Tom replied. "Let’s set aside these Earth-based instrumental studies and pay a visit to the Orb!"

Hank responded excitedly, "In the
Challenger
?"

"What else?" Tom laughed. "Starting with you and I, we can put together a crew in no time. Bud’s due back from his delivery flight in a couple hours, and Chow’s always rarin’ to go." The youth explained to Dr. Grimsey that Chow Winkler, a crusty, colorful former chuck wagon cook, was a welcome member of most Swift expeditions. "He’s our executive chef, but he’s had plenty of space-flight experience. Which—er—reminds me, Dr. Grimsey..."

The man smiled through his bush of beard. "Oh yes, I know. I’m not quite ‘space worthy’ as of yet. But I’m content to keep my feet on the ground."

Bud and Chow were thrilled to hear of the new expedition. "Brand my comet belt!" whooped the rotund westerner. "Fer all the blame trouble we get into out there, it’s all sure a sight t’ see! Don’t mind losin’ some o’ my personal gravity, neither," he added, with a thump somewhere near his deeply buried waistline.

"What exactly do you plan to do, genius boy?" inquired Bud. "Will we be landing on the Orb?"

"It doesn’t look like there’s anything to land
on
," replied Tom. "It’s just some kind of thin, nebulous mass without a solid surface—it may even be hard to
see
when we’re up close, like a mist." The youthful astronaut explained that the
Challenger
would fly past the object at a distance of a few hundred miles, staying clear of its hazy perimeter and making observations at long range. "I’m going to install some sampling devices and test instruments on a couple of the Donkeys and send them out from the ship’s vehicular hangar. They’ll pass right through the body of the Orb, taking readings along the way, and then they’ll rendezvous with the ship further along." The Repelatron Donkeys were small mobile platforms designed for personnel transport outside the spaceship. Tom had recently constructed a set of new ones with enhanced remote control features.

Enterprises’ three-decker Flying Lab, the famous
Sky Queen
, roared southward toward Fearing Island at dawn the next morning. Her yawning passengers included Hank Sterling and another veteran of space travel, Bill Bennings. "So it’s just the five of us, then?" asked Bill.

Tom responded, "One more. Dad suggested I take along Aciema Musa, who’s part of the visiting astrophysics team doing a research study at Fearing right now. I met her the other week."

"Aster-physics, huh?" Chow looked dubious. "Guess that
sounds
like sumpin’ to do with space, anyhow."

Hank laughed. "Cowpoke, those folks study all kinds of wild and woolly phenomena, from neutron stars to cosmology—the creation of the universe!"

"She’s an expert on magneto-hydrody-namics," Tom added. "She’s studied Alfven wave propagation in interstellar plasmas. It might have a lot to do with the Green Orb."

"Take yer word on
thet
one," declared Chow. "But son, I’ll tell ya one thing. From what you said, that there Orb doesn’t care to give away her secrets—and she jest might fight like a dang wildcat to keep ’em! I hope we’re all up to it."

"So do I, pardner," said Tom quietly. He wondered:

And what happens if we aren’t?

ON THE invisible stilts of its repulsion-force thrust system, the great spacecraft rode its encircling rail-rings through a pastel sky at 6:11 AM.

"Shall I call you
Captain
Swift, Tom?" asked Aciema Musa.

Tom looked up from the element-scanning readouts on the main panel. "Maybe—if we sell the TV series," he laughed. "But till then, I’m just Tom."

"How long before we arrive at the Orb?"

"At our constant 1-G acceleration—we won’t start decelerating until we’ve completed the flyby—it’ll be an eight hour jump, approximately."

"What! Eight hours in space? How’ll we pass the time?" Bud gibed from the copilot’s seat.

"Never thought about
that
," muttered Chow, standing behind them, gazing out at the brilliant stars through the control deck’s pair of rectangular picture-window viewports. "Eight hours. Time fer two snacks and a gosh-honest lunch!"

As the cook clomped off to take the interdeck elevator to his galley, Tom told Bud and Aciema: "Actually, Hank and I have a great way to wile away the time—composing a message to transmit to the Space Friends. Maybe we can get some answers from the scientists even before we try probing through that green glow."

"Early word sounds like a
great
idea," Bud agreed with nervous enthusiasm. Tom knew his best friend was recalling a recent incident, in which a warning from the extraterrestrials had prevented the
Challenger
’s destruction by an undetectable threat.

"I also have some work to do," said Aciema. "I’m interested in determining in advance what sort of readings we might expect if the object really does turn out to be a plasma phenomenon. It’ll help us in sorting through the readings."

"Then good luck to both of us!"

Tom joined Hank Sterling in the communications compartment down below and set to work on the difficult problem of formulating a clear message in the mathematical symbols of the space beings. "Even with a copy of your Space Dictionary in the computer, it’s never less than a big challenge," Hank declared.

"Sure is," Tom nodded. "For all the times we’ve done this, there’s always a new wrinkle. Any misunderstandings can really throw off the message and make the answer useless."

"
If
they answer—which they don’t always."

Hours fled as they labored, with Tom occasionally checking with Bud in the control cabin above them. Finally Tom said: "We might as well go with this version."

He had written a translation of the outgoing message below the cluster of weird symbols and hieroglyphs.

TOM SWIFT TO SPACE FRIENDS. WE ARE TRAVELING IN OUR VEHICLE TO OBJECT THAT HAS ENTERED THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

Here Tom inserted various parameters indicating the orbit of the Green Orb, its size, and the hue of its emitted light in terms of frequency.

DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION REGARDING THE NATURE OF THIS OBJECT THAT WOULD ASSIST OUR OBSERVATIONS?

"Oughta work, Skipper," Hank stated.

Tom transmitted the code string through the imaging oscilloscope and out into the void over the
Challenger
’s powerful deep-space antenna. A lengthy wait followed. "We may not get an answer until we’ve already passed the Orb," Tom grumbled. "Maybe not until we get back home."

Yet a few minutes later an answer arrived from space—an answer that answered nothing.

TO TOM SWIFT. WE ARE FRIENDS. WE HAVE NO DATA ON THE PHENOMENON SPECIFIED.

"Hmph! Some help
they
are!" complained Hank.

"‘
No data
’," Tom repeated musingly. "I wonder..." He had the receiving system print out the original, untranslated symbols transmitted by the alien beings and pored over them intently.

Hank asked, "Looking for something, Tom?"

"Not exactly." The young inventor looked up at the engineer. "I just wondered to what extent the Dictionary was translating an especially ambiguous symbol-set. Maybe it’s me, but the way the translation puts it almost suggests they have no knowledge
at all
of the Green Orb."

"You mean
nada
? They might not even know it
exists
?" Hank snorted. "Those guys are on top of just about everything going on in space."

"True. But the Orb is a very strange sort of object. Dad and I think the Space Friends conceptualize the physical world in a very different way from humans—and their modes of sense perception seem entirely different as well."

"Well—you’re right," conceded the square-jawed engineer. "They understand light in terms of geometrical relationships and electromagnetic frequencies. But they don’t seem to grasp what a
picture
is."

"Images are basic to us, to our sort of brains, but a different species may not― "

Suddenly Tom and Hank were startled from their chairs by a shrill cry from the corridor.

"
Yeeeoww! Help! Fire
!"

Bolting into the corridor they found Chow in a state of quivering panic. "Terrible! Oh my prairie stars!
The whole blame galley’s goin’ up
!"

Tom grabbed his older friend’s thick arm, trying to calm him. "Chow!—your
galley
? But― " Tom had noticed immediately that there was no hint of smoke in the air, nor had the automatic alarms gone off.

Chow shook off Tom’s hand roughly. "
I’m tellin’ you, it’s all burnin’ like a torch!
Th’ micro oven, th’ induction stovetop, the ceiling up above—fire ever’place y’ look!"

Hank had taken a few steps down the passage, which brought him in sight of the open galley door and the compartment beyond. He paused, then glanced back with a puzzled expression. "What fire, Chow? I don’t see anything."

"Have you gone gosht-durn
blind
?" The ex-Texan stomped past Hank, waving an arm. Then his barreling bulk slowed to a stop.

"See, cowpoke? Everything’s fine," said Hank in a soothing tone. "Something scare you?"

Chow was bewildered. "I—b-but I― "

"Tell us what you saw," urged Tom gently.

"Wh-what I
saw
?" Chow rubbed a hand across his bulging eyes. "I guess—I guess I saw somethin’ that wasn’t rightly there, that’s what! I ’as mixin’ up lunch on the counter, and when I turned back toward the oven, there was fire everywhere, all over the place. Figgered I ’as gonna get burnt up like a marshmeller on a stick!"

Tom asked if Chow had felt any heat, or smelled any smoke. "Wa-aal—now that you mention it, son—no. Guess not. But it shor did
look
lively enough."

"I’ll bet it did," Tom nodded. "In space our senses can play tricks on us."

But Chow looked scornful. "I wudden in
space
, I ’as in my
galley
. Think whatcher want. If it wasn’t fire, it shor was a reezernable fact-simulee!"

As the bulky man clomped away, Tom and Hank exchanged shrugging glances.

Hank returned to the communications room. Tom remained in the corridor and used the ship intercom to connect to Bill Bennings, who was busy in the vehicular hangar making final preparations for the launch of the Repelatron Donkey probes. "It’s going fine down here, Tom," he reported. "The things’ll run like watches, if... if I haven’t made any mistakes."

There was something in Bill’s tone that prompted the young inventor to ask if he’d run into any problems. "No, no. I was just a little distracted. Queasy stomach. Came on all of a sudden."

"We have meds in the infirmary if you need any."

"Sure, I know. But it’s just a little irritating. I drove out to Lakewillow a couple nights back and had some Hungarian food—guess it didn’t set too well."

A half-idea seemed to be tugging the sleeve of Tom Swift’s agile mind. But—what? "Bill, if you don’t mind telling me... Did you
see
something down there? Or thought you did?"

The silence seemed too long. "Sometimes I pay for my adventurous eating. I guess everything connects up in the body. Doesn’t it? You feel something, you see something..."

"What did you see?"

"It was nothing, Tom. I’ll be okay."

Tom walked toward the elevator, his steps dragging. Whatever Bennings had glimpsed was far from
nothing
. Tom could tell that it had startled him—even frightened him. And in the end Bill had decided, as Chow had, that it hadn’t been real. Chow... Bill...
How come I can’t think of whatever it is I’m thinking about?
he wondered.

In the
Challenger
’s small crew lounge the Shoptonian found Aciema Musa standing at a viewport, staring out moodily at the stars. Seeing Tom, she nodded and said quietly, "You do a lot of mathematical calculation in the course of your inventing work, don’t you?"

Tom smiled. "I let other people—and our computers—handle the math whenever I can get away with it. I guess I’m more an ‘idea man,’ if you see what I mean."

"Oh, of course," she nodded. "Concepts and intuition. You think in pictures, not numbers."

"Why do you ask? Did you run into a problem?"

"Not a problem. Not precisely."

"Tell me, won’t you?"

She turned at looked at him for a moment, her expression thoughtful. "All right. If you want.

"Tom, some kinds of complex problems are handled like what they call double-entry bookkeeping. You might have two or more distinct series of partial solutions running, and you don’t know until quite a ways down the road whether you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Pardon the poetry."

"I see what you mean."

"I was doing that sort of complex figuring—MHD is like that. Whenever I start I have a kind of dread in my stomach that I’ll struggle all the way to the end just to discover I made a mistake near the beginning. Sometimes you can worry so much about the possibility of error that your distraction causes the very thing you were worried about."