Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (17 page)

"Back to us... to me."

"I’m
sure
Doc Vi is out there somewhere alive. I—just
feel
it, Bash. The way I can feel all my inventions inside me, waiting to pop out, before my
brain
knows about it."

"Then please, Tom. Invent a safe return."

By the end of the morning after, Tom and his chosen crew were back on Fearing Island and making final preparations for the historic lift-off into the great unknown. To the original test-flight team he had added space veteran Neil MacColter, Susan Fresnell, and his father. "It’s high time I participated in my son’s great space ventures," Mr. Swift said to Sue Fresnell. "I don’t want anyone to call me
The Old Man!
But I’ll earn my ticket by overseeing the mobies project."

"You’ll
never
be obsolete, Mr. Swift," Sue reassured him. "I’m thrilled Tom included me in this—I’m afraid I was persistent, but my tech skills buy me
my
ticket."

"There’s surely plenty of room in this luxury space hotel."

There were the usual final details to take care of. An hour before scheduled departure, Tom, working in the mission control complex, received a patched-through call—from outer space!

"It’s so good to hear your voice, Dr. Jatczak," said Tom with warmth. "They told me you preferred not to be disturbed."

"I have contemplated grief and mastered it," said the older man across the 50,000 miles to Nestria. "I haven’t surrendered hope that my dearest is still alive. The air tanks in that little capsule are long since depleted, I know. Her life depends upon the possibility—not unlikely—that some enemy has taken her and is keeping her a prisoner."

"Yes, sir. More and more, I think that’s what we’re dealing with."

There was a pause that sounded like a distant nod. "Yes. Well. You’ll pursue whatever you come across, no doubt. But I find solace in work. In that regard, I have put together certain oddities that you may wish to investigate."

"Oddities? You mean something in space?"

"Indeed so," replied the astronomer. "We have all been trying to pinpoint Emma, and your gravitation-wave data has narrowed the search. Tom, you know I possess a device... what is it you call it?—a frequencifier. You’re familiar?"

"Yes," Tom said. "A quantum-frequency interferometric resolver. An invention I
didn’t
invent! It’s a sort of laser in reverse—a ‘contralaser’."

"Indeed, one might call it that. Rather than emitting coherent electromagnetic radiation, it receives and absorbs
external
electromagnetic radiation with extraordinary selectivity, allowing precise locating of the source—as if one used the contrary process and bounced a laser beam off the source object."

"But Emma doesn’t seem to produce any kind of emission other than the G-waves," Tom noted.

"The key word is ‘seem!’ And thus one must look into the matter. By using a special analysis protocol of my own, I’ve found—it is most odd. I have termed it the Black Window."

Tom was immediately intrigued. "And it’s connected to Emma?"

"My boy, it may well
be
Emma," responded Jatczak. "I have carefully, patiently scanned the region of space indicated by your propagation data. The frequencifier registered everything expected, stellar emissions, thermal radiance from dust clouds, the usual interstitial monoatomic hydrogen scatter—and then, at one precise point in the starry sky—
nothing
!"

"I don’t quite understand, sir."

"Ah, for there is ‘
nothing
’ to understand. No radiation passes through this little point, not the cosmological microwave background, not any degree of reflection from our sun—nothing at all. It is as if an utterly perfect universal absorber is floating in the further Kuiper belt. Nothing gets by it, nothing reflects back; yet despite this apparent absorption of energy, it generates no heat. It has no detectable mass. As if it is a
window
allowing energy to cross its threshold to somewhere else, somewhere utterly dark. It seems nothing comes back out. I might be describing a black hole, yet adjacent spacetime remains undisturbed—except for these most peculiar gravity-waves. And, of course, it is very
very
small."

"A real oddity!" Tom agreed. "And it can’t be just a coincidence, right there in the Emma region."

"I shall continue my studies," said Dr. Jatczak. "But Tom, I urge you most emphatically to investigate the Black Window on your Grand Tour. For the science, and... whatever else may be there to discover."

"I certainly will!" promised the scientist-inventor. And as he broke contact, he was left to wonder if the Black Window had something to do with the space disappearances and unexplained hazards he had encountered. "Such a distant object could hardly be the work of the Cobra group or the Sentimentalists," he reasoned. "But it could still be a weapon." The alien
Others
might be playing hired gun for Tom’s earthly foes!

One hour later, with its freight of unanswered questions, the Cosmotron Express soared into the heavens, silent and serene. The Grand Tour had begun!

ABOVE the air, still on repelatron power, Tom and Bud guided the mammoth ship to the space outpost. "Time to load your babies on board," Tom told his father, whose blue eyes gleamed with the excitement of discoveries to come.

The mobies folded-up nicely into compact bundles about the size of a large suitcase, but when fully unfolded they were many times broader, outfitted with jointed multiple legs and powerful gripper-like claws. Tom showed Bud a sketch. "Beware the Spider Crabs!" Bud gibed. "How many are they loading aboard, chum?"

"Eight this trip," replied Tom.

"We’ll be testing them in a wide variety of environments, Bud," Mr. Swift added. "I suppose Tom has told you all about them?"

"A little, sir."

"Well, let’s leave Tom to his control board and head down to the big hold. I’ll tell you about them as I oversee the battening-down procedures. I want each Spider Crab to feel snug and comfortable."

As they elevatored down one deck to the very bottom of the huge sphere, Bud said, "I know the mobies have a lot in common with Enterprises’ giant robots."

"Yes," nodded Mr. Swift, "though we’ve come a ways since then. We’ve made some advances in artificial intelligence, and the mobies have a fair capacity for responding to situations without remote operation—much like Tom’s sensitector robot-mobile, Rover Boy."

The elevator door slid aside—and Bud started backwards in panic! "
M-Mr. Swift!—the hangar doors are open—the air—!
"

Damon Swift smiled with eyes twinkling. "Still breathing, Bud? Don’t worry. The exterior hatchways are covered-over by a barrier of Inertite nano-filaments, the same principle used by the atmosphere-making machines on Nestria. Large objects pass through unimpeded, but air molecules are held back."

"Th-that’s great," gulped Bud. "Who needs airlocks?"

Stepping out onto the broad deck, Mr. Swift continued his description. "The mobies have various intakes for chemical and mineral analysis, a repelascan system, LRGM gravity mappers, and the usual instruments for measuring radiation and the like. As you can tell, they’re designed to crawl all over the surface, continually on the move. Those claws can crush rock, scoop up surface samples, even drill down a ways. For deeper probing, each mobie has a small telesampler."

"Say, the telesampler’s X-raser could come in handy if the Little Green Men start attacking!" Bud joked. The laserlike energy beam produced by Tom’s X-raser invention was a virtual science-fiction disintegrator ray, penetrating nearly any form of matter with ease. It was used in conjunction with the telesampler to retrieve deeply buried samples.

Mr. Swift chuckled but said, "Well, they’d have to be
Very
Little Green Men. The beam generated by these models is only a few molecules wide."

"At least we could care our initials on ’em—or maybe
Earth was here!
"

The loading of the mobies was soon completed, and the
Starward
bid farewell to the space outpost and Ken Horton. Attaining the desired distance from the Earth-Moon system, Tom announced that the Cosmotron Express had attained position to safely engage the spacedriver system. "Should we hold on?" asked Neil MacColter half-nervously.

"Naw," replied Chow. "Nothin’ much happens. Didn’t even make th’ soup slosh."

The Earth shrunk away. "Everything’s nominal," Bob Jeffers called out from the monitor board. "Velocity 0.01 C."

"We’ll go up by stages, just to play it safe," commented Tom. "But eventually the
Starward
will be jumping directly to its safe cruising speed for the space gradient it’s passing through."

"Tell me, Mr. Swift," asked Sue of Tom’s father, "why aren’t we starting with the next planet out, Mars?"

"We’re taking them as they come, and Mars is on the far side of the sun," was the reply. "When we loop back, after our visit to the Emma object, we’ll pick up Pluto, Uranus, and Mars. Also one of the asteroids, Pallas."

Hours passed breathlessly as Tom upped the ship’s velocity in stairstep fashion. The
Starward
’s first port of call, about six hours in, was a solar world never touched by man or machine. "Ceres!" said Andy Emda. "One of the ‘big four’ asteroids discovered right at the start of the 19th century."

"Space navigation and astronomy don’t come into my humble life as a modelmaker," Arv commented. "Where are we, exactly?"

"Roughly 400 million miles from the sun, and most of that figure is the distance we’ve traveled from Earth," Tom said. "Incidentally, it’s now classified as a ‘dwarf planet,’ not an asteroid. Good reason, too—she’s several times bigger than anything else in the asteroid belt."

"No wonder she needs a belt!" joked Chow, patting his own.

Ceres was fat, but also dim and dark. Nevertheless, as the Express slowly circled the compact globe, about a quarter the diameter of Earth’s moon, the team could discern white spots and splashes of unexpected color here and there, including a pale pinkish shade. "Holy Mack, we’ve already learned a lot in just ten minutes!" enthused Hank Sterling. "The Cerean atmosphere—maybe we should just call it ‘vacuum with a smidge of atoms’—definitely contains hydroxile ions."

"In other words, dissociated water vapor," commented Emda.

"But also trace methane, ammonia, and nitrogen."

"We’ll start learning her inner secrets as soon as Mobi-Cer is set down," declared Mr. Swift. "Tom, let’s make our pass over the Piazzi feature."

"Will do, Dad." Tom and Bud guided the
Starward
to a hovering stop some thirty miles above a dark oval named after the discoverer of the mini-planet. Tom activated the automatic ejection conveyor in the hold, and in seconds the weird "Spider Crab" glided into view from beneath the viewport, angling downward.

Abruptly Hannah yelped out, "Tom—the radar!
Something’s closing in on the mobie!
"

"Coming from behind us!" Tom exclaimed with a glance at the monitor. There was no time to act. A dark silhouette flashed by them at high speed. Its trajectory clearly imperiled Mobi-Cer!

But the mobie’s robotic intelligence proved adequate to the challenge. The lander-craft suddenly slowed as if applying the brakes and swerved away on a tangent. The intruding object missed by a good hundred feet.

As the sun glinted off it, Bud said, "Whew!—just a meteor. I thought we were under attack!"

"We
were
under attack, flyboy—by Mother Nature," grinned Tom, relieved. "By the way, it’s not a meteor. According to the instruments, it’s a moon! Ceres has her own bitty satellite, all of thirty feet across, with what looks like a very elongated orbit."

"Say, do we get to name her?" asked Neil.

"Mm now, I know this here ‘Ceres’ is the old Roman goddess o’
cereal
," Chow piped up. "I vote we call th’ little thing Cornflake!"

"We’ll, er, pass your suggestion along to the Astronomical Union." Mr. Swift shot an amused glance toward his son.

Chow nodded but grumbled under his breath. "Brand my sagebrush, they got themselves a blame
union
?"

As the mobie made a gentle landing, Sue asked Tom what sort of propulsion it used. "It has some microrepelatrons and gravitexes for any ground maneuvers beyond the capability of the spider-legs," replied the young inventor. "But for space-to-ground decelerations we use argon-gas thrusters, pushed along by focused trons. That way we get around the surface-interference effects."

The mobie, designated Mobi-Cer, crawled about the tumbled, cratered surface for a time, the
Starward
viewing its progress from mere yards above. "All systems are working perfectly," pronounced Mr. Swift happily. "The holoceiver ‘eyes’ are providing a rich feed for your telejector, Tom. The transmitron is sending a steady stream of data back to the outpost. And the onboard telesampler already confirmed something very significant—Ceres has a layer of liquid water down beneath the surface, a real ocean!"

"Which makes this a great place to establish a colony some day," Hank said. "There you go, boss—your marching orders!"

Tom laughed. "Let’s finish the tour first!"

The Cosmotron Express repelatroned away from Ceres, then almost immediately jumped to spacedriver mode. In seconds distance had demoted Ceres from dwarf planet to mere asteroid to a speck of space dust. "Fifteen percent of the speed of light!" Tom exclaimed. "We’re traveling at almost thirty thousand miles per second!"

"But still," added Hannah with a smile, "we won’t be anywhere near Jupiter until some time tomorrow—which means at least dinner and breakfast, Chow."

"Then I’d best git t’ work!"

Analysis of the Ceres data occupied much of the time before their next stop, as did eating, sleeping, and the simple enjoyment of the stellar view. Pointing forward through the sweeping viewport, Bud commented to Tom, "Skipper, is it my eyes? I’m seeing rings of color out there!" The ship seemed to be passing through an endless series of rainbow-colored halos, very faint, as if hurtling down an interminable corridor in the void.