Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (9 page)

The boys held their breaths. Gradually they felt a build-up of G-force which told them, even without watching the attitude indicator, that the
Fire Eagle
’s nose was coming up. “
We’re climbing!
” Tom cried as he checked the craft’s altimeter, derived from his Spacelane Brain invention. Up, up they soared until the craft was cresting almost a hundred miles above the earth. Without the constant resupply of heat energy from friction, temperatures along the forward cutting-edge of the duratherm wing had fallen sharply.

“You’ve done it, Skipper!” Bud exulted.

“We’re not home safe yet.”

“Yeah, not by a long shot. And that’s how we’re flyin’ her—
like a long shot!”

Again they ducked down into the atmosphere, using what ever useful pull they could coax from the skewed mini-gravitexes. Again they rebounded spaceward when the
Fire Eagle
’s plunge reached sufficient velocity. Tom’s spirits rose as he saw the gauge readings remain well within the margins of safety.

They were losing speed, giving it up to the atmosphere a little at a time. On each successive dip, the rebounds became shallower. More than two hours later the
Fire Eagle
had completely circled the earth and was nearing its original reentry point—but many miles below. They were still traveling with blinding speed, but they could no longer reach airless space.

“That’s as far as we can skim,” Tom told Bud. “On our next dip we’ll have to go for broke!”

“Could we go for something
else
, please?”

Meanwhile, ground control had been tracking the craft’s progress. Quezada’s voice came over the PER, ice calm. “You’ll be entering at a much steeper angle than planned,
Fire Eagle
, and you can’t count on lengthening your final glide path more than twenty per cent. It’ll be touch and go whether you can make it to Fearing waters. Tom... your father called in—he wants you to switch your PER cartridge to the Enterprises one.”

Tom knew, instinctively, what his father wanted to tell his son. “Just tell him ‘I know,’ and he should keep his fingers crossed. All I have time to say.”

Tom clicked off the PER. Bud murmured, almost to himself, “This is what you Swifts
do
.”

The
Eagle
lunged into its final descent. Tom and Bud knew it might be
their
final descent as well! The eyes of the veteran space pilots never left the instrument console. The temperature readings rose steadily, ominously, crossing an invisible red line into the danger zone.

“Too hot,” Bud grated. “
Way
too hot, Skipper.”

Suddenly the spacecraft gave a violent shake. The readouts told the terrifying truth. Most of the D-Wing’s nose had crumpled and torn away! The
Eagle
would begin to corkscrew, completely out of control!

“Something to try—!” Tom gasped, flinging his gloved hands at the control panel. The cabin suddenly seemed to lean back at an acute angle. The boys were almost riding on their backs.

“T-temps leveling off,” choked Bud. “Tom! Temps, airspeed—dropping! Man, look at it!”

The young inventor allowed himself the luxury of catching his breath. “What’s left of the wing’s underhull is now flat-on to our line of descent. We’re using it as a combo parachute and ablation heatshield.”

“You mean you’re letting it burn away?”

“Each spatter carries off excess heat.”

“Enough?”

“I’ll consider that question later, flyboy!”

The uptilted view-slots showed only stars against deep blue for an agonizingly long time, a view constantly interrupted by fire and bursts of sparks. Yet the
Fire Eagle
finally fell below Mach speed. With difficulty, Tom was able to shift the cabin angle back to horizontal. Below, like a misty blue tapestry, the boys could see the vast sweep of the continent of North America spreading before them. They knew their survival depended on reaching the Atlantic; an ocean touchdown was the only survival option. But the ship was losing altitude faster and faster now. The radar altimeter needle dipped near the twelve-mile mark. “Most of the sheath is gone, Bud,” Tom stated quietly. “Still a little lift from the wing-stubs, a little control and braking through the gravitex, the one that’s still functioning. That’s it. The
Fire Eagle
is basically the
Falling Brick
.”

Bud glanced at Tom. The young inventor’s jaw was set as he scanned the terrain sweeping past far below them. How long could the
brick
stay aloft, Bud wondered, before—

Suddenly the ship buffeted and shot ahead with a tremendous burst of speed.

“We’ve hit the jet stream!”

Tom nodded. “It’s what I’ve been counting on to carry us the rest of the way.”

The gambit worked. Presently they could make out the misty contours of the Atlantic coast.

“We’re going to make it!” Bud gritted.

Tom’s lips cracked in a smile. “Just pray we can keep enough lift on the wing to get us to a
slightly
soft landing! That water can slap pretty hard.”

Air Traffic Control had cleared an emergency flight route. The wide, empty ocean was now coming into view, dead ahead. They flashed across the coastline. They were well south of Fearing Island.

The two suddenly exclaimed in amazement as a fantastic, mammoth form swooped into view like a shot across their bow. The
Challenger
, skimming along only yards above the waves!

They shouted again as the
Eagle
abruptly slowed, as if they had plunged into a wall of molasses! “They’re using the repelatrons!” Bud exulted.

They passed over the gyroscope-shaped colossus and it dropped from sight—then nosed into view again. The
Challenger
was keeping pace with them, almost directly beneath—cradling them in arms of invisible force.

At last the big spaceship had to dart out of the way. Both boys braced themselves for the shock of splashdown.

With a jolt, the
Fire Eagle
slammed down into the water, bounced twice, skidding across the low waves like a hydrofoil, and bobbled to a stop amid a cloud of steam.

The boys sat stunned and breathless.

“Sh-should we—h-head for the designated exits?” panted Bud.

“What’s left of the Durafoam should keep us afloat. Says so on the label.”

“Gosh, genius boy... what a disaster. But you’ll fix the durathermor thing.”

“Well,” said the young inventor, “if you overlook almost losing our lives, I think we’ve proven that my duratherm wing is a practical method of spacecraft reentry—but admittedly the test wasn’t a complete success by any means. The thermoelectric conversion system definitely needs improvement to prevent the kind of trouble we encountered.”

“Perhaps just a
bit
of tweaking. George Dilling would approve of your way of putting things.”

Tom and Bud were taken off the
Eagle
by the
Challenger
, and a barge from Fearing towed the blackened test craft to the island for what promised to be a lengthy examination. Tom’s father managed to be jovial over the phone. “You know son, if you hadn’t cut off communication I would have told you about the plan we dreamed up to cushion your landing with the repelatrons.”

“Oh well,” Tom sighed, “it’s not like Bud and I mind surprises.”

The two adventurers flew back to Shopton in the
Sky Queen
, the hulk of the test vehicle lashed down in the aerial hangar. Only a few scraps of the duratherm wing remained. “Too early for a theory, genius boy?” Bud asked. “I know you gave her a lookover.”

Tom considered the question and finally shrugged. “There’s no mystery as to what happened—
if
you start off with the fact that the durathermor absorption terminals went bad. We fixed the problem we had before, with the warping of the cell arrays...”

“And it tested out fine! But what’s left? What happened to the apparatus between the tests at Enterprises and the test in space?”

“I’ll tell you,” Tom replied grimly. “What happened was that the
Eagle
and the D-Wing packet were mounted on the booster rocket. During the procedure the workers had easy access to the container.”

“And they sabotaged it.”

“Someone did! Someone could have inserted a little slug of something into the compressed material, some substance that splattered over the forward edge of the wing when it vaporized under the reentry heat. It caused the terminals to short out—the jettison bolts too, evidently.” The young inventor noted that the problem would be studied by Hank Sterling and the engineering section as well as by Security. “And the puzzle is the same as before: how some enemy knew all the details of the chemistry and metallurgy of the sheath, in order to precisely formulate the sabotage material.

“How—and
who
! The test D-Wing and durathermor were hand-built here at Enterprises over the last few days. No one on Fearing was involved at all. Only a half-dozen people—like Wiltessa and Sterling, Arv Hanson, you and my dad—have even
glanced
at the spec printouts.”

Bud nodded. “At least you can cut the list down by one. I may have glanced—but all my gray eyes saw were hieroglyphics!”

The
Queen
set down on its elevatoring pad-platform at Enterprises with its tail between its legs. As the long day drew forth its shadows, Chow brought Tom and Bud dinner in the small lab near the Swifts’ office, cluck-clucking at the fearsome antics of his young friends. “Not only have t’ keep you full o’ nutrition,” complained the westerner, “but I gotta clean up after you too!”

Tom smiled. “Oh? Since when, pardner?”

“Found yer mail settin’ out on the floor next t’ Trent’s desk.” Chow pulled a thick, padded envelope from a shelf in his cart and handed it to Tom.

The young inventor looked at it curiously, turning it over. Bud chuckled. “Maybe you’d better open it under water, Skipper—we do have this little problem with spies and saboteurs around here! It could explode!”

Chow gulped, goggle-eyed. “Aw now, buddy-boy—don’t pump up my ole blood-pressure like that! They X-ray all th’ mail around here, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Tom reassured him, “with the TeleTec machine. But just to set you—all of us—at ease, I’ll give it an extra scan.” The crewcut youth put the envelope under several sensitive probe devices.

“S-so—what’s it say, boss?” asked Chow nervously.

“It says ‘BOOM!’” Bud ventured, earning a withering look from a crinkled prairie eye.

“Looks like a standard plastic ‘jewel case,’ as they use for data disks,” replied Tom. “But there’s no disk inside the case—just a piece of paper folded like a letter. I can’t read the writing; after all, these are high-tech security scanners, not ‘X-ray specs’! But I don’t see anything that looks like a bomb, not even a little one.” Glancing Bud’s way, he added wryly, “And no trace of contact poison this time around either, chum.” It was a danger they had faced before.

“In other words,” stated Bud, “junk mail. Boring.”

“Trent probably had set it on the edge of his desk and it got shoved onto the floor.” Munford Trent was the two Swifts’ executive office secretary. He had left for the day.

Tom slitted open the envelope with a fingernail and withdrew the folded sheet within. “Hmm!
I’ll
say it’s
junk mail!
” He held up the sheet for the others to see. It was blank!

“Say now,” said Chow with narrowed eyes. “Mebbe it’s that there indivisible ink. Ya gotta—”

“Hey!” Bud interrupted, batting out with a hand. “Who let these guys in?” Several tiny insects were buzzing around his head.

“Looks like bees,” said his pal. “Wonder how they—” But he stopped himself and looked at the open envelope. Another bee appeared at the slitted opening and darted off into the air.

“Looks like some o’ Bud’s leg-pullin’, seems t’ me,” stated Chow. “If I get stung, yuh’re gonna be on short rations till th’ cows come home and
leave
agin!”

“I’m not behind it,” Bud protested, still waving his arms for protection. “Tom—what if these are
trained combat bees?
”

The young inventor grinned, but suddenly his head jerked backwards. “
Oww
! Good night, one of them stung me right on the back of my neck!”

Bud and Tom grabbed two spray cans of insecticide and did their best to bring down the irritating invaders. It was a drawn-out defense operation. Minutes passed before Tom could declare victory.

Chow looked down at the half-dozen specks on the lab floor, some still twitching. “Blame buzzin’ varmints! Howdja s’pose the joker got ’em into that plastic case, anyway? Take it from a prairie man, bees don’t take t’ herdin’ so well!”

Tom crouched down on his knees. He said slowly: “I’m not so sure these things
are
bees, fellows. I think... maybe... we’d better head over to see Doc Simpson—right away!”

CHOW looked at his beloved young boss in stricken surprise. “Wh-whataya mean? Sumpin wrong with ’em after all? Poison honey, mebbe?”

“Tom’s saying they’re
not
bees,” Bud pointed out.

“I don’t know
what
they are,” said the young inventor. “They look like
some
kind of bee, but not the sort I see buzzing around in the garden. They may not be harmless—and I’ve been stung!”

“Good grief!” sputtered Bud, and exclaimed: “Maybe they’re carrying Bubonic Plague or something!” Chow
just
sputtered.

Tom called the infirmary and was relieved to find Doc Simpson still lingering at the end of the day. “Feeling any effects, Skipper?” he asked Tom.

“Well... not so far. Just some tenderness where I was stung.”

“Come on over, all of you.”

The plant infirmary was stocked with the latest in medical equipment, some of it not yet available beyond the walls of Enterprises. Doc ran a blood analysis of all three, then examined Tom’s scalp with a tiny instrument that used laser-light to reveal lower layers of the epidermis without an incision. Finally he probed deeper with a medical version of the TeleTec, which did not utilize X-rays.

“I’m not finding anything of interest,” he reported. “Chow—perfectly normal for a man of your—”