Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts (11 page)

"For all we know, entirely different forms of life—forms which we can’t even imagine— may have developed to exist under conditions on Venus. Nature is too vast and wonderful for puny creatures like us to say flatly that it can’t do certain things."

"I see what you mean, Tom."

Tom warmed to the subject, which was clearly a matter to which he had devoted much thought. "Another thing," he went on, "how do we define ‘life’? As a form of energy? Well, quantum theory tells us there’s energy, motion, and change in all things, even inanimate objects such as a stone. So by that definition, there
must
be ‘life’ on Venus."

"Okay, I’m convinced," Bud said. "I must admit," he added with a grin, "you and your inventions have already made chumps out of too many experts who claimed ‘It can’t be done!’"

Tom burst out laughing, breaking the sober mood. "That’s my pal talking! Let’s just hope this space-kite project doesn’t make a chump out of yours truly!"

After disappearing from the mess compartment for a few minutes, Chow reappeared minus his apron, and wearing one of his favorite loud-colored cowboy shirts. His guitar cord was slung around his neck.

"Uh-oh! Everybody run!" gibed Bud. But he turned his chair to listen.

"Already promised Buddy Boy some gee-tar music tonight, so I sure can’t disappoint him," Chow announced with a wink at his audience. Then, after a few twangs, Chow broke into song in a voice slightly less foghorn than usual.

When I left good old Texas
To go roam wide and high,
Shore as hey never figgered
To wind up in the sky!
Oh, my chuck wagon rattled
an’ them longhorns could squeal,
But they never went loco
like this big ol’ space wheel!
Ride, ride, ridin’ up high!
Them stars shore look pretty,
Other side o’ the sky!
After ridin’ a rocket
Bustin’ broncs’ll be fun!
Them thar meet’yors is worse
Than a spittin’ six-gun!
An’ someday when I’m through
Herdin’ cows all along
On the great Milky Way,
With m’ hat an’ m’ song,
Get me down from this night
That’s as sunny as day—
I’ll head home to Texas!
An’ that’s where I’ll stay!

The cowpoke’s audience was howling with appreciative laughter long before he finished. At the final
twang!
of Chow’s guitar, they rocked the mess compartment with loud applause.

TOM and his fellow astronauts embarked aboard the
Challenger
the following morning and returned to Fearing Island. After transporting his prototype reactor back to Enterprises in the
Sky Queen,
he turned it over to Arv Hanson and Hank Sterling. The alterations he had worked out in space would be incorporated in the final version. Both the kite fuselage and the gravitex, Tom learned, had been completed by Art Wiltessa’s crew.

"Boy, that’s swell news, Art!" Tom said. "Get the modified reactor unit and the gravitex installed on the fuselage as soon as you can, will you? I’m eager to give the kite a tryout."

"I’m pretty eager myself." Wiltessa grinned. "Call it pride, but if this baby doesn’t fly, I’ll be the second most disappointed guy around here!"

Two days after Tom returned to Shopton, Felix Ming came hurrying in to his office. "Heard you were at work up here, Tom, so I thought I’d better see you right away. I have something to report! Very strange."

Tom’s eyes lighted up with interest. "Strange?"

Felix nodded. "Right. I thought I would speak to you immediately, before Mr. Ames returns to his office this afternoon." Tom motioned for Felix to sit down. "You see," he began, "though I am a full-blooded Chinese, I must confess that I have developed a perverse taste for American Chinese cooking, which is much different from what one finds in China. For a long time I’ve been going to that Chinese restaurant on Commerce Avenue."

"The Jade Bowl? Sandy and I have eaten there."

"They have your photo on the wall! Last night I went there for my supper, and was handed a menu as usual. When I opened it—well, here." Felix handed Tom a small card. "It was clipped inside. Do you recognize the symbols on it?"

Tom nodded, eyes narrowed. "Yup. It’s the calling card Li Ching likes to leave behind. One symbol is the stylized version of his name, altered to look like a snake. The other means
Death."

"That translation was provided by my sister, Tom, and she hasn’t studied the language as I have." Felix leaned close and spoke softly. "The ideogram does indeed mean death, but there is more to it, something more specific."

"A particular kind of death, you mean?"

The Chinese-American shook his head. "Not a particular kind—a particular reason. It signifies what might be translated as ‘long-tongued death’."

"Sorry, Felix, I don’t get it," Tom said.

"It is hard to find exactly the right words. Here, we say that someone is nosy—poking their nose where it doesn’t belong. In traditional Chinese society, sych a person might be called
long-tongued,"
Felix explained. "The
long-tongued death
refers to putting to death a gossip or backstabber, someone who interferes in the affairs of another. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Tom rubbed his chin. "Does it mean someone has marked you for death?"

Felix shook his head. "That would not be the customary significance. It is a warning—
butt out!"

"Right—and we Americans would usually add
‘or else’!"
Tom’s face expressed his concern. "What’ve I got you and Linda into, Felix?"

He waved it aside. "Please, we chose to help you. But perhaps someone feels we are betraying our own. And I may know who it is, Tom!"

"Someone working for Li?" Tom asked eagerly.

"No doubt it is so. I did not notice the waiter who handed me my menu, but afterwards I spoke to the owner, Mr. Tsing, who is a friend. He said he had hired a new waiter named Harry Bu, who had asked to take my table section when I was seated. We looked for him immediately, but he was not to be found."

The scientist-inventor asked if Felix or his sister were acquainted with anyone of that name. Felix smiled knowingly. "Ah, but that is not his name! When Mr. Tsing described him, he mentioned that half his right eyebrow seemed missing, and then I knew who he must be—a half-Chinese fellow I knew in college named Olin Whaley."

"This is great news. Go on," Tom urged. He felt that Whaley’s Oriental background might be a clue linking him to Li Ching.

"Whaley was a teaching assistant in the department where I studied as a graduate student," Felix continued. "One day the police came to arrest him on a smuggling charge, but Whaley had disappeared just in time."

He said Whaley was an American who would now be about forty-five years old, of medium height, and had a dark complexion. He spoke not only Cantonese but several other Chinese dialects. "I last knew him in Wichita, and have not spoken to him in eight years. I’m telling you all this not just as a matter of safety, but because it might help you find the
Sea Charger,"
Felix concluded.

Tom thanked Felix warmly and asked him to go directly to Ames’s office next door and provide whatever details might help the security chief. "He’ll tell you how to keep you and your sister safe, Felix. And if I know Harlan, he’ll start right in tracking the guy down—or maybe tailing him right to Li Ching!"

Felix met with Ames shortly after lunch. After Ming had left, Harlan Ames began making phone calls. By the end of the workday he told Tom he had no further report on the search for Whaley.

"The local address he gave on his job application was a phony. But I did get a message from Interpol at five," Ames went on. "The International Police Organization, headquartered in Paris, sent a secured e-message saying that Comrade-General Li Ching had been glimpsed briefly in Marseilles three days ago. He had disappeared again, probably by sea or air, before his trail could be picked up. And I’m sorry," Ames added, "that there’s no new word on the
Sea Charger
. The several search teams have found nothing in the area where you saw that weird iceberg."

"Thanks anyway, Harlan," Tom said. "Keep me posted—Dad too, of course."

The scientific work continued at Enterprises. By Friday midafternoon, the space kite assembly had been completed. Tom and Bud hurried over to the Barn—the main assembly building—to inspect it. Everything seemed in order.

"Let’s fly her to Fearing tonight, Art," Tom ordered. "Bud and I will go along. We’ll give her a shakedown tomorrow morning."

Bud Barclay laughed. "The space kite’s really moving up in the world, genius boy—once an ‘it,’ now a ‘she’!"

At dawn the next day he and Bud flew back to the island base, Chow and Tom’s father accompanying them. After touching down, it took less than an hour to set up the strange looking craft on a small launchpad area.

"I’m agog to see something so tiny about to head for space!" chuckled chief launch controller Amos Quezada. "It—
she!—
could ride like a papoose on your
Challenger
’s front porch!"

"Keeping her small is the whole point, Amos," replied Damon Swift. "Tom’s Space Kite is virtually unpowered—one solar battery for the necessities. Yet the subtrino wind against the cosmic reactor should be more than sufficient to carry her through the atmosphere and into orbit."

"We’re not stopping there, Dad," Tom remarked. "I’ve decided to give the Kite a real wringing out."

"Watch out, moon!" Bud exclaimed happily. "We’re comin’ your way!"

The two youths changed into special gold-foil spacesuits topped with visored white helmets. The suits were not pressurized and the helmets were not enclosed, as the astronauts would remain sealed within the craft’s shirtsleeve environment.

A small crowd of base employees had formed around the vehicle. Tom and Bud shook many a hand as they edged up to the astral "compact car."

"Wow!" Bud laughed in high spirits as he eyed the fragile-looking craft. "My first ride on a kite!"

Tom’s face, however, was serious. The Space Kite suddenly looked very small and very vulnerable. By testing a radically new propulsion technology far above Earth, he and his best friend were tossing a dare to the fates. They were about to embark on one of the most dangerous experiments he had ever tried!

ALTHOUGH this form of space launch produced no heat or backwash of gases, Amos Quezada ordered all the spectators to file into the launchpad blockhouse, serving as mission control for the flight. The boys gave warm hugs to Chow and Mr. Swift, then activated the motor-muscles that lifted the pilot’s viewdome, swinging it up and away like a garage door. Tom and Bud climbed into their seats, strapped themselves in, and closed and sealed the dome.

Tom’s fingers flew to the control board. He made a final check of the diagnostic readouts, then contacted the blockhouse.

"Go status on our end, Space Kite," reported Quezada. "Good telemetry, clear skies. No need for a countdown, eh? Have fun, you spacebirds!"

Tom said nothing but looked at Bud excitedly, and Bud grinned back. This was what the two comrades lived for!

Tom switched on the gravitex stabilizer at low power, and the Kite jerked backwards slightly on its triple support struts as the gravity "hot spot" took its grip on the mechanism. "Just to give us a little stability," Tom explained.

"Now you switch on the power to the cosmic reactor?" Bud asked.

Tom shook his head. "It doesn’t require power, remember? All I have to do is use the micromotors to reorient the reaction plates in the cells—like so!"

Tom grabbed a pair of handgrips on the "dashboard" in front of him, squeezing and slightly twisting them. They could hear the faint hum of motors—and the Space Kite leapt forward!

Bud winced involuntarily, half expecting the usual slap of acceleration pressure. But the force of liftoff was mild indeed. "Hey!" he exclaimed in self-amused surprise. "Is the thing working? We’re hardly moving!"

His pal laughed. "Guess I didn’t explain it very well this time, flyboy. The Space Kite doesn’t get thrown into orbit like a rocket. The pressure from the retardation of the subtrinos builds somewhat gradually in the reactor. Be patient, pal."

"Look who’s talking!"

The subtrino force was sufficient to lift the craft off its landing struts and propel it forward across the concrete at a moderate bike speed. They slowly accelerated and mounted higher, five feet, twenty, fifty. By the time the Space Kite crossed the island’s coast and headed eastward over the Atlantic, they had attained an altitude of two-hundred feet and were accelerating smoothly past eighty miles per hour. "It’s a start," Bud remarked. "We’re already doing better than the California freeways. And no smog!"

The radiocom bleeped. "Copacetic up there, Tom?" inquired Amos Quezada.

"Absolutely," the young inventor replied. "Tell Dad and Chow they can sit down now and leave off biting their nails."

Travelling at a shallow angle, the traverse of the lower atmosphere covered several hundred miles, taking forty minutes despite their constant acceleration. "Tom, we’re sure to get the medal for
slowest
space ascent on record!" Bud snorted. "So we’re being held up by a subatomic wind right now? That’s all?"

"That’s all," Tom confirmed. "Look at it this way. Subtrinos are shooting at us—and right
through
us—from all directions in space, including straight up from the ground below. By angling the reactor plates, we choose which particles to ‘solidify’. In this case, that’s the particles zooming along in the direction we want to travel in. We get a slight forward push as they bounce off the plates, and much more of a push as they interfere with one another and build up a layer of pressure."

"But the reactor cells won’t bust from the pressure like a balloon."

"As with an ordinary kite, the excess just leaks off, in this case through the open backside of the cell."

"Okay," said Bud. "How’s the gravitex working?"