Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet

THE TOM SWIFT INVENTION ADVENTURES

TOM SWIFT

AND THE MYSTERY COMET

BY VICTOR APPLETON II

This unauthorized tribute is based upon the original TOM SWIFT JR. characters.

As of this printing, copyright to The New TOM SWIFT Jr. Adventures is owned by SIMON & SCHUSTER

This edition privately printed by RUNABOUT © 2011
www.tomswiftlives.com

"TOM! T-
Tom
!" yelped Bud Barclay in the general direction of his best pal, Tom Swift. "
Wh-what’s happening to us?
—!"

"I don’t know!" responded the young inventor with alarm in his voice. He winced as a slap of stinging pain coursed through his body, sending him writhing into the air.

The air of the large crew compartment of Spoke Five was already full of figures that twisted and struggled like fish in a net, startled and unbelieving. They all seemed caught up in a slow-motion nightmare!

The day previous, Tom and Bud had traveled the 22,300-mile trek to Swift Enterprises’ orbiting space station, the famous outpost in space, to make a final test of a purely practical invention of Tom’s. Since its construction, the combination research facility, space factory, signal relay, and way station for outbound astronauts had rotated serenely about its spherical hub, a modest whirl that simulated the effects of gravity in the parts of the structure nearest its outer circumference. Bringing a semblance of gravitation to the free-floating environment of space was a matter of convenience, but also a matter of health. Lengthy tests had shown that space personnel suffered a deterioration of muscle in a zero-G setting and sometimes developed circulatory problems that became critical upon return to Earth.

But the rotation of the big fourteen-spoked structure had made difficult some aspects of its regular routine. Antennas required counter-rotation. Giant mirrors, focusing the harsh sunlight upon the outpost’s solar battery factory, had to be arrayed in a scattered network of hull-mounted reflectors whose angles required constant readjustment and intricate calculations. Docking, by visiting spacecraft, with the station at any point other than its hub docking corridor, was a challenge that had on occasion gone awry.

One major difficulty involved extravehicular work by the outpost’s technical and repair team. The centrifugal force of the rotating sky wheel necessitated the use of special spacesuits with magnetic gripper-coils during any activity on the exterior hull of the spoke-modules. The mechanisms had sometimes failed, and even a momentary fluctuation was enough to send an EVA worker tumbling off into space.

Upon his return to Enterprises from the Pacific, where his subocean geotron invention had once again thrust him into danger, Tom had taken up the problem in almost a spirit of relaxation. An approach to a solution had soon come forth. The outpost’s technicians had installed a bank of repelatrons—Swift Enterprises’ repulsion-ray machines, invented by Tom—in the hub of the wheel, at the junctions where the spokes joined the central unit. Aimed outward, the super-miniaturized devices would generate a pressure that would hold the facility’s personnel against the decks of the module in the absence of the rotational force, allowing the outpost to come to a full stop without the problems posed by zero-G.

In the midst of crisis, the preceding few hours flashed through Tom’s agile young mind. Waiting in a compartment at the broad end of one of the modules, Tom had transiphoned the station commander, Major Kenneth Horton, who awaited Tom’s orders inside the station control center in the hub. "Go ahead, Ken."

"Roger. Braking thrusters activated, Tom."

Small vents at the broad outer ends of the spokes had erupted in a faint haze of jetting gases. Moment by moment the mini-rockets braked the outpost’s rotation as the personnel inside braced themselves for what was intended as a
brief
period of levitation.

Through a small bulkhead porthole, a kind of light-duct periscope, Tom had watched the round blue horizon of Earth crossing before his eyes, disappearing, reappearing, with each rotation. The movement diminished. Presently Horton confirmed, "Vector zero, Tom. Full stop. Amigos, we’re bouncin’ like balloons in here—Chow Winkler looks like a captive blimp!" Tom had grinned as a reproachful squawk leaked through Horton’s microphone. Chow, executive chef and a rotund visitor to the outpost alongside Tom and Bud, didn’t accept comments on his waistline in humble silence. He was a proud—and always audible—Texan.

With rotation halted Tom’s keen blue eyes had focused on the remote control and monitoring box in his gloved hand, a multipurpose device Tom had invented which he called a Spektor. "I’m switching on the repelatrons," he had signaled.

"At which point we hit the deck like a ton of bricks," wryly concluded one of the techs, Selina Rowe, floating nearby like a dandelion puff.

"No," Tom chuckled, "that’s exactly what you
won’t
do, not if the new system works as planned."

"And if it doesn’t?" challenged Bud with joking skepticism.

"Then we’ll chalk it up to ‘normal experimental risk’!"

Despite the banter, the space crew couldn’t avoid a twinge of anxiety. Man was not born to outer space. Any experimentation ran the risk of unexpected hazards—and danger in space could easily turn deadly!

"Here we go," Tom had announced, his voice piped throughout the outpost by intercom.

A digital readout proclaimed that the micro-repelatrons had been activated. But the sky dwellers already knew—they were drifting down into place. The selective repulsion force, carefully tuned to special synthetic materials in their work garments, had been remote-controlled by Tom to take effect in a soft and gentle way. "This is great!" radioed Horton. "We’re all back on the deck and right-side-up just as we should be!"

Tom had replied happily. "And no explosive comments from Texas, I presume!"

"B’lieve me, son," came a gravelly voice in the background, "if’n I had somethin’ t’ cuss over, you’d hear it fine from here t’ the Alamo!"

"Skipper, it’s working great!" Bud chortled. "Just a little bit of pressure holding us down against the deck."

"It’s sure easier to walk around," added another crew member. "Not so clunky, what with the changes whenever you happened to move ‘up’ toward the hub. Just standing up from a chair felt a little dizzying."

"That’s the main idea," Tom said. "Using repelatrons to selectively mimic gravity creates a much more natural effect. And it also creates an environment with advantages you can’t find on Earth—not even in Chow’s Texas. Look." He had opened his hand and let loose the Spektor unit. It floated in midair. "Since the trons are only attuned to the suit fabrics, the don’t affect other―"

"Hey!" came a sudden yelp. "What’s goin’ on?"

Weird surges of pressure had begun rolling back and forth across the new work garments, up and down, in and out. Everyone in the compartment, no doubt everyone in the outpost, had suddenly bounced up off the deck.

"Good night!" Bud had called out, at first more chagrined than alarmed, and even a tad amused. "The new system must’ve gone down completely."

Then, suddenly, the phenomenon had increased—painfully so!

Now Tom, helplessly stranded "up" near the ceiling of the compartment, was struggling to snag the Spektor unit that floated maddeningly just beyond his fingertips. The bodily vibrations were becoming much worse, creating a pinching and shearing effect that threatened to leave bruises.
And that could be just for openers!
he thought desperately.

For all he knew the inexplicable phenomenon might tear them to pieces!

"Heads up, boss!" called out Bert Everett, a regular member of the outpost crew, with a strained voice. He stretched out a leg and tapped the Spektor with the tip of his boot. The Spektor tumbled head over heels in Tom’s direction. Then, as he reached out for it, it suddenly fell to the deck—as did Tom Swift and the entire space crew.

"
Gol-gosh-owww!
" came Chow’s protest over the transiphone.

"Gotta agree," Bud groaned. He had fallen on an elbow.

"Are you switching off the new system, Tom?" asked a tech.

Tom moved his fingers to do so, then stopped. "Well... it seems to be working all right for the moment. Ken," he transiphoned, "what do you say?"

"I’m getting word from the spokes right now," the station commander replied. "The malfunction—whatever it was—happened throughout Sky Haven, but it seems to be over. Just a few bruises. And complaints."

Tom chuckled. "I’ll bet."

Bud followed his pal as they "climbed"—the hub was now
up
once more—to the main station control compartment. Horton awaited them there, with Chow and the outpost’s head of technical engineering, Corvin Burkes.

"The Spektor reads everything as nom right now," declared Tom, "but it was out of reach when things went bad. Corvin, what does the board say?"

The older man gestured at the broad panel of instrument readouts. "At this moment, nothing interesting. Let’s bring up the recorded data. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying close attention, er—
during
."

They scrutinized a replay of the data. Tom frowned deeply. "What’s up with it, pal?" asked Bud.

"I’m getting the worst possible answer from the readouts," replied his friend wryly. "Namely
nothing
."

"Hunh?"

"True enough," added Burkes. "According to the automatic system monitors, power to the microrepelatron bank held steady throughout."

"Aw now," Chow objected from across the room, "You cain’t tell me my achin’ backside is jest
dreamin
’!"

Bud laughed, but Tom responded soberly. "What happened to us was real. And dangerous. And, for the moment—a mystery and a half!"

"WHAT sort of ‘danger’ do you have in mind?" asked Horton. "Could it have caused real injury or damage?

Tom nodded. "It sure could’ve, if it had continued to get worse. You know," the youth continued thoughtfully, "this didn’t seem to be a power loss, but some kind of
surge
—or some kind of fluctuation in the repulsion field that whipsawed us back and forth."

"But the records show nothing," Corvin objected.

"What they tell us is that there was no fluctuation in the power feed. But that leaves one possibility—that the repelatron spacewave field
itself
, the spectronic matrix that interacts directly with the nuclei of the selected atoms—underwent some sort of oscillating destabilization."

Tom’s listeners exchanged glances. "Genius boy, I never pretended to understand the ins and outs of your magic repelatrons," Bud said. "But I didn’t know there was
anything
that could affect the force rays
directly
. I mean—we ran into those anti-energy crystals that fouled up the field, and sometimes we’ve had to deal with weird materials the trons couldn’t ‘read’..."

"Like ‘water X’ when we were constructing the undersea tube-tunnel," agreed the young inventor.

Ken Horton asked, "Are you thinking that sort of thing happened here?"

Tom shook his head. "No. There was no trace of anything in the air; and besides, it happened all over the outpost for less than a minute, and then switched off. The energy-refracting particles don’t work that way.

"And as to an ‘unreadable substance,’ the trons didn’t make use of telespectrometer readings—they didn’t
have
to, as they were preset to repel the fabric interweave in the new work togs. And remember, the repulsion effect
did
work, and is working
now
. But―"

"With a slight interruption of service," Bud finished with a wince.

"‘
Interruption o’ service
’ my sore britches! Since when are yew so polite, buddy boy?" harrumphed Chow. The assault on his prairie dignity was unforgiveable.

After a moment’s reflection, Tom approached the portion of the control board that was dedicated to the microrepelatron system. "I’m programming in an automatic routine to minimize the problem if it happens again," he explained. "I’ll use the compartment alert-scanners to detect any ‘floating’ of human-sized bodies. If it happens it’ll automatically ease-down the system to zero. Then you’ll have to reactivate it by manual interface."