Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite (3 page)

"Thanks, chum," said Tom.

Bud noticed a gleam in Tom’s eyes. "What’s cooking now?" he asked.

Tom glanced at his father, who looked on in amusement. "Oh, just an idea."

"About what?"

"I’m all for sending an expedition to explore that satellite!" Tom answered. "Dad’s been playing devil’s advocate, but I think I’ve talked him into it. How about it, Dad?"

Mr. Swift grinned. "I decided the same thing this morning. But I didn’t want to deprive you of the opportunity to make your case!"

Bud’s face lit up with anticipation. "Do you mean it?" he asked Tom.

"Never more serious."

Bud let out a whoop of excitement. "Hot rockets! Another space trip!"

"There are a number of details to be worked out, though," continued Mr. Swift. "The only vehicle available that is at all suitable is the
Star Spear."

"So what’s wrong with that?" Bud queried. "She’s a great little ship!"

"The key word is
little
," said Tom. "Though we could land on Little Luna in the
Star Spear,
the cabin can only accommodate two. We’d have no room for the many scientific instruments that ought to be brought along to justify the trip from a scientific standpoint. I don’t want to go just to be able to say we got there first."

Bud shrugged. He clearly believed that
getting there first
was a more than sufficient reason for a space flight!

The two Swifts immediately began making plans. Calling in Trent to take notes, they roughed out an estimate of the equipment and supplies needed for a short private expedition—a minimal one.

Later Tom went to continue work in one of his laboratories on an invention which he had recently started developing. "I might need this for the trip," he said to Bud, who was looking on.

Suddenly a twangy voice, western as the Pecos, boomed from the doorway. "This a private shindig, or kin anyone git in the game?"

As the boys looked up, a grinning, bowlegged figure ambled into the lab. Chow Winkler, a former chuck-wagon cook who now worked for the Swifts as chef at the plant and on expeditions, was fat and bald-headed, with a face burnt brown as leather by desert sunshine. As usual, he wore a flashy cowboy shirt, tucked into his faded jeans.

"Hi, Chow!" Tom greeted him. "Come on in."

"Now what in tarnation would that be?" Chow asked, staring at an object on Tom’s workbench. "It looks like one o’ them merry-go-round lawn sprinklers—or a silver spider, mebbe."

Tom laughed. "It’s a model of an atmosphere-making machine, Chow."

"You mean, a contraption fer makin’ air?" A frown wrinkled the cook’s forehead. "But brand my spurs, why bother makin’ air? Ain’t we got plenty to breathe already?"

"Here on earth we do. But on the moon and other planets, space travelers won’t find any, so they’ll have to make their own."

"Well, brand my ox-eegen mask!"

"Speaking of oxygen," Tom said with a grin, "my machine will not only shoot out a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, released from rocks by electrical smelting—it will also make the stuff clump together, so that it can’t drift away when there’s not enough gravity to hold it in place."

Chow scowled at Tom suspiciously. "An’ jest how do you make gases stick t’gether? Add a little glue mebbe?"

Tom laughed affectionately at the notion. "By using Inertite."

Chow nodded. "That there’s that stuff you concocted when we ’as over in Africa." An all-but-miraculous substance composed not of atoms and molecules but literally of interlaced "strands" of the spacetime continuum itself, Tom had used Inertite to create a special sheathing to protect his terrasphere from the destructive effects of antiproton-emitting gas in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.

"I don’t get it, skipper," Bud remarked from beneath a furrowed brow. "What does Inertite have to do with holding an atmosphere together?"

"As ‘non-matter matter,’ so to speak, Inertite has quite a range of unique properties. We’ve barely scratched the surface so far." Tom picked up a bar of the whitish substance, which felt to the touch like ordinary matter. "Remember how the rocks of the taboo mountain were run through with veins of this stuff?"

"Sure," Bud replied. "That’s why the gas didn’t disintegrate the whole mountain."

"Well, the veins we could see outright were only the biggest ones. For every one of those, there were a hundred smaller ones; and for every one of
those,
another hundred smaller still. Eventually you end up with filaments so small and thin that they can only be detected with an electron microscope."

Chow looked blank, but said, "Reckon that’s mighty small, idnit?"

Tom nodded. "So small they make an atom look big!"

"Okay, so you’s got these little bitty threads," prompted Chow. "What’s that have t’do with anything?"

"Glad you asked." With the air of a magician the young inventor tore off a tiny scrap of paper from one of the pages in his notebook and walked over to a nearby workbench. He held his hand high, dramatically, and then released the scrap, which slowly fluttered down through the air. Suddenly, as it came parallel to a pair of horizontal rods about a foot apart, it stopped falling and hung in midair between them, jiggling as if caught in a spiderweb.

Bud and Chow approached and examined the space between the rods. "Nothing there," declared Bud. "So what’s keeping it up? Static electricity?"

Chow disagreed. "If’n we’re betting, my bet’s on magnets."

"Neither one!" Tom pronounced. "You see, I’ve found a way to take a lump of Inertite, like that bar I was holding, and ‘spin it out’ into the same kind of ultra-small filaments we were just talking about. Certain resonant frequencies of electromagnetic waves cause the ends of the filaments to be attracted to the corresponding ends of other filaments nearby. They join together and create a kind of continuous webbing, sort of a net of fine gauze too thin to be visible to the eye. I’ve stretched some of the webbing between these rods, and that’s what the scrap of paper is resting on. As you can see, it has some give to it."

Bud nodded sagely. "Neat and keen and all that stuff, Tom. But you still haven’t explained how you’re going to keep the air you make from dissipating into space."

"I’m getting to it. When these nets of filaments get to a certain size, they start to curl in and connect to themselves, as a soap bubble does. The spaces in the netting are so narrow that molecules of oxygen or other free gases can’t fit through. They’re trapped, and that’s what holds the atmosphere in space."

"Yeah, I got it!" Chow exclaimed proudly. "Yuh’re kinda blowin’ a big soap bubble with air inside."

"That’s the general idea, pard," Tom confirmed. "The wall of the bubble is so thin that you won’t be able to see it at all."

"Well, I think my
brain
must be too thin to see how it all fits together!" joked Bud. "So you’ve made a great big bubble of air—how do you get people inside it without popping it?"

In response Tom passed the palm of his hand between the two rods. The scrap of paper dipped down a ways; but then as the hand passed along further, it sprang back to its previous position. "See?" Tom exulted. "The Inertite filaments don’t break under stress like ordinary matter. Solid structures can push the netting around up to a certain point, but beyond that point the netting opens up and simply flows
around
the obstruction, the way radio waves can flow around a building." He explained that if such an atmospheric bubble were created on the moon or another planet, spacecraft would be able to enter and leave by simply passing through the invisible Inertite shell. No opening or airlock would be required.

Chow’s face creased into a cheerful grin. "I cain’t say I savvy every word of it, son, but if you say so, I reckon it must be true!"

"Same here!" Bud groaned. "It’s way over my head!"

"It’ll be way over all our heads," grinned Tom, pointing to a blueprint of his machine. "The ‘spider’ will be suspended about eighty feet in the air above the rock-smelting apparatus."

Bud looked mystified. "But what holds it up? Are those spider-filaments
that
strong?"

"No, the gases released in the smelter are given an electrical charge and propelled upward by a magnetic flux—the same principle used in the
Star Spear
’s matter-accelerator engines. The pressure of this stream of charged particles supports the machine just like a ping-pong ball on a water spout. And of course the rotation of the dispeller—the ‘spider’—automatically keeps it gyro-stabilized."

"Simple as that, eh?" quipped Bud dryly. Chow could only scratch his head at his young boss’s ingenuity.

The excitement Tom felt over the project lasted until dinnertime. Then, reaching home, Mr. Swift greeted him with disturbing news. "Son, you and I have been summoned to Washington tomorrow morning."

"Summoned!"
Tom repeated. "But why, Dad?"

"The official who called refused to give any reason," responded Damon Swift. Then he added tensely: "I’m afraid it’s an inquiry about our being responsible for the terror the satellite caused!"

TAKING OFF the next morning in a Swift Construction Company commuter jet piloted by Tom, Tom and Mr. Swift soon landed at the Washington airport. A government limousine whisked them to the Pentagon Building.

In one of the large conference rooms, they were greeted by Mr. Luther Helm, a balding official in the Defense Department whom they had met before. "Delighted you could come," he told the Swifts.

"As are we," replied Mr. Swift somewhat sharply.

Helm introduced them to the other members of the group. These included high-ranking officers of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and various government scientists, including several associated with NASA. One of the attendees was an old friend, Admiral Krevitt of ONDAR, the Office of National Defense Applied Research.

"Haven’t seen you two since the Russian sub business," he commented. "Both well, I trust?"

"So far," said Tom pointedly. Krevitt chuckled in response.

The two were seated at a long table with the others under the presiding gaze of George Washington’s portrait, and Helm called the meeting to order. "Gentlemen," Helm began, "here’s the situation. Forgive me if I put it in summary form. This new moon in the heavens could become a prize objective. It looks like an ideal spot from which to launch deep space expeditions, such as the American manned Mars project that you’ve read about recently. It also has strategic importance with implications for the security of our nation. Any country that gains control of it could conceivably dominate the earth through various kinds of high-tech space-based weaponry which could be shielded from retaliation inside the bulk of the satellite. I’m sure your imaginations are all adequate to the task of envisioning this."

Murmurs of agreement echoed around the table. Tom and his father glanced at each other. They had not been reprimanded. Why had they been called to Washington?

"Therefore," Helm continued, "we have decided to send an expeditionary force to land on the satellite and claim it for the United States. Mr. Swift, we feel that you and your son are the obvious choice to make such an expedition a reality. What do you say?"

Tom and his father were amazed as well as pleased. This outcome to their summons was far different from what they had expected!

"This is a great honor," said Mr. Swift. "It will mean a tremendous responsibility."

"Then I take it you accept?"

"No," continued Damon Swift. "I’m afraid we must decline."

Tom gasped under his breath and sat up straight in his chair, hardly able to believe his ears. But he felt reassured when his father gave him a nudge beneath the tabletop.

The men at the table looked startled and alarmed. "We were counting on you," said Helm after a tense pause.

"Please understand," Mr. Swift went on. "Swift Enterprises is not a government agency, and cannot function like a government agency. It’s clear that the sort of ‘expeditionary force’ you contemplate would be headed-up by a military official, or someone else appointed by the government for reasons having little to do with science and invention. With all due respect, we can’t participate in such an arrangement. If Washington is unwilling to trust us with actually commanding the expedition…" He left the sentence unfinished.

There was muttering at the table. "It’s not a matter of trust, Swift," put in Admiral Krevitt. "With these rumors of possible Brungarian involvement…well, it only seems proper for the United States to be represented by someone with official standing."

"Our choice was Col. Jess Northrup, an experienced NASA astronaut," Helm said. "You surely can’t object to the involvement of a man such as Northrup, a national hero!"

Mr. Swift smiled. "I’m well aware of his heroism twenty years ago, landing the space shuttle after the accident. I was part of the shuttle program myself back then. But this is an utterly novel situation."

"Besides, it might interfere with his next run for the Senate," whispered Tom in ironic tones only his father could hear.

Damon Swift added, "Tom and I are ready to serve our country any way we can, as always. But if we are to take up these responsibilities, you must allow us to be fully in charge."

Helm spoke quietly to the man sitting next to him, a man known by the Swifts to represent the President of the United States. After a moment the man nodded, and Helm straightened up. "You’ve made a forceful case for your point of view. We are willing to work out a protocol of cooperation between you and Col. Northrup, with Swift Enterprises clearly in charge of all the scientific aspects of the expedition. What do you say to that?"

Mr. Swift leaned over and muttered a string of meaningless syllables into his son’s ear, a bit of undetected mockery the officials would never learn of. Tom nodded thoughtfully, trying hard not to laugh. Then Mr. Swift said soberly. "Naturally we accept."

"Excellent!" Helm exclaimed in obvious relief. "And you, Tom, how do you feel about it?"

The young scientist-inventor grinned. "I had hoped to make a quick, simple, private expedition to Little Luna, as we’ve nicknamed the moonlet. Now we’ll have an added and worthy incentive. But I think you gentlemen should be aware of one fact: we don’t have a vehicle able to handle the sort of large-scale effort you seem to have in mind."