Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts (2 page)

BOOK: Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts
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"Space travel!" Bud repeated. "Two of my favorite words! So when do we leave—and where to?"

"No destination yet," said Tom. "And no way to get there, either—yet!"

Bud switched the jet to automatic pilot and swiveled his seat to face Tom and Chow. "Enough with the hints, pal. What are we talking about?"

Tom gestured broadly. "The high cost of space travel."

"Wa-aal, I heard o’ the high cost o’
livin’,"
Chow stated, puzzled. "But
high
cost o’ space travel sounds more like one of buddy boy’s jokes. Is the price goin’ up?"

"The price is already sky high!" Tom gibed, continuing the joke. "Seriously, that’s the challenge Dad wants me to take a look at—the basic expense of getting off the earth and entering orbit. At Enterprises we really don’t worry about that aspect too much, because we only do special projects with experimental vehicles, and we have a lot of commercial income to spend from sales of the solar batteries, the Tomasite patent, the Pigeon Specials—all that."

"And, as we know from last time, government funding." Bud added wryly: "With all strings attached."

Chow scratched his head. "I know them big rockets they useta use cost a pretty penny, but what about that underwater shebang you set up next to the island?"

When Tom had been faced with the daunting challenge of building and supplying the Enterprises space station, he had developed a new and more efficient method of launching spacecraft which made use of underwater buoyancy as a substitute for the rocket’s fuel-gulping first stage. This aqualaunch system was based off Loonaui Island in the mid-Pacific. Replied Tom: "It’s true that the Loonaui system has a quicker turnaround time and saves money, pard. But it’s still a mighty big, complex sort of operation."

"Well then, what about your repelatron?" Bud suggested. "Just hook up one or two of those babies to an airtight container, and there ya go!" The repelatron was the matter-repelling machine that had carried Tom’s
Challenger
to the moon.

"Sure, the repelatron works fine. But the sort of super-repelatron we use for space travel requires great big parabolic dishes like the ones on the spaceship, plus an elaborate powerplant. The field-beam has to be strong enough to work at a distance of hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of miles. There’s no way you could adapt it to a small commuter craft."

Bud was amazed!
"Commuter
craft? In space?"

"Why not, flyboy?" laughed Tom. "Think of it as the cosmic version of the Pigeon Specials!"

"Okay, now, let me figger this. Hold off jest a second," Chow demanded skeptically. "You want folks t’be able to commute in space, jest like people when they go t’ work an’ back. Brand my briefcase, Tom, where the holy hey do you think they’ll be workin’ at, the moon?"

Tom confirmed the cook’s guess with a nod. "Absolutely! If we’re ever going to make a go of a real moon colony, the settlers will need an easy, ready, low-cost way to travel back and forth to the earth. The same goes for mining Lunite up on Nestria, or doing manufacturing in a flock of orbiting space stations as we’ve planned. Mankind will stub its toes right at the edge of outer space unless we find a way to get the cost down to something like the price of an airline ticket."

"Guess I kin understand
that,"
Chow conceded at last.

Bud asked Tom if he’d come up with an approach, or a new invention. "Let’s say I
might
have," he answered. "In fact, that’s one reason the Hyper-Celerator project had to come first. I’m hoping that—"

The communications panel buzzed. "Incoming call," Bud said. "Hold that thought." Lifting the microphone, he responded. "This is TSE
HighJumper.
Barclay here."

"Bud, this is Ted Spring at Space Central." Ted Spring, a longtime friend of the Swift family, had recently taken the position of Chief Astronautics Engineer at the aqualaunch facility on Loonaui Island, which supplied the space outpost.

"Hey there, Ted! What’s cookin’ in paradise?"

"Trouble! Is T-man there with you?"

Tom took the mike from Bud. "I’m here, Ted."

"Hold on to your crewcut, Tom. Something’s happened to the
Sea Charger!"

Chow grunted in dismay and Tom and Bud exchanged glances of alarm. The
Sea Charger
was an advanced seagoing vessel the size of an aircraft carrier, built to an Enterprises design by a shipbuilding firm in Southern California, partially funded by NASA. She had been launched on her maiden voyage only days before.

Tom demanded the details. "Don’t have a whole lot of ’em yet," Ted replied. "I just got off the horn with the Navy—your pal Admiral Hopkins. About two hours ago the
Charger
submerged as scheduled."

"Yes. It was the first extended ocean test of her submersible capabilities."

"She never surfaced!"

"What!"
Tom choked. "They’d only planned a forty minute test run, then back up!"

"I know that, T-man." Ted voice was troubled at the worrisome news. "She went down and dropped out of sight. The follower jets didn’t see a hair of her, and the sonarscope on the observation cruiser lost track of her all of a sudden at two-twenty fathoms down. And when I say
lost track,
I mean it literally—she went out like a candle!"

Bud leaned into the microphone. "Ted, what about wreckage? Anything floating around?"

"So far nothing’s been sighted."

Tom’s heart thudded. Several Swift Enterprises employees—personal friends—had enlisted for the historic voyage. Now it was horrifyingly possible that they were lost at sea to the last man!

 

CHAPTER 3
THE SONAR SPECTER

WHEN Tom shut off the radio unit he sat for a moment staring out at the quilt of clouds below, broken here and there to reveal the turquoise South Pacific.

"We’ll make our refueling stop on Loonaui in two hours," he said at last. "There’s a seacopter berthed at Space Central—they use it to do inspections of the underwater launch rig."

"You plan to join in the search, Tom?" Bud asked.

"What
search?" Tom retorted, his voice tinged with frustration. "As far as I know, that seacop is the only maneuverable deepwater craft this side of Hawaii. We’ve got to do what we can."

"That’s
plain speakin’, son!" agreed Chow. "We’ll find ’em. I got me a knack fer findin’ lost stuff."

The
HighJumper
landed at the airport at Jeanmaire, capital city—or town—of the Loonaui Islands Republic. Until recently small and rather primitive, the airfield facility had evolved in one great leap into a modern international jetport to accommodate the demands of the Space Central complex at the north end of the island, jumping-off point for excursions to the space outpost. Now the airport was almost as big as Jeanmaire itself.

A taxi-chopper brought Tom, Bud, and Chow to the complex in a matter of minutes. After conferring with Ted Spring and other personnel, Tom asked that the resident seacopter, the
Emeraldina,
be readied for duty. He then contacted Swift Enterprises over the facility’s videophone, a satellite-based private television network.

"It’s a terrible, distressing event," said Damon Swift, Tom’s distinguished father. "NASA and the Navy have commenced a search, but their really fast deep-submersibles won’t reach the area for another day or so. They’ve been using surface jetboats with sonar drag-buoys." The video screen captured every flicker of pain and anxiety in Mr. Swift’s eyes.

"Where exactly was their last known position?" Tom asked.

"About eight hundred miles west of the tip of Baja California." His father read off the precise coordinates from a note in front of him.

"It’s open sea," Tom commented. "Nothing else around for a couple thousand miles."

"Perfect for performance tests—and for getting lost in."

"We’ll come up with something in the seacopter, Dad," promised Tom.

The flat, saucer-shaped
Emeraldina
put out to sea, floating yards above the waves on a cushion of air driven downward by its vertical-axis rotor blades. Reaching the area, Tom set the craft down on the surface, where it rocked gently.

"There’s one of the search boats, skipper," Bud reported, pointing toward the horizon.

"We’ll let them know we’re getting into the act," Tom stated. "Then we’ll dive."

Presently, the pitch of the big blades reversed, the seacopter dove deep into the Pacific, scanning in all directions with its sensitive detection instruments. "Nothing on standard sonar," Tom muttered. "Sono-resonance locator, zero."

"But listen, boss, ain’t that there ship coated with Tomasite plastic?" Chow pointed out. "You couldn’t see it on th’ sonar TV anyways, couldja?"

Tom nodded. "True. But I’ve set the sonarscope to look for any sign of agitation from a subsea wake, or the heat signature from a thermal gradient. The
Sea Charger
couldn’t have vanished
absolutely
without a trace."

But after hours of pursuing an ever-widening search pattern, it seemed the young inventor would have to eat his words. The dark waters held no clue.

"This is crazy," grumbled Bud. "Even if she blew up, we’d pick up something somewhere."

"Boss, you said some o’ the Enterprises people are on board," Chow said to Tom. "Who are they, d’you know?"

Tom looked at his friend with grim concern. "Bob Jeffers for one. Also Nina Kimberley."

"Aw jetz!" Bud gasped in dismay. "And Nina just got back from the Aurum City expedition!"

Before Tom could make further comment, Chow suddenly exclaimed, "Say! Look at that on the screen! Don’t it mean somethin’?"

The sonarscope screen showed a strange, irregular form, like a silhouette of light outlining a black cloudlike central shape.

"Put it on imaging mode," Bud urged. "Doesn’t look like anything, the way it is."

Tom shrugged, puzzled. "Hate to tell you this, pal, but it
is
on imaging mode!"

Chow squinted at the shape. "Wa-aal what is it, some kind o’ jellyfish? It’s wigglin’ and wogglin’ all over th’ place!"

Tom checked the control dials and positional readout. "Whatever it is, it’s about at the limit of sonarscope range."

"How big is it?" Bud asked. "As big as the
Sea Charger?"

"No, not at all—much smaller. But way too big to be any kind of fish."

"Could it be a school of fish?"

"If so, I’ve never seen them bounce sonar in
this
way," was the reply. Suddenly Tom yelped out:
"Whoa!"

The weird ghostlike object had abruptly shot across the monitor screen and vanished from sight!

"Skipper!" Bud breathed. "If it was really that far away…"

"I know," said Tom slowly. "It must have been moving faster than a space rocket! Even our jetmarines can’t approach that speed." Tom made adjustments to the control panel, but ended up shaking his head. "No trace of anything now. It must have been some sort of malfunction in the sonar transceiver—a ghost blip."

"But boss, ya don’t think—I mean, it couldn’t be—the, the—" stammered Chow, eyes wider than usual.

"The what?"

"The ghost o’ that ship we’re tryin’ to find?"

Bud snorted. "At least that’d be something, cowpoke. Right now we’ve got
nuthin’!"

Discouraged, Tom piloted the
Emeraldina
back to Loonaui, and the refueled
HighJumper
resumed its northeasterly flight. It was late night, local time, when the jet finally touched down on the Enterprises airfield in Shopton. Their big yawns led them irresistibly to bed, Tom at the nearby Swift residence, Bud in his apartment in Shopton, and Chow in his comfortable quarters on the plant grounds near his kitchen.

Several days went by but there was no report on the whereabouts of the
Sea Charger.
Unable to make progress on the mystery, Tom busied himself in his laboratory meanwhile, trying to solve the problem of developing a new and cheaper method of space travel.

"Say, wasn’t that Dr. Kupp I just saw leaving?" Bud asked warily one afternoon as he strolled into the laboratory, which adjoined the high-arched underground hangar where Tom’s mammoth Flying Lab was based. When Tom nodded, Bud continued: "He’s—not coming right back, is he?"

Tom grinned. "Bud Barclay, the big brave athlete! You’re not intimidated by that little man, are you?"

"I know he’s your ace mathematician and nuclear chemist or whatever," Bud replied as he eased down on a stool, still poised to make a run for it. "But let’s face it, he can be a little… opaque. As in: you can’t make out what he’s saying. Or if he’s saying anything!"

"True, pal!" Tom laughed. "He was supposed to join us on the trip to Australia, you know."

"So what happened? He couldn’t find his way to the airport?"

"He couldn’t find his way to his
car.
In the Enterprises parking lot!"

After a hearty shared hoot, Bud continued. "Any big brain waves yet on your project, boy genius? Your Dad’s challenge?" He noticed that Tom was intently poring over a clutter of scribbled diagrams and equations.

Tom looked up with a wry grin. "Give us time, flyboy! But if I were a detective, I’d say I’ve got a few ‘leads’."

"Okay. And just like a detective in a story, you’re keeping everybody guessing to the end." Bud scratched his bead thoughtfully. "Let’s get down to brass tacks. Where do you start in tackling the problem?"

"Good question. That’s just what I’ve been asking myself," Tom replied with a half-rueful smile. "The real hope," he continued, "lies in finding a different type of space propulsion. As you know, the advanced spaceships devised so far—I mean the self-contained kind which don’t need rocket fuel—rely on drive systems that are big, bulky, and power-hungry."

"Even the Brungarian moon ship used the sun to feed its ion drive," Bud agreed.

"Yes, and our ship, the
Challenger,
uses power from those big cosmic energy converters to run its repelatron drive setup. Other ships that space scientists have dreamed up would need very, very large power-gathering equipment to collect the sun’s energy."

"I’ve seen drawings of that sort of thing— whopping big space sails the size of those atom-snatchers you made to collect solar-wind particles for your matter maker."

BOOK: Tom Swift and the Cosmic Astronauts
13.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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