“All set, skipper. Didn’t even have to take the mid-point pause. It must be because the panels got warm enough this close to the sun. They folded and tightened down like champs!”
A quick radio call to the Outpost and another to notify Fearing Island they were about to depart were made and the ship used a light push at an acute angle to the Earth to move away before the repelatrons shoved her outward on a trip that would see them passing the Moon’s orbit in a couple hours on their way to Mars.
On day five Tom suggested Duanne take a stint at the controls. The man was not a trained pilot but had taken on whatever responsibilities Tom handed him with enthusiasm. This was no different. He had already spent many hours observing both the instruments as well as what the different pilots did with them.
Tom even had him calculate and make a course correction that would allow them to approach the planet from the trailing edge to give them more space to make their orbit insertion two days later.
With the Martian orbital position leading that of Earth, they would play a little game of catch up on the way out and take nine days at nearly constant acceleration or deceleration. Tom had no reservations about using the higher-G speeds as he knew Brandon, even at the age of sixty-two, was an Ironman marathoner taking part in at least two major events each year. He was in better shape than most twenty-seven years olds.
As they swung around and into an orbit some five-thousand-four-hundred miles above the planet’s surface, Tom was already calculating his maneuvers to align them with Phobos and to come down from above for a soft landing. They would need to come down closer by about fourteen-hundred miles and that would take place over a three orbit timeframe.
His fingers flew over the controls making minute corrections as they became necessary. He was so busy with these tiny maneuvers he had no time to contemplate the fact there should not have been so many of them.
Tom had taken over for Peter just after reaching their initial orbit. The other pilot had spent more than nine hours in the command seat as they finished their slowdown and through the series of maneuvers to place them where they needed to be.
With each orbit the rocky yet smoothed, over millennia, surface came into sharper and sharper view. Almost too soon it stood just five miles away
“Are we setting down in Stickney?” Brandon asked. The large crater featuring its own inner impact crater was a favorite of his. It also was one of the most notable and easy-to-locate features of the little moon from Earth observatories, so it was frequently used as the main point of reference for anyone looking at Phobos.
“We are. Lower edge of the crater away from the smaller Limtoc crater. And,” Tom said checking his instruments, “in just fifteen minutes. Everyone,” he now called out to the man in the command room, “climb in and strap down. We maneuver in two minutes.”
The touchdown was very smooth, and the ship held firm to the surface with no rocking or tilting.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Bud stated. “Shouldn’t we have bounced a little bit? I mean, not much gravity and all that?”
Tom’s face was in a scowl as he considered the truth in those questions. He had noticed their braking thrust had been triple what he’d anticipated.
“You’re right, flyboy. Do me a favor and turn off our artificial gravity.” Once the flyer turned their series of tiny specialty repelatrons, the scowl grew deeper.
“Professor? Any thoughts on this higher than expected gravity?”
Unstrapping himself and coming over to glance at the monitors, Brandon shook his head.
“No. In fact I would say that unless all observations from the past hundred or so years have been terribly off, this is not anything I would classified as being normal. Martian moons should have about four or five percent Earth normal. This feels more like quarter gravity. In other words, it just ain’t right!”
CHAPTER 8 /
IT’S ALL A MYSTERY
IF TOM had expected to use the hand winch to lower large portions of the test equipment to the surface, he had to adjust those thoughts and use the power winch to move nearly twice as many smaller loads. The gravity had risen to nearly one-third Earth normal and was holding at that point.
There was more gravity than he’d anticipated by at least a factor of nine as he now had that mystery to investigate and that extra downward pull for everyone to work against.
It would have no real impact on the lunar visit other than to extend it from a planned seven hours to possibly as many as fourteen hours or about two full orbits.
“At least we had a few days planned to be around here,” Bud said as he opened the case with their gravity measurement device. This gravimeter was the smallest one Swift Enterprises had in inventory at barely a ten-inch cube. Its three sharply-pointed feet extended when the handle was twisted to the left, which is what Bud did before setting in on the most level piece of ground he could find. The contact by those feet with the surface turned the instrument into the ON condition where it went through a self-check before giving a green condition a few seconds later.
“What’s it indicating?” Tom asked after it had been on the ground a full minute.
Bud checked the screen on the top. “Point-two-nine-seven-six EG Normal.” He watched the screen for a full minute. “That’s about ten percent higher than on our own moon. That can’t be right except I feel the pull. Jetz! No variation so far. I’ll go place it by that small boulder in the ship’s shadow. It’ll be safe for the long duration checks.”
Tom nodded as he worked to set up a portable environment tent with the help of Duanne and Art. The basic design had not changed over the years since he designed the first one. Only the materials were newer/stronger it featured the addition of a shaded roof.
After staking down the corners of the fifteen-foot by fifteen-foot floor he opened a small flap near the ground and pulled a handle. The enclosed compressed air made the tent puff out. It would never have the pressure of an Earth-based tent but would have sufficient air, and oxygen, to allow the team to enter, remove their helmets, and enjoy a break. A second cylinder in the small airlock would refill that as many as six times before needing replacement.
A small air purifier plus a supplemental O2 tank would make things useable for up to fifteen hours for three men, or forty-eight hours for one. Duanne went to the ship to pull those tanks out and get them installed while Tom turned to other instruments.
Peter was setting out a small, flat device that looked more like an old-fashioned robot vacuum cleaner than anything else. It would check for any indication of atmosphere starting fifty micrometers up from the surface and out to a distance of ten millimeters. Tom expected nothing to register, but with the unexpected higher gravity anything might be possible.
The tent now inflated and most of the instruments working or ready to be energized, the inventor turned his attention to their surroundings. Phobos was rougher than Earth’s moon, but still showed signs of wearing down. The few rocks sticking up from the surface were smoothed with time and collisions with micro-sized bits of space debris plus anything the solar winds could pick up and send out.
Not surprisingly, it also showed stress lines running in near parallel formations primarily north to south. These had been theorized a few decades earlier and observed finally once space telescopes had been launched, but they were stark and startling to see up close.
To his right were two of the nearest, forty feet apart, they were about a foot wide and indented by a couple inches.
At some point they would likely be the lines along which Phobos broke apart. If things were allowed to proceed as they had before the moon began to come lower they might shred the moon into small enough bits to create a small ring or two around Mars.
There was no telling what they could do given a lower and faster orbit.
“Professor? You can get into the airlock and come on out,” Tom radioed back into the ship. “I would like your impressions on some of the things you will see up close when you get here.
”
“Coming. Just have to get the helmet clicked into place. See you in three minutes.”
When the older man was standing next to Tom he began making “hmmmm” and “tsskkk” sounds as he first looked down on then stooped down to more closely examine the first stress line.
When he stood up, he turned to face Tom. “The good news is they do exist. Scientists have not been wrong all these years. You do know one theory was these are scars from something that exploded just above the surface and left scorch marks. But, no. These are definitely stress fractures deep under the surface.”
“Are they any danger to us?” Bud asked as he approached them.
He watched as the professor shook his head. “I do not believe so unless there are any sizable voids in the makeup of this moon. Then…” and he shrugged. “Anybody’s guess. I think I need to take the ground penetrating RADAR unit and make some circles around our location.”
He, Bud and Art opened that crate and assembled the unit. Looking more like a small fertilizer spreader than the huge boxes on wheeled platforms of days gone by, this unit featured two tall rear wheels, like those on a child’s bicycle, and two smaller front wheels that could swivel for steering and could be pushed along by just about anybody. It wirelessly connected to the heads-up monitor inside the visor of the astronaut operating it and also recorded everything it found.
“Need help pushing the pram, Prof?” Bud asked. “I feel the need to stretch my legs if you do.”
His voice spoke of his great hope and so their researcher stated he would be glad to be “only the eyes” if the flyer was willing to be his “wheel man.”
They headed off after setting down a laser distance beacon that would allow them to keep to concentric circles of equal distance all the way around.
The first circle was only twenty feet across and was entirely within the shadow of the ship. The next once was thirty feet farther out and meant they would need to swerve around a few points where the landing gear was touching. Plans were to move out in thirty foot increments until they were past one-hundred and fifty feet out before switching to fifty foot extensions.
Nothing of note—meaning no voids of any size greater than about a yard-wide bubble—was detected by the time they were nearly four-hundred and fifty feet out. Of course this only was accurate information down to about the twenty-five feet the RADAR could penetrate.
“I, for one, could use a break and possibly a cool beverage and about a half-hour rest,” the professor admitted as he halted the detector.
“If that’s an official motion, I second it, vote ‘Aye’ and say it is unanimous. We can turn the gear to standby and head back.”
He called out their intent over the radio and Tom suggested it was a good time for them all to return to the ship for a break.
“We’ll have five more hours before I’d like to lift off, so we break for thirty minutes, work for three hours and then pack things up,” the inventor told them all as they sat in their couches sipping ice cold beverages and nibbling on some of Chow’s special energy bars.
“Other than the unexpected gravity situation, and I’m thinking I want to land in at least a half dozen other spots and see what the local gravity is at each one. Has anybody anything out of the ordinary to report?”
There was little of consequence. The atmosphere detector found a very thin film of nitrogen and carbon dioxide atoms clinging to the surface, perhaps two millimeters thick, but nothing else. The proximity to Mars and also to the Sun meant the actual surface was too warm for them to freeze and so they did constitute a type of rudimentary atmosphere.
Six coring samples had been taken and examined inside the tent but other than suggesting the moon might be a little sturdier than previously believed, down to twenty feet, they simply pointed to Phobos being a conglomeration of hundreds or even thousands of solar object that had all come together a few million years in the past with enough force to stick together. Eons had fused much of the materials near the surface into a solid mass.
When the time came to pack things back into the ship, Bud and the professor were already inside looking over the final results of their RADAR examination.
“I see dozens of small voids, perhaps less than golf ball size on average,” Brandon said as he sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Bubbles of gases frozen on their way outward to escape no doubt.”
“At least down to the twenty-five feet we can look,” Bud suggested. “Let’s compare things with the Damonscope sweeps the skipper wants to make when we lift off.”
In their haste to land Tom had completely forgotten that a good and deep scan of the moon’s makeup down to at least two-hundred feet should be made. It would be their first order of duty on liftoff.
The crew came back with anything they’d taken out of the ship’s shadow and packed things up.
As usual, nothing unpacked ever goes back into exactly the same area as it came out of, but they managed to get everything inside by simply leaving the environment tent on the surface.
“It might come in handy for a more detailed study in the coming weeks.”
The ship’s Damonscope—now a high-definition digital version of the original film-based system—was energized when they reached an average altitude of two-hundred feet. The ship swept back and forth over a total area greater than five football fields with nothing spotted indicating a source of radioactivity other than a small blip that would have been located “south” of their first landing if that area were considered to be the North pole. The size of the blip was insignificant and was nowhere close to any of the professor’s and Bud’s tiny voids so that comparison turned out to be a dead end.
Tom set them down five more times and personally took the gravimeter outside to get a reading.
The only difference, as they headed to the polar opposite of the first landing location—and it was along the lines of half of a single percent of Earth gravity lower—was a gentle change. The farther away from landing point one the lower the gravity. Fractionally but measurable.
“That,” Professor Brandon stated as they headed down to the Mars colony, “says two things to me. The density of the moon is greater the higher away from the planet you travel—but that plus gravity from Mars would have caused it to rotate the moon so that was pointing downward—or… well, this is an uncomfortable thing to say, but whatever is causing that unusual gravity is located nearer the lower part of the moon and not equal to the equator or south of it.”
That proclamation caused all side conversations to cease immediately as the potential meaning of it reached their brains.
Slowly, Tom sought to find appropriate words to ask, “Do you mean you think the gravity could be artificial?”
If the scholar and researcher was afraid his statement might anger the younger man or be met with resistance, he was stunned to see Tom, and pretty much everyone else in the control room, grinning.
“What?” he meekly asked.
Bud, the closest of them, draped his right arm over the professor’s shoulders.
“Did I ever tell you the tale of the small, gray creatures who launched a friendly missile attack on Swift Enterprises?”
As everyone else prepared for landing he told the man the true—not the press release version—tale about the Space Friends and how they had a little thing known as a gravity stone.
“If this is not a natural thing, then perhaps they have some responsibility?”
Bud grinned again and nodded his head. “Could be…”
* * * * *
Haz met them just outside the main habitat dome. “Know any more than before?” he inquired.
Tom suggested they head for the main office where he would reveal what they had discovered and what they now had as a working theory.
On hearing the findings Haz sat back, his head only slightly nodding in understanding of what the inventor was telling him.
He finally leaned forward. “So, is there a chance that the Space Friends are holed up inside P
hobos and their gravity stone is causing all this trouble?”
Tom rubbed his chin in deep thought. “While it is possible my guess is they are not inside the moon. The gravity stone idea is fairly sound, but that leads to even more questions. Why did it get inserted inside the moon? Who did it and when? If they used Phobos as a base at one time, why didn’t they take the stone with them when they moved along? And,” he said refocusing his gaze on the Mars colony leader, “if it is the cause of the movement, can either we or they shut it off or do we have to move the moon away and blow it up to keep you all safe?”
The man across the desk from him let out a rueful chuckle. “I’m guessing you can’t come to any conclusion up here. So, next moves?”
“Next, I let some people back home know to start working on what I hope to be the solution, or at least the heavy moving gear. Then the Challenger goes back up and gives Phobos several good shoves to push her back out four or five hundred miles. At her rate of orbital decline that ought to keep her from getting any closer than she is today for the next month plus a few days. I should be back by then and we’ll do it all over as many times as necessary until I come up with a solution.” He looked at Haz and could see a question forming. “If you’re about to asked when do we leave, tomorrow. If you are going to ask what I think the overall solution is, or whether there even is one, I have to say that I don’t know but I won’t give up. Not even if I have to come up here and attach a giant repelatron to that thing that gives it a shove each and every morning until your people decide to head back to Earth.”
What he left unsaid were the words, “…if that time ever comes.”
* * * * *
This time out at the moon, Tom took the time to carefully roll it around a little so the lowest gravity area was pointing down to the surface of Mars.
“Color me as dense as a stump, skipper, but why?” Duanne asked as they prepared to get the ship into position for their shoves.
Tom ceased what he was doing with the controls and swiveled his seat around so he could see everyone in the room.
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement (The TOM SWIFT Invention Series Book 23) Page 9