She took another mouthful before nodding.
“Umm-huummff,” she said spewing puff pastry crumbs on her desk and all the way across it to land on his shirt.
“Ooops! Sorry,” she apologized wiping the mess up with her hands.
“No problem. So, if I read this correctly, they’ve started on the project?”
She shook her head making him look resigned. “Nope. Finished it! Evidently it only took a week after your dad sent over some design ideas.”
Tom brightened back up. He now had a new plan of action to put in place. It only required that his father agree, and his wife accept his offer to take her and the children on a one month vacation.
* * * * *
Bud went to speak with George Dilling in Communications. He explained to the manager that Tom was taking Bashalli and little Bart and Mary with them to Mars and that he would appreciate it if Sandy could be temporarily assigned as the communications technician on the TranSpace Dart.
“Purely to be the resident radio person?” George asked hiding a grin behind his coffee cup.
“Of course,” the flyer promised. “Anything else would be against ship’s rules. Uhh, well I have to back up on that. You see, space inside the ship is at a premium so there might be something like they do in submarines. Hot bunking. One bunk but two people using it at different times. Different shifts.”
“I’ll bet!” the older man said with a smirk. “Okay. Sandy has been really great for almost a year, minus her trip down to Mexico, and so she deserves to get out and stretch her communications legs. But, she is going to have to pass a Class A radio operator’s license and that will take a minimum of two weeks. Can the trip wait for that?”
He knew the answer as Tom and Damon had both called him regarding the forthcoming trip and cleared everything.
Bud nodded. “We leave in fifteen days. Can she start today?”
Now, George nodded. “I’ll have her installed in a quiet room with all the study materials. You will need to coach her every night. Since you passed your license nine years ago a few things have changed, but you use the equipment on almost a daily basis so you should have no trouble. Just promise me no cheating. She passes fair and square and she goes. She fails and unless the trip can be postponed for a full week—the wait period between testing opportunities–she stays back here.”
Bud reach out and shook George’s hand. “Deal!
Tom and Bashalli, and Bud and Sandy with her new license, boarded the ship. The Swifts had decided to leave the children home with the grandmothers and a special tutor for Bart who was being prepared to attend the first grade in another three months.
Goliath had been despatched six days earlier and was near the turn around point where it would start to slow down.
The Dart would catch up in three and a quarter days and pass it as it, too, decelerated. Tom and crew would arrive nearly a week early and be there to direct Goliath as it would be snugged up to the moon and used as the resident repelatron, taking the place of the various mules and saucers and even the Challenger as they kept pushing the errant satellite back up into nearly its normal position.
* * * * *
When the day arrived and the giant repelatron-powered ship was resting—upside down to the untrained eye—with its cargo deck on the ground and the dish pointing up—or down toward the planet—Tom and a small team of four stood a thousand yards away ready to start the process. Because of the curvature of the small moon, they could only see those parts of the ship eleven feet above the surface.
All systems reported GO status and the ground tracking team at the colony had positioned five RADAR measuring devices around the planet in addition to those at the colony.
Power was energized at the lowest setting, barely enough to lift one of the saucers much less move the moon. Then, minute by minute and finally into hour three it was increased until there was measurable movement. Tom had not needed to halt things because the moon would not directly overfly the colony for thirteen more orbits.
“We have a change to report,” radioed the station one-hundred-twenty degrees around the planet form the colony.
“And station three is seeing that as we have acquired a lock on. We are showing ninety feet outward motion and a rate of five feet per minute.”
It went like this until the colony station reported, “Phobos is home and in position. Reduce power to holding levels.”
Tom did this and was about to call out the success of the project when something happened. Evidently the gravity stone didn’t like what was going on and increased gravity on the moon to half that of Earth.
With no warning the satellite began settling downward at a rate that would see it entering the atmosphere in just five hours, far too short a time to get the Goliath back off and safe.
If Tom failed to do something, all would be lost.
But, as quickly as it happened, gravity returned to normal.
“If that happens too many times we could be in big trouble,” Tom admitted to those with him. “We don’t have a lot of spare power for too many surprises!”
CHAPTER 17 /
IN THE HALL OF THE LIZARD KINGS
INSTRUMENTATION HAD let them down in their search for the truth about Phobos’ interior. The deepest they had managed to penetrate was close to three-hundred feet and that only via the Deep Peek in an area that appeared to be an old crater now filled with a fine, dust-like particulate.
“What do you think that would like be if we tried to walk on it?” Bud asked from his seat next to Tom’s.
The inventor inhaled deeply and let the air back out through his nose before answering.
“Quicksand would be my guess, and that means we are going to have to be really careful when we’re all out running around,” he cautioned. He repeated the warning for everyone else in the ship.
Tom opted for a landing at the same location they first touched down. It not only was fairly level and had proved to support the ship, it also had their emergency habitat tent still set up.
From an altitude of two-hundred feet he performed a RADAR scan and one using the Deep Peek of the surrounding area. During this he located one other “quicksand” area of about thirty-feet in diameter, but at one-thousand feet out and detectable by the eye as it was in a circular indentation some five feet lower than the surface, he simply pointed it out to the crew and said to skirt around it.
Duanne offered to go out and stake it off with red tape.
“I’ll make the no-go zone another fifty feet from the edge," he suggested.
“Sounds good, but take Zimby with you as a safety precaution. I also want everyone out in teams of two with a safety line between you,” he told the crew.
The surrounding five miles had been mapped from above and now was in each person’s suit computer. The 3-D map showed them all just how high or low from the surface norm any place was. And, as an added precaution, Tom had just included a red circle around the quicksand craters so their suits would sound a warning if anybody got to within one-hundred feet of the crater edge.
Tom set the big ship down with the lightness of a feather before beginning the process of shutting off major systems and placing the rest into standby. If absolutely necessary, the Challenger could lift off inside of eight seconds. It would be rough but it was something that had saved the ship at least once in the past.
“I want four teams to head out in four directions. Red? Take your man and head up the slope to the top of the crater on a heading of about one-four-zero.” He designated two other teams and their relative directions before nodding to Bud who was shifting eagerly from foot to foot.
“Yes, Bud? A question from you?”
Settling down a little, the flyer shook his head. “Nope. Just waiting for you to tell me we’re heading for that Litmus crater.”
“Limtoc,” the inventor corrected him knowing full well that Bud knew the real name. “And, yes… that is our destination. We’ll be traversing down the steepest end so I wan
t us to take a Porta-vator.”
The Porta-vator was a self-contained lift mechanism that could be anchored at the top of an incline or even a cliff and could take a man plus equipment totaling about four-hundred pounds on Earth down—and back up—as much as two-thousand feet. It was basically a winch and a T-bar on which the astronaut stood while holding onto the upright bar.
Tom had created it as an emergency device shortly after his own mother and sister fell through a weak dome over a vacuum void on the Moon three years earlier.
They had been rescued by Chow Winkler—who had brought out his lariat to practice roping boulders in the low lunar gravity—along with Tom and Damon Swift and only by the skin of their teeth and a lot of heavy exertion.
Since then all repelatron donkeys, a favorite method of lunar exploration, carried one.
“How far down will we be going?” Bud inquired.
“I believe we have about eleven-hundred feet to the bottom of that inverted cone. Oh, and grab a sampling kit. I want to take back some of the inside materials of the cone for study. Some people believe it isn’t a second impact crater so much as it is a collapsed mini-volcano.”
“Neat! I’ll grab those two things. Anything else while I’m rummaging in the hangar?”
Tom considered the question a minute. “How about pulling out a second emergency tent. I’ll carry that and you can bring the other things. Not certain why I want that, but what the heck. We might find we need to climb inside for a rest so we might as well have it with us.”
An hour later the pair were approaching the crater—or inverted cone—edge. It was quite a stark difference between its interior and anything surrounding it.
“Now that I see it,” Tom said setting his pack down, “the more it looks like there might have been a pretty big void under that and it collapsed right in the lowest part of the cone. See how everything looks like it slid down to that point on the right side?”
Bud also set his load down and stood up looking into the cone.
“Wow. It sure does look like a cave-in. Wonder what was under all that?”
Tom snorted. “No telling. That collapse could be a hundred years old and it could just as easily be a million years old. I tend to lean on the newer end of any timeline since I can’t see any spot where notable debris from space has hit in there.”
He and Bud set up the Porta-vator and drove the tip of the self-boring anchor a foot into the dusty surface. After that, a simple press of the ON button had the screw-auger nose turning and pulling the anchor down with it. Nine feet later it stopped and gearing inside extended side anchors to hold it firmly in place.
It would reverse the process and pull itself back out once they were finished.
“Ready to head down?” Tom asked.
Bud nodded before remembering that inside a suit and helmet a simple action like that might be missed, so he added, “You bet! And, in the spirit of a promise you know I’ve made to your folks, I go first.”
The inventor knew better than to argue and so he assisted Bud in getting the T-bar set just over the edge of the cone.
Because it was not a straight drop, Bud straddled the upright bar and began using his legs to “walk” down the angled wall.
“It’s kind of loose footing, skipper. When you come down it’ll probably be best to shove off and sort of hop down. That’s what I’m doing now.”
Ten minutes later, and as he approached the lowest point in the cone’s bottom, Tom heard his friend take in a sharp breath.
“What is it, Bud?”
“Uhhh… I think you ought to come down and see this. I’ve stepped off the bar and am sending it back up. I’ll stay right here until you get down.”
Something in the flyer’s voice told Tom he could expect to see something exciting once he got down. It took the bar five minutes to come back up and when it arrived he made a quick check to ensure it had not received any damage on the scraping trip up. It looked fine so he climbed onto it and started down.
“Interesting that your footprints are still visible, Bud. Guess the wall has a good coating of fine dust particles. I’ll make a check in with the others and be down with you in a few.”
None of the other teams had anything to report so he told them to continue on for the next two hours before heading on arcing routes back toward the ship.
“Try to come back at least five-hundred feet to the left of your outbound path,” he requested.
He quickly arrived next to Bud who had decided to take a seat on a smallish boulder. Bud’s face inside his helmet was all smiles as he wiggled a little to keep himself between Tom and whatever it was behind him he’d found.
Standing back up he turned and swung his right arm around inviting the inventor to take a look.
Tom let out a very un-Tom-like oath on seeing what it was.
Behind Bud, and partially covered by loose stones and dust, sat what could only be described as a metal hatch.
They approached it cautiously. The plate was a manufactured piece and not natural, was pitted and discolored by time and conditions, but unmistakably a hatch covering something.
Together they moved as much of the debris around the edges as they could. Four minutes later they had uncovered perhaps 80% of it if the one edge and corner now exposed were any indication of size.
Tom made another radio call.
“Listen, everyone. Bud found something down there in the crater. We need at least one person down here, but we also need something like a flat-bladed shovel to pry something up. Red? Are you closest to the ship?”
“Roger that. We’ll head back down. There is absolutely nothing to be seen up here. How many of us do you really need?”
Tom answered that one man up top and one down with him and Bud ought to be sufficient.
“We planted a Porta-vator so I’ll send that back up for you.”
Tom, who had brought the emergency tent down on his back now turned to it. He and Bud had it set up on the ground in an area that sloped less than the surrounding areas before Red and Duanne reached the upper edge of the cone and the latter started down.
When Duanne arrived the two friends were sitting inside the tent discussing something that had them both alternately grinning and scowling. The young man let himself into the tent, equalized his suit pressure with the lower pressure inside, and removed his helmet.
“I brought down what looks like some sort of snow shovel I found in the hangar. Hope that’s the right tool.”
Tom’s smile told him it was just what might be needed.
The three suited back up and left the tent. With Duanne putting his back into it, the hatch—about five feet wide and nine feet bottom to top—was uncovered along with about a foot of additional space around it. That, like the hatch, was made from some sort of very old metal.
Bud stood back looking at the hatch. “How the heck are we going to get that opened?”
Tom stopped kicking smaller rocks to the side and stood up. “Well, I can’t see anything that looks like a knob or even an electronic lock, not that anything like that would still be working; this hatch has got to be a thousand years old… or even more. I suppose we might try lifting it aside.”
Duanne placed the edge of the shovel blade in the small gap between hatch and collar and gave it a little tilt.
To nobody’s surprise the hatch failed to move even a millimeter.
“Red?” Tom called over the radio.
“Here, skipper. What’s going on?”
Tom told him of their find and lack of a good pry bar.
“Okay. I think I have the thing back in the ship. Zimby and his partner just got back there. I can see them climbing the ladder. Hey, Zim!”
The other man stopped his climb and answered.
“Yeah, Red. I’ve been monitoring the skipper’s calls. What is this miracle tool you think we might have?”
Red described it and told Zimby where he believed it would be found.
“Okay. Assuming it’s the
re I’ll have it heading for the cone ASAP.”
“Pull out our other Porta-vator,” Tom requested. “I have a hunch we are going to need the extra lift.” He added a short list of other tools he would like to have come down.
It took another hour—the three went back to the relative comfort of the tent—before Zimby called down that he was just descending with everything they asked for.
The three met him near the bottom of the first Porta-vator and assisted him in shucking the three bags plus the nine-foot durastress bar he’d brought down.
“I took a few minutes to laser-cut the tip at an angle so it might fit inside the gap. Now I’m looking at it, I think I did the right thing.”
Tom agreed.
It took all four men to get the bar tip into the gap. It tool all four of them to begin working their way out to the end, but all they managed to do was lift the side of the hatch an inch.
Bud let go and reached down to shove a wedge Tom had requested into the wider gap.
The bar was moved farther in and the process repeated twice more until they had one side lifted about a foot. Then, they abandoned the bar and crouched down to give it a manual lift.
That was less successful that using the bar, so Tom called a halt to that attempt.
“Now comes the time we get to use a little power tool,” he told them. Reaching over to the small pile of things Zimby’d brought down he pulled out a box labeled: HANDLES/SELF WELDING
He handed two of the four pieces to Bud suggesting where he might place them. As Bud complied Tom did the same with his pair.
From the box he pulled out a small fob with a single button covered by a plastic shield. That was removed and he told everyone to step back and look away. Pressing the button caused the magnetic mounts on the I-shaped handles that had been set at the upper and lower corners of the hatch plate to almost explode with blinding light.
When the light stopped, the four handles had been permanently welded to the metal. The joins were glowing red but quickly cooled in the icy vacuum of space.
Next, he directed that the two Porta-vator T-bars be brought over. He slipped the lower bars under the tops of the handles and used some durastress cable he also had requested to bind them to the handles.
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement Page 19