“I see. But, how do you prove any of that?”
Tom smiled. “By taking up a team of archeologists and anthropologists. I have Personnel working to get five of each who are willing to live on Mars and use the saucers to commute up and down for the eight months it is going to take for Mars to get back around and the Earth to catch up and be close enough for reasonable flight times.”
“You know something? That is exactly what I’d do as well!”
* * * * *
Tom addressed the team of scientists that would be travelling with him to Mars.
“I will not overstate nor will I minimize the potential for danger in what you are about to embark on. Mars is in itself a dangerous planet. You cannot go outside without the aid of breathing apparatus and protective clothing. Even with that available, it is one-hundred percent better to not venture out unless you are in the combination pressure and spacesuit you have been issued. And, Phobos is ten times more deadly.
“You have all been shown the videos and the data regarding the erratic gravity. You must be on your guard at all times for fluctuations. Now, here’s an important thing… you also have to be on guard for your neighbors.” He looked at the group and they were all nodding. “I see that lesson has sunk in so I won’t hammer at it now.
“When we arrive my job is to see hat you have safe and ample means of getting into the cavern and back out and up. That is mostly in place although fair warning; it won’t be like traveling in an elevator in a luxury hotel. Nothing you will encounter up here will qualify as luxurious.”
This got him a small laugh from the seven men and three women. One of the ladies called out, “We’re so used to rickety ladders and badly knotted ropes, any powered means will be a luxury!”
“Glad you are all prepared for less than perfect conditions. I can’t tell you how to best do your jobs. You are experts in your fields and highly respected ones at that. All I can say is if it can be removed without damage—and I doubt if much falls into that category—do that but everything else gets studied in place. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of photographs will be taken and cataloged along with nearly constant videos. I’m guessing that is standard practice for you anyway.”
He went over how the trip would happen including the crowded conditions inside the ship.
“You will each have a small cabin but your crew will be doing what is known as hot-bunking, There are only twelve cabins in total and a five-man crew, so one of us will be sleeping in a special couch inside the storage room. A sign will be on that door in the lower living space when it is occupied so if you see it, please try to be quiet. Normal conversations are fine, just no shouting arguments about King Tut's curse or something like that.”
When he asked for questions, Tom was surprised the only one came from one of the men, an Englishman named Walter Frobisher.
“Yes, Dr. Frobisher?”
“Ummm, I hate to sound like a sissy, but I tend to become slightly nauseous on airliners whenever they encounter turbulence. Will this trip be rough or smooth? I ask because I can take certain tranquilizers to settle my stomach.”
Tom smiled at the smaller man. “The trip, once we leave the atmosphere and get up to the ship that will take us to Mars, will be smooth as sitting in your own living room. You will feel no acceleration or deceleration and in the vacuum of space there is no turbulence. What I must be totally honest with you is that once on Phobos you may be in for a bumpy ride. We haven’t been able to find a pattern for the gravitational swings and while the satellite does not buck and shake, the changes are sudden and can be, well, disconcerting.”
The Englishman smiled. “Oh, I have no troubles once I am on solid ground. I once spent a month in an area plagued by earthquakes striking fifteen times a day. No problems.”
Tom made a mental note to take the man aside in private to tell him this would not be like the ground shaking under him. He also noted that Frobisher probably needed an extended session inside the zero-G chamber Tom had created years earlier to train astronauts for the rigors of space when building the original Outpost in Space.
The meeting broke up with everyone being told they had five days to go home and get their things in order.
“Take-off from here will be at nine on the morning of this coming Monday with the larger takeoff from Fearing Island at noon. Remember to pack only a few vital items such as personal electronics and instruments of your trades along with your toiletries. All clothing will be provided including the under suits we all wear in space.”
He did take the Doctor aside as people shuffled out of the meeting room and suggested it would be beneficial for him to spend an hour inside the training equipment.
“Why only me?”
“A legitimate question,” the inventor told him while trying to figure out how to word things, “but the truth is with your smaller stature, the artificial gravity in the ship will affect you differently. I need to be assured you won’t have any problems. I trust that you understand that precautions are only here to protect you and the others.”
“Of course. Forgive me for even questioning your request. Uhh, when do I get another go at your zero-gravity chamber?” He, like the others, had already had a brief fifteen-minute session to check for disorientation. Everyone passed, but Tom felt he needed at least a two-hour test.
“After lunch, so don’t eat too much. Bud Barclay will come get you from your room.”
At three Bud reported to his friend that the Doctor had passed with flying colors. “I have to tell you he was nervous about possibly losing his lunch, but I think it is all in his head. There was no sign at any time he was having troubles. You couldn’t have wiped his grin off with sandpaper!”
The image in Tom’s mind made him chuckle.
* * * * *
The transfer flight to Fearing took off five minutes late because Sandy wouldn’t let go of Bud.
“Sorry for the delay, folks,” he announced to the scientists sitting in the Sky Queen’s lounge. “My wife was just delivering a long message to me and I had to stand there and, uhh, pay attention. Don’t worry, though. We can easily make up the delay in the air. Hang on because there is a report of a storm front coming in about the same time we’ll pass over Rhode Island. This is a big jet but we may feel a minute of bumps.”
The flight was almost perfectly smooth as Tom let Bud skirt the storm by heading out almost due east from Shopton before turning south for a fast flight to Fearing.
The TranSpace Dart was sitting on her fins out on the takeoff pad. The Queen landed on the main runway and quickly received permission for a taxi over to where the spaceship was sitting.
Everyone stopped talking on seeing the towering ship standing in front of them, nearly falling over each other to take a look, causing a backup at the lower hatch. But, within a minute they had all managed to get out onto the tarmac where ten faces were looking upward in awe at the top of the arrowhead-shaped ship.
“That is one huge rocket,” a woman archeologist stated. “Must be really large inside.”
“It is tall and a little wide down here on the ground, but the accommodations are not as spacious as you might believe. All this lower seventy percent is taken up with power and drive systems. In fact, at the top where the two pilots sit, that space is just about the same size as the front of a compact sports car.”
“One of those dinky foreign jobs to boot!” Bud added with a sly smile. “Don’t worry, though. We go so fast you won’t have much time to notice that.”
In groups of five—four passengers with one crewman—they headed up in the internal elevator, were shown to their cabins and around the living and work quarters and all given a brief safety lecture before Tom and Bud climbed the narrow ladder to the cockpit. With only a brief warning to strap in, the ship lifted and headed into the midday sky.
The hookup to the black hole was as smooth as any Tom and Bud had made and soon the ship was racing past the orbit of the Moon on its seven day trip to Mars.
* * * * *
Tom’s plan was to let the scientists have a two-day recovery and orientation period once they reached the Mars colony. He would fly them up and around Phobos on the second day to give them a look at their new work location before putting to them work the next day.
As with other groups of Earth visitors, to keep the air and food supplies of the colony safe, Tom had packed away in the hold of the ship a small habitat tent with ten bunks plus an air supply and enough food to sustain the scientific team for up to five months. It was all concentrated and could be left unrefrigerated. They wouldn’t eat in luxury, but they would have their own quarters in which to rest between visits to Phobos. An unmanned resupply ship would meet Mars when it was about 65% of the way back around the sun with the Earth playing catchup.
During the first of these two rest days, Tom and a small Enterprises team headed up to Phobos to accomplish two things.
First, they rigged up a more permanent four-person elevator with armatures and wheels that would keep itself from scraping down and up the crater wall, and would be quicker making the one-way trip in only two minutes.
With the cavern below in total vacuum, there was no use in putting up an airtight barricade and lock, so he satisfied himself with placing three of the five-man emergency tents inside the cavern where the scientific team members could take breaks.
A supply of extra oxygen tanks would be brought up with the scientific team.
The second thing Tom did was to borrow the larger and more powerful atomic earth blaster from the colony and set it up over the smaller cavern containing the gravity stone.
Stefanie had made a detailed study of all her findings and had devised a plan of action that included the statement it would be perfectly safe to make a four-foot-wide hole down to the eighty-foot mark before inserting an airlock. She had suggested a slight angle of about three-degrees from perfectly vertical—missing the current shaft bottom and plug—so Tom and Bud set up the launch rail five feet to the right of the current hole. It would not intersect with the current lower hole, ending fifteen inches to the side of the small plug.
The only interruption was in taking the blaster back out once it reached a depth of about ten feet to allow it to be slipped into and through the airlock before going back into the hole.
The airlock’s top and bottom would be left open while the blaster headed down to the smaller plug, stopping inches above it before being withdrawn and the airlock lowered into place and sealed.
It would be up to manual labor to break through the last two feet and into the cavern.
An attachment ring on the inside wall of the airlock would let a narrow version of the porta-vator be hooked up so people and equipment could be lowered and raised, along with—everyone hoped—the gravity stone.
Tom’s thought, which his father agreed with, was to remove the stone altogether until it might either be understood and repaired, or deactivated, or just stored someplace where it would be of no consequence to anyone or anything.
This was easier said than done as they still needed to get into the cavern and come up with a method for bringing up the stone that might still be attached to a power supply or anchored to the floor.
Just about everything was unknown.
Tom Swift hated unknowns!
CHAPTER 19 /
ONE, FINAL, CONTINUOUS PUSH…OR NOT
THE FINAL, manual, excavation did not go as easily as Tom would have liked. For one thing, the stone found at that depth was so dense that simple hammers and chisels didn’t make much of a dent. That, plus the four-foot shaft was incredibly narrow for this sort of work.
Two men used to heavy labor from the colony had volunteered to come up and provide the strength necessary to break into the cavern. Because of space limitations, only one could work at the shaft bottom at a time so they spelled each other off at twenty minute intervals.
It was on the fifth shift that John Crabtree, formerly a railroad track construction engineer and currently the colony’s expert in repairing everything they had that moved, reported that between them, they had only chipped out about a centimeter of material in an area barely nine-inches across. “I’m sorry, Tom, but this stuff is as hard as diamonds.”
Bringing down the small earth blaster was not the solution as it would need to be operated from above and the nature of it being a tethered device would mean the airlock would need to be left open. Tom wanted to preserve the atmosphere in the cavern.
He wondered about backing the airlock up to the surface and using their blaster to go down another twenty of the assumed twenty-three or twenty-four inches of materials before going back at things with manual labor.
If we only have a few inches to get through after that perhaps the hammers will be enough to break that out. They won’t be working against another couple of feet of hard materials, he told himself.
It as then that Crabtree’s statement registered in his mind.
Diamonds?
He knew that gemologists cut diamonds with other diamonds, so why not try to rig a diamond-tipped drill? He reasoned that if someone could drill a series of holes around the perimeter of the bore bottom perhaps the rest could be weakened so much it could be smashed apart.
It took until after he’d returned to the colony before he found out he could find what he required just fifty-seven miles away. A trove of crystals had turned out to be large diamonds, some as big as five-inches across. A few had been brought to the colony with an even larger number mined and sent down to Enterprises to pay for many of the services and even the most recent three habitat domes.
Damon had suggested the colonists keep them as Enterprises had already written off the costs associated with the colony, but Haz had insisted.
Today, there was still a reserve of about eighty-one million dollars sitting in an account ready to pay for any special items requested.
“Of course you can have one of the diamonds, Tom,” the colony manager assured him. “And, in case you don’t know this, we have an electric jackhammer we can rig it to. Totally self contained with one of your Solar Batteries that’ll run it for over two hours. No need to try the drill route with that piece of equipment.”
The very next day along with the scientists, Tom took the digging tool up in the Challenger.
Hank and Bud stayed with the research team at the giant cavern while Tom and three others headed back to the gravity stone cavern.
“I honestly don’t mind going down with the hammer and finishing the job Jake and I couldn’t get done before,” John Crabtree told Tom. “It’ll give me a bit more exercise, and I need that. Too many things not going haywire up here so I do a lot of sitting around.”
The big man and the jackhammer were lowered into the bore and through the airlock. As he climbed down the last few feet and set the tip of the hammer against the floor, he also braced himself against the wall. With the lower gravity he knew the hammer could shove him backward and up with no problems. Other than, that was, the problems associated with having your head shoved up and against something like the bottom of the airlock.
Along with the hammer he had brought down a container into which debris could be loaded and then hauled up through the airlock.
In the airless void, no noise was to be heard, but even the people on the surface could feel the slight vibrations as the hammer slammed into the hard rock at a rate of 1,800 strikes per minute. Heavy and specially padded gloves meant the operator’s hands remained unaffected and helped in gripping the tool.
John stopped after just two minutes and filled the debris container.
“Okay up there. The first hundred pounds or so of busted up rock ready to haul up.”
With that, the line went stiff and the soft-sided container rose up and out of his sight.
He went back to work and by the time to container returned he had more than enough to fill it. Plus, he had managed to get down almost nine inches and mostly to the edges of the bore hole.
�
��This is going to be a cinch,” he told those above, “but I’d better get my safety line on because I could break through at any time.”
“Don’t go down more that twenty inches at any spot,” Tom warned. “I want to come down then and inspect things and also see if the old hammer and chisel and arm swings can get us through in a bit more gentle manner.”
“Right. I’ll let you know. Probably another eight or nine loads or so.”
It took ten loads before he figured he’d gone as deep as Tom wanted him to, so he scraped up the last of the rocks and a lot of dusty materials before calling for it to be removed.
“Also, at least for now, I’m attaching the jackhammer to the take-up line so you can have that as well. I’ll come up after that.”
Fifteen minutes later everybody was on the surface and Mike Pemberton, another of the colonists, was using a soft bristle brush to clean his friend’s suit.
The team discussed strategies before Mike, the lighter of the two colonists, said he’d go down and try to get the breakthrough.
“Okay,” Tom said, “but be certain you are safety lined to the airlock and still have your line attached to the surface. Take things slow and easy.”
The man grinned. “I’ll be extra careful, Tom. Promise.”
Seconds later he had slipped his feet into the hole, stood on the cross bar of the porta-vator, and was disappearing down the bore.
“I’ve passed through the airlock and am standing on the bottom,” he reported a little later. "Good thing I brought my brush down because there is a lot of tiny stuff I’ll bet John’s gloves just could not get a grip on. Gimme a minute to sweep and let the dust settle and then I’ll get to work.”
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement Page 21