When he reported he was about to take the first strike at his chisel, Tom found he was holding his breath. He let it out and tried to take a few even and deep breaths before speaking. “Go ahead,” he finally said in a calm voice.
“Roger. Starting now.”
During the ensuing fifteen minutes Mike made several reports including one when his chisel broke up a piece nearly eleven inches across and three deep. “It looks to be an anomaly and not that everything from here on will crumble,” he said.
Three minutes turned into five and then nine before something happened and the first small hole broke through.
He lost his chisel in the hole that finally intruded past the cavern’s ceiling.
“Got poke through,” he reported. “Want me to try to break it all out?”
“Please use that camera in your pack and take a look to ensure nothing is below, then go for it,” Tom instructed.
Only a small amount of rocky debris, and the lost chisel, could be seen on the otherwise clean floor and so Mike moved back and braced himself now taking swings with the hammer alone. Piece by piece the small hole widened and more and more materials dropped away.
“I’ve got about sixty percent of the bore floor open now. I won’t be able to stand here for much longer. Do you want me to lower myself part way down and break the rest out around my waist?”
“No. Come on up and we’ll do another complete video survey. I still have my little recon robots that I’d like to take another look at the stone and also make a sweep around the perimeter of the cavern. Good work, Mike, and you as well, John.”
Tom called for a one-hour break back inside the ship before anything else was to be accomplished. During this time he contacted Bud for a status check.
“Man, if you could see these sci-geeks. Like kids turned loose in a candy store. Check that… let loose outside a candy store with pockets bulging with money. They hardly know where to start. Hank and I had to arbitrate the order they have been going down because everyone had a perfectly wonderful reason they ought to be first. Personally, I think they all boiled down to wanting to have their name at the top of the list.”
“Keep them working nicely with each other,” Tom advised. “If any one of them tries to push their weight around I suggest you remind them that as long as they behave they stay. Misbehave and they go home.”
“I had to do that already and only got a ‘Yeah but you’ll be gone soon so we can do what we want,’ look. Not totally certain how to handle that one.”
“Tell them they could find themselves down on Mars and not back up here. Haz can make that happen when we are gone.”
“Right.”
Tom returned to the business of getting the gravity stone out of the cavern. From past experience he knew the actual stone likely weighed only a hundred pounds—on Earth—so here on Phobos it would be easy enough for one person to carry it.
He had never figured out if the stone was hollow or if it was just made from something fairly lightweight.
Since the first moment of breakthrough into the cavern until now, there had been no indication of any danger from approaching the stone. That didn’t mean whatever was powering the stone was entirely benign; it might even be a radioactive source they had not been able to measure.
After radioing everyone on the little moon with his intentions, Tom flew one of the saucers back to the colony and the Challenger. There, he build a set of instruments along with a mechanical wedge he believed would be able to lift on side of the stone and then measure whatever was below it. Everything from invisible light to hard radiation would be seen and measured. Along with one of the small gravimeters he knew he would get the best yet “look” into what was happening with the stone.
Art Wiltessa wandered over to the small station the inventor was using to build his package and stood back, observing for several minutes, before asking a question.
“What happens if that figures out there is something very bad attached to the stone?”
Tom sat back, stretching his back muscles.
“Well, my hope is that we’ll find nothing more dangerous than a connection to a large version of a battery. If so, we detach it, make more measurements, and bring it out. Then it gets flown to the surface of this planet and allowed to completely discharge whatever power it can store.”
Art nodded before asking the inevitable. “And, if it is not connected to something innocuous?”
“The inventor stood up and turned to face Art. “Then, I try everything from trying to slip a tomasite cover over and as far under it as we can get and see if that cuts off most of its gravity generating capability after which I find a way to get a robot built to go pick the thing up, detach it from its power and bring it to the surface. We would do that remotely and then try to get the stone away. In the meantime I foresee another robot filled with tomasite foam going down to fill the hole under where the stone once sat and block things off.”
“Then, would you fill the shaft back in?”
Tom smiled. “Absolutely. I figure that if the rocks around the power supply have contained anything over all these years or centuries, then it will still perform that function. I think I’d just make a plug at the bottom of the shaft and backfill with some of the loose materials around the hole.”
With Art’s assistance he completed the new sensor and wedging device a couple hours later. They carried it to the Challenger and headed to the moon shortly after that.
Bud met them, having left the scientists an hour earlier. He wanted to be part of the gravity stone removal, and his tolerance for the petty bickering between the ten scientists was wearing him down.
Together they lowered the new equipment into the shaft at which point Tom activated it and drove it forward on its two studded wheels.
The built-in high definition camera showed them what they might see if they had been in the cavern. What they saw was simply the roughly pyramid-shaped stone with no indication of any radiation or protective shield.
An hour later every measurement they might possibly make had been. Tom even had the device use its wedge to lift up one side an inch and then measure what came up from the hole under the stone.
With nothing measurable, Tom announced he—and Bud once he saw the look on his friend's face—would be heading down to witness the lifting and disconnect of the stone.
They traveled to the airlock on the narrow porta-vator and were soon standing on the floor of the cavern.
Bud looked at the stone and shook his head.
“So, why did Deep Peek show there was something around the stone and yet I’m seeing nothing?” he asked as he and Tom stood shoulder to shoulder fifteen feet away. “Even the little bots ran into something, but now I see nothing!”
“This is only a guess, but I’d say there is some sort of field around the stone. Not certain what or even why, but perhaps it was once a perimeter alarm. Now, it is a mere ghost of what it once was but Deep Peek saw it nonetheless.”
Tom reached out and began moving toward the stone. At about eight feet his fingers touched something that yielded to his hand while giving him a slight tingle as if some sort of electrical field was touching him. He told Bud about it.
“Oh, it's still there,” was all Bud could think to say. When Tom stepped forward he encountered no resistance other than a slight tingle as his body pierced the field.
As best he could estimate, the field was only about an inch thick.
Bud came inside commenting that it actually felt invigorating.
The gravity stone was relatively easy to move from its position inside the cavern, but it was definitely attached to some sort of power supply far beneath the floor that only allowed it to be shifted by about three feet in any direction.
Tom pondered whether it might be safe, or was asking or a disaster, if he simply severed the semi-flexible tube carrying power. The problem was the more he studied it, the less he understood about the entire situation. He brought the new devise close to th
e hole and the tube.
There was nothing measurable coming through the tube. Zero power readings were to be found on his instruments. Nothing was to be seen through the semi-opaque sides of the tube. And, when he dared to reach out with his gloved hand, there were no vibrations and nothing tangible to be felt.
Believing it was a necessary delay, Tom rode the porta-vator to the surface and hiked the three-hundred feet to Challenger where we placed a call to his father.
“You caught me just ready to leave, Son. What can I do for you?”
Tom explained the gravity stone and its anchoring tube.
“I’m not sure what to do, Dad. Do I cut that tube or is that asking for trouble?” He sent his father the video of the gravity stone being moved and the discovery of the attached tube along with all the measurement data.
“You say there is no registration of power, no vibration indicating it is connected to something generating the power for the stone?”
“Nothing. I even had all lights turned out to see if there was some sort of beam inside. Not anything even on infrared or ultraviolet scans.”
He told his father he’d considered evacuating the moon and placing some sort of remote-controlled severing device that would be triggered from far away.
“I say do that, but be sure to have the Goliath ready to give one heck of a push should the stone object to it. That means I am suggesting a push far to the side and into space where it would be captured by the sun and drawn in rather than heading down to Mars.”
Tom hated the idea of losing the valuable information to be gleaned from what the scientific team might find in the giant cavern. Even if he didn’t say so to his father, he believed it might be worth the risk to have someone calculate the exact push to keep Phobos around Mars for as long as humanly possible.
Once the call was disconnected he sat at the computer trying to figure out the power needs and the exact angle of push he would give the little moon. More than once he wondered if a higher orbit would be a safer one. Could he push the moon fast enough to raise it by several thousand miles and expect it to remain there?
The basic answer was yes, he could expect that, but only if he could achieve that speed and disconnect the stone.
With the scientific team happy and totally oblivious to anyone other than themselves, Hank had also come to the gravity stone site with John and Mike transferring to the large cavern to act as liaisons and guards.
“I see a gleam in your eyes that tells me you plan on doing something either foolish or exceptionally brave,” the flyer told Tom.
“Perhaps a bit of both.” He told Bud about his desire to cut the attaching tube and be ready to shove Phobos back up. “I’ve spoken with dad and he agrees we ought to sever that tube or cable or whatever it is remotely. We have what is needed in Challenger so I’m going to get build a guillotine for something that diameter and we’ll see what we get. Oh, and while I’d doing that can you go back and tell the scientists they will need to conclude today’s fun and excitement in about three hours?”
“Sure. Nothing I’d like more than to ruin their day!” And with that he was out of the control room and the ship, sprinting to the waiting saucer fifty yards away.
By the time he returned to say the scientists were grumbling about having to leave, “‘…and why can’t we just live up here?’ and that sort of thing,” Tom was nearly finished with the small, clamp-on device that would use a high-pressure compressed nitrogen cylinder to drive an exceptionally sharp, durastress-coated angled blade with such force it could cut through one-inch steel rebar.
He asked that Bud stay up at the top of the bore hole while he went down to install the device. It took only a moment and he was quickly riding the porta-vator back to the surface.
“The hardest part was dropping off the porta-vator into the airlock, and then having to climb down that rope to the bottom. Good thing the gravity is only about one-twentieth at the moment. I shudder to think what might have happened if it shot up all of a sudden. I believe I’ve had about enough of that.”
Bud went back to herd the scientist up the side of the crater and onto their saucer while Hank took on the pilot position in Challenger. This freed Tom to perform some last minute computations and to be ready to press the “cut” button.
From a position nearly three-hundred miles above and slightly behind Phobos, the two ships paused while Tom activated the device. Two things happened:
1) The gravity stone must have taken exception to a loss of its connecting tube because gravity on Phobos shot up to Mars normal levels.
2) Phobos immediately began dropping lower in its orbit.
The drop was not great because gravity soon dropped back to half Mars normal, but if left unchecked it would accumulate and become a real problem in several months.
Tom shook his head. It had always been a possibility, but one he had hoped would not come to pass.
He moved to another control panel and brought up the programming for Goliath which was still stuck—using its Attractatron—to the lower trailing area of the little moon. Slowly he set the power of the repelatron to press against the surface of the planet below, always shutting off as it got to within fifty miles of the colony. It would not come back on until it had passed by that much.
It was a foregone conclusion that the ship would not be able to provide all the necessary push the moon out of orbit as its power pods could only deliver so much energy before needing to be shut down for twenty-to-twenty-six hours. He had been using two of the three at any given time allowing the third to have its rest period, but he now pondered using them all and giving the moon a really hard shove.
If he did not give it that shove, it would spiral down and down until it either broke up and scattered all around the planet, or simply crashed doing as much damage as was possible.
CHAPTER 20 /
LIFE GOES ON………
BECAUSE IT was going to be necessary to wait for the Earth to ship a new, fully-contained nuclear reactor to provide the necessary high power to get the best push for the Goliath’s repelatron, Phobos had slipped another six hundred miles closer to the surface. Its meek gravity was beginning to be felt every time it raced over the colony domes. Water in the most fully filled hydroponics tanks often overflowed slightly; the habitat domes grew taller by about a foot; dust storms gathered more quickly but often soared into the sky as if attempting to follow Phobos as it raced past.
In another two months it would be brushing the atmosphere and nobody wanted to imagine what sort of storms that would set off. Shipping time from Earth was going to leave just two days between arrival and the first bits of the moon possibly being ripped away by the molecules of the Martian atmosphere.
Ditto the widespread damage possible should it decide to break up at that point or even earlier.
Even of greater loss was the potential to learn more about the lizard aliens who had inhabited the gigantic cavern inside the small moon.
But, the ultimate loss would be if it damaged or destroyed the colony and the domes that had kept the citizens safe and warm over the years. That could never be allowed to occur.
To Tom’s mind, it was something that had to be conquered in the next two weeks at most and not to be delayed even another day after that.
His Space Friends had been silent in spite of multiple pleas for information or even guidance. The finding of dinosaur statues and even carefully preserved tissue samples that yielded unmistakably prehistoric dinosaur DNA had been a difficult thing for Tom and for all of Earth’s scientists to come to grips with.
So many cries of, “You’re trying to put one over on us!” and “Prove where this came from; take us there and show us!”
There was no way Tom could figure to reattach the tube and the gravity stone had adhered to the floor with a stubbornness that almost spoke of some sort of built-in anchoring device.
The call to Enterprises with the power needs set many things in motion, but no matter how fast Tom or his
father wanted that reactor to be ready, the fact was it was going to take a week at the very best just to get a trio of new power pods available. A full-fledged reactor was several months away.
Following three days of pushing—both in the “shove” sense as well as the stressing of the power pods—Tom began to despair. It was turning out that Phobos was coming in a little faster than calculations would have anyone believe, and the power pods were showing signs of fatigue.
The nuclear reactor would likely not arrive in time and the longer he waited the harder it was going to be to shift the moon.
His sleep, such as it was, that evening was interrupted by Haz Samson.
“Get up, Tom! You have to come to the command center.”
Groggily, he sat up, tried to focus his eyes on the man, but the sudden bright light in small cubicle where he had his bunk in the Challenger, combined with the even brighter back lights of the control room, meant he could only tell who is was by listening to the timbre of the voice.
He croaked out, “Haz? What is it?”
“I need to have you tell me,” came back the answer. “Come out here and do some Tom magic and check the readouts. My people are either in seventh heaven or insane. I need you to tell me which.”
Tom forced himself to swing his legs over the side of the couch and accepted Haz’s helping hand to stand.
Bud, who had also been awakened by the noise of his friend’s 2:00 am visit handed him a cup of water as he entered the larger room.
Tom found that his heart was racing and he had no idea why other than the possibility that Phobos was about to crash.
Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-Placement Page 22