Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates (14 page)

Tom stood restlessly and leaned against the boulder. "And the government men I met with on the jet know nothing of all this?"

Bao gave a slight smile. "They know some of it, more than they chose to tell you—especially Bernt Ahlgren. But by design, for the ultimate in secret-keeping, Collections is permitted a sort of independent existence. It is the same with my own associates."

"I see." Tom ventured a guess. "The People’s Republic of China?"

The man shrugged. "I am your humble friend and servant."

"Okay, keep your secrets," grumbled Bud wryly. "But tell me this. They gave Tom the giveaway cube, then tried to kill him by crashing the government jet. What kind of sense does that make?"

"Tom was what one might call a target of opportunity. The planned action was originally directed against the three government men. The Lieutenant decided to—what is it you say?—strike while the iron is hot."

"You and your people have saved our necks, and taken great risks to do it," Tom declared, sober and grim. "Obviously we’re very grateful. But now what, Mr. Bao? The pirates still have Little Luna, and the science colonists are running low on food. I wanted to pry out some sort of info on the barrier-control mechanism. I failed." His mind added:
Again
!

The man joined Tom in standing. "I am not able to solve all your problems, Tom. All I can do is guide you to a boat on the river, then to an automobile awaiting us, then finally to the city of Cordóba, where you will find air transport back to America. Then—then be lucky."

It was the next twilight when the three finally pulled up to the perimeter of Cordóba’s airport. "Go through that gate. It has been left unlocked for you," directed Mr. Bao as the youths got out of the car.

"You’re not coming with us?" asked Tom.

"No." He added, "Your flight has been arranged. Through the gate, angle left. You will see a jet bearing a decal of your flag."

"Thanks, Mr. Bao," said Bud earnestly. The giant of a man did not reply, but gunned the engine and sped away.

Tom and Bud did as instructed. Their eyes went wide as they saw the craft intended for them. "Good gosh!" exclaimed Tom.

It was the
Sky Queen
.

Aboard, awaiting them, were two relieved and overjoyed men, Slim Davis and Tom’s father. "Believe me, son," said Mr. Swift as Slim jet-lifted the Flying Lab toward the stratosphere, "when Zimby Cox reported that you two hadn’t signaled him, we were ready to invade Equatorial Africa all by ourselves!"

"I can imagine," Tom laughed, settling back in the sofa in the top-deck view lounge. "Who told you guys where to pick us up?"

"The call came from John Thurston’s office," was the response. "He could only say that a reliable source had informed him that you two had escaped from Li Ching and were on your way to the Cordóba airport. I assume Collections was the source."

"Or the China group they’re working with," said Tom. "So what happened in Africa?"

"The Borukundi government, amply supported by any number of nations, stormed the underground installation around Noon today. Turns out it’s located within two thousand feet of the Goaba cavern."

Tom smiled. "We know."

"Bet the beacons made it pretty easy to find," remarked Bud.

"They surely did," confirmed Damon Swift. "Those rocks where you left your hydrolung suits were perfect for the transmitter-spikes."

"We weren’t too sure, Dad. We rammed the spikes as deeply as possible into the cracks in the rock, but the contact wasn’t as good as it might have been." Even deep underground, Tom and Bud had not been entirely isolated from the outside world. The young inventor and his companion had brought along two transmitters, subsonic wave generators whose output, conveyed by the rocky crust, was monitored by instruments at the Goaba research facility. Triangulation, matched to the mapping data assembled from the cycloplane overfly, had led the heavily armed troops, in motored rafts, directly to the mining outpost without the false turns Tom and Bud had endured.

Bud asked, "What did they find at the complex?"

"About two hundred disgruntled employees, some interesting films, and a good deal of ingenious mining equipment. And one Tom Swift Enterprises giant robot!"

Tom inquired about the anti-Diracinium. Mr. Swift replied, "They were keeping what they had in isostasis tanks. It wasn’t much—a few ounces. It seems most of the ‘anti’ material they wrung out of the Diracinium is now floating around Nestria in Li’s Great Wall."

"It doesn’t take much antimatter to build a wall like that," remarked Tom grimly. "The entire cloud mass probably doesn’t weigh more than a few pounds."

"More than enough to destroy unwanted visitors," his father commented.

"How about the valley fortress?" asked Bud excitedly. "
That’s
the big deal! We can take the Cobra and his spaceship just like the rest!"

But later, as the
Sky Queen
pierced the night high above Mexico, Slim Davis reported disappointing news. "Just got off the radiocom to D.C., Skipper. The Argentines say the whole place was abandoned, everything inside smashed or torched. No sign of a landing field able to accommodate a spacecraft, by the way."

"The Cobra and the rest must’ve got away by boat and amphi jet—probably choppers as well," Tom said to Bud and his father. "He must have another base for the
Fanshen
."

"Somewhere near the equator, I would guess," observed Damon Swift. "He’d want to get the extra boost from the planet’s rotation."

For Tom Swift the last dregs of the night were spent in Shopton, at Enterprises. By first light, the weary young inventor contacted Kent Rockland over the PER unit.

"I’m afraid we’re not doing so well up here, Tom," he said listlessly. "The colonists are getting pretty weak from lack of food. And now Doc Simpson is worried about another problem."

"What?"

"Illness. At first it just seemed like the common cold—you know, ‘something going around.’ Started among the Brungarians. No one even thought of a quarantine. Now it’s spread."

"But if it’s just a cold― " Tom began.

"No, we were wrong. Skipper, within the last two hours eight people have collapsed, and it looks like the weaker ones are headed into a coma!"

"Oh no!"

"Simpson thinks it may be a common virus that has become more potent under low-gravity conditions. And our undernourished, debilitated state is making it worse. We just don’t know what’s going to happen to us." Tom could hear the despair in the man’s voice.

"Kent, listen to me, and tell the others. We haven’t run out of options—and I’m going to try another
right now!
" Across thousands of miles of space, Tom Swift’s determination rang out!

TOM immediately called his father, who had slept the rest of the short night at home. "What do you have in mind, son?" Mr. Swift asked. He too was stricken by the increasingly desperate plight of the Nestria crew but strove to remain calm.

"I’m going to call our space friends and ask for help." The young inventor was speaking from the Enterprises space communications center.

Tom’s idea brought a surge of hope to his listener. Yet Mr. Swift expressed a word of caution. "We’ve been trying ever since you received their warning in the
Challenger
, and they haven’t responded."

"But now there’s a new factor, the contagion among the colonists. It’s something that might move them—after all,
they
were the ones who asked for
our
help when they had their own disease crisis."

While preparing his epic journey to the moon, the space beings had contacted Earth to request help in curing a strange contagion spreading among the lifeforms on their world, which the Swifts had termed Planet X. Tom and his colleagues had solved the problem, and the extraterrestrials had expressed, in their own manner, a sense of gratitude.

"You’re right!" Over the line Tom could hear his father rap his fist against the breakfast table. "And they’ve certainly come through in other tight spots!"

Though Damon Swift couldn’t see it, his son nodded vigorously. "If they hadn’t stopped the
Challenger
in time, we’d have plowed right into the disintegration barrier! And don’t forget," Tom added as he switched on the decoding computer with its Space Dictionary file, "they were the ones who moved Nestria into earth orbit and gave it an artificial gravity. They may have an angle on this we’d never think of!—
if
they choose to intervene, that is."

"Yes," replied Mr. Swift. "And where the X-ians and their strange ways of thinking are concerned, there is
always
an ‘if’!"

Ending the call, Tom began composing a message to the mysterious beings. He roughed out the basic content, revised it, then finally used the Space Dictionary to access what Earth knew of the space friends’ visual language to approximate its meaning. As always, the final message was encoded in the stark hieroglyphs that symbolized logical and mathematical concepts.

Tom beamed out the message over the plant’s magnifying antenna, and had it repeat in an endless loop.

TOM SWIFT TO SPACE FRIENDS. OUR SCIENTISTS ON EARTH SATELLITE NESTRIA ARE STARVING DUE TO OUR INABILITY TO SEND FOOD SUPPLIES THROUGH THE BARRIER OF OPPOSED FORCE MATTER. A DISEASE IS NOW SPREADING AMONG THEM. REQUEST YOUR HELP IN REMOVING THE BARRIER OR PROVIDING SAFE PASSAGE FOR OUR TRANSPORT VESSELS.

The speed with which the space friends responded to messages varied greatly in an unpredictable manner. Sometimes hours or even days would pass. Yet there had been occasions on which the answer had come almost instantaneously.

His heart pounding, Tom settled back in his chair to begin what might prove a lengthy wait and a trial to his patience. And just as he did so, the alarm bell rang—incoming signals from space!

TO TOM SWIFT. WE ARE FRIENDS. WE ARE NOT ABLE TO COMPLY WITH YOUR REQUEST FOR INTERVENTION.

Just as he had feared! The youth groaned in frustration. But there was more to the signal from space.

TELL SATELLITE INHABITANTS TO SEARCH BASE OF CLIFF BELOW ENERGIZER CHAMBER. THERE THEY WILL FIND OPENING TO MATERIAL SOURCE TO SUSTAIN LIFE.

What in the world—? Well, it’s something,
Tom thought. He phoned his father with the news. Just as he had finished, Bud Barclay rushed in. "I heard you’d gone over here. Got something from the space people?" Tom showed his pal the message. "Opening to material source?" Bud stared at the monitor in perplexity. "What does that mean?"

Tom had already begun making notes, studying the symbols even as he conversed. "Okay, flyboy. Let’s take it bit by bit. They’re talking about an opening at the base of a cliff. It must be something underground—could be a natural cave... but you know, these clustered symbols suggest something artificial, made deliberately."

"Like a tunnel? Or a mine?"

"I think so! So the ‘opening’ means the entrance-way. But as to this ‘material source to sustain life’ bit, I have no idea."

Bud rubbed his chin. "Could be they have a kind of store room, don’t you think? Maybe they’ve got big freezers full of food!"

Tom smiled at his friend. "I doubt humans could eat whatever it is the X-ians use for food. But there’s
something
down there. We’ll just have to wait and see what the colonists turn up."

"No mystery about what that ‘energizer chamber’ is, at least," declared Bud. "It has to be that cave where we found the gravity cube." The flier was referring to a mysterious, immoveable object left on the asteroid by the Space Friends. Though it had not revealed its inner workings, it seemed clear that it served to concentrate the gravitational force around Nestria, giving the tiny moonlet an environment more accommodating to its visitors from Earth.

Acting in haste, Tom contacted Rockland over the PER. "We’ll check it out immediately," he replied. "And Tom, Bud, there’s something I think you’d both want to know. Three more of us have collapsed from hunger and the contagion—and one of them is Chow!"

Bud turned white. For all their mutual joshing, Chow and Bud were the closest of friends, and Tom was equally fond of the devoted old range cook who had accompanied the youths on so many of their daring journeys.

"Thanks for telling us," said Tom dully.

"I’ll have whoever’s still able to make the trip head out to the—wait a sec ... " Kent broke off, and Tom and Bud could hear confused sounds and excited voices in the background.

"Rockland! Rockland! Come in!" demanded Tom worriedly. "What’s happening up there?"

After a tense minute the voice of the base commander resumed. "Enterprises—Tom!
We’re under attack!
A big ship just made a low pass and strafed us!"

The news electrified Tom, Bud, and other listeners who had gathered in the communications room. They clustered around their young boss in anxious silence, straining to hear the word from space.

"Kent!—what can you tell me?" demanded Tom.

"I wasn’t out there. A couple of the Egyptians came running in, and it took a while—
oh
!" Again a break. Then: "I can see it now, through the window. It’s a spaceship—a black spaceship! Just hanging there a few hundred feet overhead, on lift-thrusters, looks like. Skipper, it’s
strange
, hard to see, like a sort of shadow."

"It’s the light-distortion sheathing," Tom pronounced.

"Now I’ve got ’em swinging the beam from the big searchlight—there!"

"What?"

"Pinned them in it. For just a second I could make out an insignia on the fuselage, a kind of symbol."

Tom knew exactly what Rockland was referring to. "Chinese writing. It’s the
Fanshen
!"

"Starting to move― " Abruptly Kent cried out in alarm. "Explosions!
They’re bombing Base Galileo!
"

The listeners could clearly make out the reverberations of huge, thunderous blasts over the PER speaker. "What are they using? Missiles?"

"Negative, Enterprises. Never seen anything like it—thin glowing beams stretching down from the spaceship like metal rods, with tiny objects on the tips. But the rods don’t seem solid. I can see through them. When the tips contact the ground,
big
blast!"