Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite (8 page)

"A new and unknown world!" Dr. Jatczak exclaimed.

Ron Corey said softly, "Some day we’ll make it a green world, Doctor—a world with air, water, and food crops to keep colonists alive."

"I hope the tree-huggers won’t make a national park of it," grumbled Jason Graves. "I see quite an industrial potential down there."

"Brand my space suit," Chow quavered, "jest lookin’ at the thing makes my spine feel like a buckin’ bronc!"

Bud glanced at his pal, who had said nothing so far. "What’re you thinking, genius boy?"

"Mostly about setting us down safely," he answered. "I’ll coast in to about twenty miles altitude and head north to the pole. Bud, you and Dr. Jatczak break out the small telescope and see if you can spot a good, flat place to land. I’d like to get as close to the pole as possible."

"I would suggest you also look for any signs a Brungarian landing." All eyes turned toward Dr. Kutan.

"But I thought the report of their expedition was bogus!" Kent protested.

Teodor Kutan shook his head. "These competitions between nations are anything but simple and straightforward. It would be typical of the Brungarians to have launched an expedition, and then denied it when word got out. They would prefer not to confirm it until—and unless—it was a complete success. The new democratic government has not completely broken with its predecessors."

"Report whatever looks interesting," Tom directed Bud and Jatczak.

"Righto, skipper," Bud replied.

"Let me know if you spot any love-starved space sirens," said Rafe. He winked in the direction of Violet Wohl, who turned away disdainfully.

Tom guided the spaceship closer to Little Luna, whose gravity was too slight to sustain the craft in an orbit. Bud and Jatczak hastily set up a tripod-mounted telescope and scanned the surface of the satellite. A strange panorama passed before their eyes. Rocky and barren, pockmarked and forlorn, the little world was devoid of life. The rugged terrain was indented with yellow craters and broken by upthrusting crags of gray, pink, and blue. The sharply curving horizon had a sawtooth outline.

Presently, as Tom cruised northward, they passed from the sunlit zone into the nighttime portion. Yet even in the dim light, details of the terrain were visible.

"Fortunately, there’s enough earthshine to light up the satellite," commented Dr. Jatczak with his eye to the telescope.

"Earthshine? What in the name o’ coyotes is that?" Chow queried.

"Sunlight reflected back from the earth."

Chow beamed. "Then most of it’s comin’ from Texas!"

The others chuckled and Tom drawled out of the side of his mouth, "Well, brand my panhandle if it ain’t!"

After circling the satellite several times, the travelers could find no sign of any earlier landing by a spaceship.

Bud gave a whoop of triumph. "Yippee! We’ve won the race!"

The crew joined in a ringing cheer, as the men shook hands and slapped one another on their backs. "Never bet against good old Yankee know-how!" exulted Jason Graves. "Wish I had a cigar."

Jubilant, Tom nosed the
Titan
in still closer and began to descend toward a relatively flat area that Bud and Dr. Jatczak had noted, which was almost precisely at the moonlet’s north pole.

"Looks a bit small for a ship this size," commented Col. Northrup. "But you’re the captain, son."

Tom did not respond, and Bud, in the copilot’s chair, called out, "Ten thousand feet to touchdown point."

Suddenly a buzzer sounded.

"What’s that?" asked Gabe loudly. "Incoming call?"

"It’s one of the automatic alarms," muttered Hank Sterling.

"Y-you mean there’s a problem?"

"Tom’s compensating now."

Tom and Bud were making rapid adjustments to the controls. The pallor of their faces told the onlookers that something unexpected had happened.

Hank approached next to Tom and quietly let him know that he was standing near, ready to help.

Not looking up, Tom said in a low voice, "I can’t figure what’s happening. We’re accelerating toward the surface."

"Another computer glitch?" Hank asked.

"No," replied the young astronaut. "This time it has nothing to do with the ship. Some sort of force is pulling us downward, and it’s getting stronger by the second. If I can’t pull the ship free—
we’ll crash!"

TOM SWIFT’S words carried to the rest of the cabin. "It must be those alien cronies of yours!" rumbled Jason Graves. "They’ve induced us to send an expedition up here just to destroy us!"

"Knock it off, Graves," commanded Kent Rockland.

"Let’s refrain from causing our captain any distraction," added Kutan.

Rafael Franzenberg elbowed his way to Tom’s side, nudging Hank out of the way. "Tom, let me see the nano-interferometry readings!" he demanded. Without question, Tom brought the data up on a monitor. "As I thought—the radar bounceback is getting red-shifted. That means—"

"Gravity!" exclaimed Tom unbelievingly. "We’ll have to flip and fire the main thruster!"

"Everyone strap in!" bellowed Bud.

Assuming that the miniscule gravity of Little Luna would require only a slight nudge of power to ease the
Titan
to a gentle landing, Tom had been heading down nose-first, planning to reverse orientation close to the surface. But now, reaching out, he switched on the gyros for the descent maneuver made necessary by these unexpected conditions. The craft responded by heeling over to a vertical, tail-down position. The atomic thruster was now engaged, the blast firing straight downward to slow the ship.

"More power, skipper!" Bud urged.

There was a jolt as Tom upped the thrust. The
Titan
hung motionless for a moment, Tom’s hands flying back and forth among the banked rows of levers and switches. At the same time, his keen blue eyes kept a hawklike watch on various dials.
Don’t dare to trust the computer now!
he thought.

Under Tom’s guidance, the
Titan
began to sink groundward. But the rate of descent was very uneven.

"By jingo, this is like goin’ down in a start-’n-stop elee-vator!" Chow gasped. "My stomach cain’t set itself down!"

"The forces pulling on us must be changing rapidly," said Kent breathlessly. "Tom has to compensate by hand."

"Minor problems," Northrup commented. "Nothing to worry about."

"Does
anything
ever bug you, Colonel?" asked Gabe Knorff, irritated.

"Sure, son," he replied suavely. "Photographers!"

"One thousand feet!" Bud sang out.

Moments later, Tom flicked a switch to extend a pair of long impact-cushioning struts, which Bud had christened the Daddy Long-Legs Gizmos. These hydraulic struts were to absorb the impact as the craft settled down on the four stubby landing legs that sprouted from the bottom of the propulsion module. Special anchoring mechanisms at the ends of the long struts, capable of penetrating the hardest rock, would drill themselves deeply into the ground to help stabilize the craft on the surface.

"Impact five seconds!" Tom announced. The expeditioners braced themselves.

A heartbeat later came a sharp jolt.
The Swift expedition had landed!

"Relax, everybody!" said Tom in a loud voice. "We’re here!"

The cabin rang anew with cheers, and even Jason Graves joined in.

Bud hugged Tom. "You did it, pal! Score one more for old Swift Enterprises!" Tom could only grin happily in response.

After radioing mission control and reporting the successful touchdown, Tom turned to face his crew. "Okay. Into your space suits!" Tom directed, his heart thudding with excitement.

Quickly the crew donned their gear and stepped through the airlock in small groups. Tom went first, carrying an American flag, the base of which was tipped with a long spike.

As soon as his feet touched ground, Tom wedged the spike deep into a crevice between rocks. Then he stepped back and saluted the Stars and Stripes. The others did the same.

At ease again, Chow exclaimed, "Sure feels good to stretch my legs!" He kicked his heels together and gave a little hop.

The next second, Chow was soaring high above the ground! Screeching over his suit transiphone and flapping his arms wildly, he came down ten yards from the spot where his leap had begun.

"A cowfly boy!" Bud quipped as the crew rocked with laughter.

Chow looked sheepish. "Brand my jets!" he said, "I must have swallowed some helium pills!"

"Don’t worry," Tom reassured him. "It’s just the low gravity here."

"Yes, the gravity
is
low," commented Dr. Jatczak in puzzled tones. "Yet not at all what it should be. There is a mystery here to be solved."

Kent Rockland agreed. "Up here, we weigh only one-twentieth as much as we did on Earth, according to my instruments. That’s enough to hold us down if we don’t get too frisky—but it’s a good thousand times stronger than we had estimated from Earth."

"We’ll have plenty of time to investigate that," declared Col. Northrup. "At this moment, our commander has a duty to perform."

Tom had left the channel open between the
Titan
and mission control, and he knew his words were now being broadcast to the entire world. Speaking over his suit mike, Tom described their space voyage, the survey flight around the satellite, and the landing. He concluded:

"I hereby officially take possession of this satellite for the United States of America!"

A thrill of pride swept over the crew as all of them snapped to attention and saluted, their gloved hands brushing their space helmets. Gabe Knorff took a run of photographs with the pressurized camera that he had been provided with.

A few minutes later Tom’s father, at mission control on Fearing Island, informed Tom that millions of American listeners were celebrating in the streets, jubilant but astounded to learn that they now owned Earth’s new moon!

As the young inventor signed off, Bud grinned. "Brother!" he said. "Now I know how Columbus felt when he claimed land on another continent."

"Only there ain’t no Injuns here," Chow spoke up.

"I should point out a certain legal aspect of the American claim," noted Dr. Kutan, sounding like a man making a lecture. "International treaties prohibit nations from asserting for themselves ownership of celestial bodies. Our being able to claim this satellite derives from the evident fact that it was guided, artificially, into orbit, thus rendering it a
vehicle
by legal definition—in fact, a derelict, which we have now taken possession of."

"Thank you for clarifying that," said Rafe with loud sarcasm. "I know
I’ll
sleep better tonight!"

The crew’s high spirits, however, ebbed as daylight faded and the encampment rotated into the shadow zone. Although at the poles the daylight region was always in view even at night, the men were appalled by the utter barrenness of the satellite; and the huge ball that was Earth, glowing in the sky, made them homesick.

To keep the men’s minds occupied, Tom had Jason Graves work them at top speed. Acting as his special lieutenant by prior agreement, the industrialist was at last in his element. For two hours the expedition labored to unpack supplies, set up equipment, and try out the vehicles that had been carried, disassembled, in the
Titan
’s storage bays. These electric mini-tanks, powered by Swift solar batteries, were pressurized and geared to work on the atmosphereless moon until Tom’s invention could establish earthlike conditions.

Declaring himself satisfied with their progress, Graves finally dismissed the others to a hearty meal provided by Chow. They retired to their bunks in the
Titan
for the rest of their first long night on Little Luna.

Early the next morning, Tom announced to the others that he and Bud were going to do a little exploring in one of the caterpillar tanks.

"Be careful, fellows!" Hank Sterling warned. "We’ll keep in constant touch by radio," Tom promised. But this was a promise he was unable to keep: as soon as the base camp was out of sight behind the jagged hills, radio communication became intermittent and was riddled with static.

The ride was slow and jolting over the rugged terrain. With no blanket of air to soften it the sunshine blazed pure white, and the rocky ground seemed to glisten with a steely brilliance. Though the specially designed tank treads were able to grip the rocky surface as they crawled along, there were many moments when the tiny vehicle seemed to jump yards into empty space, falling back at a snail’s pace.

"Man, this is more like a drive along the bottom of the ocean than a space trip," Bud complained. "Any theories about the gravity mystery, Tom? Did the spaceship flip a tripwire switch when we started to land?"

Tom was silent for a moment. "There’s no way to switch gravity on and off—no way known to Earth science. But our space friends have an amazing ability to manipulate matter and energy to suit their needs. My guess is that there’s some device, somewhere on Little Luna, that’s acting as a gravity
concentrator.
The gravitational field is tremendously boosted, but only very near the surface. That’s why we weren’t able to detect it from the earth beforehand. Our landing difficulties had to do with the fact that the G-force gradient was extremely ‘steep.’ In other words, the force of attraction was doubling almost every few yards, rather than over many thousands of miles."

"I see," Bud responded. "But why did the space guys set up wild conditions like that?"

"Who knows? They never seem able to explain their motives very clearly."

An hour passed as the tank crawled and bounced along, periodically checking in with the
Titan
.

"Hey, look at those crater walls!" Tom exclaimed presently. "Kent will want to examine them—what weird colors!"

"Maybe they’re extinct volcanoes," Bud speculated.

"Let’s go see."

Tom steered toward the wide crater in front of them, but as the treads crawled forward, the tank suddenly slewed around. Its nose dropped, and the ground seemed to fall away beneath them. Gray powder began to inch up over the view plate!