Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express (8 page)

"As we told our government, it seems to be based on a high-thrust, high-temperature proposal from some years back," noted Damon Swift.

"Yes, an idea by a speculative science writer; but no one knew what to do with it. But I’m being a little rhetorical—"

"A-
ha
!" muttered Chow under his breath.

"We think we know where the engine design originated—an engineering group in Sumatra. But still, it’s a big deal. How do you make a nimble, workable little war-worthy vehicle if it’d have to be the size of a city block to lift itself? A full-scale nuclear powerplant would be required. The metalloid fuel itself—are you familiar with that term?—would be tremendously heavy."

"And then a metal was discovered that is tremendously
light
for something of such great tensile strength," Tom said. "Neo-Aurium."

"So now we get to the nittiest of the gritty, gentlemen," pronounced the Brungari-American. "Neo-Aurium. Mined beneath the sea by Tom Swift Enterprises, used widely in the projects of Tom Swift Enterprises. Including the new spaceship."

"So we
are
under suspicion," stated Tom’s father coolly.

Emda waggled a hand dismissively. "No, not you, not the company. But one reason I’m here is to use an outsider’s eye to see if, somehow, the Sentimentalists have done to you what I did to them."

Tom was stonefaced. "A plant among the workforce."

"It seems to have happened at Wickliffe, eh?"

"So the higher-ups think—"

"Aw, come on. Who ever knows what—or
if
—the world’s high-ups
think
?" The man chuckled pleasantly. "My friend, it’s all a big game. I’m just one little piece that’s being shoved around from square to square."

"I don’t think of it that way," stated Tom with blunt indignation. "I don’t take it lightly. I’m sure you know that we had a murderer running around Enterprises just recently."

"Yeah," nodded Emda, "that Garton Baxx fellow. Well, check me out. I come with complete registered biometrics. Take samples. My DNA is on file. Or shall we just get on with it?"

"We’ll do both," Mr. Swift said with a hard smile. "You still haven’t
quite
managed to tell us what you’ll be doing here."

"I’ll be working with your own security people—Phil here, and Mr. Ames—on recognizing any typically Sentimentalist elements in this plant-espionage matter. Remember, I’m a good resource—I’ve
been
there.

"Also, I hope you’ll allow me some direct involvement in your moon-scouting mission. The tech of the
Dyaune
has changed somewhat; I’ll leave the inventing to you, but perhaps I can assist you in fine-tuning your instruments to detect it. The engine-signature method you used before is now outdated."

"That would help," Tom agreed.

"Gotta say somethin’," Chow piped up. "No offense, mister, but if you or your
hat
come pokin’ around my kitchen—!"

Emda grinned. "I’ll stay off the range, Chow. I’ve read about you. But if your pots and pans start talking to you—"

"Jest happened th’ one time," Chow growled defensively.

"By the way, nice hat."

"Hunh?—oh... yeah." The cook was suddenly deflated. "That kinda hat’s really catchin’ on all over."

"With
farmers
, hmm?"

"Er—let’s get to work," said Tom. "Andy, prepare to have your brain picked. And by the way—"

"Hmm?"

"The
Challenger
lifts off for the moon tonight."

Emda laughed in surprise. "Man! You were already planning the trip?"

"We are
now
," declared Tom.

After a morning of hurried consultations and arrangements, Bud lifted Tom’s three-decker Flying Lab into the skies above Enterprises at 2 PM, turning her nose southward. "Back to Fearing," the young pilot said jauntily to the others in the cockpit—Tom, Chow, and Andy Emda. "I think the
Sky Queen
knows the way by heart."

"We can go up to the viewlounge in a while, Andy," Tom told the Brungari-American. "I’ll introduce you to Bob Jeffers and Sue Fresnell, who’ll be with us in space. But I thought you’d like to watch takeoff through our underslung viewports."

"Pretty dramatic," Emda declared. "Still, our blastoff into space aboard the
Dyaune
was more exciting yet—that old buggy produces G-forces that slam you back in your seat, just like in the primitive days of space travel."

"Yeah, pre-repelatron," remarked Bud.

"But your repelatrons are hard to get. I suppose just about every government on Earth is competing for a deal with Swift Enterprises."

"Our own government plays a role, too, as I’m sure you know," responded the young inventor. "There are big security and defense issues, and the trons are watched and tracked almost as tightly as nuclear materials. But as of now they can’t be bootlegged or mass-produced—not as long as the field antennas have to be made of Lunite."

"Right. Lunite from our little-bitty new moon up there." Emda paused musingly. "But of course—Neo-Aurium is also rare and difficult to obtain."

"But
somebody
did it," Chow pronounced. "Sure did—right outta th’ soggy ground next to the city o’ gold. Right under our noses!"

Tom knew that the westerner felt very sure that Andor Emda was in league with that Somebody.
And Chow has good instincts about people
, Tom thought. The youth felt inclined to trust the well-vetted visitor. But not all the way. Not with their lives. Tom didn’t need Chow Winkler to put him on the alert.

After the usual quick flight and smooth-as-silk landing, the small group elevatored up into the
Challenger
’s cubelike cabin module, suspended amid the encircling rings that held the repelatron force radiators. "This thing’s
huge
—quite a sight!" enthused Andy. "Just compare this to the old Mercury capsule in the Smithsonian."

"Yeah," said Bud, "it’s about the size of a dining room chair. Even the base of the Apollo capsule isn’t much bigger than my kitchen table!"

Sue Fresnell chimed in with wide eyes. "Progress in the Space Age has been fantastic, hasn’t it? And now we have Tom’s Cosmotron Express to look forward to."

"Is the
Starward
construction keeping to schedule?" Emda asked Tom.

The young inventor answered wryly, seating himself before the command deck’s main control panel. "Is there really a
schedule
? What we usually have is a target date and a lot of scrambling! But we’re looking OK for the Grand Tour mission."

Emda nodded his understanding. "The
Dyaune
was stalled for years, you know. It was Nattan Volj and his coterie of engineers who got the job done. That’s one reason for his followers’ worshipful attitude."

"The
Starward
was originally designed to be a repelatron vehicle all the way, with scores of our new-style repelatrons built right into the hull," Tom explained. "Design began right after we completed the Pacific mission in the subocean geotron.

"But when we were experimenting with my time-transformer apparatus—for the dyna-4 capsule—we detected an unexpected effect, a kind of ‘momentum backlash’ that showed how we were grabbing and stretching the fabric of spacetime. That led to the cosmotron spacedriver and a whole new approach to the ship."

Bud grinned. "Now our marvelous magical trons have been demoted to standby equipment."

"It’s more than that, though," declared Tom. "We have to use the repelatrons in the vicinity of large, massive bodies because the asymmetrical distortion of the spacetime gradient—they call it the curve of the ‘gravity well’—prevents the spacedriver effect from spreading evenly across the volume of the ship."

"In other words," said Emda, "the momentum tide isn’t
flat
enough."

"Exactly—and we’ve dealt with a similar problem in the dyna-4 capsule as well. The unevenness would impose a shearing stress on the
Starward
, as if the forces were trying to turn it inside out."

Bud chuckled with his own personal wryness. "Believe me, genius boy and I got enough of
that
on our first space flight, when we had a little encounter with a mini black hole."

"
More
than enough, I’d guess," said young Bob Jeffers, already a veteran of space.

"And that’s why we’ll be heading for the outer solar system on the shakedown cruise," Tom concluded, "out in the flatter part of the sun’s gravity well."

Tom’s and Bud’s hands knew their jobs well, and it took only minutes for the
Challenger
to rise through Earth’s veil of air and plunge into the stark blackness of space. Tom said, "As we get away from Earth—we’re not in freefall and we still have most of our weight—we’ll accelerate up to 1 G, then hold constant to the midpoint."

Andy Emda flashed a broad grin. "Comfort and luxury all the way to the moon! We didn’t have either in the
Dyaune
back when we were in a race against this very ship. I never dreamed I’d see things from the reverse angle!—or even return to space at all."

Susan Fresnell, an attractive red-haired young woman, stood nearby in the much-muted glare of the sun, gazing over the shoulders of Tom and Bud through the twin "picture windows" of the control compartment. "I’ve only been up in space a couple times so far," she said. "Such beauty! I’m glad the higher-ups—Tom’s friends Hank Sterling and Arv Hanson—are engrossed in the engineering of the Express."

"And
we’re
glad we could bring a fine technician along on this half-day jaunt," Tom responded. "We’ll need your assistance when it comes time to fine-tune the sensor instruments."

Sue smiled appreciatively. "My husband the insurance agent worries about these little Enterprises adventures in science and space, but I don’t. As the motto puts it, I’m ‘in good hands,’ about the
best
hands there are!"

"Haven’t lost a Swift yet," Bud remarked. "Not permanently, at least."

The trip to Luna took three hours, giving the
Challenger
’s young captain time to discuss another matter—and another invention—with the visitor to Shopton and space. Down in the ship’s hangar, Tom showed Andy a small unit bracketed to the bulkhead. It was a framework of lengthy rods, joined at right angles as if along the edges of an open-faced cube. "Before anything else, what’s it called?" asked Emda with a smile.

Tom smiled back. "No clever name for this one. It’s my G-wave propagation analyzer. I know your astrophysics background taught you about gravity waves."

"Yes indeed. Spacetime ripples spun off into the cosmos by accelerating or collapsing masses."

"And very hard to detect, even in theory, because of their enormous wavelengths and very slight energy content," Tom noted.

"Mm, a challenge for Swift ingenuity!"

"Actually, this is more my father’s project than mine. An informal international group of astronomers, the StarWhisper Consortium, wants to see if Enterprises can solve a space mystery, one they’ve been gathering data on since last year."

"Two space mysteries at one time!"

"Right. Typical for us," chuckled the youth. "The mystery is called
Emma
—a nickname for Emission Anomaly Deneb Algedi. That last is a star in the constellation Capricorn."

"A source of gravity waves?"

Tom shook his head. "The star isn’t, no. But the astronomers have been picking up G-wave emissions originating somewhere along the line-of-sight between Earth and Den-Al. It’s a convenient designation."

"I see," said Emda. "Somewhere deep in space?"

"Well, even with a baseline as wide as the earth’s orbit around the sun, gravity waves are so diffuse that it’s all but impossible to triangulate on a source," replied Tom. "But there’s reason to think that Emma is very close to our solar system, even within the Oort cloud that surrounds our sun in extra-planetary space. The blurred readings that have been accumulated so far put the source level with the plane of the ecliptic, the ‘playing field’ our local planets roll around on. That would be quite a coincidence if the source were out in interstellar space, unrelated to our system."

"Yes, obviously," mused the astrophysicist. "Perhaps we’re dealing with a new, distant planet orbiting the sun way way out. But it would have to be extraordinarily dense and in rapid rotation—somewhat like the staroid fragment that came along with your ‘mystery comet,’ Tarski."

Tom shrugged. "But that’s part of the mystery, Andy. From what the StarWhisper people can make out, Emma isn’t rotating at all, whatever it is. There’s no sign of that sort of wave profile. It seems to be generating gravity waves in some unexpected manner, from a nonrotating, non-collapsing, non-accelerating source."

"The crudity of the detection instruments can only reveal so much. Hence your new invention, eh?"

"Mm-hmm—
hence
. Like other such detection devices, it uses rods made of sapphire, in this case ultra-pure sapphire from the Petronius microplanetoid we ‘landed’ in Utah. The real innovation, though, is the way we use a system of extremely fine laser beams to detect and measure any twists or bends in the structure that signify a passing G-wave."

"Lasers are used in all of them, aren’t they?" objected Emda mildly.

"This approach is new. We don’t measure simple bounceback or beam interruption, but use a phenomenon called photon convection to get three-dimensional information from all along the surfaces of the rods at one time, analyzing the resulting inputs with phase interferometry." Tom explained how fringe photons were serially refracted at the sapphire surfaces, following the curves like a thin coating of oil. "The goal isn’t just to detect the gravity waves, but to determine a precise propagation vector. With that sort of data, even as small a baseline as our Earth-Moon trip should be enough to determine the location of Emma—within a few hundred million miles, at least; which would be a very big improvement on what StarWhisper has come up with so far."

"As I said, Swift ingenuity, famed the world over," pronounced Andor Emda. "When do you begin taking readings?"

Tom chuckled. "When? Three weeks ago! The detector has been running continuously, digitally recording the raw data for computer enhancement and analysis."