Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (11 page)

"Don’t try to talk yet, son."

When Tom felt completely revived, he accompanied his father into the laboratory. By this time, the blowers had cleared the room of gas and the air was safe to breathe. Mr. Swift sniffed the tank cautiously. A faint trace of gas was still evident. He caught some in a burette and tried several chemicals on it. When he was through, he looked at Tom.

"Know what that stuff was?" he asked grimly.

"Some type of nerve gas, I imagine."

"Fluorophosphonate ester. Son, if you hadn’t got yourself clear, you’d be dead by now!"

Tom shuddered. "I wonder if the Aer-Cel Company really did send me that tank?"

"We’ll find out right now!"

Mr. Swift picked up the phone and asked the operator to get the president of the Aer-Cel Company. Tom listened to the conversation, then flashed a questioning look as his father hung up.

"He knows nothing about it—says they never sent over any tank of oxygen," Mr. Swift reported.

"In other words, somebody pulled a fast one!"

Father and son stared at each other, sharing the same sobering thought.
Evidently Tom’s enemies were still at work and would stop at nothing!

One afternoon Bud found Chow parked outside the laboratory door acting as a specially appointed—
self-
appointed—guard.
"You
kin go on in. I recconize you!" he declared. Inside, Tom was hard at work with a calculator. His desk was littered with papers, each one covered with figures and equations. From time to time the young scientist paused to punch a new problem into his computer.

"What gives, chum?" Bud asked.

Tom grinned and ran his fingers through his spikey blond crew cut. "Just working out the ascent track of the rockets."

"What a headache!"

"We want to circle the earth in an orbit 22,300 miles up. But the trick is to make our rockets hit the orbit at just the right spot."

"Where’ll that be?"

"Directly above Ecuador in South America," replied Tom. "The CBN people figure that will be the best spot for sending and receiving signals."

"Got the course all figured out?"

"Just about. We’ll go up in a big arc from the underwater launch site near Loonaui Island in the Pacific, tending east. By the time we’re a thousand miles up, we’ll be zooming along at 21,000 an hour."

Bud gave an awed whistle as Tom continued, "At that point, we’ll cut the engines and coast the rest of the way. We’ll travel in an elliptical track around the earth till we reach our final altitude. Then, one more spurt of power to regularize our orbit, and we’re in business!"

Bud glanced at his pal’s workbench, littered with sketches and figures. "Plans for your ‘water-pistol’ system?"

Tom nodded. "I’ve progressed to the point where I need to do some actual nosing around on the ocean floor at that Pacific site Dad visited. You interested in a ride, flyboy?"

Bud laughed and said, "I could
probably
be talked into it!"

Tom was eager to go. Two days later he took off for the Pacific in the
Sky Queen
. With him were Bud and a small crew of technicians, including Enterprises’ young chief of engineering, Hank Sterling.

"Let me get this straight," grinned Hank. "You plan to launch your rockets like balloons, but from the bottom of the ocean. Doesn’t that count as going the long way around?"

Tom smiled back, knowing that Hank was already thoroughly familiar with the project. But he decided to elaborate on the idea for the benefit of the others. "The rockets will be two-stage versions of the Workhorse drone rockets we’ve been building over at Swift Construction. We’re leasing a big, fast cargo ship to freight them through the Panama Canal and on over to Loonaui Island—actually, to a tiny islet we’ve purchased about four miles offshore. There we’ll install the rockets in the aqualaunch shells, as we call them."

"Those are your carrier vehicles?" asked one of the engineers.

"Right. Basically, they’re long cylinders pumped full of pressurized helium, made of a special compound of Tomasite. The rocket sits in a round opening at the very top, like a cork in the neck of a bottle."

"How do you get those aqua-blimp-things down to the ocean floor, genius boy? Weight them down with ballast?" Bud inquired.

"No, we’ll pull them down on a cable setup. When we release them, they’ll rush up to the surface with increasing speed. When the tip breaks the surface—that’s the actual rocket, remember—we’ll ignite it, and off she’ll soar, already moving pretty fast. If all goes well, we should be able to launch three a day, which we could never accomplish at Fearing." Tom was referring to Fearing Island off the Atlantic Coast of the US, where Tom’s small rocket ship, the
Star Spear,
was based.

With its solar-fed engines purring contentedly, the great silver stratoship streaked across the continent faster than the speed of sound. Soon they were soaring far out above the broad Pacific.

Late that afternoon, Tom arrowed in for a landing on Loonaui. The lush tropical island was set like a green jewel in the sparkling blue waters below. Gentle rolling white breakers burst into foam against the outlying coral reefs.

"Oh, man, I can feel that South Sea island magic already!" Bud sighed as he climbed out of the plane.

"Well, don’t get too romantic, pal!" teased Tom. "We’ve got a lot of work to do."

"Aye-aye, skipper!"

Tom and his friends were driven from the small airfield at Jeanmaire, the capital of the Loonaui Islands Republic, to the northern end of the island where Mr. Swift had leased an aging hotel and grounds for use by the Swift Enterprises project. They were greeted by the crew of native Loonauians that Tom’s father had engaged during his earlier visit. A mammoth warehouse had already been constructed at the water’s edge, next to a modern pier.

The people of Loonaui were strong, sun-bronzed Polynesians, with a sprinkling of other groups—Samoans, Filipinos, and even some direct descendents of the old French colonials. Most of them were friendly, but one man in particular, named Pali, seemed different from the others, both in looks and disposition. He wore a sulky, scowling expression. Tom noticed that he seemed to be a man with a following.

"I wouldn’t trust Pali farther than I could throw a rocket," Bud confided in private.

"Ditto," Tom agreed. "But I have no reason to discharge him. If I do, it may only stir up trouble."

"Leave it to me," Bud said. "I’ll keep an eye on him and find out if he’s up.to anything."

While Tom was busy setting up quarters for men and equipment that were to arrive from Shopton in large numbers, Bud mingled casually with the natives. He soon realized that he could find out little without knowing the native language. Fortunately, Bud managed to make friends with a good-natured native boy about twelve years old, named Kipu, who agreed to act as translator.

Late that afternoon, Bud saw Pali and a group of friends stroll away from the work area. Summoning Kipu, he set out to trail them. Some distance away, he found the natives seated near a grass hut in a secluded grove of pandanus trees. Bud and Kipu crept up close enough to hear what was going on.

Pali was haranguing the other men in their native language. Suddenly Kipu clutched Bud’s arm and turned to him with a look of terror.

"Come! We must go back to your friends at once! I am scared trouble!"

Tom was checking cargo lists in his palm-thatched cottage when Bud and Kipu burst in.

"What’s wrong?" Tom asked.

"We come to warn you!" cried Kipu, still wide-eyed with fear. "Pali is making great stirring-up. I heard him say you and the men with you are evil—that you come to shoot fire rockets at the sky. This will displease the spirits of nature. Pali tells the island people to destroy you or a great sickness will come to Loonaui!"

"Good night!" Bud gasped. "What’ll we do?"

"There’s no sense getting all worked up," Tom advised. "This is a modern, educated country. I’m sure few people pay any attention to stuff like that."

"But you heard what he said!" Bud exclaimed.

"I’m not forgetting a word of it. But Dad had all those workers screened and I’m sure they’re loyal."

"What about Pali? Would you call
him
loyal?"

"He’s the one bad apple," Tom admitted. "But if it comes to a showdown, the island police will prevent trouble. The government here is enthusiastic about our project."

Bud scowled uneasily. "I still think this setup is dangerous," he mumbled. "But you’re not listening."

Tom went over to a crate of trade goods in the corner and took out a colorful atlas of the world, which he gave to Kipu. "Here, take this for your kindness. You’ve done well to warn us about Pali. If you hear more news, please come and tell us at once. We mean no harm to any of your people!"

In the week that followed, there were no further signs of trouble. Tom threw all of his energy into the job of constructing the rocket base. Men and equipment arrived every day and work progressed rapidly.

Although mission control for the space outpost itself would be established in the hotel, a secondary construction site and base for subocean activity was to be set up on a tiny islet four miles off shore. This uninhabited islet, called Bolutanbu, was a curving strip of land barely above sea level, two miles long but only a hundred yards wide at its broadest point.

Tom and Bud landed by cabin cruiser on Boluntanbu, which had already been briefly surveyed by Mr. Swift. With the assistance of Oco and Ambuli, the Loonauians piloting the craft, the youths unpacked and entered two Fat Man suits that had been shipped over aboard the
Sky Queen.
These were remarkable one-person submersibles equipped with robotic arms and legs, shaped like huge metal eggs and self-propelled.

"Down we go!" chortled Bud into his sonophone communicator. The two waddled down the beach and into the mild surf, walking another hundred yards to the point where the sea floor suddenly dropped away at a sharp angle, an oceanic cliffside.

"The Seuratt Abyss," Tom explained as they activated the water-jet propulsion units and began to descend into the turquoise depths. "Not very wide, but it’s the deepest Pacific trench near the equator—two miles down!" He explained that the crevice was a vent for the long-extinct volcano that gave birth to Loonaui eons ago.

Twenty minutes later they were strolling along on the sandy floor of the sea, their paths illuminated by special electronic lamps built into the suits; for the sun could not penetrate the depths.

"You sure this crack in the ground is wide enough for your launching-shells?" asked Bud skeptically.

"More than wide enough," replied the young inventor. "The shells, and the attached rockets, are pretty narrow—nothing like Dad’s big
CosmoSoar
rocket! And the narrowness is actually a plus, because the rock walls block ocean currents that might foul up the launch."

They examined several relatively flat sections of ocean floor. Soon a launching site was laid out, marked with self-digging spikes equipped with tiny sonar locating beepers.

"Here’s where we’ll put the electric winch system that’ll wind the cables down to the floor," Tom said, half to himself. He could already visualize the entire setup.

Bud had jetted a few hundred feet away, using his suit lights, which were attached to the "forearms" of the Fat Man suit, to illuminate and explore the languidly waving undersea vegetation.

"Tom, there’s something over here," he sonophoned. "I can’t tell what it is—it’s in the middle of one of these sea-bottom forests. Maybe you should—" Bud’s message ended in a startled gasp!

"Bud?" cried Tom. "Barclay, come in!" At full speed he propelled his suit in the direction Bud had gone. But long before he reached his pal, Tom was able to see three things ahead of him in the subsea gloom.

The first was Bud’s suit, turned away from Tom and frozen in a position of fear.

The second was the twin beams of light from Bud’s suit aqualamps.

The third was the object upon which the beams converged.

Not a dozen feet from Bud Barclay loomed a huge monstrous head with curving teeth like daggers!

TOM HIMSELF was frozen with dread inside his metal vessel. The sea creature was like something from a bizarre aquatic nightmare, its snout and teeth reptilian, its head almost parrotlike, with the featherlike crest rising above. There were also long, curving horns on top, like those of a snail.

Oh man, the skull of that thing’s as big around as a dining room table!
exclaimed Tom’s thoughts.

Abruptly a staccato, wavering sound echoed in his ears.

Bud was laughing!

"Sure fooled me!" he cried. "It’s just a big carving!"

Tom advanced closer to the thing rising from a clump of vegetation, and saw that it was true. The monster was actually a carved figurehead rising from a catamaran-like wooden hull mostly buried in the sand and silt of the ocean bottom. On closer examination it was clear that this was not a figure
head
but a figure
tail
: it was carved onto the boat’s stern, and faced backwards.

Tom touched the figure gently with his mechanical claws, but it fell away like smoke. The wood was completely rotted out.

"How old do you think old Betsy is, Tom?" Bud asked.

"I’d guess it dates from late in the Nineteenth Century," responded Tom. "I’ve read about this. The tribal culture of Loonaui kept up their boat-building traditions even under the French. We’ll have it raised for the museum in Jeanmaire before we start setting up the launcher equipment."

Still chuckling and joking about their momentary fright, Tom and Bud surfaced and walked back up on to the pebbly beach of tiny Bolutanbu, where they packed the Fat Man suits away on the cabin cruiser. Then they made the crossing back to the hotel, which Bud had nicknamed Space Central.

After dark that evening Tom, Bud, and Hank Sterling decided to take time out for relaxation and pay a visit to the quaint trading village at the north end of the island, a half-mile beyond the Swift encampment.

Kipu came along in the jeep to act as translator. The narrow, twisting dirt-and-gravel streets, poorly lighted with torches and oil lamps, were crowded with people. Traditional Loonauians in colorful wrap-around garments rubbed shoulders with planters in soiled white ducks and sailors from the trading schooners. The ships lay at anchor in the harbor.