Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (17 page)

It soon became clear to Tom that Hank and Arv had not exaggerated the difficulties of the job. The slight bursts of the spacesuit steering thrusters was more than adequate to start the big cylinders moving; the problem was dragging them to a stop in time. Floating in the void, Tom would nose a section toward its berth, only to wind up out of line, or at the wrong angle. Once he swung a spoke clear around broadside to the hub.

"Whew!" he gasped. "This is worse than any target I’ve ever tried to hit!"

"The computer simulations just didn’t cut it," Hank Sterling commented.

But the presence of their beloved young boss seemed to inspire the space crew. Two hours later, Ken Horton reported that the first of the modules, on the far side of the hub, had been docked successfully.

"Wonderful!" Tom radioed. "Who gets a bonus in his paycheck?"

"I’m pleased to say it’s my fellow native of the Lone Star State!"

"T’weren’t nothin’, boys," radioed Chow modestly. "Jest goes t’show that you young whelps shouldn’t under-estee-mate real experience!" With Chow giving some instruction, half the wheel was finished by the end of the shift.

"Great work, all of you," signaled Hank Sterling. "Now let’s all hit the mess hall and rest on our laurels—for an hour or two!"

Tom looked forward to finally seeing Bud inside the mess hall spoke. But as he climbed between the crowded levels, he was surprised not to see his pal anywhere. "I thought ol’ buddy boy was here m’self," declared Chow at Tom’s side.

"You looking for Bud Barclay?" called one of the crew members. "I just passed him heading out toward Module Nine."

"Thanks, Mary," Tom responded. "I think I’ll go float over to say hi."

"Mind if I go with you?" asked Ken Horton.

"Not a bit," said Tom. But he was thinking:
Though Bud might not like it!

The two jetted across the vast emptiness toward Module Nine. One of the sections not yet connected to the hub, it was safely "parked" about a thousand yards off. Tom noticed that it had not yet been fully prepared for docking, as the bulky rocket motor that had lifted it through the atmosphere was still locked in place.

"Hey, Barclay,"
Tom radioed.
"What’re you doing?"
There was no reply, and Tom commented to Ken, "Guess he’s inside."

The two entered the section through the temporary external airlock that was used by the fuel-scouring team. The interior of the module seemed fairly complete. The deck-floors had been installed, as had worklights and air-circulating apparatus.

Checking his suit dials, Tom said to Ken. "We’ve got a good shirtsleeve environment."

"I won’t mind getting shed of this big bubble-head for a few minutes," chuckled the astronaut. "But where’s old Bud?"

"I don’t know," said Tom, puzzled. His puzzlement turned to concern when Bud gave no answer as their calls echoed through the cylinder.

They floated from one circular compartment to the next, using a ladder that was like a tower of rings. As Tom poked his head into deck three, he suddenly cried out: "Ken!"

"What?"

"Bud’s in here—
he’s not moving!"

BUD WAS floating near the deck in his spacesuit, his face bloodless, his helmet drifting nearby. Calling his name, Tom gently rotated the floating form around.

"See anything?" asked Ken.

"Nothing," Tom replied desperately. "At least there’s no rupture in his suit. And he’s breathing." Unsealing and pulling off Bud’s suit gauntlets Tom chafed his friend’s wrists. "I don’t want to try taking him across to the hub. Please go get Dr. Kwan and bring—"

Tom was interrupted by an explosion of sound, a deep, throbbing roar. A powerful force slapped Tom and Ken down to the deck and crushed them against it!

"Wh-what—" Ken sputtered.

"The—rocket—engines—!"
Tom spat out through clenched teeth, shouting over the roar.

Tom had been able to cushion Bud’s helpless form as it fell to the deck. Tom and Ken continued struggling against the acceleration pressure of the section’s motors for long painful moments. Then sudden silence fell as the engines cut out and the pressure dissipated.

"How could that have happened, Tom?" panted Ken. "There’s no fuel for the engines—I mean, we’re here inside the empty fuel tank!"

Floating upward Tom winced and shook his head. "Don’t you remember? There’s still a small reserve tank in the engine complex." He reminded Horton that the motors, floating free in space, were to be guided back to earth under remote control after completion of the station. Reentering the atmosphere and parachuting into the ocean, they would be recovered and reconditioned for further use. "Someone’s set off the engine for this module by remote signal, I’m guessing," Tom concluded. "Which sounds more than a little like the work of the Mosquito, Stanis Blatka!"

"Why? To ram the space station?"

"We would have collided right away if that were the goal." Tom’s mind flitted back to his experience bound beneath the motorboat. "The guy’s got a sick mind. He doesn’t just murder you, he likes to do it in a dramatic way, to make a point."

"Okay, but how—?" Then Horton gasped. "You don’t mean—"

"Reentry,
Ken!" confirmed Tom grimly. "He plans to incinerate us in the atmosphere!"

"And we can’t contact the outpost from inside the module," said Horton. "But they’ll see us, of course, or track us by radar."

"Wrong on both counts," was Tom’s retort. "Everyone was either on sleep shift or in the mess hall—remember? And the automatic radar alarm is only activated by
incoming
objects!"

"Well, great longhorns!—all we have to do is step back outside and use our radios outside the hull!" Horton led Tom scurrying back down the ladder to the airlock by which they had entered.

"The hatch motor isn’t working!" groaned Horton in frustration, thumbing the switch. The motor gave forth a grinding sound. He and Tom tried to force their way into the airlock by putting their shoulders to the access panel, but it would not move.

"This thing’s built too strong," Tom said. "It can’t be forced. And whoever knocked out Bud and fired the engines must’ve forced some kind of glue or sealant into the hatch panel after he watched us go aboard."

"So we’re
stuck
—literally! What about the main hatch at the tip of the section, the one you’d use to enter the hub?"

"No go," responded Tom. "I could see the the outer cowling was still sealed in place. We can’t remove it from the inside."

They made their way back to Bud. As Tom moved to take his friend’s pulse, Bud suddenly groaned.

"Bud!" Tom exclaimed.

The muscular young pilot ran his fingers through a lock of his dark hair, which had tumbled across his forehead. His eyes fluttered open.

"T-Tom?" Bud choked. "And…" Suddenly his thick voice was filled with fury. "Tom! It’s him!
Horton did this to me!"
He lashed out with his fists, but zero gravity sent him into a spin, and the blow missed Ken entirely.

"Whoa, whoa, pal!" Tom admonished. "Ken’s been with me since we got here."

Bud groaned again. "Yeah … yeah. It was just a dream. Now I remember…"

"What happened to you?" asked Horton.

"It was a set-up," Bud declared in disgust. "I was resting when I was intercommed that you two had arrived and wanted to see me in Module Nine. I went inside, and—and then—"

"Look at this mark on the back of Bud’s head," said Tom to Ken. "It’s like a little cut from a blade."

"There must’ve been some kind of knockout drug on it," Bud said. "I never did see anyone."

Tom looked chagrined. "You know what? I’d bet our enemy was still nearby when we came aboard, floating out of sight on the other side of the module!"

"Don’t matter none now, pards," Ken pronounced with an exaggerated drawl. "How do we keep ourselves from takin’
the
long hot road
down to the ground?"

"Won’t a team from the outpost come after us when we turn up missing?" Bud asked.

Tom sighed. "By that time we’ll be a few thousand miles downrange and accelerating away from the station. The return capsules aren’t maneuverable enough to reach us, and the only three people alive who know how to operate the
Star Spear
are—"

"Us!" concluded Bud dismally.

"Is there a way to tell where we are?" asked Ken.

Tom shook his head. "Nope. This section doesn’t even have a porthole. It was to be used for storing the solar batteries." He looked into the faces of his friends with deep sadness and resignation. "All we can do is wait."

"We’ll have one big clue as to our position," Bud said. "When the walls start smoking, we’ve hit the atmosphere!"

Hours passed in the hollow spoke as it arced downward from space toward the earth. To be more comfortable they pulled off their bulky spacesuits, taking their deadly ride in shorts and T-shirts. Not many more words passed between the three.

Bud knew his friend’s powerful mind was churning furiously, considering one alternative after another. At one point he put a hand on Tom’s knee and said gently, "Look, Tom, just let it go. You’ve done your best—always did. I’d rather go this way, with you on a great adventure, than a thousand other ways I can think of."

Tom nodded gratefully but said, "Don’t ask me not to think, Bud. That’s the one thing I can’t manage."

A long time afterward, a faint whisper broke the silence from outside the cylinder.

"What was that?" hissed Ken Horton. But he knew the answer, as did Tom and Bud.

They had begun to hit the soft, bare outermost edge of the earth’s atmosphere.

The whisper of molecules became a mutter, then a slight, continuous moan. They could feel vibrations in the metal of the walls as wisps of air tickled the hull.

"How fast you reckon we’re going?" Ken inquired. "Just scientific curiosity, mind you."

"Oh, not all that fast," Tom replied. "Not even fifteen miles per
second,
I’d say, at a pretty nearly flat angle."

"But we’ll get a lot slower by the time we hit the lower stratosphere," added Bud. "Not that we’ll be around to notice it."

"Will anything of the module actually reach the ground?" asked Ken.

"Oh, certainly! Don’t underestimate the durability of Swift space-age materials!" Tom exclaimed. "The magtritanium-Tomasite composition shell can shrug off the temperatures. Which doesn’t mean it won’t get hotter than a solar furnace here inside."

And in fact the inside temperature seemed noticeably warmer.

"You’re not giving me much to cling to, boss," Ken commented wryly. "I’d heard you and Bud here were pretty good at getting out of scrapes."

Bud shrugged, staring at Tom to gauge his reaction. "Don’t pick on genius boy, Kenny. He’s been a little distracted for a few weeks. It’s this phobia thing." He described Tom’s fall from the
Queen
.

"Hmm, I see! Well, Tom, this is an even bigger fall—maybe it’ll cure you."

"Maybe," Tom responded dully. "At least it won’t much matter, will it."

The hurtling module began to sway.

Outside, the rushing air sounded like the hiss of a snake.

Inside, it was becoming as balmy as a California summer day.

Below and far ahead, the Indian Ocean was still hundreds of miles distant. Yet in another sense it wasn’t so very distant at all.

AS THE MODULE horned its way into the upper fringes of the atmosphere, the cushion of air slowed it down, bit by bit. And as it fell more slowly, it was no longer in free fall, and the pull of gravity was able to timidly reassert itself.

The helmets, the loose space gauntlets, everything loose and floating free began to drift toward the underside of the next-higher deck divider, which became their "floor." Then, as the cylinder wavered and shimmied, objects began to gently bounce off the curving walls.

Bud was fanning himself with his hand. "I don’t usually mind the heat," he noted, "but with you two perspiring it’s getting a mite
close
in here."

"Lemme see," Ken said. "I’d guess we’re in the upper nineties. Not all that hot for Texas."

Module Nine gave a mighty shake, like a dog with a bone.

"Will we start tumbling, boss?" asked Ken. "I’as never much good on those carnival rides, y’know?"

"The tapered shape of the spoke is pretty aerodynamic," said Tom. "It was made to cut through the air while staying stable. Of course that was heading the other way!"

Bud was lying pressed against a support stanchion. Now he sat up halfway. "Tom, do you think the Mosquito burned up all the fuel in the reserve tank?"

Tom Swift rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I—I don’t know, Bud. I—" He tried desperately to draw his thoughts together: with the return of gravity came the eerie, awful sense of
falling—
and his vertigo. "No," he finally muttered. "The rocket burst was too short and mild. The tank is probably about half-full."

"Okay," Bud continued, "then why couldn’t we—"

"He’s got something!" Horton burst out. "With the engine still locked in place and fuel in the tank, couldn’t we
fly
this thing—somehow?"

The corners of Tom’s mouth twisted up for the first time in hours.
"Aerodynamic
doesn’t mean
flyable,
guys. Let’s say we
did
rig up a way to fire the motors—over the next few minutes. So what? They’re in the tail end, pointing the wrong way. It’d just speed us up."

"Well…yeah," said Bud in discouragement. Then he glanced at his pal and his heart beat faster with hope. Tom had a new gleam in his eyes. He was thinking! "Still…" Tom murmured, "there might be a way to do something at that!"

Bud raised his eyebrows. He sensed that Tom’s phobia had been driven off at last! "You trying to say we’re not
quite
dead yet, skipper?"

Tom gazed off into the recesses of his imagination. "Maybe not
quite!"

Half a world away, it was night on Loonaui Island, and the atmosphere was that of a funeral. Within twenty minutes the space outpost had reported that Tom, Bud, and Ken were missing; ten minutes later, that Module Nine was being tracked by radar along its wayward course back to earth—beyond hope of interception.