Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space (18 page)

Informed in Shopton of the tragedy in the making, Tom’s mother and sister, and Bashalli Prandit, had tearfully insisted on joining Tom’s father on Loonaui. They were flown there via Swift Enterprises jet at supersonic speed, arriving in less than four hours.

"Where are they now, Damon?" asked Mrs. Swift bravely as Sandy tried to stifle her sobs and Bashalli tried to comfort her friend through her own tears.

"About seven hundred miles above equatorial Africa," answered Mr. Swift in a lost, quiet voice.

They watched a radar scan, relayed from Egypt, that showed when the cylinder began to penetrate the atmosphere, setting up a hot sheath of gaseous flame that reflected the scanning waves.

"It won’t be long," said Damon Swift. "It will come down in the Indian Ocean, near the coast of the Malay Peninsula." He left unsaid what
"it"
was.

"Sir, something’s changed!" exclaimed one of the technicians.

"Changed?"

"The—the vehicle has slowed. Radically! And there’s a new angle of descent."

No longer in a smooth but uncontrolled fall, Module Nine was decelerating!

Damon Swift pointed at a portion of the radar feed. "The sheathing effect is breaking up
here—
in front—as if—"

"What?" asked Anne Swift.

"As if it’s retro-braking."

Module Nine slammed into the middle of the Indian Ocean at 5:26 AM, Loonaui time. Its velocity was more than sufficient to smash it completely, peeling it into long fragments and twisting those fragments like pretzels. No one aboard could have survived.

But there
was
no one aboard.

Satellite imaging guided a small fleet of amphibious jetcraft to the warm waters off the coast of the great island of Madagascar, where—at 5:09 AM, Loonaui time—a compact human bundle, three spacesuited figures lashed tightly together by hoses from an air-recirculator, had splashed down under the canopy of a parachute. They were picked up struggling to stay above water, having shed their spacesuits—an enormously difficult task in itself—but using their air-filled bubble helmets to help them stay afloat.

"You three might like to know this," said the medic aboard the rescue craft. "I’m told one of your space station crewmen—Hanson, I think they said—took a prisoner who’s going back to earth in irons, so to speak."

"Blatka?" asked Tom Swift, his voice raw and husky, his eyes almost swollen shut.

"They called him ‘Mosquito’."

Bud forced out a semblance of a cheer. "Man, I’d give anything for five minutes with that guy—just me, him, and my right fist!"

"They said he was up there under a phony name. He’d been training all along in Shopton with your astronauts. Bulked himself up, changed his hair color."

Tom nodded. Every muscle and bone in his body ached. "International law will deal with him."

"But say, amigo," interrupted Ken Horton, speaking to the medic. "Aren’t you maybe a little bit
curious
o’ how we got out of that module?"

"Oh, Tom’s father already explained it to us," grinned the medic. "Once he knew you’d all parachuted free, he worked it out backwards, y’might say. Know what I mean? He said you must’ve worked the parachute—from the rocket engine—free from inside, then got out through the side hatchway up in the ionosphere. Your spacesuits protected you, right?"

Tom choked out a laugh. "Right! The heat of reentry weakened the plastic sealant gumming up the hatch. Then, when we slammed on the ‘brakes’—I was able to set off the rocket engine—the jolt was enough to crack the hatch completely. But we couldn’t have gotten out if we hadn’t been able to slow our descent—the airstream blast would have been far too violent, even under low pressure."

"Tom, your Dad said he couldn’t figure
one
thing, though. He knows you must’ve got into the engine electronics to start ’er up. But how did you turn the whole module around so the engine’d point forward?"

Bud Barclay chortled gleefully and threw an affectionate arm around his pal. "Genius boy here got his brain online and remembered how he’d flipped a boat upside down when he was chained-up underneath it! He had us jumping off the walls, angling toward the middle—kind of a low-gravity space ballet! Forced the whole thing to swing around—something about
angular momentum."

"Ow,
Bud!" groaned Tom. "My shoulders!" Then he added modestly: "But really, I just drew on my experience, that’s all. They say experience is the only school for fools!"

Ken Horton nudged Bud. "Now that you two’ve lived to fight another day, what’s next?"

"Well," said Bud, "if it were up to me, I’d start off from Tom’s outpost in space and head straight for a satellite of Mars, where some friends of ours live. But Tom never goes the same way twice, you know. Since we just did
‘up,’
I’d guess we’ll be heading
down!"
Bud was a better prophet than he knew. Tom’s next quest would take him into the depths of the sea, an incredible adventure a newsman would later title
Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter.

Sixteen hours and a hospital stay later, Tom and Bud were climbing shakily from a helicopter at Space Central, to wild cheers from a huge crowd, led by young Kipu. He held up a sign:

BLOND BOSS—
BACK LIKE SPACE BOOMERANG!

Tom’s mother smiled through tears of relief as her son greeted her with an affectionate hug and kiss. Mr. Swift welcomed the boys with hearty handclasps and congratulations—and tears of his own. Then it was the girls’ turn. Their tears had long since dried.

"Bring us back any stardust?" Sandy laughed.

"Just a moonbeam apiece," Bud quipped.

"And a kiss for good measure," added Tom with a grin at Bashalli, as the boys proceeded to suit the action to the words.