Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (20 page)

“It may be another of their inhuman ‘experiments’,” exclaimed the young inventor angrily. “Dad, Doctor—Doc Simpson and I will be jetting to Shopton almost immediately. Please radio the jet if there are any further developments.”

There was no news of the AWOL planetoid for two days. And when news finally came from Dr. Jatczak, it was puzzled and worrisome. “Yes, I sighted it as it emerged from behind the disk of the moon. The new trajectory has nothing to do with the former one.”

“Is Petronius approaching the Earth?” Tom asked anxiously. Bud was standing nearby, fearing the answer.

“Speaking literally, yes,” said the astronomer. “It appears to have entered a figure-8 orbit around both the moon and the earth, the sort of elongated orbit used by the Apollo moonflights. I have calculated that it will come within about 11,000 miles of Earth before receding again toward the moon. No apparent danger as of now. But I was saying that with great conviction before!”

Bud touched his chum’s shoulder. “Can’t we just punt it away, like we did with the big one?”

“Perhaps so,” said Tom. “In fact, Petronius is so much smaller than Bartonia that a longterm application of the
Challenger
’s repelatrons would alter its orbit.”

“Both would take time, of course,” came the voice of Jatczak.

“It appears we
have
time,” Tom stated reassuringly. “By the time Petronius has orbited back to the neighborhood of the moon, we’ll have had a chance to study the matter and put something together, if necessary. We could easily force it down on the moon. Then again—

“You know, fellows, this news isn’t all bad. I’d been thinking of bringing Little Brother nearer the earth, to more easily mine the sapphire.” His tone was confident. Yet everyone knew the danger that lurked behind those words. What if the same uncanny power that had already altered Petronius’s course decided to act again?

And that was indeed what the fates decided upon. “Within the last hour, as it passed through its Earth perigee, it began to swerve and accelerate in violation of the laws of orbital mechanics,” Mr. Swift informed Tom and Bud as they stood in the Enterprises observatory. “The movements are completely erratic and unpredictable, but the resulting tendency is clear. The planetoid’s trajectory is evolving toward a very close, fairly circular orbit.”

“Petronius has somehow made itself a captive of the earth,” mused Tom. “Fortunately, it’s such a small object that even lowered parameters don’t pose a particular problem.”

“B-but genius boy,” choked Bud, “if it’s wandering all over the place, it—it could—!”

Tom nodded sharply. “I know. If Little Brother decides to plunge into the atmosphere—that’s it. A mass of that magnitude would pack a punch that could turn a whole city into a crater! Or if it struck the ocean, picture a tsunami with spreading waves a hundred feet high.”

“Trying to shatter it would only compound the problem,” observed Mr. Swift. “And it’s now beyond the point where a gradual series of repelatron pushes could send it back out into space. Nor can we use something like the Bartonia rock-rocket; the sapphire is too resistant to pulverization.”

Bud wiped the untamed lock of black hair from his forehead. “Do you know the cause yet? Maybe the space friends could move it away—”

“Their messages say they ‘
have no information on causal factors.
’ To which they add ‘
insufficient present capacity to affect orbit of mass
’,” replied Mr. Swift. “So that’s that.”

Tom commented, “I don’t think they’re behind it; the X-ians don’t do things in such a random, erratic manner. My theory is that this is some sort of backlash effect on the local spacetime field, surging back and forth, set off by the destruction of the staroid. Something about that huge mass of sapphire must make it unusually reactive.”

“Of course, you have a plan, right?” Bud insisted hopefully. “A Tom Swift plan? An invention?”

Tom responded by turning to his father. “Dad, the only real alternative is to go ahead with my farthest-of-far-out approach. We’ve worked out the numbers.”

“It appears feasible, son—fantastic but feasible.”

Bud looked from face to face. “Jetz, what’s the plan? What do we have to do?”

Tom pulled-up his familiar look of cool determination. “What we have to do is make Petronius
our
captive, Bud. Before one of its zigzags takes it into the atmosphere, we’re going to grab the planetoid and bring it down to Earth on
our
terms.”

“Skipper—it almost sounds like—”

“It is. We’re going to
land a planetoid!
”

Bud gave a sickly grin. “Ohh man! Let old futurist Gerard top that one!”

Within hours Tom was able to describe the operation to the crisis team he had assembled. “Really, it’s not as fantastic a job as it sounds at first. We already have the basic technology available on the shelf—the duratherm wing.”

“But come
on
,” objected space veteran Bob Jeffers. “You’re not really worried about protecting this big rock from reentry friction, are you, boss?”

Tom smiled. “No, I’m not. We won’t be extending the durathermor heat-absorption sheath around the planetoid. The D-Wing—giant sized!—will be more or less free-standing.” Tom showed the assembled group a series of sketches and digitized blueprints. Extruded and shaped by its interstitial transifoil as before, the resultant duratherm wing would spread wide above Petronius, firmly attached to the underlying sapphire mass by several columnar struts and a myriad of anchored metallumin cables. The wing would be four times the size of its captive passenger—nearly half a mile across! “It won’t take inordinate power for the D-Wing to put on the brakes at the right point in Petronius’s orbit, easing it into the atmosphere on a course we can control from the ground.”

“Where do you plan for touchdown to occur?” asked technician Felix Ming. “In the ocean?”

Tom shook his head. “There are too many unknown thermal parameters. Even at reduced speed, we’re dealing with reentry temps and retained heat in what amounts to a huge gem, something no one has studied. A steam explosion at sea could be as dangerous as an H-bomb blast!”

“We’ve found a suitable landing site,” stated Hank Sterling. “The Defense Department has approved our use of the Uintachgi Test Range in the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah. No cities for a hundred miles.”

“It’s a patch about twenty miles long, along the descent trajectory axis,” Tom continued. “The ground characteristics are good for damping out what’ll be a big earth-shock even if we make a perfect landing. We’ll use one of their existing observation blockhouses as our control center.”

“Nicely tucked out of the way, I hope,” murmured one of the listeners.

A few days and many erratic orbits later, the errant planetoid had its first human visitors. Tom brought down the
Challenger
on Petronius’s dark surface, a thin crust of accumulated meteoric material hiding the fantastic treasure beneath. The young space venturer supervised a team of twenty as they used atomic earth blasters to drill three deep “postholes” for the main strut-columns. Then they maneuvered a massive cylinder off the great spaceship’s external vehicular stage. Big as a freight car, this was the container for the folded, ultracompressed duratherm wing.

The crew returned to the ship, leaving the container floating some 800 feet above gravityless Petronius. “Phase Two,” Tom murmured to Chow, standing next to him on the command deck.

“Is that the spiderwebby thing, boss?”

“Sure is.”

At the touch of a button several score micromissiles flashed downward from the D-Wing container. Accelerating in seconds to tremendous velocity, the diamond-tipped projectiles speared deeply into the planetoid’s underlying sapphire, trailing unbreakable cables of metallumin-carbon composite fiber. In thirty seconds the “spiderwebby thing” was in place.

“Now Little Bro’s really our captive!” cheered Bud, at the main control panel.

“Roped an’ hawg-tied!” exulted Chow. But Tom Swift, all energies focused, remained silent.

After the three broad support columns had been implanted and linked to the D-Wing container, Tom pronounced himself satisfied with their work. “Readings looking fine,” he announced. “Bud, let’s take the
Chall
directly to the Utah blockhouse. We don’t need to delay for a few more orbits of ‘Pete.’ Everything’s in place. Let’s land the darn thing!”

The action of the incredible enterprise now shifted to the Great Salt Lake Desert. Four hours later, as Tom prepared to initiate braking and descent, he received a PER call from Shopton. “I’m monitoring with the megascope, son, and it’s fortunate I am. Petronius is shifting again!”

“We can adjust.”

“The adjustment will have to be ongoing. But you won’t need to do a great deal to initiate reentry. Dr. Jatczak just PER’d that its revised trajectory slices right into the fringes of the atmosphere!”

Tom sucked in his breath. “Then one way or another, Petronius is coming down. This is it, Dad—now or never!”

As the mission control team—and Tom’s personal support struts, Bud and Chow—looked on, readout screens in front of the young inventor flashed estimates, continuously revised, of when the planetoid would strike Earth’s atmosphere. As Petronius approached, gravitexes inside the D-Wing container and the support columns made small, somewhat desperate refinements to its path, steering it as close to the desired entry point as possible. “But it looks like we’ll have to do most of the steering inside the atmosphere, using the wing’s reshaping capability,” Tom explained to no one in particular.

Chow whispered to Bud, “Don’t sound like Tom’s too happy about it.”

At last the string of numbers hit zero.

“Radar from the space outpost confirms atmospheric penetration,” announced one member of the blockhouse team.

All eyes focused on a large monitor screen, to which a picture of Petronius was being transmitted from the Enterprises space prober. For minutes no change was evident. Then, slowly, thready plumes of fire began to flicker about the surface and the wing assembly. “Temps nominal,” Tom reported. “Angle good.”

“Structural flex within limits,” called out Arvid Hanson.

In minutes the planetoid was glowing brightly as it dipped deep into the fringes of the outer atmosphere. “Can’t turn back now!” breathed Bud.

Suddenly a red light flashed on the control board. “The five-minute alert!” Tom murmured. His heart pounded as his finger poised over the key that would initiate the main landing sequence. Would his plan succeed?

Tom’s finger stabbed the button.

On the megascope monitor screen, the watchers saw long, flat white streamers shooting from what had become the stern of fiery Petronius. They fanned out in a circular pattern like the slender petals of some gigantic sky flower.

“What in tarnation are them things?” Chow gasped.

“Those form the drogue chute,” Tom told him. “Drogue—
drag
. They’re to give us an extra edge before we extend the D-Wing.”

“Brand my space hat, I never seen a parachute like that before! Don’t hardly seem like they could do any good at all.”

“They do, though. They’re what’s known as a ribbon chute. Actually, it’s the only kind practical for a colossal job like that.” He noted that the purpose was not to retard the plunge but to add a degree of stability. “Tumbling is the main danger at this point.”

As he spoke, Tom was intently watching his bank of instruments. The intense heat of friction bathed Petronius and its streamers in a glowing ball of air plasma, the same burning blast that Tom and Bud were all too familiar with.

“Where’s Pete now?” asked one of the watchers.

“Way up over the mid-Pacific, just where we want him,” Tom replied.

“We’ve speared it!” Hank exulted.

A radar slave computer was feeding figures on Petronius’s velocity to a readout counter. Tom’s spirits soared as he saw how the crystal planetoid’s fall was being shepherded along by the combined action of the gravitexes and the drogues.

Tense silence reigned in the bunker while all eyes followed the fireball’s descent track, relayed from various space-based radar eyes. On the monitor screen, the close-up image, transmitted from the megascope space prober, showed the ghostly outline of Petronius wrapped in a cocoon of neon-bright flame. “More colors than a Chow Winkler shirt,” gibed Bud nervously.

“Cain’t joke back atcha right now, buddy boy,” muttered Chow with dry tongue.

They could see that more and more of Petronius’s rocky crust was being burned away. Something sparkling and iridescent was starting to reveal itself.

“How soon will you deploy the wing, Skipper?” Bud asked.

“At approximately fifty miles’ altitude. Soon.”

As the minutes ticked by, Tom thought of the myriad people who must be watching the fireball with their naked eyes or through telescopes or binoculars. By now the fiery spectacle would be visible over much of the western United States and Canada.

Many of the sky watchers, Tom realized, must be praying through fear or hope. Countless millions more around the world were glued to their TV sets and radios. Despite soothing words from the world’s governments, fascination and dread gripped much of humanity. A moment-by-moment account was being broadcast from Enterprises’ observatory, along with the transmitted picture from the space prober.

“The ribbon chute’s almost gone,” Bud remarked tensely. Only frayed wisps of the streamers could be seen. The rest had been consumed in the fiery plasma.

Tom studied the instrument dials showing Petronius’s velocity, altitude, and temperature as gauged by radar and infrared sensor. “It’s time, everyone. Here goes the duratherm wing!” he announced as he pressed a triggering keyboard button.

A glittering silver-white sheath billowed out above the flame-wrapped planetoid. The group in the bunker watched breathlessly as the vast D-Wing took form, spreading, fluttering, then stabilizing.

“Great splutterin’ spooks!” Chow gulped in awe. “It’s like seein’ a’ eleephant fly!”

“But that thing’s a lot bigger than any elephant!” Bud gulped. “Bigger than a whole stampede of ’em!”