Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (6 page)

Ames shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like a terrorist or a mad scientist, offhand. I’ll alert Wes Norris and the Feds, though. Never know.” Norris was Swift Enterprises’ customary FBI liaison.

Tom returned to his office to keep a scheduled appointment. Presently two men were shown in: one of late middle-age in an expensive silk suit, the other white-haired and skinny in casual, somewhat shabby attire. “Hello, Mr. Demburton, Mr. Gerard. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Demburton, the well-dressed man, smiled as he shook hands. “A pleasure indeed. Have you had occasion to stay in one of my hotels, Tom?”

“Many times, sir—on every continent except Antarctica!”

“We’re working on that one,” the man chuckled through perfect pearly teeth, easing down into a chair. “As to my colleague—”

“I’ve read your articles, Mr. Gerard,” Tom said with enthusiasm. “Your book, too.”

Neil Gerard shrugged. “Out of print.”

“Does it seem peculiar, the two of us coming to Swift Enterprises together?” asked Demburton. “A hotelier of world-class interests, and a—well, what shall we call you, Neil? A futurist? A prophetic engineer?”

“Hunh? Oh. Doesn’t matter,” replied Gerard. “Use my name.”

“I’ve thought a lot about your ideas, Mr. Gerard,” Tom declared. “I grew up with them. When we built the outpost in space, I wondered if it was the first step to the space colonies you envisioned.”

“And now you have such a thing on Nestria,” smiled Demburton. It was the same smile he had come in with.

“It’s not
my
vision, Nestria,” pronounced the shabby speculationist. “I mean, wha?—mm, nothing to be
ashamed
of. Just different. Differentness is okay.—I guess
so
! Without
differentness
, whatcha got?—
sameness
!”

“That’s very true.” Tom hesitated awkwardly, wondering if the man felt offended. “You’re right, of course. You were thinking in terms of terraformed asteroids and huge artificial structures, real cities in space.”

“Beaming down electricity from solar collectors. Microwaves! Safe microwaves. Birds fly, not
fry
. Make it a motto.”

Demburton nodded. “And now Swift Enterprises solar batteries—”

“Not the same thing. Nice enough. Not the same. Naw, it’s all out of date, my old stuff. Wha? Yeah. Oh? Big deal thirty years back.”

“It sure was,” said Tom. “My father and I often talked about
‘New Stars For Man
’ and how your proposals could change civilization. It may well be the future, sir. The day may come when most ‘Earthlings’ never set foot on Earth!”

“Yeah? Really? Naw—well, maybe. Who knows?” said Mr. Gerard indifferently.

“That day may be on the horizon right now, Tom,” declared Mr. Demburton. “World Portico Hotels Corporation has a proposal for you—for Swift Enterprises.”

The young inventor chuckled politely. “I don’t know there’s enough space-vacationing
yet
to make an orbiting
hotel
a profitable idea.”

“Not a space hotel, Tom,” responded the executive suavely. “Not right now. But WPHC has many interests. We’re about progress.” This was their advertising slogan, Tom remembered. “We’d like to see some movement on Neil’s ideas. It’s time for mankind to push the envelope right out into space.”

“Nothing to do with envelopes,” muttered Neil Gerard. “Hunh? No. Not that you should bother reading the book. International geek! Well, it got me up in the morning. Hello sun, hello moon.”

“What sort of project do you have in mind, Mr. Demburton?” inquired Tom anxiously.

“A space colony, Tom, just as Neil imagined! We’d like to engage Enterprises in a magnificent, historic venture—a prototype city on, or rather
in
, an asteroid in orbit around the Sun!”

“Yeah, solar orbit,” Gerard said in his vague monotone. “Better test, away from the apron strings. Kind of a, wha? y’know, feasibility study. Like that thing where people lived in the ‘Mars Dome’ for a couple years until someone got appendicitis. They just did it in Russia, too, if you believe those people. So. Test out the whole Gerard vision. Felton here thinks he can get the money for it. That’s what I didn’t have thirty years back, Tom. Gotta have money or you’re dead. Me, I was dead. Don’t ever let yourself get dead.”

During the dense verbiage Tom Swift’s bright eyes contemplated the prospect—an incredible challenge! “Gentlemen, I’m sure my father will be very interested—and I’m about ready to take off right now!”

“Think so? Today? No, today’s way soon,” mused Mr. Gerard. “Give it a week or two. A decade. Sell it to the media, news people. Get the book back in print. Not for
me
, Tom. Never. It’s for—” He spread his arms wide, eloquently.

“Yes,” Tom agreed, not entirely sure what he was agreeing with. “But you’ll need to find the right kind of asteroid, in the right kind of orbit, to apply the overall approach you’ve outlined.”

Demburton snapped his thick fingers. “No problem at all! We’re here today because we’ve identified such an asteroid, you see. It’s out there now, a perfect candidate. It’ll be passing near Earth soon, Tom. You see, it’s a fairly large chunk of real estate, following along in the wake of the comet, Tarski.”

Tom had difficulty hiding his astonishment. Somehow these men knew of the Follower—the intruding planetoid Dr. Jatczak had detected with sophisticated instruments only days previous—a discovery not yet announced to the world!

“MR. DEMBURTON,” Tom said, “how did you, er, ‘identify’ this asteroid? I don’t recall it from any of the recent news reports, and we get science updates continuously here over our videophone network.”

The hotelier laughed. “Oh, we forward-thinking business types have our ways, Tom. I put out the word quite some time ago that WPHC had an interest in funding scientific research involving near-Earth asteroids with certain characteristics. A friend of one of my managers turned out to be an astronomer. The manager, Niras Ewelle, called me last Friday; I called her friend that evening—it was morning there...”

“It was overseas?” Tom asked curiously—curious for some instinctive reason.

“Yes, the hotel is in Madagascar. Off the east coast of Africa, you know. As we say, the sun never sets on our hospitality.”

Madagascar—where the head of the Bose family held court! Was there a connection between the Fearing raiders and this sudden proposal to Swift Enterprises? “Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, what is the name of the astronomer? I might know him myself.”

The executive searched his memory. “Hmm. I’m told he’s a well-regarded professional in the field...”

Gerard spoke up in his unwarned way. “Talmadge. My brain noted it down, directly on the lobes. Easy enough. Always a snap to remember names that start with ‘T’.”

“That’s right,” nodded Mr. Demburton. “Louis Talmadge. He said his observatory is in the mountains east of Fianarantsoa—‘Fianar’. That’s a growing little city near a big nature preserve. We anticipate tourism in its future. We opened the Fianar Portico Magnifico three years ago.”

“I think I’ve read of Dr. Talmadge,” Tom said uncertainly. “I’m curious, sir. Did he mention how he was able to discover such a small body?”

Demburton gave Tom a look that was mildly shrewd. “Why do you say ‘small,’ Tom? I didn’t use that word.”

“You sure did, Felton,” languidly objected Neil Gerard. “I heard you use it just the other day. I’m not saying it’s, wha?
important
that you did. Just trying to
stickle
. You can’t build this future stuff on word-stupidity. I’ve always said that. Or at least I’m saying it
now
. As you can hear. Hunh.”

After a kindly pause that avoided eye contact, Demburton continued. “It
is
rather compact, I’m told. Something like ten miles across. Talmadge said the weight—I mean
mass
—is promising as to our purpose.”

“I also said that,” added Gerard. “In a sense. You have to listen.”

Tom decided to be cautious in further probing and to avoid mentioning the developing plan to visit the planetoid. For the moment he thought it best to not reveal Dr. Jatczak’s discovery. “We’d want to focus on the scientific and technical elements of this sort of project, of course. Gentlemen, no promises yet, but I think you can count on interest by Swift Enterprises. I’m always working on something, but we have no time-critical projects at the moment.”

As Tom had come to fear, Mr. Gerard spoke up. “Time is always critical. Without time... well, where would space
be
?”

There was a split-second pause, rushingly filled.

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Mr. Demburton, shaking Tom’s hand. Mr. Gerard just shook, no exclamation, evidently bored at the prospect that his life’s dream might soon be realized.

As the two began to leave, Demburton waved Gerard ahead and strode back to Tom. He leaned forward and spoke in a near-whisper, with abundant coffee-breath. “Tom, please understand. Neil has always had his own unique way of expressing himself. His thinking is hard to follow at times... well, frequently. But I’m advised that he has substantial legal claim to his work, and his name does mean something to at least a fraction of the public. We keep him close and—keep an eye on him. Feel free to ignore him. As we do. But smile!”

The young inventor did smile, if warily. “It sounds like you’ve written him off, Mr. Demburton.”

“Don’t think ill of us, Tom. He made his real contribution in his youth.”

“They may say the same thing about me.”

“Yes. Well, surely not. Mm—we’d just like you to understand our position.”

“Yes sir,” replied Tom. “I really do understand.”
But I don’t understand everything!
his thought added.

The balance of the day was spent in discussion of the towering new space project. Tom met at length with his father and Jake Aturian, head of the Swift Construction Company affiliate and always something of the more cautious “voice of reason.” They solicited off-the-cuff opinions from the engineering and technical departments, and distributed copies of Neil Gerard’s many yellowing articles for comment. “We’ll have to look very carefully for ways to build the science into this kind of years-long voyage around the sun,” noted Mr. Swift. “But even as a ‘stunt,’ it’s an extended experiment in human adaptation to the space environment.”

“And much more than that!” exclaimed his son. “The planetoid could function as a base for research and close-up observation for distant parts of the solar system.”

“Does the planetoid have the right sort of orbit for such a research effort?”

The young inventor grinned broadly. “Well—maybe not
yet
!”

Tom ended his long day back in the Security office, for a brief head’s-up meeting with Ames and his assistant, Phil Radnor. The latter said, “Skipper, I don’t think I’m tracking you on this. What’s the worry about Demburton having gotten early word on the Follower asteroid?”

Harlan Ames smiled. “Come on, Rad. Worry is a good policy around here.”

“All too true,” chuckled Tom ruefully. “It just seems unexpected—surprising—that this fellow in Madagascar happened across such a hard-to-find object just before Dr. Jatczak, probably the world’s greatest astronomer, discovered it. Dr. Jatzak’s instruments are ultra-sensitive and very advanced, and his post on Nestria gives him a tremendous advantage in this case.”

“In other words,” said Radnor, “coincidence is getting stretched like taffy. Usually an early-warning signal for trouble on its way.”

“The Madagascar connection, and what looks like a link to the island raiders by way of this Bose family—all very striking,” pronounced Ames. “An attack on a spaceport, a proposal for a space project. And what links them together?—”

Tom completed the thought. “Space.”

“About the
emptiest
clue there is.”

Over the next several days, as contracts were debated and ultimately signed, Tom and his talented engineering team worked on their ongoing enterprise, the durathermor system and its application, the duratherm wing. “Look at this!” Tom told Bud jokingly, handing him a sheet on which long strings of formulae had been written.

Bud looked it up and down. “Mm-hmm. Must be what they call free-form poetry.”

His friend laughed affectionately. “Poetry in motion! If the muses are with me, this Durafoam reformulation is all we’ll need to get rid of that burnout problem with the durathermor.”

The final reformulation tested out satisfactorily. The problem with the heat terminals handled, Tom was at last able to send up a small model of the D-Wing, designed by Arv Hanson, for a brief, crucial test in space.

As the tiny booster rocket flamed into the Shopton sky from Enterprises, Tom and Bud rushed to the monitoring station. “Everything right on the button!” the young inventor announced happily. Presently came the word, via telemetry, that the D-Wing model was in low Earth orbit. Tom let it make one circuit of the Earth; then, as began to draw near again, he turned the monitoring and control operation over to Hanson and Hank Sterling. “C’mon, pal,” he said to Bud. “Let’s watch the test on the megascope!”

The two hastened to the plant’s domed observatory building, where Tom’s father awaited them beneath the towering column of rings that formed the antenna for Tom’s electronic space prober.

“All set and ready,” declared Damon Swift, pointing at the megascope’s circular screen. In the middle of the screen, between the sea of stars and the blazing blue of the earth, floated a small silver-white cone.

“So that’s your ‘rocket in distress’!” nodded Bud.

“Now for the Sir Galahad rescue!” Tom checked his handheld monitoring unit, called a Spektor. “Coming up...
mark
!”

They watched the screen tensely. For a moment nothing changed. “Of course we’re seeing this in ‘real time’,” muttered Mr. Swift, “Faster than the control signal from the plant—”

“
There it goes!
” Bud cheered.

From the underside of the cone, the side facing the world beneath, a sort of “tongue” of dull-colored material leapt out into space, swelling before three pairs of eyes with startling speed. In less than two seconds it had assumed a shape like the tapering head of a javelin, though with a blunted nose that turned slightly upward. Two guidance control booms jutted out behind.