Tom Swift Jr #34, Chapter 5: A Matter of Time

“What are you going to do, Tom?” Sandy asked.

Tom folded up the note and placed it in his pocket. “Don’t worry about it, Sis,” he said gently. He noticed the apprehensive look on the girls’ faces and decided to downplay the incident. “This isn’t the first time we’ve faced threats, but we’ve always beaten them in the end. I’ll give this note to Harlan and let his team investigate it. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

The girls insisted on returning to Swift Enterprises immediately, so the group piled into the car. Bud drove them back to the plant, where he dropped Tom off and then left to take the girls back home. Tom, meanwhile, went to see Harlan Ames. When he heard Tom’s story he shook his head. “You seem to have a real knack for getting into trouble!”

“Do you think you could check into this note for me?” Tom asked.

Ames nodded. “I’ll see what I can do, but it’ll probably lead to a dead end. Have you had any ideas on who might be behind this?”

“I’m afraid not, Ames. We’ve just never had this kind of trouble before. The Black Cobra was never very interested in our space friends, and the Brungarians would be more likely to steal from them than stop us from communicating with them. I think this is some entirely new foe.”

“You’re probably right. I’m guessing it’s a small group of people pursuing some xenophobic agenda. It sounds like they just wanted to give you a warning this time, but I doubt they’ll be that forgiving again. Be careful, Tom.”

“I will, Ames. Say, has anyone made a public announcement about the interstellar voyage I’m working on?”

“Not to my knowledge. The public relations department doesn’t usually issue press releases without your approval.”

“Then let’s keep his new project under wraps. I’m guessing that this party, whoever it is, knows that I’ve been communicating with our space friends but possibly isn’t aware of the particulars. The less they know the better.”

Next, Tom walked over to his father’s private office. He found Tom Sr. at his desk, hard at work. When Tom walked in his father stopped what he was doing and looked up. “Tom! How have you been?”

Tom smiled. “Not too bad, considering. I hate to bother you, but I wanted to see if you ever resent my message to our space friends.”

Tom Sr. thought for a moment. “Why yes, I did! The message was resent about an hour after you asked me to do it. Did I never get back with you?”

Tom Jr. shook his head. “I don’t think so – or if you did, I missed it.”

“I’m sorry about that, Son. I haven’t been this busy in years, what with my work on the fusion project.” Tom Sr. started digging around in the piles of paper on his desk, looking for a particular memo. “First there were the experiments to learn how to fuse helium 3, and then I had to get the lunar colonies built, and then there were the long talks with Ned about pursuing commercial opportunities… ah, here we go.”

Tom Sr. grabbed a piece of paper out of a thick stack, looked at it with satisfaction, and then handed it to his son. The note read as follows:

THE EXACT LOCATION OF THE DEVICE IS NOT KNOWN. IT CAN BE LOCATED BY SEARCHING FOR THE FOLLOWING ENERGY SIGNATURE:

The remainder of the message was a series of numbers.

Tom Jr. studied the numbers carefully. “I’m guessing that the device emits an electromagnetic signal on this frequency. Our space friends want us to locate it by scanning for that band of radiation. Is that your guess, Dad?”

Tom Sr. nodded. “You should be able to use the damonscope for that. After all, it was designed for precisely that kind of work.” The damonscope was a device built by Tom Jr. to detect faint amounts of underground radiation from high altitudes.

“I think that will work. Thanks, Dad!”

A week later, Bud found Tom sitting in his private laboratory, adding wires to a delicate piece of circuitry. Bud looked at his lab with astonishment. “Good night! What happened here, skipper?”

Tom laid down the soldering iron he was holding and looked up from his work. It was easy for him to understand Bud’s reaction. One entire wall of Tom’s lab had been demolished, and a construction crew was hard at work laying long strands of thick cables. Large sections of the laboratory floor were missing, and pieces of lumber and other construction debris were scattered everywhere. Bud could hear the sounds of a large-scale excavation project coming from beneath the office.

The young inventor got off his chair and walked over to greet his friend. “So there you are! I haven’t seen you around for a few days. What have you been up to?”

Bud shook his head. “I’ve been testing the new X-318’s, remember? Hank Sterling just finished the first production units earlier this week, and I was asked to try them out.”

“That’s right! I’d forgotten all about it. Those are the new repelatron-powered commercial jets! How are they?”

“They’re a real blast to fly!” Bud said enthusiastically. “There’s no doubt about it – you’ve got another winner on your hands. I bet they’ll sell like hotcakes!”

Tom nodded. “They should be much safer than normal craft, to say nothing of the energy savings gained from switching from jet fuel to solar batteries. Traditional aircraft are fragile by their very nature, but it should be almost impossible for an X-318 to fall of the sky. The safety factor that’s been built into them is considerable. But you know I didn’t design them, right?”

Bud looked at him curiously. “You didn’t? Then who did?”

Tom laughed. “I’m not the only employee at Swift Enterprises, Bud! We’ve got thousands of highly talented people working for us. That particular project was actually spearheaded by my sister Sandy. She has quite a talent for aviation, and thought it was time to bring aeronautics into the modern era.”

“Wow! I guess inventing runs in the family. But what on earth is going on in this lab?”

Tom paused to look at the chaos that had descended upon his private laboratory. “I guess the simplest explanation is that I’m trying to lay the groundwork for my latest invention. My old laboratory just didn’t have everything it needed, so I’m doing a bit of remodeling.”

Bud pulled up a chair and sat down. “Tell me all about it, professor. What’s been going on?”

“Well, let’s see. First, a few days ago I met with Dad and asked him to upgrade the test fusion reactor he built here at the plant. I’m going to need a lot of power for my next invention, and our current power grid won’t be able to handle it. Fortunately, it won’t be difficult for him to make the modifications that are necessary for his test equipment to produce commercial levels of power.”

Bud’s eyes grew large. “Tom, do you realize that just one of your father’s new power plants can produce enough energy to power all of North America? Just how much energy do you need?”

“All I can get, fly boy! I’ve also asked Dad to install a miniatured fusion plant on board the Challenger. He’s not going to remove its solar-power cells, but sunlight alone can’t provide the energy we need, so an additional power source is necessary. This will also make it easier for the craft to travel in places where there isn’t a good supply of sunlight.”

“So you’re not going to build a new spacecraft?”

Tom shook his head. “I wish I could, but there’s just not enough time. It’s much quicker to upgrade the Challenger than to design a new spacecraft.”

“That’s too bad, Tom! I was hoping you were going to create a new starship. You could have called it the Exedra.”

Tom looked puzzled. “I could have called it what?”

“It was just an idea. But say, you haven’t explained what’s happened to your lab!”

“Well, Bud, as I was saying, my new invention needs power – incredible amounts of power. The construction crew over there is laying the superconducting cables that will connect my test equipment to Dad’s fusion reactor.”

“Superconducting cables?”

Tom nodded. “They make it possible to transfer enormous amounts of electricity with very little loss. I’m going to need every last ounce of power I can get!”

“But why are they digging under the lab?”

“I’m going to need a place to test my prototypes, Bud. I could do that outside, but with all the recent attacks I thought it might be best to conduct my tests underground. They’re digging a tunnel that will be about four miles long. In interstellar terms it’s pretty tiny, but it will be enough to see if the principle is sound.”

Bud nodded. “I understand. Speaking of that, you never did explain to me the brilliant brain-wave that you had at Lake Carlopa. Just how are you going to break the light barrier? And please keep it simple! Not everyone has a four-digit IQ.”

Tom laughed. “I’ll start at the beginning. The alien planet is 367 light-years away, and we want to get there and back in a reasonable amount of time. Say that we want to make the trip in just one year. In reality we’d like to make the voyage much quicker than that, but I’ll be generous. In order to travel those 367 light-years in just one year we would have to travel 367 times the speed of light. That works out to a speed of just over 68 million miles per second.”

“Wow! Now that’s fast. Can it be done?”

Tom shook his head. “The laws of physics dictate a maximum possible speed of 186,000 miles per second, which is a snail’s pace when it comes to crossing interstellar distances. So I started looking at alternate explanations.”

“Like wormholes?” Bud asked.

“That was one of my very first ideas. Instead of trying to travel 367 light-years, you simply find a shortcut through the fourth dimension. The problem is that there really isn’t a good way to create a wormhole. Even if you could come up with the exotic forms of matter a wormhole needs in order to exist, the energy requirements for creating it are truly astronomical. We’re not just talking about a single fusion reactor, Bud. It would take more like the combined yearly output of energy from every single star in our entire galaxy. It’s completely out of the question.”

“You’re not kidding! So what was the answer?”

Tom eyes sparkled with excitement. “I realized I’d been looking at the problem all wrong! We don’t actually care about how far we are traveling. What really concerns us is the amount of time it takes to get there. So, instead of trying to manipulate space, we’ll just manipulate time instead. Or, rather, the rate at which time advances.”

“What do you mean?” Bud asked quizzically.

“Imagine, Bud, if you could alter the flow of time while you were traveling along in space, so that only one day passed instead of thousands of years. You’re still traveling the same distance, but it doesn’t take as long because you’ve slowed down time itself!”

Bud frowned. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, professor, but isn’t that exactly what happens when you travel close to the speed of light?”

“Not quite!” Tom said. “As your speed approaches the speed of light time does slow down, but only for you. Time continues passing normally for everyone else. It may only take you a few days to get there, but hundreds of years would have passed back home. Our space friends don’t have hundreds of years, Bud.”

“So there’s an alternative?”

“I believe there is! I’m working on a device that will temporarily take us out of the Universe’s time stream. We’ll still be able to travel, but we’ll be advancing into the future much slower than we would have ordinarily.”

Bud frowned. “So you’re building a time machine?”

Tom shook his head. “Time machines allow you to travel backwards in time. My invention changes the rate at which you are moving into the future. It’s completely different.”

“If you say so, skipper! It’s all way over my head. Do you have a name for your miracle machine?”

“For now I’m calling it a kronolator. It comes from the Greek word “kronos”, which means time, and the word dilate. Essentially the machine will allow us to dilate, or stretch out, time itself.”

Bud stood up. “I still don’t think I understand it, but if you say it works then that’s good enough for me! When can we start testing?”

Tom laughed. “Right now all I’ve got are a bunch of ideas and half-built parts, Bud. In a few days the changes to the lab should be complete. Come back then and we’ll put it through its paces!”

The young inventor worked feverishly over the next few days, rarely even stopping long enough to sleep. Days came and went while Tom paid little heed to the outside world. His mind was completely consumed with the intricate problem that was before him. Even the construction noises that surrounded him were insufficient to break his intense concentration.

Chow attempted to coax Tom to eat, but the food the cook brought him was often left uneaten on his workbench. One evening he came in to bring his boss supper and saw that that the young man had not yet touched the lunch he had brought earlier. The sight was more than the cook could stand.

“Well brand my skillet, Tom, but you gotta to eat sometime! This here work of yours just ain’t healthy. You’re goin’ to make yerself sick!”

Tom looked up from the machine he was calibrating. “What’s that, Chow? Oh, did you come to bring lunch?”

“Lunch! Now look here, son. I brought lunch five hours ago. It’s still right where I left it! Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Tom saw the tray in the cook’s hand and winced. “Sorry about that, Chow. My mind’s been busy lately, I guess.”

“Well get it unbusy, pardner! At this rate you’re gonna waste away to nothin’ before the week is out.”

Tom smiled as the heavyset cook turned around and stomped out of the lab. He quickly finished his dinner and resumed his work. Hours later, the young man stood up and yawned.

“Well, I think that will about do it,” he said tiredly. He looked over his new invention with pride. Tom had assembled the kronolator in the middle of his laboratory floor. The device was an irregular mound of parts, wires, and tubes, roughly cylindrical in shape. It had a diameter of roughly nine feet and a height of six feet. Tom looked at it with great satisfaction.

“That unit won’t take us to the stars, but it should prove the principle. If this works, I can build a much more powerful model and miniaturize a lot of the components. We should be able to fit the production unit inside the Challenger.”

As Tom was about to leave for the night, he suddenly heard a siren go off. Tom instantly recognized the sound. Someone had broken into Swift Enterprises!