20 Aug 2010

TSJ #36, Chapter 6: The Chariklo Centaur

Posted by joncooper

THE COSMOTRON EXPRESS ARRIVED two hours later, ready to accept the Kranjovian prisoners and transport them back to Earth. Harlan Ames, the security chief at Swift Enterprises, transferred the soldiers to the other spaceship. “They’ll be taken into custody as soon as we land,” he promised Tom. “The State Department is very interested in questioning them.”

“You’ll never get anything out of us!” General Volnas screamed. “All hail the glorious might of Kranjovia! You will regret this, Tom Swift! I will have my revenge!”

“We’ve heard that tune before,” Bud said, yawning. “Honestly, it’s getting a bit old. You should be more creative! Try something different.”

“You have a big mouth, but an empty head,” the general sneered. “The doom of your country is inevitable. We will dance on your graves.”

“You’ve got it backwards,” Harlan replied. “The dictatorship in Kranjovia is highly unstable. Your fearless leader’s policies have caused the Kranjovians to be in an eternal state of unrest. Declaring war on the United States really wasn’t the smartest thing for him to do.”

“The Kranjovians declared war?” Tom asked, surprised.

“A group of Kranjovian soldiers attacked a spaceship of the United States,” Harlan explained. “Our government has decided to interpret that as an act of war.”

“You’ll never defeat us!” General Volnas screamed. “Your pitiful forces will be crushed by our superior might!”

“We don’t have to defeat you,” Harlan replied. “You’re doing that all by yourself! Once your people realized that its leaders had declared war on a nation that had space aliens for allies, they began rioting in the streets. Even your army is in a state of panic! By the end of the day your government will be overthrown and the United States won’t have had to fire a single shot.”

“Nice going!” Bud told the general. “That’ll definitely earn you a spot in the Kranjovian Hall of Fame.”

The general continued to shout incoherent threats as Harlan marched them off to his ship. Bud leaned back in his chair and smiled. “You know, that went pretty well.”

“It did,” Tom grinned. “That’s probably the last we’ll see of him! There’s no time to rest on our laurels, though. We’ve got a date with a centaur that I don’t want to miss!”

“A what?” Bud asked, puzzled. “When did we start dating mythological creatures?”

“You’ll see,” Tom said mysteriously.

Tom and Bud spent the next two days working on the claytronic stones. Tom spent his time in the laboratory while Bud dismantled the kronolator and brought its pieces to Tom. The young inventor worked feverishly on his latest idea, often staying up far into the night.

By the end of the second day Bud had finally finished taking apart the kronolator. He brought its last piece into Tom’s laboratory and wearily sank down into an overstuffed chair. Bud glanced around the lab and saw that it was in complete disarray. Electronic components were strewn all over the floor, and a complicated mess of tubes, wires, and circuits covered the workbench. At the far end of the room a giant aquarium had been converted into a holding tank for an unidentified green goo.

“So what’s this all about, skipper?” Bud asked. “Why did we chop up your greatest invention and scatter its parts all over the floor?”

Tom grinned. “Sorry about that. I’m usually not this messy but there just wasn’t anywhere else to put it. The Challenger is a pretty big ship, but laboratory space is still at a premium. Parts that are on the floor are easy to find.

“In answer to your question, though, this is all about the claytronic stones. The problem with them has always been that the reaction takes far too long. Turning a vat of goo into a bicycle isn’t nearly as useful if it takes a week to complete. The Barclay Group wants me to grow entire cities with this stuff. Do you have any idea how long that would take?”

“A month of Sundays?” Bud asked.

Tom laughed. “More like a year of Sundays. In fact, our Sun might burn out before it finished! But with the time distortion field everything changes. If I can control time then it doesn’t really matter how long something takes. Sure, it’ll still take three days for the stones to take on a new shape, but if three days inside the field are just a few moments outside the field then it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I get it,” Bud replied. “So you’re trying to build a portable time dilator so that the stones can work inside the field?”

Tom shook his head. “Not really. These are replicating stones, remember. What I want is for the stones to produce their own time dilator as they expand. Otherwise they’d replicate until they reached the end of the time field and then stop. My work has been focusing on simplifying the time dilator to something that the stones could replicate on their own.”

“Sounds like a plan!” Bud said. “But how does the smoke fit in?”

“What smoke?” Tom asked, puzzled. He turned his head and saw a column of smoke billowing in one corner of the lab. His eyes widened. “That’s not a part of the experiment – that’s a fire!”

“Then why didn’t the fire alarms go off?”

“Oh no!” Tom exclaimed. He watched as the beaker that had been smoldering caught fire. Flames climbed toward the ceiling. Am ember landed on a nearby chair and quickly caught fire. “We took the smoke detectors out when we were rebuilt the lab, and they never got replaced! Bud – go pull the fire alarm in the hall while I put this thing out!”

As Bud raced outside the lab Tom searched the room for a fire extinguisher. The flames quickly consumed the leather chair and spread to the bookcase, torching Tom’s collection of scientific journals. In the flickering firelight Tom spied an extinguisher mounted on the back wall. He grabbed it, removed the pin, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Tom glanced at the gauge and saw that it had no pressure. A quick examination revealed why – a hole had been punched all the way through the wall of the container.

“Must have been damaged in the battle with the Space Legion,” Tom muttered. He tossed it aside and glanced around the room in panic, as the flames drew nearer to the invention on his workbench. Smoke began clouding the room, making it difficult to breathe.

A moment later the fire alarm went off. Sirens echoed down the corridor and red lights flashed. Bud raced back into the room. “What do we do now, skipper?”

“We get out of here!” Tom shouted. He and Bud ran out of the room. Tom slammed the door behind them and quickly pressed a series of buttons on a nearby panel. As crewmembers began racing toward them they heard a huge sucking sound coming from inside the lab. Tom could hear glass breaking and pieces of equipment smashing into each other.

“What did you do?” Bud shouted over the deafening noise.

“I vented the lab’s air into space,” Tom explained. “Fires need oxygen to burn. With the air vented the fire won’t have any fuel and will go out. I just can’t believe I didn’t have working fire-fighting equipment in the lab. That was a terrible oversight.”

“Especially since your father invented his own fire-fighting equipment,” Bud needled. “You really should carry some of his fire-fighting pellets with you.”

“I normally do,” Tom replied, sighing. “It’s just one of those things I didn’t think about when planning this trip.”

“I guess even geniuses can’t think of everything,” Bud replied, grinning.

After Tom was sure the fire had gone out the young inventor repressurized the room and opened the door. He shook his head when he saw the damage. The far left of the room had been scorched by the blaze, turned into a pile of ashes and ruined equipment. Other instruments had been violently thrown around when the air was evacuated from the room, causing glass and bits of broken electronics to be strewn about. “At least the workbench didn’t catch fire,” Tom remarked. “That’s something.”

After sending the crew out to find a working fire-extinguisher, Tom and Bud started cleaning up the lab. By the next morning they had returned the room to working order. The crew was able to locate a box of Mr. Swift’s fire-fighting pellets, which Tom gratefully placed in a cabinet on the wall.

“What are you going to do about the burnt furniture?” Bud asked.

“I’ll just replace it after we get back to Fearing Island,” Tom replied. “Right now it’s not important. The good news is that my stones are back in working order – and just in time for our date with the centaur!”

Tom left the lab and headed up to the bridge. Bud followed. When they made it to the bridge Tom walked over to Donnie McGinnis, who was at the helm. “We’re almost there, skipper,” Donnie reported. “You can already see her on the scope. We should be touching down on Chariklo in less than twenty minutes.”

“The centaur is a rock?” Bud asked.

“Exactly,” Tom replied. “As you know, the main asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter. However, there are also a number of asteroids that orbit between Jupiter and Neptune. These asteroids are called centaurs. Their orbits are usually unstable. We’re headed for a centaur named Chariklo, which is about 160 miles across – a pretty good sized-rock!”

“And it’s way out here?” Bud asked.

Tom nodded. “Its orbit actually follows Uranus pretty closely. I thought it would be a great place to test the claytronic stones. We can just set them down on the surface and let them replicate. With luck, they should be able to use the minerals in the asteroid to reproduce themselves.”

Donnie landed the Challenger on Chariklo without incident. Tom and Bud put on spacesuits and carried boxes of equipment out to the surface of the asteroid. The rock was a light-gray planetoid with a heavily-cratered surface. Boulders of all sizes were strewn about, with a fine layer of dust covering everything. All around them was the vacuum of space, dark and unforgiving. A few weak stars could be seen. The sun was a small yellow dot, barely noticeable.

“Not much to look at,” Bud remarked. “I can’t say this is an inviting place.”

Tom nodded. “It does seem to lack many of the comforts of home. But it’ll work just fine for our experiment.”

As the two boys carried the carried the equipment away from the ship Bud noticed how difficult it was to walk.“There’s really not much gravity on this rock,” Bud commented.

“It’s almost negligible,” Tom agreed. “But our magnetic boots seem to be working. Luckily this asteroid has a high-iron content. We should be fine.”

The two teenagers walked about a tenth of a mile away from the Challenger. They set the boxes on the ground and began emptying them. Tom took out his time dilator and began connecting it. When he was ready he set a container of green goo next to it and stepped back about 100 feet.

“So what’s going to happen?” Bud asked, as Tom took a remote control out of his spacesuit pocket.

“For this first experiment I’m not going to try anything complicated,” Tom replied. “All I want to do is see how quickly the stones can replicate themselves. The time dilator has an effective radius of about fifteen feet. If this works, the stones should replicate both themselves and the dilator until they cover a radius of fifty feet.” Tom’s eyes glowed with excitement. “We should be able to watch the stones replicate in real-time – right before our very eyes!”

Bud nodded. “Sounds good, genius boy! Let’s see what these stones can do.”

Tom pressed a button on the remote. The time dilator glowed to life! A second later the area surrounding the dilator was plunged into darkness.

“Of course,” Tom muttered. “I knew that. We can’t actually see through the dilation field. But the stones should be replicating inside.”

“How will we know if–” Bud suddenly stopped as he noticed the black field start to grow. It expanded slowly at first, but its pace picked up over time.

“It’s working!” Tom cried enthusiastically. “The stones have to be replicating. The time field is expanding!”

He watched eagerly as the radius of darkness expanded to twenty, then thirty, then forty feet. When it hit fifty feet he turned to Bud. “It works! It’s even better than I’d hoped.”

Bud nudged Tom. “Isn’t it supposed to stop?”

Tom looked back at the field and frowned. The black field continued expanding beyond fifty feet. “That’s odd,” he remarked. “It’s supposed to shut itself off after fifty feet. Oh well – I’ll just kill the reaction.”

He pressed a button on the remote. Nothing happened. His eyes suddenly widened. “Bud – the kill signal can’t get through the edge of the time field!”

Tom and Bud took a few steps back. The black field continued creeping toward them.

Bud looked at Tom in horror. “You mean there’s no way to stop it?”

“That’s exactly what I mean! Run for your life!

The two began sprinting toward the Challenger. The black field expanded behind them. Within moments it was just a few feet away!

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