Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon (2 page)

"It has not to do with the school, no. It is this." Petar paused, gathering difficult thoughts. "My older brother, Samimel, works for COSMOSA. You know of that?"

Tom nodded. "Yes, the agency of your government in charge of space and rocketry, like our NASA. I met people from COSMOSA up on Nestria—the astronauts with Col. Mirov."

Nestria was Earth’s tiny new moon, an asteroid that Tom had landed on and begun exploring in the name of the United States, as recounted in
Tom Swift on The Phantom Satellite.

"Samimel works there; computer work," continued Petar. "Sometimes he hears things, or intercepts messages—computer messages. He does not try to, but it happens. Late one night, just before we left for America, he called me from a phone at a restaurant, a place in the country. He was very upset—what do you say?—
distraught.
You know?"

"Yes."

"He said, one of the messages, he thinks it came from a secret group, scientists who work for COSMOSA but also meet in secret. There is a group in my country,
i-Szentimentalya—
that is to say, the Sentimentalists. They wish to bring back the old way, the government as it was before."

"I’ve heard of them," Tom said. "It’s thought they have sympathizers planted in the current government."

"Some say so, yes. The planted persons are those who think they would benefit if the new democracy were overthrown. But the point is, Samimel told me that this group has made radio contact with the space people, the ones you call your space friends!"

Tom suppressed a gasp of surprise at the news. Ever since these friendly scientists from another planet had guided a missile to Swift Enterprises bearing a message, they had chosen to communicate only with Tom, whom they seemed to trust, or with the young inventor’s father. Though the world knew of the alien beings, their messages, now sent by radio in symbolic form, had normally been directed to special receiving equipment at Swift Enterprises or, on occasion, to Swift spacecraft. The thought that the anti-democratic Sentimentalists faction might be in touch with the space friends was deeply disturbing.

Petar seemed to read the expression in Tom’s eyes. "It is bad, yes. But there is worse."

"Tell me."

"Samimel thinks a ship, a capsule, is being sent to us from space. Tom, it contains sick animals, animals dying of a disease that could pass on to the living cells of earth creatures and kill them—all of them!
Like an epidemic!"

Tom Swift felt the horror of the idea! "If it can really cross over from alien life-forms to our kind of life, we would have no defense against it. But why would the space friends do such a thing?"

"I think—Samimel thinks—the secret scientists have made promises to help them, as if they knew about such diseases and could cure it for the space people. But Tom, listen to me, they will use it as a threat against the government, against the whole world!"

"I understand," said Tom quietly. "Does your brother know you were going to tell me all this?"

"He knew I was to come here and begged me to tell you, to convince you! And then—"

"What else, Petar?"

Tears sprung into the young Brungarian’s eyes. "I tried to call Samimel when I got to America, but they said he was sick, in a hospital. When I called there, they had no record! I—I am much afraid—they have killed him." Tom grasped his hand in sympathy. "And now I have told you all I know. Take me back to the others now, please. Surely the professor, Atkossov, is already suspicious."

They stood. Tom looked the other in the eye. "You’re very brave, Petar. I hope your brother is all right, but whatever might have happened, I know he’d be proud of you."

In deep silence Tom guided Petar Nevolyan back to the tour group, meeting up with them at the big observatory dome at the edge of the plant. "The doctor says he’ll be fine," Tom told the overseer of the group, who nodded but gave Tom a suspicious look.

As the tour went on along its way, Tom motioned for Bud to stay behind. As they began to ridewalk back to the main lab building, Bud nudged his friend. "Okay, Tom, that fishy smell in the air isn’t from Chow’s catfish stew. It looked to me like that guy knocked over those slides deliberately."

"Ten points for Barclay," Tom confirmed.

"What’s it all about?"

Tom told Bud the story, speaking carefully and calmly. "We don’t know how much of it’s true, if any of it is," he concluded. "But if Petar was play-acting, he’s mighty good at it."

"An epidemic from outer space!" Bud boggled. "What do you plan to do?"

"The first step is pretty obvious," said the young inventor. "Contact our space friends!"

The two friends hurried to the space communications center that had been established in the airfield control tower. Here the imaging oscilloscope, which translated the signals received by the experimental magnifying antenna into visual form, was located. The center was staffed round the clock by specialists trained in the mathematical symbol-code used by the friendly beings, the team supervised by Nels Gachter, a brilliant student of the application of mathematical logic to communications theory.

"Tom! Bud!" Nels exclaimed as the boys rushed in. "You have the look of someone expecting an important message—or wanting to send one."

"I hope she’s all warmed up, Nels," said Tom. "We need to transmit something immediately."

"The transmitter awaits you," replied Gachter with a smile. "Mars is getting a bit low on the horizon, but you still have a fair window, perhaps forty minutes." The alien scientists had hinted that they operated from a scientific base in orbit about the red planet.

Tom frowned. "It may take longer than that just to put the message together. But we can relay the signal through the space outpost; they almost always have a line-of-sight to Mars."

"I’ll contact Major Horton immediately." Ken Horton was the commander of the famous Swift Enterprises space station.

Tom sat down to work at a computer flatscreen, Bud at his elbow. "What exactly are you going to say, Tom?" he asked.

Tom looked at his friend soberly. When Bud called him by his first name, instead of a nickname like
genius boy
or
skipper,
it was a sign the matter at hand was grave indeed! "I need to tell them, as briefly as possible, about the report we’ve received. And if it’s true what Nevolyan said, I have to make them understand that what they’re doing is dangerous!"

"Who knows if these guys even understand concepts like
danger
or
good and evil,"
muttered the dark-haired young pilot. "We don’t even know what kind of bodies they have—if they have bodies at all!"

"We know they understand
danger
in some sense or other," commented the young inventor as he adjusted the computer controls. "Don’t forget, they’ve warned us about it before. They attach some sort of value to life. But there’s another big problem on top of all that."

"What problem?"

"If the Brungarian faction is already in communication with the space friends, they may be able to pick up our own outgoing signals as well. We’ve got to figure out a way to get our message through without saying anything that would put Petar or his brother in danger."

"I get it," said Bud. But he lay a hand on his pal’s wrist. "And I know something else, Tom, and so do you. We may just have to take that risk. Because it sounds like it could come down to those two lives versus the lives of every living thing on Earth!"

TOM NOW set his formidable young mind to the difficult task before him. Communication between earthly humans and the other-planetary scientists was based upon complicated visible symbols that represented universal concepts in mathematics and logic, concepts that were presumed to be the same on any world, anywhere in space or time. As interpreted by Tom and his father, these concepts paralleled concepts in the natural languages of society.

Yet it seemed there were many barriers to understanding, many unexpected difficulties. So much of human communication depended upon a prior familiarity with ordinary human institutions, human needs, and human emotions. The space friends had none of these, so far as was known. Their mode of society was as unknown as the form of their bodies, their scientific technology as strange and inexplicable as magic. Even their motives in making contact with our planet were far from clear.

And now, somehow, Tom Swift had to construct a message of the gravest importance, understandable to those meant to receive it, but completely opaque to mankind’s earthly enemies!

He muttered, half to himself and half to Bud, as he worked out the various figures on the flatscreen, consulting frequently with the "space dictionary," a computerized record of symbols previously used which had been compiled by Tom and his father, Damon Swift. "Let’s see, I can use the same cluster of symbols they used to signify ‘danger’ when they transmitted that warning to us in the
Star Spear
. And I can pair their symbol for negation, or reversal, with the shapes we’ve interpreted to mean ‘friend’ or ‘friendly,’ as when they say ‘we are friends’."

"I see," Bud remarked, not intending to provoke an answer. "That’s their call-sign—like a signature."

"They’ve talked about the environment for life often enough," murmured Tom, "and here, I think I can abstract part of this cluster to represent bodily health… something like ‘completion’ or ‘satisfaction of the equation’…" Perspiration broke out on the young inventor’s forehead as he focused his concentration to the utmost. Finally he gave a sharp nod and flashed Bud a grin of triumph.

"Done!" he exclaimed. "That wasn’t too bad. How long did it take, flyboy? About an hour?"

Bud chuckled. "About three! So what did you come up with?"

Tom showed his pal the translated message on the screen, reminding him that it was only an approximation of the intended meaning.

TOM SWIFT TO SPACE FRIENDS. DATA RECEIVED CONCERNING ARRIVAL OF LIFE FORMS UNABLE TO MAINTAIN LIFE FUNCTIONS. CAUSAL FACTOR MAY BE DANGER TO ALL LIFE HERE. NEW METHODS NECESSARY TO SOLVE PROBLEM. RESTRICT COMMUNICATION TO THIS SOURCE! AWAIT YOUR REPLY.

"Wow! Not bad!" exclaimed Bud admiringly. "I almost understand it myself! You’re telling them the diseased animals are a danger to us, and they need a better plan."

"Exactly! And I’m hoping my wording will suggest to any ‘eavesdroppers’ that we’ve
already
exchanged messages with the space friends on the subject, as if this were a follow-up." He pointed with his finger to the exclamation mark ending the next-to-last sentence. "I used their ‘exponentiation’ symbol to give emphasis and urgency, as they have done in the past."

"I remember," Bud said excitedly. "So let’s send it off and see what happens!"

With the assistance of Nels Gachter Tom fed the array of symbols into the messaging computer, which beamed it off into space via the big antenna. In moments they received confirmation that the signal had been relayed by the outpost in space.

Then came the most difficult phase of all—waiting. As the long afternoon became longer, Tom and Bud grabbed sandwiches for a late lunch, but remained close to the communications center. At four eighteen the alert-bell rang on the translating computer, and the boys rushed up to the screen in great excitement. A cluster of the strange hieroglyphs appeared on the imaging oscilloscope’s readout monitor. Beneath the symbols appeared the computer’s tentative translation, derived from the space dictionary.

RESPONSE FORTHCOMING

"Good night!" Bud grumbled. "All that time for a dinky message like
that?"

Tom gave his pal a friendly poke. "Patience, space cadet! Most of that time was just transit time to their base and back again. With something this complex, it may take hours or even days for them to put together—" Tom was interrupted in midsentence as the alert-bell rang again!

Gachter’s eyes widened. "Another message already!"

TO TOM SWIFT. WE ARE FRIENDS. A CONDITION OF DANGER

There the translation stopped and a buzzer sounded. Tom sighed. "No surprise—new symbols that the computer can’t even guess at! I’ll put them on the flatscreen and see what I can come up with."

Tom’s experience in interpreting the space beings’ mode of thought seemed to lend skill and speed to his efforts. By supper time he had put together what seemed a reasonable continuation of the interrupted message from space, which he showed to Bud and to his father, who had arrived in the meantime and had been briefed on the developing crisis.

A CONDITION OF DANGER HAS DEVELOPED ON OUR PLANET OF ORIGIN. THE LIFE FUNCTIONS OF FORMS OF ALL KINDS HAVE BEEN IMPAIRED BY COMPONENT UNITS ALTERING MASSED LIFE STRUCTURES FROM WITHIN. ALTERNATE SOURCE ON YOUR PLANET REPLIED TO FIRST MESSAGE. IN CONSEQUENCE A SPECIMEN CONTAINER WAS SENT BY OUR ####. WE ARE NOT ABLE TO ACT TO PREVENT THE COMPLETION OF ITS SEQUENCE. CONTAINER COURSE WILL TERMINATE AT #### SEVENTEEN ROTATIONS. SOLVE FOR POSITIVE RESULTANT IF YOU ARE ABLE. NO COMMUNICATION PENDING RESOLUTION.

"Great day!" muttered Tom’s father in grim astonishment. "A terrible predicament."

"What about those two squiggles in the middle of the translation?" Bud asked. "What’s
that
supposed to mean?"

"Untranslatable symbol clusters," explained Tom. "At least Dad and I can’t make them out on our first attempts."

"But we do have a few likely ideas, son," Damon Swift reminded him. "The first term suggests something dominating or controlling, perhaps a word like
authorities
or even
masters."

"In other words, the guys in charge back home," Bud said.

"Right," confirmed Tom. "And it seems the local group of scientists—the ones based at the Martian station—won’t, or can’t, block what the others have already set in motion. As to the second unknown term—"

Tom exchanged glances with his father.

"What is it? Where’s the thing going to come down?" Bud demanded nervously.

"The most likely translation," began Mr. Swift, "is along the lines of ‘the mass in orbital period of thirty rotations’."