TOM SWIFT And The Martian Moon Re-placement BY Victor Appleton II Thackery Fox & Associates Made in The United States of America This book is dedicated to the surgical team in Portland, Oregon who performed my quadruple heart bypass surgery the Friday before Thanksgiving this past year and got me home for Turkey Day. It happened right in the middle of writing this story and sidetracked me for more than a month, They left me with a pair of scars that might have been worse, but they took their time and got me stitched up with minimal visual evidence of them having been inside. Bravo to them and also to my fans who heard about this and wrote those wonderful emails of encouragement. Thanks all! ©opyright 2018 by the author of this book (Victor Appleton II - pseud. of Thomas Hudson). The book author asserts sole copyright to his or her contributions to this book. This book is a work of fan fiction. It is not claimed to be part of any previously published adventures of the main characters. It has been self-published and is not intended to supplant any authored works attributed to the pseudononomous author or to claim the rights of any legitimate publishing entity. However, the publisher claiming copyrights have allowed more than one of the books in their series to drop into Public Domain status and so have relinquished total control over these characters. 2 THE NEW TOM SWIFT INVENTION SERIES Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-placement By Victor Appleton II Small, irregular and rocky Deimos and Phobos circle the Red Planet in tight orbits. One is very close at 5,827 miles above the surface—about from New Delhi, India to Northern Australia— and the other circles at about 23,460 miles—or nearly geosynchronous orbit around the Earth like Tom Swift’s Outpost in Space. Neither is very large and neither appear to be natural moons of the planet, but more likely large asteroids that were once caught in the Martian gravity influence… and just stayed around gathering more materials over the millennia. There is a problem… tiny Phobos and its seven-and-a-half hour orbit has moved. Not a lot‚ perhaps only 170 miles since the last full measurement twelve months earlier, but it seems to be coming closer and far too fast for comfort of the colony on Mars. So, what can go wrong if a chunk of rock less than eight miles wide hits the planet? Or, if the some people have their way, it gets shoved out of orbit and into the Sun and is just no longer an issue? Tom Swift knows that there is a balance to just about everything in the universe and within our own solar system. He is greatly worried about the effects of either solution and now seeks to find a way to stabilize things and understand why the little planetoid has changed its behavior. __________________________________________ This book is dedicated to Asaph Hall who, in 1877 discovered the pair of rocks circling Mars. He called them Phobos (panic or dread) and Deimos (terror) the sons of Ares, Greek god of war (or Mars to the Romans). Neither is perfectly round like our own Moon, and neither has a totally- explained origin or purpose. Also, this is dedicated to Jonathan Swift (no relation) who, in Gulliver’s Travels, speculated about them and came surprisingly close to guessing their sizes. Oh, and that was about 150 years before Hall actually found and named them. Curious or spooky??? 3 Little Phobos traversed an area of the Red Planet some believed had been the impact site of an even smaller moon eons earlier. CHAPTER 13 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS C H A P T E R P A G E 1 Many Ends Tied Up All Nice and Neat 9 2 The Call From Haz 19 3 On-Site Visit 29 4 A Foot or Two 41 5 The First Serious Meetings 51 6 Sandy Shines 61 7 An Initial Landing 71 8 It’s All a Mystery 81 9 Just Get Rid of it, Please! 91 10 The Greater Good… or Not 101 11 The Second Landing 111 12 Earthbound… For a Bit 121 13 A Vicious Cicatrix 131 14 Princess Stephanie of Mars 141 15 The Attack 151 16 Success Comes Before… Aww, Nuts! 161 17 In The Hall of The Lizard Kings 171 18 “You’re in For a Bumpy Ride!” 181 19 One, Final, Continuous Push… or Not 191 20 Life Goes On……… 201 5 AUTHOR’S NOTE The idea for this story came out of the blue as I lay in bed one night in July thinking I had only a few thousand words still to write in the previous book, and after that I did not have a good idea what I wanted to do. Other that write more Tom Swift books. But, to do that you have to have a title invention, a good idea of how Tom is going to build or accomplish it, and one, two or even three (?) well-rested hands to type things with. Sorry, with which to type things (can’t dangle that participle!) I’ve long loved the lore, supposition and now combination of facts (“Mars must have had water in the past”) all the way to crackpot statements (“There’s a face on Mars” and “This picture proves there was a race of giant gorillas on Mars…”) surrounding the Red Planet. It takes a lot to write one book; it takes almost infinite patience to write eight or ten of them. This one is book 23 in the series I have previously told folks I believed might run for up to six books. Total. Book 24? Sure. Why not? All it will take is a good title invention, a really good idea of what Tom will do to solve the problem or accomplish the task and giving my hands—and I only have the two of them—a damn good rest so they can once again glide over the keys on my Macintosh keyboard telling me the story. Oh, haven’t I mentioned this before? My fingers write everything; my brain only keeps them moving. I often believe that if I lost a finger, Tom might develop a stutter. _________________________________ Copies of all of this author’s works may be found at: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/tedwardfoxatyahoodotcom My Tom Swift novels and collections are available on Amazon.com in paperbound and Kindle editions. BarnesAndNoble.com sells Nook ebook editions of many of these same works. 6 Tom Swift and the Martian Moon Re-placement FOREWORD Once upon a time a fellow writer, whose name was a play on the man’s actual name, wrote a series of twenty books about a young man who did incredible things in outer space and on—and under— the Earth who was part of a great organization called UNEXA. That character, Chris Godfrey, had all those adventures as he grew up, took a more management role, and later tried to keep others from repeating mistakes he had made in his early years. One of his adventures included Earth’s moon suddenly coming in closer and closer. People on Earth try to pull together to build a giant repelling device that, at the eleventh hour, fails. But, a hero comes forward and saves things at the very last moment. Sorry for the spoiler! Oh, don’t worry; people survive and live ever after as they clean up the horrific devastation, but the thing that is most stark and disturbing about the entire story is how Hugh Walters (born Walter Hughes) sees the trivialness of man, narrowness of thought within religions, the pettiness of politicians, and the “What’s in it for us?” of trade unions. There is also how some people will simply give up until panic forces them to do terrible things to each other. I did not want to have that desperation and despair become part of this story, but the basic issue at hand—a moon or asteroid or something coming to hit something else (such as us!)—is becoming more and more a possibility. Thus was born this tale. So, it is with a huge smile and a sigh of relief I can report that nobody injures their elbow when the courtesy missiles explode, no whale suddenly comes into being and falls hundreds of miles from the sky, a bowl of petunias does not simultaneously appear thinking, “Oh no. Not again!” and while the answer to the BIG QUESTION might remain “forty-two,” that has nothing to do with what goes on inside this book. Victor Apleton II 7 8 CHAPTER 1 / MANY ENDS TIED UP ALL NICE AND NEAT TOM SWIFT, twenty-seven years old, married with two children— Bart and Mary—and his brother-in-law, Bud Barclay, were cruising along at nine thousand feet. It was a bit noisy in the small helicopter, and nobody would ever claim the aircraft was vibration free, but they had incredible smiles on their faces. Their wives were in the large, three-decked jet shadowing them. Sandy Swift-Barclay, Tom’s younger sister, and his wife, Bashalli, were in the cockpit flying the Sky Queen, Tom’s first large-scale invention and the very thing he’d been working on when he and Bashalli met more than nine years earlier. Sandy was the more qualified pilot between them but Bashalli had just passed her three hundredth hour of flying time and was rated to fly everything from single-engine propeller planes up to multi-engine jets.