Tom Swift and the Mystery Comet (20 page)

"It makes sense now," Tom nodded. "‘
Read from her diadem the disclosures.
’ It’s this sequence of metal stripes that we’re supposed to read and translate. That’s where the real message is. It spells out the danger—to us and to Earth."

Chow had been listening with open mouth. Now he rushed in with: "Brand my comet spurs, I get it! Stripes o’ metal!—it’s like them bitty little tags that get read at th’ cash register!"

"
Bar codes
," confirmed Tom. "That’s the basic idea, anyway—it
has
to be something like that. But these bars are written in strips of metal, not ink. A long-range spectrographic study, or just digging up a specimen here and there during surface exploration, wouldn’t have done the job. Scanning the code sequence requires
exactly
what the telesampler is able to do—sweep right along the hidden layer, retrieving detailed sample data continuously, in order, from beginning to end."

Dr. Feng now spoke, as if from some great distance away. "It had to be this way. They could not travel to us, but they saw it from deep space, aeons ago—the danger to the living planet, third from the Sun; to its delicate, primitive inhabitants who had nonetheless begun to climb the stairway of intelligence..."

"And more to the point," interjected Sarcophagus, momentarily caught up in fascination, "who had that peculiar mutation of the brain that leads to the use of language! Otherwise a message would be futile."

"Are you now a believer, Doctor?" asked Lett Monica.

"I’m giving my disbelief a very short suspension."

"Dr. Feng—what else?" Tom urged.

"I think... I know... they transmitted the pattern of lights to our world over and over, for centuries—millennia! They could only hope that there would be someone to see, someone who would pay attention and try to unravel the meaning. They couldn’t know who or where or when. From such a distance they would never know if it had happened. They simply sent the message. Some saw it and wrote it into myth. It became part of the Bible, of mystic lore and folktales. Even today—some of the UFO’s reported are just spots of light moving across the sky."

"But the Brotherhood was there watching the sky," breathed Hank Sterling. "The right kind of people at the right time and place!"

"All that meditation... maybe they really
did
get mentally transformed or something!" suggested Bud excitedly. "They weren’t just there by accident!"

"No," said Feng. "Not by accident. The Sanctum Never Seen was built
there
, in that valley, for a purpose, to... to observe..." Suddenly his voice faded out.

"He’s losing it!" gasped Lett.

But the academic recovered. "No. I’m all right. All this that I’m saying—it feels like something in a dream."

"You yourself have meditated on those alchemical symbols, Dr. Feng," Tom pointed out.

"Yes... "

Suddenly Tom and Bud jumped forward, to prop up Dr. Feng as the frail academic began to collapse! They guided him into one of the seats.

His eyelids fluttered but he again regained strength. "My word, I thought I’d handle excitement much better than this!"

"Doctor, you’d better go to your compartment and rest," Tom urged.

Feng ignored him. "The, the Messengers of Light—the translation key is found on the third of the plates, in the numerical data. The sky lights were too crude and limited to convey more than the basic warning, what to watch for, when to expect it. The diadem in the crown... Tom Swift, use the key. Only you... can..." He passed a hand over his face. "I can’t talk... Yes, perhaps I ought to rest." Bud offered to help Feng to his cabin.

As they left, Tom threw himself into the grim task of translating the "bar code" message of the White Queen. Shunning food, the scientist-inventor used the
Challenger
’s powerful computers to analyze and reanalyze the numerical data from the original Sanctum inscriptions. "I didn’t make much progress until I started using the zodiac data as well," he explained to the others when he’d succeeded in his task. "The senders were efficient—they used the star-position numbers that gave the
when
and
where
of the comet as a key to extracting the complete translation rules from the rest of the message."

"And you’ve applied the key to the comet metals?" asked Dr. Sarcophagus.

"Yes. I’ve done the best I can do. It all hangs together. I understand about the
consort
and the
Dead Hand.
"

"Okay now, son," sputtered Chow. "Enough o’ th’ big buildup! What’s with this here
concert
? What’s that
Hand
fixin’ to
do
to us?"

Tom looked over to Hank Sterling, and the young engineer took the reins. "The comet code data has nothing to do with words," Hank began. "It encodes, in a super-simplified way, what you might call pixel positioning data."

"Pixels!" repeated Sarcophagus. "It’s a
picture
?"

"More like a diagram or schematic," Hank corrected. "It’s to be understood in three dimensions and it evolves over time—it has successive ‘frames’ showing how things change."

"What things?" asked Bud Barclay.

"It’s basically a kind of map of a region of space—space itself, the spacetime continuum. The fabric of space can have curvature―"

Dr. Sarcophagus interrupted. "The metric of space."

"That’s what they call it. You can use a diagram to map it out, just as the lines of latitude and longitude map out the spherical curvature of the earth."

Chow waved a beefy hand impatiently. "So what th’ Sam Hill is it
mappin
’? What’s it
for
?"

"I can’t help wondering myself," declared Lett. "What sort of danger does it show, Tom?"

Tom replied: "Do you all know what a neutron star is?"

"Aw now, you blame well
know
I’m not likely to!" huffed Chow.

"It’s not something you’ll find in your galley, pard," smiled Tom. "It’s something that happens when stars of a certain mass collapse upon themselves. The orbital electrons and nucleus protons in the atoms the stars are made of—mostly hydrogen and helium—are forced to merge together under gravitational pressure. They become bunches of neutrons, forming a continuous material called
neutronium
. As all the space between the separate particles has been squeezed out, neutronium is unbelievably dense."

"To illustrate by convenient analogy, as in my entertaining lectures," put in Dr. Sarcophagus, "if you were to take a steel rod laid across the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific and remove all the atomic space within it, the result would be a little slug about as thick as your thumb—yours, Winkler."

"But it would still have all the mass and weight of the entire extended rod," Tom continued; "and neutron stars retain their original mass as well—but what was once a star several times bigger than our sun is now compressed into a little ball about twelve miles in diameter! Gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is fantastically intense—it’d turn the Statue of Liberty into a thin film in a fraction of a second."

Chow gulped voluminously and Lett said, "I see, I get it. The intense gravity changes the curvature of space, and that’s what the diagram is mapping."

"But what does all this have to do with Comet Tarski?" demanded Sarkiewski-Sarcophagus. "Despite its use as a code-carrier, it’s a flimsy little comet, not a neutron star!"

"I’m afraid Comet Tarski isn’t the problem," said Hank quietly.

Tom answered the skeptical question. "The consort to the White Queen—the Dead Hand—is an invisible one,
invisible
because it’s much too small to be detected from a distance. It would be hard to pick up even with the megascope. The diagram indicates that it’s roughly another million miles beyond the comet’s coma, on the side away from Earth. According to the spacetime diagram, what we’re dealing with is a fragment of a neutron star
less than one inch across!
"

The listeners didn’t know how to respond. "So that’s it?" Bud burst out. "The big danger to the whole human race is some little
marble
?"

Chow added sagely, "Don’t see how yuh’d set down th’ dang Statue o’ Liberty on a marble!"

"It’s called a staroid," continued the young inventor. "It’s
almost
impossible to chip anything off a neutron star, but there are a few scenarios that permit it—and it’s happened. This little marble has as much gravity as the Moon!"

"Y’mean that little Starro thing’s gonna
hit th’ earth?
" exclaimed Chow. "I mean—wh-what’s gonna happen to Texas?"

"If it’s following a path similar to Tarski, it won’t come anywhere near our world," Sarcophagus insisted scornfully. "At that distance even the gravitational tug of something the mass of the Moon would be imperceptible without special instruments. Hardly a catastrophic danger."

"Yet it
is
a danger," came a faint voice from the interdeck elevator. Dr. Feng had rejoined them. "For the Dead Hand is to strike out at the sun!"

"The course of the staroid follows that of the comet—or actually vice-versa: Tarski is slowly orbiting Starro, which pulls it along with it. Obviously the White Queen was given that course deliberately, by the alien race that sent the messages. It’s a big signpost, a marker for something that couldn’t ordinarily be seen."

"They hoped, a desperate hope, that planetary inhabitants advanced enough to detect the code inscribed on the comet would have the ability to defeat the Dead Hand." Feng panted slightly as he spoke.

"What will the Dead Hand do, Tom?" asked Lett Monica. "What will happen in five months?—that day, that hour?"

Tom’s mouth was dry. "It’ll reach a certain critical point within the solar gravitational field, and its own intense field will undergo an abrupt change of state. It—it will act like a million-mile-wide
lens
, producing a concentrated beam of hard radiation, radiation from the sun, that will sweep across the inner solar system on the plane of the planets."

"Across
our
planet," pronounced Hank. "It’ll be like worldwide fallout from a massive nuclear war. Over time, human deaths could be in the hundreds of millions."

"
Don’t ask me to accept this, Swift!
" exploded Randolph Sarkiewski. "It’s just your personal theory, your dramatic sci-fi scenario! Where’s the peer confirmation, the hard evidence, the confounded
journal articles
? You
feel
sure of your ‘findings,’ rock-solid. Let me tell you something—all of you! A famous mathematician lost his mind and a friend asked him,
How could someone with your rational mentality believe in these fantastic delusions?
And the man said,
Because they came into my mind with the same logical conviction as all my best theories!
Get the point? One man’s
feeling of truth
isn’t sufficient―"

Bud stepped forward menacingly. "I’ve wanted to have my fist meet your face for quite a while now, Sarcophagus! If you don’t swallow your―"

"Bud!" Tom reproved.

Sarcophagus wasn’t finished. He seemed to be advancing to sheer hysteria. "
You
, Feng!
You’re
the cause of all this! Crackpot intuitions, your privileged personal connections to the Cosmos—! If there’s a world panic, it all falls on you, Feng,
it all falls on you!
"

"Lett!" Tom barked. "Please escort Mr. Sarkiewski to his cabin. If he hasn’t cooled down, lock him in!"

As the fuming skeptic was led away, Chow asked Tom: "Wa-aal now, looky, boss. Starro’s jest a pewly little thing. Jest use one o them repellers o’ yours to push ‘er on out inta space."

"Starro has the mass of the Moon, Chow," responded Hank. "Want to try pushing the Moon around with a repelatron?"

"But you’ve figured
something
out, Skipper," urged Bud. "I
know
you have."

Tom didn’t nod, but said, "Maybe. But we have to put about immediately and return to Earth."

"Not to the comet?—or Starro?"

"There’s no point," said the young inventor. "There’s nothing we can do about the staroid’s course, not a thing. I’m hoping we can do something about Starro himself!"

Tom withheld explanation, and Bud commenced the process of deceleration and reversal of course.

"Sarcophagus took a pill," reported Lethal Monica. "He’s calmed down and sends his apologies."

"Another apology? The ‘unique events’ are really piling up," said Tom dryly. "He can leave his compartment, but he’s not to say
anything
to
anybody
—especially not to Dr. Feng. The stress of all this is starting to affect Dr. Feng pretty severely. It has me worried."

"I’ll make it my business to keep close to Sarco and make him mind," promised Lett. "I can’t help you kayo the Queen’s consort, Skipper, but I do owe you something for my ticket to ride."

"Thanks, Lett."

In minutes a further problem was thrust upon Tom Swift’s prodigal mind. "I’m keeping it under my hat," Bud told him, "but the super-repelatrons are starting to have intermittent problems just like the others. You still think it comes from Tarski?"

Tom shook his head. "No, I’m sure the whole thing is caused by Starro. Our instruments have finally been able to scan it, and the neutronium fragment is spinning like a top! A relativistic effect—Einstein predicted it—called
frame drag
is coming into play. Instead of just causing some distortion of local spacetime, Starro is producing a kind of ‘spacetime tidal wave’ that gradually builds to a critical point and then surges out into space, over and over. That’s why repelatrons are affected—the spacewave repulsion field is embedded in the fabric of spacetime. That’s also why other spacetime constants, like the spin coefficients used by the localculators, have been going haywire. It may even be affecting the ability of the Space Friends to communicate."

"I see. Er, I don’t
see
, but I ‘see’!"

"I might’ve guessed this, Bud, if I hadn’t been a little shaken up. All the tumult on the surface shell of the comet is probably caused by tidal effects, interaction with the gravitational field of the staroid."

"Why is it getting worse?"