Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon Read Free

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,