Free Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express by Victor Appleton II Page A

attractive red-haired young woman, stood nearby in the much-muted glare of the sun, gazing over the shoulders of Tom and Bud through the twin "picture windows" of the control compartment. "I’ve only been up in space a couple times so far," she said. "Such beauty! I’m glad the higher-ups—Tom’s friends Hank Sterling and Arv Hanson—are engrossed in the engineering of the Express."
    "And we’re glad we could bring a fine technician along on this half-day jaunt," Tom responded. "We’ll need your assistance when it comes time to fine-tune the sensor instruments."
    Sue smiled appreciatively. "My husband the insurance agent worries about these little Enterprises adventures in science and space, but I don’t. As the motto puts it, I’m ‘in good hands,’ about the best hands there are!"
    "Haven’t lost a Swift yet," Bud remarked. "Not permanently, at least."
    The trip to Luna took three hours, giving the Challenger ’s young captain time to discuss another matter—and another invention—with the visitor to Shopton and space. Down in the ship’s hangar, Tom showed Andy a small unit bracketed to the bulkhead. It was a framework of lengthy rods, joined at right angles as if along the edges of an open-faced cube. "Before anything else, what’s it called?" asked Emda with a smile.
    Tom smiled back. "No clever name for this one. It’s my G-wave propagation analyzer. I know your astrophysics background taught you about gravity waves."
    "Yes indeed. Spacetime ripples spun off into the cosmos by accelerating or collapsing masses."
    "And very hard to detect, even in theory, because of their enormous wavelengths and very slight energy content," Tom noted.
    "Mm, a challenge for Swift ingenuity!"
    "Actually, this is more my father’s project than mine. An informal international group of astronomers, the StarWhisper Consortium, wants to see if Enterprises can solve a space mystery, one they’ve been gathering data on since last year."
    "Two space mysteries at one time!"
    "Right. Typical for us," chuckled the youth. "The mystery is called Emma —a nickname for Emission Anomaly Deneb Algedi. That last is a star in the constellation Capricorn."
    "A source of gravity waves?"
    Tom shook his head. "The star isn’t, no. But the astronomers have been picking up G-wave emissions originating somewhere along the line-of-sight between Earth and Den-Al. It’s a convenient designation."
    "I see," said Emda. "Somewhere deep in space?"
    "Well, even with a baseline as wide as the earth’s orbit around the sun, gravity waves are so diffuse that it’s all but impossible to triangulate on a source," replied Tom. "But there’s reason to think that Emma is very close to our solar system, even within the Oort cloud that surrounds our sun in extra-planetary space. The blurred readings that have been accumulated so far put the source level with the plane of the ecliptic, the ‘playing field’ our local planets roll around on. That would be quite a coincidence if the source were out in interstellar space, unrelated to our system."
    "Yes, obviously," mused the astrophysicist. "Perhaps we’re dealing with a new, distant planet orbiting the sun way way out. But it would have to be extraordinarily dense and in rapid rotation—somewhat like the staroid fragment that came along with your ‘mystery comet,’ Tarski."
    Tom shrugged. "But that’s part of the mystery, Andy. From what the StarWhisper people can make out, Emma isn’t rotating at all, whatever it is. There’s no sign of that sort of wave profile. It seems to be generating gravity waves in some unexpected manner, from a nonrotating, non-collapsing, non-accelerating source."
    "The crudity of the detection instruments can only reveal so much. Hence your new invention, eh?"
    "Mm-hmm— hence . Like other such detection devices, it uses rods made of sapphire, in this case ultra-pure sapphire from the Petronius microplanetoid we ‘landed’ in Utah. The real innovation, though, is the