Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates by Victor Appleton II Page A

both youths felt despondent. "I had really hoped that the magnetic deflector would be enough to get at least a small cargo capsule through to the base," Tom murmured. " Safely through. Now... " Seeing the look on his friend’s face, the young scientist-inventor straightened. " Now we send up our sample-scooper!"
    Bud thumped him on the back. "You’ll lick it, genius boy."
    Tom went home for a few hours sleep, rising early to do some work on his computer. At the breakfast table he reported to his family: "I’m sure I’ve got the field-contouring worked out for the sampler rocket."
    "Do you have to wait for the next time they pass through the shadow?" his mother asked.
    "Not in this case, Mom," Tom replied. "We’re not trying to penetrate the barrier, just to skirt around its outer edges. Art Wiltessa expects to have the payload section finished by noon," he went on. "It’s too big and heavy to launch from Enterprises, so Bud’s going to jet it down to Fearing. It’ll be launched on one of our Workhorse booster rockets."
    Sandy put in: "Dad says you’ll be having your Super Scooper land in the ocean."
    "Right, sis. Our samples will be microscopic, but if even one grain of antimatter gets loose from the internal containment field it’ll cause a huge explosion."
    "We can’t risk a ground landing," said Mr. Swift. "Once we verify by telemetry that everything is intact, one of the seacopters will pick it up. Then Bud will fly it back to Enterprises."
    "We’ll have it in hand tomorrow morning," Tom concluded with a show of confidence.
    The young inventor’s confidence proved well founded. The probe mission came off without a hitch, and at nine the following morning a bulky many-sided container was delivered to Swift Enterprises Analysis Lab Four, where two excited young men awaited it.
    Tom rolled the container into a test chamber and used a repelatron to produce a perfect vacuum inside. Then robotic arms connected several sensors and analysis devices to ports on the side of the container.
    "This is fantastic!" Tom muttered in awe, his eyes pressed to a binocular-like viewer.
    "Is it what you expected?" asked Bud.
    "It’s definitely Diracinium—or rather, anti -Diracinium. But the atoms have been molded into some kind of molecular construct that I’ve never seen before. And according to the spectronalyzer... Wait, I’ll pump the data into the computer and bring up a simulation."
    In a moment they were gazing at a weird multicolored shape on the computer monitor. "Good grief, they’ve twisted it into a pretzel!" exclaimed Bud.
    "It’s a molecular chain inter-looped like a knot," his friend said. "And it’s continuous—see where the ends connect up?"
    "I gather it’s too small to see, hmm?"
    "Yep, about a tenth the size of a salt crystal. But what’s unbelievable is what it’s doing!"
    "It’s doing something?"
    Tom grinned. "Something normally seen in biology—in nerve cells. The linked molecules are producing what are called action potentials at their points of contact, which end up separating negative and positive ions. When the potentials become too strong, the reservoirs discharge into one another and the process begins again. And then—look."
    The young inventor touched several controls to bring up a new simulation, one which showed several dozen of the twisted molecules. "Hey!" said Bud. "What’s making ’em spin around like that?" Each of the molecular chains was now rotating like a top, with a start-and-stop motion.
    "It’s a reciprocating electromagnetic effect," explained Tom. "Each buildup-discharge cycle produces a pulse which yanks the nearby chains into a half-circle rotation. But don’t get the wrong idea, flyboy. I had the simulation run slow. In realtime the chains are spinning more than a billion times a second!"
    Bud Barclay discharged a deep breath. "So—do we know how to get through the barrier?"
    For some time Tom was silent, the shifting glow of the screen playing across his