Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker (5 page)

"If I knew? I am waiting for you to tell me!" snapped Mr. Sundriesson.

The promise that Tom had given John Thurston—the vital need for complete secrecy at this point in the dangerous game—was a weight upon Tom’s tongue. "Sir, I—I can’t give you the information I owe you, not now. Please trust, just for a while, that my reasons are good ones. At any rate, what happened here wouldn’t have been prevented by my personal oversight. There’s no indication of any carelessness on the part of any of the workers. Including me!—sir."

"
That
will surely become a matter for the legal profession to consider. As for now, of course, all operations are suspended. Have I more to say to you? I do not. Good day!" The unforgiving click of the radiocom suggested that Mr. Sundriesson’s closing pleasantry was less than deeply felt.

"Kind of a mess, huh, Tom?" said the radiocom operator sympathetically.

"Sure is." Tom sighed. "At least nobody died."

"Except maybe the SMB."

The self-reparative powers of Swift and Barclay were legendary, and by evening Bud was up and around and no worse for wear.

He joined his pal for supper. "I don’t feel too bad," Bud stated. "But I sure feel bad for the project, Tom."

"It’s a great loss," nodded Tom disconsolately. "Science could have learned a lot from an experiment like that—and in a way that’s what it was, flyboy, an experiment in applied engineering, aquatic style."

"So I suppose we’ll be flying right back to Shopton?"

"Not right back," the other replied. "Because there’s something
I
want to learn. Namely, the cause of the tube failure. It’ll have to be identified and dealt with if the SubMoBahn is ever to be revived." And Tom couldn’t deny, inwardly, that he felt a great need to prove that Mr. Sundriesson’s assumptions about him were unjustified. They had struck his
guilt
nerve hard.

Bud took a thoughtful bite of Chow’s casserole. "Still thinking the ‘drowning Roman’ bunch had something to do with it? Because
I
sure do!"

Tom studied his fork for a moment. "Motive—opportunity—means. It’s the last one we may be able to uncover something about."

"Some kind of sabotage. The usual deal."

"And yet... Bud, to even
start
thinking about running traffic through a long underwater tube, we had to convince everyone, ourselves included, that it could be made safe. Every repelatron had a whole hardware-store’s worth of electronic backups built into it. It wasn’t like those old-style Christmas-tree light strings, where one burnt-out bulb blacked out the whole string.
Every
tiny part of
every
system was multiply redundant and independent, and the slightest deviation from top efficiency would have signaled itself to us instantly, long before the part went critical."

"I see, Skipper," said Bud. "Security Level:
Awesome
! And you told me that even if one tron were to fail, the others near it would be enough to keep things dry while it was being fixed. So several of the darn things must’ve gone bad in the same place, at the same time."

"At the
exact same moment
!"

The young inventor stood and switched to pacing mode. Bud half-smiled as his eyes followed him around the executive dining room. Tom mused aloud: "So. Same moment. Component failure? Not possible. Power fluctuation? Never happened on
one
neutronamo, much less a bunch."

Tom’s audience asked if something could have interfered with the spacewave fields that were the basis of the repulsion effect. "I mean, you’re always gonna get a little static."

But Tom gave a negative shake of the head. "The linear fields generated by the repelatrons aren’t electromagnetic in nature. Static in the usual sense wouldn’t affect them at all."

"Uh-huh. But the Black Cobra managed it," Bud pointed out—with a knife.

On several occasions the youths had come up against a determined foe, a Chinese expatriot named Li Ching. He had taken to calling himself the Black Cobra, and his technological piracies and subversive attacks had constituted a serious international threat until his recent death. "You’re right," conceded Tom. "And I haven’t forgotten the anti-energy crystals he came up with. But don’t
you
forget that we doped out how to protect the repelatrons from the blocking effect, when we studied the sample we captured." He noted that all the SMB repelatrons had been made safe from the Cobra’s crystals.

"All right then, genius boy. So be a genius
man
and rise to the challenge! What
else
can foul up a repelatron?—pardon me as I eat while you think."

"What else?― " Tom was all frown for a second, but Bud could tell that behind it something was dawning. "I’m thinking of when we tested the bubblevator prototype that time..."

"Hey, that’s right! The airspace bubble started to collapse on us—just like the SMB airspace did."

His chum nodded. "The seawater was infused with a foreign substance the repelatron couldn’t handle—the field beams couldn’t ‘see’ it, so to speak."

"I know the trons have to be really fine-tuned, not just to elements and compounds, but even specific mixtures and proportions," Bud prodded.

"And yet― "

"Darn!"

"And
yet
," persisted Tom with a quick smile, "that’s the whole idea of the new aquatometer setup—to get detailed info on changing seawater composition well before it arrives, in order to compensate for the lag effect in readjusting the super-repelatrons."

Bud asked, through a mouthful of Persian rice, if the aquatometers might have had some undetected flaw. "If it’s undetected, I wouldn’t know!" gibed Tom. "Still... you know, Bud, the microrepelatrons inside each aquatometer—which ‘feel out’ the surrounding water composition by back-reaction—are themselves constrained by the lag effect. We had to set up some fancy pre-programmed sequencing to permit us to run through the materials signatures, using multiple antennas. And now I can see how a very dilute, very exotic mix might not be detected."

"Opening a window of opportunity wide enough for a few million gallons of seawater!"

The next day, as the
Sea Charger
made for the several ports on the Swedish coast where the bulk of the construction crew would be let off, Tom worked in the vessel’s laboratory section on various water samples taken from the vicinity of the SMB. He almost immediately made an intriguing discovery that moved him to call his father in Shopton.

"You say you can’t identify it, son?"

"The substances themselves aren’t unusual," Tom replied into his PER unit. "But I’ve never run across anything like these relative concentrations and proportions. The science databases haven’t given me any leads so far."

Mr. Swift offered a speculation. "Might it be artificial? Some sort of industrial byproduct?"

"Perhaps so, Dad. But in a funny way, the makeup seems too
ordinary
for that. There are no weird, complex chemical compounds in the water—it’s all done with regular seawater stuff, metallic salts, chromium, manganese, silicates, gold, iron—you get the idea. But to give one example, the density of chromium particulates is off the charts! Yet it’s not precipitating out in the textbook way. It’s as if it were being
held
in some sort of forced suspension."

"Intriguing. Have you any notion as to the source?"

"Not so far," replied the young inventor. "It only took a couple hours for the local currents to disperse the traces all over the place. But I’m at work on a little something, Dad, that could help."

Characteristically, Tom switched his efforts to the
little something
immediately. By mid-afternoon his workbench was littered with technology, which Bud found him sifting through when he dropped by. The athletic Californian was joined by young Dan Walde, whom Bud had casually befriended.

Bud pointed at a small object on the bench. "Does the magic crystal ball hold the answer, Swami?" The object was a fist-sized globe, crystalline but pearl-white and opaque. Wire leads were bunched at its bottom.

"Is it a repelatron?" inquired Dan.

"No," Tom said, "although some models of the trons do have spherical radiator antennas. I guess you could call it a sort of monitor screen."

Bud laughed. "Good grief, you mean I was right? You really
do
look into it?"

"Yup. Here, watch." Tom flipped a power switch and carefully adjusted a dial. The sphere became slightly luminous, and then, slowly, lost its whiteness and took on an appearance of crystalline transparency.

"Something inside it," Dan noted. A shadowy triangular form, like a spear tip, had been revealed at the center of the "crystal ball." As Tom continued to make adjustments, the triangle became sharply outlined.

"Okay, genius boy, there it is," declared Bud. "So what is it?"

"It’s a directional indicator, like the needle on a compass," Tom explained. "But unlike the needle on an ordinary compass, this version
doesn’t exist
! It’s an
image
generated by electronics." He went on to describe how he had been working on a similar image system for some time, in hopes of devising a 3-D television. "The globe is filled with a matrix of tiny interlaced ‘flakes’ suspended in a transparent gel. Microwave interference patterns, produced inside the image space by nano-transmitters spaced over the inner surface of the globe, affect the grouping and orientation of the flakes. Then the 3-D image is created as a laser scanning beam sweeps across the matrix and bounces back to your eyes."

Dan and Bud circled the workbench, keenly observing the floating indicator. The image changed with their changing perspectives, as a solid object would. "So someday I’ll be watching
America’s Least Talented
on something like this?" Bud asked skeptically.

Dan muttered, "That’s a good show!"

Tom laughed and said, "Actually, I finally abandoned this approach, at least for television-type viewing. I just thought I’d use it as a quick-and-dirty readout viewer in my new underwater tracker."

Dan Walde’s face lit up. "Wow! A new Tom Swift invention?"

"Always!" snorted Bud. "And now the explanation. Sit down, Dan."

"This one’s pretty simple, guys," grinned Tom. "It’s just an adaptation of my aquatometer, which I’ve made more compact and lighter in weight." He described how individual divers, in hydrolung suits, would carry the portable units with them. "I worked up some new approaches to the repela-scanning gimmick that make it much more sensitive and flexible."

"So I take it you can use it to pick up that weird stuff you found in the seawater," Bud remarked with a nod, which Tom repeated back in confirmation. "And you can use it to track the stuff back to where it came from?"

"Sure, like a hound dog on the scent. Remember, the aquatometer doesn’t just tell you what’s out there in the water, but
where
it is—a 3-D profile of its relative concentrations. The analysis computer will put it all together and control the spheroscreen accordingly, pointing the indicator toward the direction of highest overall densities. And that’s the most promising direction to search in." When Dan asked how soon Tom would be putting together a team of divers and commencing the search, the answer was, "Right away! If the source of ‘water X’ is intermittent, we need to get on the trail before it’s totally scrambled. The ocean has already made it undetectable by normal means."

Dan Walde nodded, but Tom and Bud could tell that he had more on his mind. "Mind if I make a little pitch to be one of your team members? I was trained on using the diversuits, you know—I guess some day we’ll
all
be—and it would be a big boost to my learning to use it for on-the-spot oceanography research."

Tom was doubtful. "I don’t know, Dan. This is a serious situation. I’m not sure using the search for training purposes is such a good idea."

"Keep at it, Dan," Bud stage-whispered. "He’ll give in. Fifteen seconds tops."

"Maybe I can add something to sweeten the deal," said the college student with a somewhat shy smile—for he was actually talking to the great Tom Swift! "There’s a scientist in the Oceanography Department at the University who’s a friend of our family. We’ve known him for years. Really, he’s the one who sort’ve inspired me to go into the field."

"The
wet
field," Bud quipped.

"As a matter of fact, it’d make sense to have a professional oceanographer along with us," noted Tom thoughtfully. "We’ll need a thorough understanding of the seafloor terrain and ocean currents. Is he someone I might have heard of, Dan?"

Now the student grinned broadly. "Yeah! Cause to tell the truth, Tom, he’s somebody you
already
know—really well!"

TOM had no trouble guessing the truth. "Good night! You must mean Ham or George!"

Hamilton Teller and George Braun, whose names were always yoked together, were well-known oceanographers who had twice joined Swift expeditions to Aurum City, a site of ruins on the floor of the Atlantic thought to be connected to the ancient legend of lost Atlantis.

"Mr. Braun was born in Nebraska—Minden, as a matter of fact," explained Dan. "He and my dad knew each other as kids and kept in touch. He was at my parents’ wedding."

"Now that you mention it, I remember his mentioning that he was on sabbatical from a teaching position when he and Ham Teller joined us last time," Tom said.

"Yep—Omaha!"

Bud snorted. "C’mon, don’t tell me George got Ham to leave Brooklyn and move to
Omaha
!"

Dan laughed. "Hey now! There are more jokes about
Brooklyn
than about Omaha!"

Tom was pleased with the notion. Within the hour he was speaking to Braun, easily winning his consent. "And I can speak for our Brooklyn Boy too," he chuckled. "We’ve been splitting a room here in
Oh
! lately so we can continue to avoid real life by working on another one of our oddball mysteries. We could even combine your operation with our own—if you’d be willing to send your big ship a mere thousand miles up to the
way
North Atlantic."