Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker (8 page)

"Well, I’ll be an oyster’s uncle!" said George. "We weren’t seeing things before, were we? Light can get bounced around in funny ways down here."

"We saw lights and no mistake," Tom retorted. "Let’s try for another look!"

"I’m
already
looking," snorted Ham Teller. "But if you mean close-up reconnaisance, I’d say we have quite a
walk
ahead of us!"

Dan Walde’s eyes darted back and forth between the speakers. "Tom—I assume—you
can
fix the jets, right?"

Tom Swift shook his head, his facemask going along for the ride. "It wouldn’t be possible for me to open them up and get into the microcircuitry down here. It may be that the jets will start working again on their own as we put in some distance from the electrotaxis zone. Otherwise, though, we’ll just have to bob up to the surface and signal for a pick-up. We’d have to get into the open air—our suit radiocoms don’t work under water, and the sonophones don’t have more than a few miles range."

"We shall have the verdict soon, I’d think," commented Alix. "The electricity is being switched off."

The fish, or what was left of the swarming shoal, were now dispersing as if the electric fishing rig had been turned off or withdrawn from the water. In order not to take any risks, Tom directed the others to walk some distance across the bottom before trying their diverjet units.

Disappointment was instant. "Nothing!" exclaimed George.

"Not exactly
nothing
. We’re getting a weak flow through the jets—thank goodness, because it’s needed for the hydrolung system," Tom commented. "But unless we plan to become mer-pedestrians, I’m afraid we’ll have to buoy up topside and abandon the search for now. Switch your buoyancy units to high power."

"Don’t bother," said Bud quietly. "I’ve been trying my controls. You don’t see me ‘bobbing,’ weaving, or anything else."

Tom confirmed it in a tense voice: "My unit’s dead too."

They all were! "
Parakeets
!—what do we do now?" cried Dan fearfully.

"
Enough
with the ‘parakeets,’ already!" came the voice of Brooklyn.

"Calm down, Danny," George commanded. "We’ll just need to jettison some of our equipment, that’s all. The aquatometers—sorry to say it, Tom. And of course we don’t need the jets anymore."

The youthful sea explorer returned a slow headshake. "The aquatometers don’t weigh enough to make a difference. As for the diverjets, you
can’t
unhook them, not if you plan on breathing. The hydrolung apparatus is built into the stanchion brace for the jet."

"Then we’ll do it by brute force!" Bud exclaimed impatiently, tossing aside his aquatometer. Before Tom could stop him, Bud sprang upward, his powerful arms thrashing him toward the distant surface. The team watched his ascent as it became wavery, slowed—and halted. The bead of light began to fall again.

"Can’t be done," declared Bud sullenly as he touched down, panting. "It’s like hauling Santa’s bag of goodies."

"You have the most muscle power, flyboy, but what we all have is
way
too much negative buoyancy—dead weight—in these fancy electric suits," Tom pronounced. "That’s why we had to have the buoyancy units in the first place. Without those or the jets― "

Dan Walde seemed to be verging on panic. "You mean—y-you mean we’re
stuck
down here on the bottom?"

"Do relax, young man," reproved Alix. "The breathing apparatus has not been affected, and those nice Swift solar batteries will last years, I’m told."

"Which is just about how long it’ll take if we have to
leg it
all the way to Iceland!" Ham Teller grumbled.

Alix shrugged slightly. "Admittedly, there is also the problem of food and water."

"Aw, good grief, this is ridiculous!" Bud protested. "When we don’t show up, they’ll start a search in the seacopters and the jetmarines—the
Sea Charger
herself can submerge, in fact!"

"That’s right," said George. "And don’t forget, that U.S. sub will report having seen us."

They all looked at Tom. His long silence was ominous. "I believe in being hopeful," he said slowly. "But we have to deal with the facts. It’ll be hours yet before we’re due back, and probably hours more before any kind of large-scale search can be organized. We’ve traveled hundreds of miles since we encountered the
Disbursement
, and we’ve changed course several times. You don’t need to be an oceanographer to know that the ocean’s a mighty big place. It could easily be days, even weeks, before we’re located."

"What you’re saying then, Tom, is," summarized Ham Teller, "that we’re
sunk
."

"I wouldn’t put it that way," Tom replied.

"I would," declared Alix.

"You were right about Swedes and dourness, Tuundvar!" George Braun stated.

"This isn’t solving the problem, fellows," reproved their leader sternly. "Let’s head for the seamount. Those lights we saw could indicate some kind of underwater operation, people who could help us."

"If nothing else—climbing to the top puts us closer to the surface," Bud added.

Although the "underwater waterspout" had disappeared, there was no guarantee that their safety was more than temporary. At Tom’s suggestion the
mer-pedestrians
circled widely and approached the undersea formation from a different direction. "Keep your eyes open, all of you," Tom warned. "Let’s not get caught twice by the same trick!"

Bud shot his pal a puzzled look through his visor dome. "You said
trick
, Tom. Are you thinking that someone’s giving us the underwater hotfoot on purpose?" Then he added: "Not that I didn’t think the same thing right off."

"Just a hunch, but I’d almost bet on it," Tom said with quiet anger. "As I understand it, the usual maximum range of an electrotaxis operation is far less than what we encountered. The gear we’re up against must be tremendously more powerful and advanced. If there’s a trawler stationed up there to guard the seamount, that would explain it. Even if they didn’t know we were down here, they could be circling constantly on patrol—maybe a whole fleet of trawlers posing as ordinary commercial fishing operations."

"But to what end?" asked George. "What’s the big deal with this guyot, anyway?"

Bud raised his eyebrows. "A
ghee-oh
? What’s that?"

"Perhaps more clean expressions from Nebraska," wisecracked Alix.

Dan Walde laughed. "It’s a flat-topped, extinct underwater volcano. Oceanographers have spotted a number of them in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. They were named after a Princeton professor."

"Yeah? So what gave ’em that Tom Swift style crewcut?" Bud persisted.

"They stood above sea level for centuries and were worn down by the surf."

They trudged on across the seafloor silt and rock—on, and
on
. The guyot was bigger and more distant than they had first assumed, and their progress was irregular and torturous. Even the fact that their modest buoyancy made them lighter than they would have been on the surface worked against them, as any attempt to walk quickly caused them to break contact with the bottom and loose traction.

After some time, Dan brought up a clock readout on his mask-screen. "Para—er,
golly
!" he gulped in dismay. "It’s been almost two hours since we started walking!"

"In not too many more hours the
Sea Charger
will start getting nervous about us and raise an alarm," Tom observed.

"Tell us flat out, Tom—how long can we stay down here without being, you know—
dead
?" demanded Teller.

The young inventor could not provide a definite answer. "The aquadapticum tablets vary somewhat in potency from person to person. But honestly, in another twenty hours or so we won’t be doing so well."

At long last the aching, weary travelers stood at the base of the huge formation. After a rest period, they began to ascend. The eroded volcanic rock of the guyot offered many easy hand- and footholds, and this time their lightness helped more than hindered.

As they neared the summit, signs of human handiwork began to appear—discarded tools, rusted bits of machinery, lengths of metal cable, even an exhausted pair of scuba tanks.

Bud plucked a bulky, box-shaped object from the join of two upthrust rocks. "Look at this, Skipper," he called out. "It has a big lens on the front."

"A camera?" asked Alix.

"No," answered the young inventor as he examined it. "It’s a portable underwater flashlamp—a worklight." He slid the switch on the side, curiously, and a dim yellow beam shot forth.

Ham commented, "Batteries still work."

"It hasn’t been down here very long," said Tom. He gestured toward the spot next to the rock where Bud had found it. "It wasn’t buried in sand or silt—just sitting there."

"Right where the workmen dropped in a few hours ago," declared Bud. "You know—our happy troop of fish-shockers."

Tom tossed the lamp away. "No sign of anyone now, though. The scopes haven’t detected anything moving bigger than a mackerel." He chose not to voice the thought that came after:
But they could have antidetection gear like we do!

When they gained the wide, flat summit of the guyot there were more evidences of a major suboceanic operation. Tom led them to a square concrete slab with large mooring rings at its corners. "They lowered some kind of heavy machinery onto this base, on a moored cable arrangement." His theory was confirmed a moment later as they unzipped a big waterproofed sack made of plastic material that lay nearby. Inside was a spindle, thickly wound about with cord.

Tom held up the end of the cord, very narrow but with a braided apprearance. "Bet you ocean guys recognize this."

"Sure," said Dan. "It’s called isobraid. Neutral buoyancy foot for foot, but the plastic composite is ultra-tough."

"And more importantly for the things they use it for underwater, these interwoven loops keep it from stretching or twisting," Tom added.

Suddenly his thoughts were scattered by an exclamation from Ham Teller, who was standing some yards distant at the edge of the guyot’s tabletop. "I—I—I can’t believe it!
There it is
!"

Electrified, the hydronauts struggled and shuffled to Ham’s side as quickly as they could manage. It was George Braun who arrived first. Following Teller’s gaze downward, the oceanographer sonophoned a gasp.

"It’s real!
The Conqueror Worm
!"

IN THE light of six aqualamp beams—reduced to a dim starlight by distance and murk—a gigantic, fantastic form could be seen scurrying across the ocean floor far below!

"That’s no worm!" pronounced Tom Swift, stunned at the eerie sight.

The bizarre creature was wide as a truck and long as a freight train, a sinuous line raising a cloud of silt and gouging a trail behind it. It seemed to have no distinct head, nor any legs, although hints of scuttling protuberences occasionally showed through between the separate segments of its body. What the hydronauts could make out was like a chain of pearlescent globules that flopped back and forth, jellylike.

"Good gosh, it’s like an underwater centipede!" breathed Bud. "Look how fast it’s moving!"

"Even if we can’t see any legs or claws, it must have ’em along its underbelly," observed Ham. "It has to be using something to grip the floor and give itself traction. Kong Dubya sure ain’t swimming."

Alix repeated "Kong Dubya" under his breath. "It’s a nickname," explained Braun. "You know—‘Kong’ from
Conqueror
, ‘W’ from
Worm
."

The creature was barreling along in an arc, evidently curving around the base of the guyot. In moments the last bit of its tail-end had disappeared.

"Did we really see it?" gulped Dan Walde as they turned away from the edge.

"I know
I
did," stated Tom. "And now I have a great reason to get us topside. I’ve got to live long enough to study it!"

Resting upon the concrete slab, the six batted about ideas for hours. Eventually they slept a little, half at a time so watch would be kept.

When all were awake again at the same time, Tom noted that the search was almost certainly in full swing—somewhere. "We’re a good seven hours overdue," he said.

"Let me be the first to say—I’m getting a tad hungry," grumbled Bud. "Good night, fish all around us and not a line to catch them with."

Alix gestured contemptuously toward the spool of isobraid. "A line we have, and plenty. What we don’t have is a way to cook and clean whatever we catch."

"Or get it into our mouths," added Bud.

Tom rose and bobbled over to the spool, again taking its free end and examining it curiously. "This style of line isn’t just for tying things up or cable use," he sonophoned. "These colored bands at intervals― "

"Yes," George interrupted. "It has a conducting core, basically a thin, flexible wire running the whole length inside the insulating plastic. It won’t carry much voltage, but it’s used in certain kinds of lowgrade underwater electrical work, such as connecting to remote instruments."

Bud stared at his pal, then ineffectually tried to slam his palms together. "Hey, wait! Tom, couldn’t wire like that be used as an antenna? With a super-long antenna, maybe we
could
signal somebody out there!"

"It could be adapted to use as a radio antenna," Tom confirmed, "and we could attach it to the output jack of one of our suit radiocoms. But there’s a big problem. Even with a long antenna, radio waves just don’t get much distance deep under water like this. In fact, the surface up there acts as a reflector to radio waves, as it does with light."

"Ye-aah," groaned Dan. "The signals wouldn’t get anywhere."

"Not from way down here," continued the young scientist-inventor, excitement touching his voice. "But what if we hoist the end of it all the way up, so it pokes a ways into the air?"

"So how?" challenged Ham. "We can’t get
ourselves
up—and if we could, we wouldn’t
need
the antenna."

"Tom’s got a big idea cooking," stated Bud happily. "After all this time, I know the look! We’re talking about a guy who turned a crashed plane into a jet-propelled locomotive."