Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron

THE TOM SWIFT INVENTION ADVENTURES

TOM SWIFT

AND HIS SUBOCEAN

GEOTRON

BY VICTOR APPLETON II

This unauthorized tribute is based upon the original TOM SWIFT JR. characters.

As of this printing, copyright to The New TOM SWIFT Jr. Adventures is owned by SIMON & SCHUSTER

This edition privately printed by RUNABOUT © 2011
www.tomswiftlives.com

"IT IS no surprise," Bashalli Prandit observed with a wry smile. "Warm white sand, sparkling waves dancing across a lake, merrymaking friends making merry; ah, and two lovely young girls immodestly displayed. And what have we?—we have Tom Swift, young inventor, inventing."

Tom Swift, young inventor, reclining on a blanket in the shade of an umbrella, glanced up from the notebook that rested on his bare lean stomach. "I take it you’re feeling unpaid attention."

"And I intend to collect."

Tom winked. "As someone once said, ‘It is no surprise’."

"Mother said Tom was
born
holding that silly notebook," offered Tom’s sister Sandra, a ways away on her beach blanket. "Give up, Bashi. He’s just impossible."

The raven-haired young Pakistani flashed a lovely, steely smile fortified with double ranks of determined teeth. "But you see, I have taken my attitude from Swift Enterprises. I shall make the impossible
possible
."

Tom had attended the Enterprises employee beach picnic with an affable reluctance. An inventor invents, and he was in the thick of it. He had played a little sand-volleyball, a little beach-badminton, and taken a swim that had barely wetted the back of his blond spiky crewcut. Now his deep-set blue eyes were keenly focused on a page of scrawled equations and rough sketches.

Bud Barclay, Tom’s best friend, came rollicking up out of the gentle waves of Shopton’s Lake Carlopa. "Hey, genius boy! What do I have to do,
roll
you in?"

"Come
on
, everybody!" snorted Shopton’s famous headline generator. "You know this is how I have fun. That company, Hidden Resource Inc., expects a demonstration of the repelatron lithextractor in just― "

Bashalli plopped down next to Sandy, interrupting Tom with a shake of her head. "Thomas, surely you lie awake at night alone in your bed, seeking names for your machineries.
Lithextractor
! My word."

"Nope,
my
word!" chuckled the inventor in question.

Soon after Tom’s return from Australia and the conclusion of his adventures with his sonic silentenna, Tom and his father, who was the head of Swift Enterprises, had received a visit from a small delegation representing Milendro Brundage, whose company, Hidden Resource, was unknown to the two Swifts. The visitors had presented the two with a challenging problem involving mining and mineral extraction in the Dakotas. Tom’s lithextractor, now near completion at the Swift Construction Company, Enterprises’ Shopton affiliate, was the Swift answer. But the final details occupied Tom’s prodigal young mind.

A broad deep shadow fell athwart the group. Chow Winkler, a wide older man wise enough to cover his width in colorful beach garb with a western theme, came plodding up. "Can’t get ’im up, hunh?"

Bashalli said, "No, indeed."

"Wa-aal, brand my sea bass, nothin’ new about
that
! This here young sprig’s allus taken t’ figgerin like water to a fish."

That-there-young-sprig laughed, and Bash’s giggling voice came back: "Please! Don’t call my date a fish!"

"Don’t even call him a
date
," Sandy eye-rolled.

"Say now!" persisted Chow. "He’ll be a flyin’ fish afore we’re through with him."

This was greeted with three winces and one pair of raised eyebrows. "Flying? What’s that about?" asked Tom, smilingly mystified.

Chow looked sheepish. "Guess I got me a big mouth. All th’ eatin’ I do." He was Enterprises executive chef and everyone’s friend and favorite.

"Now that the secret’s out," said Bud, "we might as well tell what it is. But you’ll have to get up on your long legs, pal, and follow me."

"And leave the notebook," sniffed Sandy.

Bud led the way toward a nearby boathouse, the other four following. Swinging up the wide door, the muscular youth nodded at a sleek, Tomasite-hulled speedboat with a wraparound windshield and the Tom Swift Enterprises "guy with a hat" insignia on the side.

Tom shrugged. "I knew you were going to have them bring out the
Blue-Eyed Blitz
," he noted. "How is that a surprise?"

His muscular friend cast a suave look. "Hey, this is misdirection, like sleight-of-hand. You haven’t even noticed the
real
surprise."

Tom’s eyebrows shot up as Bud nodded toward a big, curving object lying on its side against the wall of the boathouse. It was made of red-and-white-striped fabric material and rested atop a projecting framework of white tubing.

"Wow!" Tom exclaimed. "A water kite!"

Bud grinned excitedly. "They just delivered it yesterday."

"You mean it’s yours?"

"Bought it over the Net! It’s the latest model, Skipper, super-lightweight, springy, but tough as titanium. Tom, it’s the nearest thing to flying like a bird you’ve ever tried!"

Tom knew his friend had enjoyed the sport back in his native San Francisco. "Boy, this is terrific, Bud!"

"Now you get yerself up there an’ show how it’s done, Boss," Chow urged. He added: "Then I’ll try it." As the others stared at him, the cook patted his stomach. "Heh! Jest kiddin’."

The boys pulled the
Blue-Eyed Blitz
out of the boathouse on its wheeled carrier while the girls and Chow balanced the featherweight kite on the gunwale. They maneuvered the craft down into the shallow water off the section of the Rickman Dunes recreation area that Enterprises had rented for the day. Anchoring the craft, they waded ashore. Tom carried the towline and a pair of water skis which Bud had stowed in the boat.

Sandy and Bash overflowed with eager excitement—mixed, in Bashalli’s case, with a twinge of worry. Her snarky humor fell away as she asked Tom softly, "You—you haven’t done this before? Ought you not practice a bit? At a safe altitude?"

"We plan to start off at six inches, then increase gradually," Bud gibed.

"They say it’s pretty safe," noted Sandy. "You don’t go all that high. And there’s an emergency release if you want to get loose and fall in the water."

Chow leaned close and whispered to Bashalli, "I’m jest a mite worried too. But go try stoppin’ these boys when they got their brains all set."

Bud said to them, "Hold the kite for me, will you, please?"

While they did, he strapped the safety harness around his right thigh and turned to Tom. "I’ll do my flying trapeze bit first and then you take a turn."

"
Now
I see why you were all keeping me away from the picnic basket," Tom said wryly.

"This shouldn’t faze you after all the acrobatics you’ve done in outer space!" Sandy said with a laugh.

Bud nodded as he slipped his feet into the water skis. "Sure, there’s nothing to it."

"If there is nothing to it, there is no need to
do
it in the first place," murmured Bashalli under her breath. "Logically speaking."

"Oh, you know
men
," commented Sandy.

"These
boys
should live so long."

Grinning, Bud attached the towing cable securely to the kite harness. Tom and the girls swam out to the speedboat and made the line fast to a cleat at the stern, then clambered into the boat. Bud waded into the shallows on his skis, then poised the kite above his head, gripping it by the crossbar-strut.

"Okay, let ’er rip!" he shouted.

"Don’t much like that choice o’ words," gulped Chow back on the beach, a natural mother hen beneath his Texas hide.

The
Blue-Eyed Blitz
got under way gently, pulling the line taut. Then Tom gunned the whisper-quiet electrokinetic engine, powered by a Swift solar battery, and Bud whizzed forward until his skis were skimming the waves amid a torrent of spray.

As the
Blitz
picked up speed, the kite swelled behind him like a parachute canopy, filling with wind. Then, suddenly, Bud went soaring aloft! Higher and higher he rose. The kite bellied stiffly overhead as be hung by his arms from the crossbar, special gauntlets strapped around his forearms, hands, and wrists to ease the strain. Excited shouts went up from swimmers and the onlookers along the beach.

"Oh, I wonder what it’s like up there," Bash murmured breathlessly.

Tom glanced over his shoulder. "Bud says it’s like taking off on a ski jump and not coming down!"

The
Blitz
made the long circle around the midsection of Lake Carlopa, its broadest stretch, then nosed back toward Rickman Dunes. As Tom cut speed Bud gradually descended until he was again planing over the placid surface.

"
Jetz
!" Bud called out as his ride stumbled to an end. "That was great!"

"Okay," said Tom. "My turn. But we’ll have to do it again later, when Mom and Dad get here."

The young inventor waded ashore and listened to last-minute instructions as Bud helped him attach the safety harness. "I’ll take it easy, Tom," Bud assured him in a whisper.

As Tom waded into position and Bud took the wheel, Chow called from the beach, "Hey, how bout’ you let me in th’ boat too?"

Bud nodded. "Sure, cowpoke. Er—sit toward the rear, please." A somewhat cumbersome loading operation commenced. But at last the westerner was in place.

As the craft started off, Tom could feel the lift of the water kite almost at once. The wet wind stream beat against his face. Suddenly he was arcing upward! "So this is how a bird feels!" Tom grinned with exultation as his muscles tightened. The boat was now far below and ahead, lake and sky all around him. The sensation of the sharp wind slapping openly against his skin was very different from parachuting—or, as had once happened, falling helplessly through the stratosphere.

Yet he was still Tom Swift. After acknowledging the thrill and the scenery, he began to think about his notebook and the lithextractor.

His reverie came to an end with a sudden jerk and a slight sound barely able to pierce the whoosh of the wind. He glanced down and his eyes went wide.

The length of towline below him was flapping and whirling uselessly in the wind!

"Good night!" he gasped. "It’s snapped!" He was flying free!

The situation was perilous. Panic nudged against him as the kite, slowing, lost lift. Though he could loose himself and fall to the lake, a plunge from such a height risked broken bones—at a minimum. Still...

And then things changed, suddenly and strangely. With a stunning jolt the kite leapt forward, angling upward again at breathtaking speed. The young inventor’s arms twitched with pain where they joined his shoulders.
What’s going on?
he wondered desperately. With no towline, how could the kite be charging skyward into the wind?

Noticing a rattling sound, Tom arched his back and looked up. A small crescent of metal encircled the joint where two struts came together. A thin cable, or cord, extended forward from the object and off into the sky. "A hook!" he gulped. "I’ve been snagged in midair!" He doubted it was a split-second rescue; but deliberate or not, he was now being dragged away from Lake Carlopa and the chance to free himself by dropping.

He passed, at freeway speed, over the ridge that bordered the lake, one hundred yards up and rising.
Okay, okay,
he thought.
If I can get the kite loose from the hook, maybe I can glide into a turn, loop back and set down on the water.

He looked up again. The hook hadn’t closed itself around the strut—it was open like a questionmark. If he could somehow joggle the kite—

Kicking off his skis, Tom began to swing his weight from side to side. The kite didn’t like it, lurching and dipping in sickening, unpredictable ways. The hook slid back and forth along the strut. But whenever it passed the middle, the pull caused the strut to flex. That was the key! He adopted a rhythmic movement. As the hook slid through the flex-point, he wrenched himself forward, a bit of gymnastics that tilted the whole structure and, for an instant, lessened the taut pressure on the hook. It twisted—but snapped back into position.

He repeated the maneuver, arms aching.
Can’t keep this up!
he admitted fearfully.

The hook slipped off!

But now Tom and the kite were almost falling, hard land waiting below. As a free parachute, the kite was a bust.

Maneuvering into some sort of glide-path seemed impossible. Although Tom could tilt the kite from side to side by swinging, there was no way to control the vertical axis and angle the cloth against the windstream. The crossbar merely rotated in his hands.

But, as usual, Tom Swift was a magnet for ideas—it was in his blood. He suddenly remembered the length of split towline slithering below him. With an unnerving swing of leg he managed to snag it, and in a second it was in his hands. He tossed it up, looping around a strut, then repeated. Working the double-loop into position above him, he pulled on the cable. The kite responded!