Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (14 page)

Soon gaudy-colored fish darted past their cabin window. The water darkened to violet, then gray, until at fifteen hundred feet or more they entered the realm of perpetual night.

Suddenly Bud noted a burst of wavery patterns on the audio-analyzer oscilloscope. Flipping a switch, loud noises erupted from the hydrophone speaker. In the yellow glare of their aqualamp search beam, the boys glimpsed the cause—a black cachalot whale fighting off the waving, reddish-purple tentacles of a giant squid.

"A duel to the death!" Bud gasped.

"Giant squid. Monsters! Once thought to be a myth; as indeed am
I
in
reality
," remarked Ruykendahl with irony. "The oceans hide some grim secrets. And who'd ever guess it topside?"

Tom remarked, "Bud and I went up against some of that guy’s cousins in the Caribbean a while back."

"One of ’em really liked me, though," joked Bud. "Speaking of secrets, Tom, anything on the readouts?"

Tom glanced at the dials of the automatic instruments. "Not so far."

Deeper and deeper the
Angler
sank. They were three miles below the surface when the seacopter finally settled to a hovering halt mere yards from the bottom.

"Boy oh boy, what a landscape," murmured Ed Longstreet, who had come forward from the rear compartment to peer out at the barren scene with the others. Here and there could be seen an up-thrusting fold of rock or a scattering of mineral nodules. Nothing else broke the gray-brown monotony of the ocean floor. "Looks like we’re even too deep for plants—too far from sunlight."

"That’s another case where science has changed its mind," Tom said. "It may look like a big wet desert out there, but it’s chock full of all manner of tiny organisms that don’t mind depth and darkness, aquatic animals as well as plants. Some of them dive down temporarily from above to do a little
deeper
-sea fishing. Some of the plants even use slight thermal gradients to give them energy here in the dark!"

To keep the sensors close to the rugged bottom, he had Bud descend the final few yards, bumping to a stop. Tom moved a lever to extend the crawl treads, and the
Angler
began to rumble slowly along the bottom. Minutes later, Tom stopped the craft.

"Picking up something now," he said in hushed excitement. "The telespectrometer’s showing a weak indication of Lunite
just
above the detectability threshold—high concentrations of calcium carbonate too!"

Bud squinted out the cabin window and shook his head. "As a certain big-hat-wearer would say:
Brand my shellfish
, I don't see nothin’ nowhere out there but sea muck!"

"Neither do I," Tom admitted, playing the search beam over the ocean floor. "The readings are just too faint for any useful triangulation. This could be like hunting for a needle in a haystack."

"A Lunite needle in a mighty soggy haystack," Bud retorted.

"Ah now, young fellas, you must use your eyes as well as your electronics," chuckled Ruykendahl. "The shapes of these small objects are odd enough to make them stand out against the sand and rock, even if half-buried. Longstreet and I both found one easily enough."

Tom nodded. "Good point. C’mon, flyboy, let’s suit up."

"You have diving suits for this kind of pressure, Tom?" asked Ed in surprise.

"Special ones, custom tailored and made to order!"

The two boys squirmed into Fat Man deep-sea suits. These were shaped like thick chrome-silver eggs topped with viewdomes of ultrastrong Tomaquartz and equipped with remote-controlled mechanical arms and legs.

As Tom and Bud emerged from the
Angler
’s airlock, Bud sonophoned: "Tom—about that pressure business― "

"Did Ed’s question make you jumpy, pal?"

"Me? Naw! But... we’re three miles down, and you did some redesign work on the Fatsos just a while ago..."

Tom reassured his friend quickly. "After we added the diversuit elements, we tested each suit thoroughly. We always do—the works! This depth is pretty much their limit; but we won’t be going any deeper. Look around, Bud. This western part of the Yupanqui Basin is pretty flat."

They set off and began to search the area. Aqua-flying with their ion diverjets, they circled outward from the seacopter until they had combed more than a square mile of the sea floor, keeping keen eyes on the midget instruments built into their suits.

"Any luck?" Bud called over his sonophone. "I sure haven’t had any."

"Not a trace," Tom replied. "The Fat Man tele-spectrometers aren’t giving us any more than the one on the seacop, even at closer range."

"Same with eyeballing. We may as well go back to the ship."

"Ten minutes more. See that long rise over there? Let’s skim along the edge in two directions. It looks like it’s a major current-deflector, and floating stuff may have ended up stuck or dumped there."

Tom jetted left, Bud right, playing their powerful suit lamps over the low ridge, which resembled an undersea dune.

"Flyboy!" Tom signaled. "The Lunite readings are getting stronger all of a sudden!"

"Be there in a sec!"

A lengthy opening in the bottom, a long black fissure, suddenly edged into the lamp beams.
Wow!
thought the young inventor.
Readings jumping all over the scope!
Whatever was setting off the sensors was somewhere down in the crevice!

Tom hovered above the opening for a moment, gazing down into its well-like interior. He swiveled the lamps, and saw that the sloping sides of the fissure suddenly fell away into black depths that extended beyond the range of the beams. "Bud, there’s a deep hole in the seafloor over here—it may be artificial!"

"
Jetz
!" cried Tom’s fellow explorer. "
Maybe
it leads right to the crypt!"

"I’m going in a little ways."

The youth diminished the thrust of his jets and adjusted the Fat Man’s electronic buoyancy-control device. He began to sink into the fissure.

Seconds later he noted with surprise that the sides of the hole seemed to be withdrawing instead of narrowing. The polyfrequency sonarscope told him that the bottom of the crack was much further down than he had supposed.
Too much pressure for safety
, Tom told himself.
Better head back up
.

But he had no sooner given mental voice to the thought than he exclaimed aloud as the Fat Man’s monitoring light board suddenly flashed red all across, and the one-man cabin rang with sound!

"Good gosh, it’s happening again!—all the emergency circuits are being energized!" he gasped.

The suit controls had seized-up under the electronic onslaught—a high-tech charley horse! Tom desperately fought to regain control, but every effort led to a new buzz of warning.

Not every alarm was a mere malfunction. "Too deep!" choked the youth. If he didn’t reverse his slow, nightmarish fall immediately, the mounting pressure would exceed the suit’s limit. He would be crushed!

"ARE YOU down there, Tom?" called Bud from the edge of the fissure. "I don’t see your suit lights."

A distorted, droning sound shuddered through his suit speakers. "Say again, Tom. Tom?"

The Californian jetted upward to get a better vantage point. He swept the area on all sides with his lamp beams and sonarscope. "Hey Skipper, I’m gettin’ a little nervous up here! Do you read me? Where’d you get to?"

He again dropped low over the yawning crack. "Okay, pal, guess I’ve been nominated to play fetch again. I’m comin’ down."
Jetz
, I hope you’re down there! he thought fearfully—for he remembered what Tom had said about the depth-limits of the Fat Men!

Tilting his suit slightly so he could see downward through the dome, Bud began to descend. Again he heard the harsh droning sound. But this time he thought he could make out a voice!

Now a cone of greenish light appeared far below. Bud gave a start—it was turning like the Wheel of Light! But it was also brightening as it rose up beneath him.

Tom’s Fat Man! "Skipper! Do you read me?"

Now the voice was strong and clear. "Now I do!
Whew
!—the whole suit went out on me. Major malfunction down here."

Bud laughed in surging relief. "Right, call it a real wardrobe malfunction!"

Tom had reversed the emergency interrupts and regained his control of the Fat Man. "I was
way
too near to getting a little wet!" he told his pal as they soared up out of the opening. "Tell you the details later. Let’s get the
Angler
over here and take some onboard readings with full instrumentation. I’d like to know how deep the crevice goes—and whether there’s any sign that it leads to something
big
!"

Returning to the waiting seacopter, Tom guided them to the fissure, directing the full panoply of detector devices downwards. "Mighty deep," commented Ed.

"I’ll say," Tom muttered. "More than 130 fathoms further down from the seafloor. And I think that’s not the end—it just jogs sideways out of view."

"Did someone dig this tunnel?" asked Nee. "A royal road to the treasure cache left by the space beings?"

Tom shrugged, uncertain. "If it
is
artificial, erosion and earth movements over millions of years have made it as good as ‘natural’."

"Your machinery said
something
is down there," declared Ruykendahl. "You said you detected that space substance, Lunite. Evidently the presence of your diving suit set off the same sort of wave of force that you told me about. No doubt that means one of the treasure-beacon objects is deep within that crevice, hie?"

"No doubt," nodded Tom coolly. "Come here for a second, Nee."

Tom led the adventurer to the airlock, as the others followed behind. "Am I now to walk the plank after all?" harrumphed Ruykendahl. "Too harsh a penalty for a bit of natural impatience!"

Tom stood next to his Fat Man suit and pointed.

Locked in its jointed metal hand was a complete beacon-object!

Tom grinned at the three gaping expressions. "I think I jostled it without realizing on the way down, and saw it on the way back up, sticking out from the wall like a sore thumb from outer space!"

"You might have mentioned it, Skipper," stated Bud with mock annoyance.

"I
did
say ‘details later,’ didn’t I?"

After some comradely cheering, Nee observed, "Well now, I’m most gratified to have earned my modest fee."

"We didn’t find a thing where the
Wascala
dropped anchor, Ruykendahl," snorted Ed Long-street.

"Let us not be small-minded. It was
from
that location that our captain tracked the ocean currents."

"We’re grateful, Nee," said Tom, adding: "In fact, we may even give you a bonus."

"Which I surely can use."

Further instrumental surveys indicated that the Lunite readings had come from the recovered artifact only. There was no sign of any further anomaly that might signify the presence of the memory crypt. Ending the search, the
Angler
returned from the sea with its tiny treasure. Tom decided to make port at nearby Easter Island, and arranged for the
Sky Queen
to rendezvous with them there, piloted by a small crew from the Loonaui base who would then man the seacopter for its journey back.

Before departing the island, Tom spoke to Lieutenant Moreno. "Unfortunately, I can provide no news as to the masked horsemen," he told the American. "There is no sign of them in town, nor of any organized group of cultists—if that wasn’t a mere cover story. Of course we located and searched that little sea rock of your captivity, but there was nothing to be found. We have been most methodical and thorough; the Governor is greatly concerned."

"I see," Tom responded quietly. "What about rumors, Lieutenant? I know your friend Mr. Springthorpe has told you of his sighting up north."

"My friend Cyrus—with his little stuffed pet, Bertie! Yes, he described this ‘wheel of light’. But I’ve heard no other such reports—surely they would be repeated in the newspapers under big headlines. Perhaps the location is too far away."

"I don’t suppose Breeman Halspeth said anything useful?"

Moreno shook his head. "We called Halspeth in and verified his identity, checked over his passport. He responded frankly to our questions, and produced the necessary papers and alibis. There was no reason to detain him. He left us by air, yesterday morning."

"Oh?" The young inventor paused thoughtfully. "There’s no doubt he’s involved in all of this in
some
way," noted Tom in a grim voice. "But at any rate, sir, Mr. Longstreet plans to remain on Easter Island for a time while he decides where to go next on his travels. I’ll be in touch with him. He can tell me what’s in the local headlines!"

"We’ll keep him well informed," Moreno promised. "And also—keep him well protected. If there are enemies here, he would make a nice target for their plotting, I would say."

When Tom returned to the Flying Lab, he found Nee Ruykendahl awaiting him with folded arms. "Now then, Tom, I wish to discuss with you—certain matters."

"Mm-hmm. Like what?"

"Bud Barclay appears to have gained the impression that I will be staying here on Rapa Nui, like Longstreet."

"Well, Nee, as you say, you’ve provided the services we hired you for. You’ll be paid by electronic funds transfer. I assume you’ll be anxious to get on with your life."

"Oh, I intend to
get on with my life
, my friend," he replied sarcastically. "Must I point out that the artifact now stored in your jet is my personal property? Did you plan to fly off with it?"

Tom stared at the man indignantly. "I assumed you were still willing to let us conduct our studies of it. We don’t yet know if the complete object I found is of any value to the extraterrestrials as to their—purpose. There may be more data to be extracted from your object and Ed’s."

"In other words, it is valuable, eh?—and Ruykendahl is the owner!"

The young inventor felt himself flushing with anger. "The space people tell us that they’re dealing with a serious problem. Time is critical! I don’t think it would do much to enhance your public reputation if things fell apart because—because you wanted to hold the artifact for ransom!"