Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (4 page)

"Yes," Tom agreed. "And if it was covered over it must be very old. It looks as though there is a second part to it, its other half."

"Quite so," said the adventurer. "A curious sort of thing. Yet I am not an archaeologist,
hie
? Perhaps it was just something dropped from a ship, years and years ago. A paperweight. Indeed, it rested upon my bookcase, innocently."

"Okay," interrupted Bud. "But what about Ed?"

"On the cruise last summer, again we dived at Easter Island. This time it was Ed Longstreet who found a similar encrusted object. The shape suggested what was beneath, and I told Ed what I just told you. I suggested that he loan his find to me, to take home and put with the other and see if, indeed, they had been made to fit closely. But he was reluctant. He wished to have it more fully cleaned and brought forth, by professionals of his acquaintance in Mexico. He may not have trusted me, sad to say.

"Yet we have kept in close touch by email message almost daily. At last he told me the object, Artifact B, was ready for the test. I was to bring my half and rendezvous with him on the ninth last, at a certain place in Mexico, the little town of Las Mambritas, not far from Rosarito, on the coast of Baja California."

"I can guess what comes next," declared Tom. "He didn’t show."

"He missed the meeting, even after many days of speaking of it, even that very morning."

"By telephone?"

"No, Tom, always by email. Of course, I did have some cellphone numbers to reach him, but have only got his voicemail, which tells nothing. He did not show up in this place, a library. The staff knew nothing—no one of that description, no messages left."

Tom shrugged. "Cousin Ed’s kind of a free spirit, Mr. Ruykendahl. If he was briefly delayed, he may have assumed you’d wait."

"For days? Don’t think so, hmm? And he has not responded to email since that morning. It is more than two weeks."

"You know, Ed’s parents live in New York," Bud put in. "We could contact them."

Ruykendahl shook his head. "What a fine idea! I did so immediately, trying not to alarm them. I have called more than once. There is nothing."

Tom said quietly, "I see." He was silent for a time, turning the artifact over in his lean hands. "Ed might have allowed word to get around about his object. If someone thought it was valuable..."

"I am thinking the same as you, Tom. And so my worry."

"And no one even knows what these things are, or where they come from?" asked Bud.

"Nor when they were fashioned. They do appear to be machined objects, suggesting a relatively recent date. One wonders, what were they doing, lying upon the seafloor, covered by crusty sea debris? How old might they prove to be? Decades? Centuries? Trinkets—or, ah!—something of value to Ed, and to me. And, boys, he does not need the money—but I do."

Bud scrutinized the object. He commented with a smile, "No little ‘
souvenir of’
inscription. Still, it looks like somebody’s school crafts project to me. I had to carve a fish out of soap."

Ruykendahl continued unfazed: "I was in Utah, on the slopes. When I read that you were visiting, Tom Swift, in your great jet plane—well, I had wished to get in touch with you, not merely because Ed Longstreet is your cousin, but because you have your camera device which could determine the age of the artifacts."

"My electronic retroscope," Tom nodded. "I don’t have it here on the ship. But I do have some instruments to look inside the object and give what it’s made of. Have you had it X-rayed?"

"Yes. But no details of structure could be made out. Of course, one wishes not to carve into it."

"Do you know anything of the material it’s made from?"

The man adopted a trace of a smile. "I would ask you to make that determination, if you would."

Tom led them to the middle-deck lab section, to a cubicle used for chemical analysis and similar work. He set Artifact A beneath the electronic eye of a Swift Spectroscope, and examined the monitor readouts—colored bars and elliptical patterns.

"So?" Bud asked impatiently.

Tom looked up but didn’t answer immediately. "Let’s try the leptoscope on it."

The leptoscope was in effect a combination X-ray, telescope, and super-microscope, using advanced methods to represent details of substances and objects nearly down to the level of the atom. Tom scanned through the object in thin layers, from the outside in. The onlookers waited in silence as the minutes passed and Tom’s frown deepened.

He switched off the machine with an abrupt movement. "I’m afraid I can’t be of as much help as you hoped, Mr. Ruykendahl."

"You are ‘Tom’ and I am ‘Nee.’ Can your instruments not penetrate the material?"

"They penetrate it fine, and I have a preliminary analysis of its composition," Tom declared. "It’s made almost entirely of calcium carbonate—lime."

Bud made a skeptical noise. "You mean, like sea shells?"

"Like coral."

Nee Ruykendahl was as skeptical as Bud. "I am hardly unfamiliar with either of those. Sea shells, coral—yes, they can be quite hard, but despite my tender care I managed to rap against it a few times with my tools, and it is more like metal."

"Oh, I agree," nodded the young inventor. "Scanning down to the one-angstrom level, the leptoscope shows a complex pattern of molecular chains, all interwoven and ‘knotted,’ so to speak. There are other trace-substances all through it. I think they act as a binding agent, a sort of
glue
. It would take diamond-tip tools to make much headway into this thing."

"But Skipper, what
is
it?" asked Bud. "What’s it for?"

"I have no idea. It’s uniform throughout, completely solid."

"You are not saying, I should hope, that this is
not
manmade after all?" Nee objected. "Not the involuntary artwork of a mollusk!"

Tom chuckled. "No, I’m sure it’s been artificially produced—or at least artificially worked and cut. It’s a nice bit of molecular engineering, Nee. The best bet is that it’s something made in the last few years and accidentally dropped overboard."

"But—the thickness of the encrustation― "

"I can’t explain that. Perhaps it has some sort of odd chemistry that catalyzes biological processes in contact with its surface. If you’ll permit me to take it back to Enterprises, my retroscope may have a better answer."

Ruykendahl nodded briskly. "Surely. I would be curious to see your methods in action."

But Tom politely shook his head. "I’m—sorry, sir. We have something of a security alert in effect at the plant right now, and I can’t allow visitors onto the grounds." As the older man sputtered, Tom added shrewdly. "Of course, if you’re suspicious of my motives, I can understand. There may be other places to take it for answers."

"Let us both set suspicion to the side," replied the adventurer with a narrowed gaze. "I have no motive to do wrong against you, Tom. And as for your doing wrong to me, you lack my sort of animal cunning, clearly, so I think Artifact A will return to me promptly. I am traveling at the moment; I will telephone in a few days."

The
Sky Queen
returned to the ground, and Nee Ruykendahl left.

"He’s not like I expected," Bud remarked. "The TV series didn’t do him justice. He’s a lot
seedier
in person."

Tom nodded, adding wryly, "Maybe we all are. But chum—I didn’t tell Nee everything I found with the instruments."

"Something weird?"

"Something that might make the two artifacts very valuable—and might have been behind whatever happened to Ed."

Bud’s face lost its humor and grew tense. He had come to regard Tom’s cousin as a friend. "Sounds like you think he was kidnapped."

"Yes, or― "

"Let’s leave it at
kidnapped
," Bud retorted. He picked up the small object and held it before his gray eyes. "What was it you found, Skipper? What makes it valuable?"

"What makes it valuable is what it’s made of—not the lime, but some of the trace substances," Tom pronounced. "Bud, I’m pretty sure Artifact A comes from someplace other than Earth!"

BUD BARCLAY took it in for a moment. "We’ve seen quite a few ‘artifacts’ from outer space already, pal."

The meteor-missile that had borne the symbol-language of the space friends to our world had been only the first such artifact. The beings had sent other vehicles, and traces of ancient alien visitation had turned up in the Yucatan jungles and beneath the Atlantic. The extraterrestrials—home planet undisclosed, they had become known as the X-ians—seemed unable to give an account of their history, or even their physical form. The abstractions of mathematics, the basis of their attempts to communicate, were unsuited for certain specifics. And it seemed in addition that the Planet X dwellers didn’t care to tip whatever they used as a hand.

Tom agreed with Bud and said thoughtfully, "I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the Space Friends or not, but the substance I’ve detected is Lunite."

Bud gulped. "From Little Luna? Then it
must
be connected to the SF’s—they’re the ones who moved Little Luna into orbit in the first place!" In an astounding feat of unexplained technology, the beings had steered a small asteroid, now known as Nestria, into orbit between the earth and the moon. Leading a rocket expedition to the moonlet, Tom had been able to establish a breathable atmosphere for the human visitors, and Nestria now sported a thriving colony of scientists from many nations.

Unique to Nestria was a semi-crystalline metal, never found on our planet, which Tom had named Lunite. The metal had proven its worth as a key part of repelatron technology.

But it had another, fearsome property. "Whether the Lunite metal in this artifact—long nanotubules scattered all through it, barely detectable—was mined by the X-ians or not, it most likely came from somewhere in space. And because it’s
Lunite
we’re talking about," Tom continued tensely, "the two artifacts aren’t just scientifically interesting, but dangerous."

"Hunh? Why?"

"Have you forgotten what Lunite can do?—what those two hunks of Lunite I held in my hands did?"

Bud hadn’t! "Jetz!
It can disintegrate things
!"

"The deatomization effect," nodded the young space explorer. "We have no idea how to control it, but we do know Lunite is involved in producing it."

"Tom—could the artifact be some sort of
weapon
?"

"Could be," was the reply. "If so..." For a moment Tom seemed to be struggling with an idea, a disturbing one. "The Black Cobra has hinted at having made his own extraterrestrial contacts. And we think he knows all about Lunite and the deatomization effect. It’s one of the reasons he tried to seize Nestria!"

"Uh-huh. And he just tried to seize
you
, Skipper, right out of the sunny skies!"

Tom gave a wan smile. "That’s the ‘popular theory’ right now, anyway. We don’t really know, I’ll admit. Though—this artifact, and Ed’s disappearance sure makes the theory an interesting one!"

The Flying Lab returned to Shopton with its freight of mystery. While Bud ran some errands Tom sat down with Harlan Ames and Ames’s assistant Phil Radnor to discuss the matter of Ed Longstreet’s apparent disappearance. "Sure sounds to me like, at minimum, an abduction," declared Radnor. "A rare, valuable object—Li Ching’s possible involvement― "

"Let’s not let our hunches
abduct
the facts," warned Ames dryly. "Li’s involvement rests mainly on the intuitions of such investigative noteworthies as Sandy Swift—and a few traces of metal, evidence of, basically, nothing."

Radnor nodded. "Yeah, okay, true. From what I know of your cousin, Tom, he might’ve had every intention of meeting with Ruykendahl but stumbled across something along the way and gotten himself..."

"
Distracted
is a good word," chuckled the youth. "Ed might be under the impression that he sent Nee an explanation, not realizing he’d sent it to the wrong place or something. And he’s notorious for giving out phone numbers to voicemails that he hasn’t checked since the turn of the century."

"And another thing," said Ames. "This fellow Nee Ruykendahl—what do we really know about him? He’s basically a celebrity in eclipse, looking for publicity. True? The fact that we can’t get in touch with Ed at the moment doesn’t mean Ruykendahl’s story isn’t complete fiction."

"You’re right, Harlan," agreed the young inventor. Yet his thoughts added:
But that artifact is mighty peculiar—and the Lunite is real!

When Tom’s father arrived, Tom repeated the story and discussed the various matters of doubt.

"A new adventure in the making, I’d say," Mr. Swift commented. "At any rate, son, it seems your lithexor performed flawlessly. I have a feeling Hidden Resource will have Swift Construction Company go forward on the fullsize version."

"I think so too."

Tom was anxious to scan the subsea artifact with his electronic retroscope, and Mr. Swift was anxious to view the result. They took Enterprises ground-conveyor system, the ridewalk, to the lab that the retroscope called home and placed the artifact in position on a holding rack in front of the camera’s scanning tube. "Let’s see if anything’s been eroded away from the surface. I don’t expect to find anything, though."

"Too new for the cosmic ray effect to make a pattern, surely," agreed Damon Swift. "With that sort of micro-engineered structure it must be of modern manufacture, however it first appeared. And besides, it doesn’t appear the sort of thing someone would carve pictures or symbols into,"

As anticipated, the "retro" viewing panel showed no change from what was visible to the eye. "All right then," said Tom. "Let’s see what the master time dial has to tell us."

Tom carefully adjusted this age-determining component of the retroscope apparatus. But when he looked at the dial readout, he was all frown. "Nothing."

"Try recalibrating," urged the elder scientist.

Tom did so, and then began running a check of the electronics. But nothing Tom did caused the dial to light up with an age reading. "Well... I guess Artifact A is
ageless
as well as
priceless
," Tom joked. "Seriously, Dad, I can’t imagine what might prevent the retroscope from coming up with even an approximation."