Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (5 page)

"Yes—that would be possible even if there are no eroded surface patterns for the imager to ‘read’," murmured Mr. Swift in perplexity. "Odd. But no doubt we’ll stumble across the answer soon enough."

Tom spent the rest of the day in the administrative office, then accepted an invitation to have supper with Hank Sterling and his family. The puzzle remained in his mind; but the more insistent puzzle was the one involving Cousin Ed.

As it was still early in the evening when he arrived home, Tom suggested that his mother place a call to her brother Quent, Ed’s father. "I don’t want to alarm him," said Anne Swift. "But I think I can manage it with a smidgen of cautious wording. Big Brother Q has always been a little slow on the uptake. I say that in a loving spirit, of course."

Tom went out to the small workshop adjoining the house. When he walked inside again an industrious hour later, his mother reported:

"Quent hasn’t heard from him, and is
absolutely
certain there’s
not a thing
to raise one’s blood pressure over. I spoke to Edna, too. They’ve learned to take for granted that their boy can fend for himself."

"I guess we ought to trust parental instincts," Tom nodded.

"Dear, as a parent of two very bright and unusual children, I learned otherwise. Now I go by opposites."

Next morning Harlan Ames told Tom that he had extended feelers to a number of his security contacts, trying to attain some insight into the subsurface repute of Nee Ruykendahl. By mid-afternoon it seemed Ames’s efforts had already paid off. "A woman is driving here to meet you, Tom," Ames announced. "She has some sort of connection to the people who own Ruykendahl’s ‘safari’ company. It’s a big corporation. She was over in Rochester when the company grapevine reached out and grabbed her."

"It’s in their interest to tell us what a sterling guy their employee is," observed Tom with a smile.

It took several hours—worth two snacks delivered by Chow Winkler—for the visitor to arrive. The Swifts’ office secretary and receptionist, Munford Trent, showed in an attractive dark-haired woman, hand extended but face serious. "Hello, Tom. Ona Matopoeia. Yes, my real name; I am Greek, from Macedonia."

Tom nodded her into a comfortable chair. "And you work for—um― "

"Bluegreen Safari-Adventures, Ltd., it is called; that is to say, for those who own it. It is one small possession of a much larger corporation, with headquarters in Milan, ZandinAlfaGiovo. But I’m sure you’ve heard of ZAG."

"Are you part of the public relations staff, Miss Matopoeia?"

She smiled. "I understand why you might suppose that. And indeed, the house attorney who called me, from Milan, was concerned about the possible effect of these questions about Mr. Ruykendahl—the public effect, you see. Matters of image."

The young inventor gave a look of apology. "Ma’am, we don’t want this to get blown out of proportion. We don’t have any real suspicions about Nee. It’s just― "

"It’s just that in fact you
do
," she interrupted crisply. She seemed to be teetering on the edge of a cautious revelation as Tom waited. "You and your people have your own reputation, of course, and it is a fine one to have. The Swifts are regarded as trustworthy—your word is your bond."

"We like to think so," said Tom.

"Then may I presume that what I am about to discuss will remain a matter of confidence? Not to spread further than your father—and your security staff, I would suppose."

"And one or two others among my most trusted associates," Tom rejoined firmly. "I won’t keep secrets from them. But I’ll vouch for them personally, ma’am."

"All right," she said. "Concerning Nee Ruykendahl, I’m afraid these hesitations of your are well justified."

"Really!"

"Yes. You see, I am, basically, a private investigator that ZAG has hired, very quietly. I specialize in trans-national financial matters—fraud, embezzlement, outright theft.

"The management of the corporation has found reason to suspect Mr. Ruykendahl, who was hired and attached to the Bluegreen division because of the public value of his name, of what amounts to fraud. There is growing evidence that he has lined his pocket, misused funds, and exploited these ‘safaris’ to rook the clients—they are usually wealthy—into phony side ventures."

"What sort of ventures?"

"Various sorts. Nee Ruykendahl is rather a
restless
breed of man," she pronounced. "He passes easily from one thing to another. He organizes bogus, hopeless ‘treasure hunts.’ He hints at mineral strikes in obscure locations, hard to reach—‘
but you could get in on the ground floor
,’ as the phrase goes. I gather he has managed to engage your scientific interest in some sort of archaeological find?"

Tom replied cautiously, "Of a sort."

"Easter Island?"

"How did—?"

"It is a scheme he has tried before," Ona Matopoeia continued. "He knows people who are adept at fabricating artifacts—antiquities. He has shown you such a thing, hasn’t he?—to pique your interest. Soon he will offer to lead you and your scientists to the location. But there is always the small matter of his fee. Of course, he will promise nothing. And nothing will be found, naturally. But he will smile inwardly, to have hoaxed the great Swifts!"

Tom’s own smile was bemused. "Seems like a pretty elaborate way to make a few extra bucks, Miss Matopoeia."

"It is a challenge to a man like that, what they call a
grifter
. Look at his career. Defeating great odds—followed by the cashing-in. A matter of ego. Ultimately the real motive behind con men."

The young inventor considered the matter, uncertain how much to reveal to his visitor. How did he know that
she
wasn’t the
grifter
in this affair? "Is there something you’d like Enterprises to do?"

"I am here because my employers wish to protect themselves," was the reply. "The Bluegreen division is profitable; we do not wish to see it disgraced in the news media. And so it is best to warn you, Tom, before things come crashing down."

"We’re grateful, ma’am."

"We can help each other. If you can find a way to play along with this scheme, to gather evidence... It would assist us greatly to know who he works with."

Tom promised his cooperation. Ona Matopoeia promised a telephone conversation with Harlan Ames, who had left for the day.

Tom met Bud for dinner in town, the kind of dinner that comes with fries. The impulsive pilot was amazed at the report on Ruykendahl. "Genius boy, I knew most of the guy’s rep was enhanced—amplified!—but it’s a downer to think he might be a crook."

"Kind of your hero, chum?"

"We all need heroes, Tom."

The pair of heroes laughed. Then Bud asked the young scientist-inventor for the latest thinking on the subocean artifact. "Thinking? Pretty much at a dead end," was Tom’s answer.

"And you say it doesn’t show up as old on the retroscope dial?"

"It doesn’t show up as
anything
—as far as time is concerned."

"But it’s a solid object. It’s not a ghost or somethin’." Bud shrugged. "Maybe because it has that Lunite in it― "

"No, I’ve tested Lunite under the scope before—some of the things left behind on Nestria, in the cave of the gravity-cube," said Tom. "The time dial gave a reasonable age. So... it isn’t..."

Bud Barclay, best friend, knew the significance of a Tom Swift pause after a trailoff. He waited expectantly as the Swift brain mulled over something new.

Tom bolted to his feet. "We’ve got to get back to Enterprises!"

BUD didn’t ask and Tom didn’t elaborate. They threw down money and made for Tom’s sleek sports car. It took minutes to reach the plant and skid to a stop in the executive parking lot.

Tom raced to the lab with Bud at his heels. He pulled the artifact from the security-safe and again placed it beneath the retroscope.

"I, um, see what you mean about
nothing
," Bud remarked cautiously, with a nod at the time dial readout.

"Just wait, pal. I need to get into the programming." In a moment Tom exclaimed with delight:

"There! I was right!"

"About what?"

Tom indicated a set of numbers on one of the digital meters. "What those numbers mean—Dad didn’t think of it either― "

"Jetz,
what
?—!"

Tom grinned. "Artifact A wasn’t telling us her age because it was
too great!
The analytical routine couldn’t interpret the input."

"Then you’re saying," began Bud, "you’re saying this thing is
old
? Real old? Skipper, you’ve measured stuff going back thousands of years with the retroscope!"

"But nothing like this! The reprogrammed time dial shows it, Bud.
Artifact A was manufactured hundreds of millions of years ago!
"

Bud plopped down on a lab stool, limp. "I know you’re not joking. You don’t joke about science."

Tom plucked up the artifact and stared at it, eyes aglow with scientific excitement. "Obviously, it wasn’t made by humans—not Earth humans."

"So—the space friends?"

"We don’t know yet. Maybe not! There’s never been any suggestion that the X-ians were here on Earth so long ago, before the age of the dinosaurs. No," he continued, "I think this is something else, from
somewhere
else."

Bud whisked his stray lock of black hair off his forehead—for all the good it did. "Wasn’t Nee saying something about ‘Atlantis in the Pacific’?"

"Don’t count on that one," Tom declared with a head-shake. "The whole theory of ‘Lemuria’ was put forward in the 19th Century as a way to explain the migration and distribution of lemurs and other animals. Besides, he’s got the wrong ocean! It was supposed to be in the Indian Ocean, a land-bridge between India and Madagascar."

"Okay. But I know I’ve read about a lost continent in the Pacific."

"Sure. ‘Mu.’ That one’s even
more
fictitious!"

Tom finally went home, brain brimming and almost boiling over. His scientific family, and a long conversation, awaited him. The next morning he asked Hank Sterling and big-boned Arvid Hanson, Enterprises’ chief prototype engineer and modelmaker, to join him in his underground lab adjacent to the cavernous hangar for the
Sky Queen
.

"What’s happenin’?" asked Arv jovially. "Need a model thrown together by noon?"

"I believe we’re here for our general scientific expertise and vivid imaginations," Hank told him as Tom chuckled. "Engineers!—nobody more fancy-free than engineers."

"I’ll be asking for a few of those fanciful ideas if this experiment doesn’t work," declared Tom, gesturing toward a lab counter. A metered pulsed-current generator was attached to Artifact A by two very fine silver wires, hard to see.

"So that’s what you were telling me about," murmured Arv, bending close. "Ruykendahl’s lump."

Hank Sterling was more interested in the equipment. "Looks like you’re planning to feed some square-wave pulses into the thing."

"Exactly," said Tom. "Very low frequency and power at first."

"But why?"

Arv added skeptically: "Not only that, but—isn’t this made of calcium carbonate, like coral? How’s it supposed to conduct a current?"

The young inventor brought up a diagrammatic image on a computer monitor. "This is a simplified version of the artifact’s inner structure, at tremendous magnification. These twisty segments here are about the size of human nerve cells.

"Last night I showed this function-schematic to my Mom and Dad, and Mom—her background’s molecular biochemistry, you know—said it resembled, in a way, sequential parts of an RNA string in a cell nucleus."

"
That’s
what I call a
Mom
!" gibed Hanson.

"Look, this bit is like what they call an ‘exon,’ which is coded by molecular patterns to guide cell replication. In other words, it’s the ‘memory chip’ for the cell’s ‘data’. And the segments are like cells in another way, too—it looks to me that each ‘link’ can pass an activation current along to the next one by calcium-ion transfer where the segments intersect, as nerve cells do."

Both imaginative engineers found Tom’s notion almost
too
imaginative! "Well now," Hanson said, "what should be make of that, Hank? Is he saying this lump is some kind of nervous system? A sea shell brain?"

"Maybe a computer for the fish."

"Maybe we should just sneak away."

Tom laughed. "Fine. But I have reasons for my off-the-wall ‘square-wave’ impulse, fellows. Going over the leptoscope data, it seems to me this entire object is meant to function as a kind of circuit, or circuit board. Basically, the Lunite filaments thread the calcium segments together in long,
long
chains that run from this contact point here to the second one, the other terminus of the circuit. I guess you could say the artifact is a kind of calcium-chain yarn ball, all wound around."

"Hunh!" snorted Arv. "The world’s most complex knot!"

Hank observed thoughtfully, "If it really
is
something left on Earth by ancient spacemen, it just might be a component of one of their machines after all—a real sort of ‘circuit board,’ but based on technological principles entirely different from ours."

"Principles derived from biology," Tom nodded. "Let’s see what happens when we tickle it a little. Shouldn’t hurt it."

Making a final check of the connections, Tom depressed the key on the board that would begin feeding a pulsed current into Artifact A.

The three jumped back, startled, as the lab erupted in sound!

Wincing, Hank covered his ears. "Wh-what—what in—?"

The flood of noise seemed to be coming at them from all directions. Tom shut down the pulse generator—but the wild racket continued unabated. "It’s not coming from the lump!" exclaimed Tom suddenly. "Listen! It’s coming from the lab equipment!"

The matter clarified. Every piece of equipment in the room, every computer, every electronic device connected to a speaker, beeper, or buzzer was sounding off frantically. "Malfunction warnings—overload alarms," yelled Arv.

"And not just in the lab!" Tom responded. He swung open the thick lab door, and a roar of sirens came surging in. Hangar technicians were standing in mute confusion or bolting about in disorder.