Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster (8 page)

TOM SWIFT:

YOU HAVE DONE MANY THINGS FOR THIS COUNTRY. I HAVE TO DISCLOSE TO YOU THE GREAT DANGER YOU ARE FACING. PLEASE ARRANGE TO MEET WITH ME SECURELY IN YOUR OWN OFFICE. I HAVE ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOUR PROBING BENEATH THE CRUST OF EARTH THREATENS ALL HUMAN LIFE! YOU MUST BELIEVE ME!

DR. MONT. SNEFFELS

"OH MAN!" Tom muttered to himself in a tone that suggested—correctly—his internal eye-rolling.

After some thought and hesitation, Tom let his curiosity get the best of him and called the number.

The ringing phone was promptly answered, "Hello—Mr. Swift?" Tom knew then that the phone number had been established for his use only.

"Hello, Dr. Sneffels," Tom said. "I received your message, of course. Kind of an unconventional way to deliver it."

"Yes," the man replied. "I apologize, but it was absolutely necessary for my personal safety, and yours. No one must know of this connection between us."

"You don’t think playing shooting-gallery with torpedoes on Lake Carlopa might excite some interest?" Tom commented dryly.

"That was unavoidable," he said. "I saw that your sister had entered the Yacht Society race, and I’d been watching for days for her to go out on the lake in her sailboat. I planned to motor up to her and pass the message to her that way, to be passed along to you, Tom. Admit it, if you had received such a message in the mail, you’d have thrown it away—if it got to you in the first place."

"That’s true, I suppose," Tom conceded. "But what do you mean when you say—"

"Not over the phone," Dr. Sneffels interrupted. "Even this dedicated line may be unsafe. Let me meet you somewhere within your installation, Swift Enterprises. You have your ways to check-out visitors, I know. I’ll be disguised, but we’ll both feel secure."

Tom couldn’t help sighing. "Very well. Tomorrow?"

"I was hoping for this evening. You can alert your security staff that a visitor is to be expected. I will give them my name; I presume they can be trusted."

"I’m afraid the question is whether
you
can be trusted," Tom replied. "But all right."

To Tom’s surprise Dr. Sneffels hung up the phone immediately without a time having been set.
We’ll see if he shows,
Tom thought, and informed Harlan Ames of the note, the call, and the visit.

As Tom finished changing clothes and re-entered the lab, he suddenly broke out laughing. "Chow! Were you waiting for me all this time?"

"Sure was!" said the Texan ominously. "Specially when I saw’d you hadn’t taken a nibble ’r bit o’ your sandwich!"

Tom apologized. "Sorry, Chow—I thought I’d change my clothes first, and I guess I got sidetracked, and—I forgot!"

"I’ll get you some fresh soup," Chow said. As he turned Tom thought he heard him murmur, "Water through a sieve, shore ’nuff."

The young inventor worked hard on various aspects of the earth blaster all through the rest of the day, summarizing his progress in his electronic journal, which his father had access to.
Dad will be pleased at how far I’ve gotten,
Tom said to himself.

A knock on the door announced the arrival of Bud Barclay. "Feel like dinner in town tonight?" Bud asked.

"Sure," his pal replied. "But you may have to wait a while. I’m expecting a mystery visitor sometime after six."

Bud glanced at his watch. "Almost seven now."

Tom was surprised at how the time had flown. He quietly gave Bud a brief account of the telephone conversation with Dr. Sneffels, and showed him the message.

"Shall I leave?" Bud asked. "Sounds like he may be antsy with others in the room."

Tom shook his head. "Let him be. I’d like you here, flyboy—you may have to help me toss the guy out!"

At seven-sixteen the gate guard informed Tom that his guest had arrived, and presently he was shown into the lab by plant security.

"Just buzz if you need anything, Tom," said the security staffer meaningfully.

Tom shook hands with Dr. Sneffels, who was wearing a white toupee and large thick-framed eyeglasses, which he removed with a glance at Bud. "Dr. Sneffels, this is—"

"I know who he is," said the man.

"Thanks for the rescue yesterday," Bud offered as they shook hands.

"I’m a fair marksman; it’s a hobby," Sneffels responded. "Along with boating, and—but I’ll get to that."

Tom asked him to take a seat and bade him go ahead with his story.

"And quite a story it is," said the man. "You won’t want to believe it. But I’m absolutely sincere.

"I’m something of an amateur spelunker—a cave explorer. Done it since I was a young boy. Pretty good at it, too. Tom—Bud—have you ever run across the Great Pawnauck Mountain Mystery?"

"Did the Hardy Boys solve that one?" cracked Bud.

"I’ve heard of it," Tom answered.

"A reporter wrote a book about it some forty years ago. There was a little flap—then it was forgotten. Everyone assumes it was just a hoax. The man talked about old legends going back to the 1800’s concerning the area of Pawnauck Mountain in the Appalachians. There were sightings of mystery lights, half-seen figures that disappeared, mining operations that were plagued by unexplained disasters. A whole village of miners supposedly vanished overnight—twenty-two families, men, women, children."

"What you’re describing sounds like a typical urban legend," Tom commented.

The man nodded. "Of course, yes. The reporter said he’d had a strange experience of his own while exploring the area. He claims he was exploring deep in one of the natural caves when a landslip opened up a new extension, which he entered. Inside he claims he found a huge sealed room, obviously artificial, lit by a weird light-green luminance. In niches along the walls were the mummified corpses of…"

He paused and Bud almost fell forward from his chair. "Of
what?"

"Of strange creatures. Like nothing ever seen on earth. You can read the book for a description."

"Were these ‘creatures’ supposed to have been intelligent beings?" inquired Tom.

"They were all wrapped in some sort of metallic drapery, like a cloth of metal."

Bud had resumed a skeptical attitude. "And I suppose this guy lost the cave and couldn’t get back again, right?"

"No," Sneffels responded. "He deliberately blocked up the entrance and returned to the surface to get scientific help. But when he and his team went back down again, that whole extension of the cave had collapsed. Digging through the blockage was impractical."

"And then he wrote his book, and made a nice profit," Tom commented.

"He’s been dead for a good many years now, Tom." The man paused; he was ready to move on to the next episode. "As a teenager in Lexington I read the book. It made an impression on me. But it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I took a notion to do some exploring in that same area, the Pawnauck cave system." He took note of Bud’s wide eyes and smiled. "No, I didn’t find the legendary lost room. What I found, though, were preserved, calcified track-marks—footprints, in other words.

"They were not made by anything I’ve ever heard of. And, boys, they were in strata that hadn’t been touched for millions of years—I’m sure about that!"

"Do you have plaster castings? Photographs?" asked Tom. "Or shall we go right to the conclusion, Dr. Sneffels—where you ask Swift Enterprises to fund an investigation, to be headed up by you?"

But the man shook his head. "Not at all. I destroyed my photos and the negatives, burned my notes, and did my best to forget the whole thing!"

"Why?"

"The dreams!"
Sneffels said with intense feeling. "They began the very night of my discovery, and continued intermittently for months."

"Nightmares?"

"Call them night
visions,"
he replied. "Or weird, invasive obsessions. I can’t really describe them, but I had an overwhelming impression of something ominous and deadly existing deep within the earth—subterranean intelligences disturbed by our actions on the crust and ready to emerge and wipe us out!"

Bud was transfixed again. "B-but it’s just a dream—right?"

"Is
it?" was the rhetorical response. "From my studies since then I’ve become convinced that Earth could support an entirely separate ecosystem, one based on silicon rather than carbon. Life of that sort could evolve deep within the crust, in the region of paradoxical densities we call the Moho Discontinuity."

Without taking his gaze off Dr. Sneffels, Tom said to Bud, "That’s what they call the border between the crust and the mantle, Bud. It averages about 10 miles beneath the sea bed and 30 miles beneath the continents."

"Doctor, what did you mean—our actions disturbing the silicon guys?" Bud asked breathlessly.

"I presume the worst would be our underground H-bomb tests, which may do significant damage to their habitats," he answered. "Lifeforms can be affected by unfamiliar vibrations—think of the harm done to whales by the Navy’s sonar experiments, for instance. But then, consider those lost miners. The Terranoids—I call them that—may regard any significant ground penetration as a threat. And they have the power to protect themselves!"

"Or at least, that’s what came to you in your dreams," commented the young inventor.

Sneffels did not react to this, but simply added, "To them the surface of the crust is an alien environment, like the moon is to us. I think they were shocked to discover life up here…

"That’s my message, Tom. Probe too deeply underground, and I fear what could happen—not just to you and your scientists,
but to our whole surface world!"

Dr. Sneffels fell silent. Bud let out his breath and slowly eased back from the edge of his chair.

Tom said, "Do you want me to say I believe you?"

"No," he replied. "It’s too incredible. I just want you to consider it. Try not to let your suspicions blind you."

"Tell me this, Doctor. What leads you to believe that Swift Enterprises is planning any sort of deep-earth activity?"

Sneffels met Tom’s eyes. "It’s obvious. I was one of those people that stopped to watch the other day, when your digging machine broke the water main. Your earth-boring invention evidently works on some new principle, and nothing can stop you from pushing on to new depths. It’s the way of science—isn’t it?"

Tom rose from his chair to indicate the end of the meeting, using the telephone keypad to buzz for the security officer to accompany Dr. Sneffels out. "I’ve thought about the possibility of silicon-based life, though mostly in terms of other planets, not inside this one."

"For all practical purposes, deep-earth
is
another planet," Sneffels said as the guard entered.

He rose and they shook hands all around, Tom promising to consider his warning carefully. As Sneffels was led out, Tom added: "By the way, just what is your area of specialization, Dr. Sneffels?"

The man paused at the door. "D.D.S.—I’m a dentist. Why?"

Tom tried to keep a straight face. "Just asking, sir. Goodbye."

After the door closed, Tom and Bud exchanged glances, not quite knowing whether to shiver—or break out laughing. "What do you think, genius boy?" Bud asked.

"I think there are a lot of suspicious elements in that story of his—to say the least!" declared the young inventor. "That business about ‘stop the H-bomb blasts’ comes right out of old flying saucer ‘contactee’ accounts and 1950’s sci-fi movies. And his ‘night visions’ sound to me exactly like paranoid obsession—a psychiatric condition."

"Yeah," Bud agreed. "But the story sure had a haunting quality. Maybe he’s had one too many whiffs of the ol’ ‘twilight sleep’ gas!"

Tom laughed. Then he said: "Of course it could be a deliberate hoax to steer the South Pole expedition off course somehow. I wonder what his real name is."

Bud Barclay was surprised at Tom’s comment. "I thought that
was
his real name!"

With a grin, Tom shook his head. "It couldn’t fool a true Jules Verne fan! In
A Journey to the Center of the Earth,
the explorers descend down the inside of
Mount Sneffels,
a dead volcano in Iceland. Given his underground theme, ‘Mont. Sneffels’ was pretty obviously a phony name. The DDS may be real, though."

As Tom prepared to leave for dinner with Bud, the dark-haired young pilot said, "Oh, by the way—that police sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness of the guy I saw."

"Bronich’s pal?"

"Yup," confirmed Bud. "In fact, Harlan was going to fax it to all the offices here at the plant, as well as to Captain Rock and our FBI contacts." He pointed at the digi-fax on the other side of the lab. "Bet it’s waiting in the tray right now, Tom."

Curious to see the look of the fourth accomplice in the attack on him, Tom strode over to the fax and pulled the copied sketch from amid a pile of sheets. As he looked at it, his eyebrows elevated in surprise.

"Bud!—
I know this guy!"

"YOU DO?" cried Tom’s pal in disbelief. "Does he work here at Enterprises?"

"Nothing like that," Tom replied. "But I had some pretty serious dealings with him earlier in the year—me and Hank Sterling." Tom explained that the sketch was a close likeness of Dr. Drurga Leeskol, a European scientist known to be peddling his services to various anti-democratic forces throughout the world.

"Sure, the guy who held you and Hank in that cellar during the run-up to the South America trip," Bud said excitedly, referring to events recorded in Tom’s Flying Lab adventure. "Wasn’t he supposed to have been working for Kranjovia?"

"That’s what we figured. He slipped out of the U.S. before the Feds could nab him."

"He must’ve been behind the high-tech stuff we’ve been victim to, like sabotaging your magnetic alarm system and the electrodes on your new-version blaster!"

Hank Sterling’s investigation of the earth blaster’s control circuitry had revealed no defect. This indicated that the act of sabotage had been accomplished in some subtle manner—which pointed further to the involvement of a high-level scientific mind.

"I’ll phone Harlan Ames after dinner and bring him up to speed," Tom declared. Then he picked up some further sheets from the fax tray. "Speaking of Harlan, here’s that list of members and guests of the Excelsis Club."