Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome (12 page)

"Tom!"
he called anxiously. His voice came out in a hoarse croak.

There was no answer, and Bud’s nerves grew taut as he fought down a surge of fear. He tried to get up from the stool but he staggered and his legs gave way. He sunk to the floor, weak as a kitten.

"Help!"
the young pilot cried out in panic.
"Somebody—help!"

TOM SWIFT was just coming down the hall on his way back to the laboratory when he heard Bud’s muffled call for help, faint as a whisper. Startled, he broke into a run.

"Bud! What’s happened?" he cried, bursting into the laboratory.

His friend was sagged against the worktable as he struggled to force himself to his feet, his head drooping. Tom threw an arm around Bud’s muscular shoulders and raised him so he could see his face. Both of Bud’s eyelids were fluttering weakly. His skin was flushed, hot, and dry.

"Bud, talk to me! For Pete’s sake, tell me what happened!" Tom pleaded. "Did someone do this to you?"

"I... I... don’t know…" The words trailed off. Bud could hardly move his jaw and his mouth hung open. Tom noticed with alarm that his pal’s tongue was dark and swollen.

Good night, what’s wrong with him?
the young inventor wondered desperately.

Plucking a paper cup from the wall container, Tom tried to fill it at the lab faucet. To his amazement, nothing came out!

A sudden thought struck Tom. The repelatron! Maybe it was switched on, repelling all water from the room as well as from Bud!

Dashing across the laboratory, he checked the portable test-repelatron which Bud had put back in place after playing his prank on Chow. The device was switched on to low power!

"Poor Bud’s dehydrated!" Tom exclaimed aloud.

He flicked off the power switch, then hurried back to the sink and tried the faucet again. This time, after a few coughs and gurgles, water finally struggled its way out.

Tom filled the large paper cup and held it to Bud’s lips. Now barely conscious he swallowed it down in greedy gulps and mumbled for more. After complying, Tom eased him back gently against the worktable.

"We’ll soon have you fixed up, pal!" he tried to reassure his friend. "I’ll get Doc Simpson." He phoned the infirmary, and the call was routed to the medic in his car. Tom spoke a few moments with the physician, then called Chow in the plant kitchen. "Hop to it, Chow, and get some salt over here! Lots of it!"

"Sure, boss. Is somethin’ wrong?"

"Bud’s ill. Please hurry!"

By the time Chow arrived, panting and lugging several bags of salt, Tom had filled a big experimentation vat with warm water and was stripping off Bud’s clothes. Lolling over, the youth was too weak to assist his friend.

"Great snakes! You gonna give him a bath? What’s goin’ on?" the cook gulped in a frightened voice.

"Please, Chow, just help me get him into the tank!"

Bud’s athletic physique was now a disadvantage, his solid muscle weighing him down and making him difficult to lift and maneuver. But between them Tom and Chow managed to gently lower him into the water up to his nodding chin. Hands trembling with nervousness, Chow slit open the salt bags with his jackknife and dumped the contents into the tub.

"The repelatron was on," Tom explained, his keen eyes focused on his stricken friend. "Something went wrong with its detector. It was sending out a very general radiation. Too much moisture was squeezed out of Bud’s tissues and dumped into his bloodstream." Tom helped Chow stir the salt into the water. "Doc says to let him soak for a while, and keep forcing him to drink."

As the two held him up, ten minutes passed. Doc Simpson arrived on a run with his medical bag and began to check Bud’s temperature, pulse, and respiration.

"You reckon he’ll pull through?" quavered Chow. "I mean—what’ll happen to him?"

"I want to check him over completely, but he should be fine," Doc replied. "He just needs a chance to replace the moisture he’s lost."

Bud was given water to drink until he complained of feeling bloated, and the bottle of smelling salts from the first-aid cabinet was waved under his nose. Half an hour later the shaken youth felt well—though waterlogged—and insisted upon getting out of the bath.

"Jetz! What a dopey trick I pulled!" Bud said. "I must’ve clocked the switch on accidentally when I set the thing in its clamps."

While Bud was easing his wrinkled limbs into his clothes, Tom said, "If it’ll make you feel any better, pal, what happened to you actually showed that we made progress today."

"Uh-huh," retorted the youth without enthusiasm. "How’s that, genius boy?"

"Apparently the new circuitry allows the repelatron to tune itself broadly to virtually any mixture in which the sampled compound is the main ingredient—in this case, various water solutions, including those found in human tissue. That’s a real breakthrough!"

Bud nodded ruefully. "Sure enough. I can feel it breaking through!"

The next day Bud felt fully recovered. Tom stopped by Doc Simpson’s office at Enterprises to discuss the cases of Bud and Bashalli, then remained behind at the doctor’s request while Simpson called Shopton Memorial Hospital for information on Reuben Niffman. He hung up the receiver with a smile.

"Will you come along, Tom?" Doc requested. "They want me to complete some paperwork for them, but Reuben Niffman’s mind is clear and he’s ready to talk."

"Good!" said Tom.

At Shopton Memorial, Tom went directly to Niffman’s room. He found the mechanic sitting up in bed. He looked rested, and his eyes had lost their weird, glassy stare. As Tom reached out to shake his hand, Niffman looked anguished and his eyes teared up.

"I don’t know how to say it, but I sure am sorry for what happened," he said to Tom, reddening. "I remember it all pretty well, but it’s nightmarish. I’ll do everything I can to make up for it, Tom."

"I’m just glad you’re better, Rube," the young scientist-inventor told him kindly.

"They told me what the blood tests showed. I hope you’ll believe me, if you can—I don’t do drugs, and I don’t know how that stuff got into me."

"I do believe you," Tom responded. "But when do you think it started? Did somebody feed you the idea that I was building a bomb?"

Niffman sucked in some air, his face now grim and angry. "I’ll tell you the story. It’s all pretty far-fetched—but I guess that sort of thing is normal for you, Tom!"

Tom chuckled his wry agreement and sat down next to the bed.

"It started a few weeks ago, while you were on your second trip up to Little Luna," he began, speaking slowly and deliberately. "I received a letter at home, a big envelope with no return address. Inside was a piece of paper and a postage-paid return envelope with a pre-printed address—and a fifty dollar bill!"

Tom raised his eyebrows. "No signature, I don’t suppose."

"No signature," the mechanic confirmed. "The note was printed, like from a computer, not handwritten. I remember it said something like:
Congratulations, you’ve been selected for our special marketing survey! Keep the fifty dollars, and we’ll send you a hundred dollar reward if you send us a thorough and detailed account of your activities yesterday, from the moment you awoke to the moment you fell asleep. This is a memory test—details count! Sign your statement and send it back to us in the envelope provided.
"

Tom looked puzzled. "No specific questions?—about your work, for example?"

Niffman shook his head vigorously. "Nothing like that. Anyway, I figured I owed ’em something for the fifty—I had my neighbor, who’s a cash-register jockey, check it out to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit—so I wrote what they wanted as best I could and mailed it right off. Two days later another envelope came!"

"The hundred dollar bill?"

"Sure was! Along with the same request concerning the day previous, promising to increase the amount of my reward by one hundred dollars each time I responded."

"I see," said Tom, musingly. "What was the address printed on the return envelope?"

"It was always a post office box, but Tom, each and every time it was a different box number at a different place! I thought that was strange, but hey!—it was good cash for very little work."

"How long did this go on, Rube?" Tom asked.

"Ever since then, week after week. The payments arrived every other day in just the same manner, bigger each time." Niffman paused. "There was a change, though."

"What?"

He reddened again. "Well… there was… somebody started adding a personal note, in handwriting, to the printed note. At first it just thanked me—a few words. Then it was signed with an initial—finally, it filled the back of the sheet, and was signed fully. She… she said her name was Stephanie, and—"

Catching on, the young inventor smiled. "She said she was falling in love with you, didn’t she."

Niffman cleared his throat. "Yeah, more or less. She built up to it gradually, as if what I wrote about my day fascinated her. She started telling me a little about herself—though not much, now that I think of it…"

"Enough to get you hooked."

"Right. And I really
was,
Tom… I’m a single guy and I’ve never had much luck with, you know, girls."

Tom gave Niffman’s shoulder a squeeze of sympathy. "Don’t feel embarrassed, Rube. So how did it end up? Did you meet her?"

Niffman shook his head. "Naw. She said she was breaking the rules by writing to me that way and couldn’t risk even calling me on the phone, not yet. So it all just sort of built up—and so did the money. But I swear, boss, I never wrote down anything I shouldn’t—no company secrets or anything."

Tom nodded.

"It continued like that right up to the other day," the mechanic went on. "In fact, I’ve probably got a couple of those envelopes waiting for me at home now, with money inside."

"But was there a certain point when you started to feel funny? Not yourself?"

"I can’t quite put my finger on it, it was so gradual. But I know it happened. The guys at work started mentioning it, but I thought they were just, you know, messin’ around. But I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the stuff Stephanie was writing to me.

"It slowly came out that she didn’t like you, Tom, didn’t trust you. Kept bringing up something she said she’d heard, that you were inventing a machine to make helium—that the government was paying you to develop a bomb, a thousand times bigger than the H-bomb!"

"Did she say something about setting the world on fire?" Tom inquired. "Were those
her
words?" He found himself stressing the word
her.

"I think she sort’ve planted the idea in my head, yeah. Anyway, it all started getting to me. I could hardly sleep, and when I did, I dreamed about it! Finally she said that if I ever had a chance, I ought to smash your new invention for the good of the world! She said it would make me her hero! I kept thinking about that…"

Tom pinned the slender mechanic in a sober gaze. "Reuben—did you sabotage that pressure test?"

Niffman gulped. "Tom, I—I don’t exactly remember, but—I think I probably did. I know I deleted the message from Wes Beale. I sort of have the, er,
impression
that I did something to the tank inter-seal…" He gave Tom a pitiable look.

"Thanks, Rube. It helps us understand—we’re grateful. Do you remember taking on my new invention in the immersion lab?"

"Pretty well. I was crazed. I knew you’d been working there. I stole one of the electri-keys—you can guess."

"Yes." Tom changed the subject. "The addresses on those envelopes—was it the same city each time, at least?"

The man nodded. "Sure was—Mansburg!"

Tom was startled.
Mansburg!
A word he had heard very recently—from the lips of Amy Foger!

As he was thinking about this, Niffman continued to speak. "I just can’t figure it out, Tom. If I was drugged, how’d they do it?"

"Very, very cleverly, I think," was the young inventor’s reply. "Want my guess? I think those accounts they had you write up and mail back meant nothing to them. It was just a ruse—to get you to mail back their envelopes!"

"But why the hoppin’ heck—?"

"To get you to lick the flaps.
It was the glue on the flaps that contained the drug!"

Niffman stared. "Good golly!" His face clouded and he was silent for a long moment. "Then, I suppose… there isn’t really a Stephanie, is there?"

Tom shook his head gently, and Rueben Niffman sighed, looking away. After a sympathetic pause Tom continued: "You were right about a couple things, Rube. Yes, the story
is
far-fetched. And yes—for
me
that’s
normal!"

Later, meeting with his father and Harlan Ames back at the plant, Tom said: "Mansburg is where some of the Foger clan live. All in all, that ol’ finger of suspicion is really pointing Amy Foger’s way."

Ames agreed. "If you dismiss her immediately, Security can keep her off the premises."

"Yet it’s all just supposition," objected Mr. Swift thoughtfully.

Tom pointed out that by keeping Amelia Foger on the payroll and in her job, she could be watched carefully. "It could give us further evidence—maybe even lead us to the people behind the
Mad Moby
and those neurotoxin containers. That would be worth some risk."

"All right," said Ames. "My guys can keep watch on her here at Enterprises, and when I contact the Feds, I’m sure they’ll establish surveillance of her in town. Meanwhile let’s see if we can trace who the various PO boxes were rented to—though I’ll guess in advance that the names will be bogus. They—or maybe
she
—showed real smarts, using a different box, at a different mail facility, each time."

Tom spent the afternoon continuing—with extra care—to work with the redesigned repelatron, Bud Barclay assisting him. By the end of the day he was sure he had conquered the basic problem of producing a machine that would repel any mixture of sea water carried by subocean currents to the vicinity of the hydrodome.

"We’ll ring the site with a dozen or so spectro-samplers, like the one in the portable repelatron," Tom explained to Bud. "The field will be electronically recalibrated each time to deal with any new mixture that is ‘incoming’."