Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (17 page)

"I’LL BET they're bird watchers," Tom said nervously.

One, an elderly woman, pointing at the geotron, was gesticulating wildly. A half-dozen were backpedaling in terror. The others gaped and trained their glasses on the craft.

Bud chuckled. "We've really given them one for the record book! A giant, glass-eyed, iron-billed sandpiper!"

"I don’t blame them for being frightened," Tom murmured, chagrined. "I should have been careful to pick a place to surface inaccessible to the public."

A man in the group picked up a stout stick and brandished it fiercely. Another began breaking off a branch from a tree. Several boggling women retreated, screaming, as the geotron rose up further and settled flat on the beach.

"Good grief, they must be getting ready to attack us!" Tom gulped.

"We may have to call out the coronary squad, Tom."

"We’d better duck out through the cellar!"

As Bud shook with laughter, Tom threw the geotron into reverse, and the huge sharp-nosed machine withdrew into the ground.

When it was safely below the surface, Bud said, "Whew! Welcome to tomorrow’s headlines! What now, mole boy?"

Tom brought up on the screen a topographical map of the area. "Hmm. Rather than head back, I’d like to test my invention in rocky soil before we run into it deep under the sea floor," he said. "The system can’t compress solid rock, just shove it a bit if it isn’t too massive. We’d have to detour around a layer of real bedrock.

"This is forested parkland around here. Suppose we head straight below it and on toward the northwest."

Bud nodded agreement and Tom set the geotron in motion. The craft wedged its way steadily along, twenty feet below the surface and cruising without a ripple.

Tom PER-ed his father to report the upcoming test. "How far afield do you intend to go, son?" asked Damon Swift.

"It all depends on the ground composition. I’d be willing to go quite a few miles before heading back. While we’re down here we might as well take advantage of whatever comes along."

"Scientific serendipity! Good luck."

Tom experimented with the system and found that the
Gee!-Oh!
could burrow along much more rapidly than expected. After about an hour and a half, Tom announced that they had journeyed more than thirty miles.

"And it’s getting plenty rocky, all right," Bud murmured as he watched the material streaming across the repelascope screen and imagined the crunching sound the craft must be making as it elbowed its surroundings aside with a thrust of repulsion force.

"We're getting into granite." Tom cautiously increased power to the repelatrons, and the craft moved ahead somewhat faster.

Suddenly they heard a dull rumbling sound. Jarring vibrations shook the geotron, and it began to lurch violently in random directions.

"
J-jetz
!" Bud hissed nervously. "Is somebody dynamiting up there?"

"Worse than that," Tom said, eyes focused on the instruments. "I think we’ve set off an underground rockslide!"

He had scarcely finished speaking when the geotron ground to a stop. With a pale glance at Bud, Tom gunned the repelatrons to their fullest thrust power. There was an eerie metallic creaking as the huge machine strained to push back the enormous weight of rock all around it. But the geotron did not move.

Bud turned a frightened face to his companion. "Tom, we're trapped underground!" he gasped. "But where? How deep?"

Tom began to check the localculator position-finder in response. Suddenly the geotron began to shudder wildly! "We’re breaking free!" the young inventor cried—in fear as much as hope.

Screeching a metallic cry the strange, unruly subterrene abruptly lunged forward, hurling Tom and Bud backwards against their seats. With a jolt the deck tilted downward at an angle. It became obvious that the
Gee!-Oh!
was worming its way into the earth at top speed—not much for freeway travel, but a headlong nightmare deep underground!

"We have to get control back right away," gasped the geotron’s designer, "or we could end up stuck miles down!"

The craft had turned wild as a bronco in its plunge into the earth. The boys were pounded against their padded seat restraints with such violence that Tom had to fight to maintain consciousness—much less regain control.

Worse yet, the geotron began to twist and turn about both its axes. It rotated completely over several times, spindle-fashion, leaving its pilots dangling upside-down for a moment. And then its forward angle abruptly dove into a downward curve, progressing into a complete loop—an underground somersault! Now its snout was nudging upward.

"
Th-the hull is deforming!
" Tom managed to gasp out. "
The pressure dynamics have become unbalanced!
" His words were barely audible under the harsh creaking and groaning of the stricken machine.

If Bud had a gibe in response it was blotted out by a sharp report. The boys gasped as their craft was hurled upward like a cork popping from a bottle!

Clang
! The hull crashed against rock. Then came a sickening plunge that ended in a bone-jarring thud!

The
Gee!-Oh!
fell still and silent at last. The boys lolled in their seats for a minute, shaken and stunned, trying to collect their wits. Around them lights flickered and faded, then struggled back to life.

Bud murmured, "T-Tom? Are you all—
ungh
! Wh-what happened?"

"I don't know," Tom managed, panting. "But we’re stopped... somewhere."

"The way we shot up—maybe we made it up to the surface."

Bringing the main control board back to hesitant life, Tom reactivated the video system and switched on the geotron’s exterior lamp.

Bud exclaimed in awe as the screen revealed a large subterranean cavern. "We must have hit the roof of this place!" he said. "But it’s a good twenty feet overhead! Tom, this crate can’t fly, can it?"

"No, Bud," he responded slowly, "but the answer will sound even stranger. Believe it or not, we
fell
. Upward!"

"Fell upward! I know you’re not, but—
are you kidding?
"

Tom shook his head. His voice took on an edge of excitement that was invulnerable to the situation. "No, on the level. I've heard about this happening in deep South African mines—rock falling upward, that is. Remember, under the tremendous pressure encountered at great depths, rock and other crustal material is slightly elastic. It has a bit of ‘give.’ When a tunnel or shaft is dug, some of the overlying pressure is partly released, and loose rock may be squeezed upward. Miners have been killed or hurt in this way."

"How does that explain our accident?" Bud asked, still puzzled. "Are we in a mine?"

"When we broke through the floor of this cavern," Tom explained, now in professorial mode, "the pressure on top of us suddenly dwindled to zero—so the pressure underneath, acting through the repelatron field, spewed us up like rock out of a volcano. We crashed against the roof and fell back again."

"Safely, right? Please?"

"We’re alive. The control board is active."

Bud shook his head. "Man, this is really a topsy-turvy world down here. We can tell Chow that bronco-bustin’ is nothin' compared to underground
rock
-bustin’!"

Rubbing his bruised head, Tom declared, "Bud, do you realize we've made scientific history today?" he said. "It’s not just a case of going ‘where no man has gone before.’ I doubt if any living creature has ever― "

"Good night, Skipper, tell me about it up in the sunshine!" reproved his fellow geonaut. "Turn over the engine and let’s get moving!"

But the engine refused to turn over. The craft rocked slightly and creaked, but didn’t move. Tom scrutinized the readouts. "Our corkscrew trip, and hitting the ceiling, threw half of the repelatron reaction-rods out of whack. The ship can move in one direction but not make an opening to pass through, while the repelatrons at the other end can shove away the earth, but there’s no longitudinal thrust to move us that way."

"We can’t separate the two halves and take one back up?"

"The geotron’s not like the seacopter—the halves aren’t independent units that can be separated."

Bud strove to remain calm. "All right. Well then. Do we know where we are?"

Tom accessed the positional instrumentation. "Not too far down—about 2200 feet. We must’ve got deflected upward at some point."

"Okay, 2200—easy. Not even half a mile. So all we have to do is radio our position to Enterprises. They drop a hole down to us by earth blaster and lift us out."

But the young inventor was already making further checks, and his report was grim. "The power surges and fluctuations degraded the spatial emulator template in the localculator. It’s not providing our geographical position."

"But—then—all they have to do is triangulate on the Private Ear Radio― "

Tom shook his head. "It’s not really a
radio
. It’s a quantum level link. Without wave propagation from the source, there’s nothing to triangulate."

"Fine, Tom!" Bud snapped. "Then I’d say your latest search for scientific data is a bang-up success!"

"I’m sorry, pal," was the quiet reply.

Bud was instantly remorseful. "I’m sorry too." He gave his friend’s shoulder a squeeze. "So now—the solution."

Minutes later, at Swift Enterprises, the Private Ear Radio on Damon Swift’s office desk beeped to signify an incoming call from the one thing in the universe it was attuned to—the
Gee!-Oh!
’s corresponding unit.

"My heavens, Tom—what a fix you two are in!" exclaimed the elder scientist. "We’ll begin an aerial search with penetradars immediately!"

"I’m hoping that won’t be necessary, Dad. I’d like to make it home for dinner—oh, Bud says
Me, too!
"

Tom had worked out a solution, just as Bud had expected. Within the hour special geophysical sensing devices at Enterprises were ringing with vibrations—sound-range vibrations speeding through the solid earth!

"Even if we can’t use the geo-repelatrons to get us out of here," Tom explained to Bud, "we can still use them to push and jar the surrounding earth. I’m having the ’trons send out pulsations of repulsion force, producing vibrations in the crust—propagating waves that
can
be triangulated on!"

"I say—thank goodness for propagation!"

The geotron shrieked out its sonic cry for help. It took mere minutes to pinpoint the mole-mobile’s location, in Canada just north of Lake Ontario. Fortunately the youths were beneath open land. After securing the necessary permissions, Hank Sterling and Tom’s father—and Chow—flew to the area in the
Sky Queen
with several key pieces of technology aboard. Several back-and-forth traverses by Tom’s earth blaster opened a shaft above the geotron, narrow but just broad enough to accommodate the terrasphere, a spherical manned capsule that descended on long cables.

Tom and Bud exited the geotron’s airlock hatch and sprinted at the terrasphere, holding their breaths and squinting their eyes. The cavern air was thick with natural gas and other unbreathable accumulations from the depths of the earth.

As Hank piloted the skyship back to Shopton, the youths sat in the viewlounge, tending to their new bruises as Tom talked the matter of over Mr. Swift.

"Tomorrow’s first priority is to return with more digging equipment and raise the geotron," promised the elder scientist. "We’ll freight it back to Construction on one of the H-5 flatbeds."

"Tom, what was the prob down there, anyway?" asked Bud. "What’ll it do to the search for the memory crypt?"

Bud’s question hung in the air for long moments, looming like a dark mountainous cloud.

"What’ll it do?" repeated the young inventor. "If we can’t work up a solution, it could bring the search to a dead stop."

And it wasn’t a matter of pure scientific disappointment. If the search came to a stop, the space beings warned and promised destructive consequences to mankind!

TOM SWIFT was already focused on the new challenge. Replying to Bud’s question, "I think I understand what’s going on. Remember what I said about the limitations of the geo-repelatron system with respect to rock strata? Well, it turns out that even when bedrock doesn’t completely block the route, its presence within the ‘expansion bubble’ around the ship badly distorts the pressure vectors. As far as the hull and frame are concerned it’s like the difference between bending and
scrunching
. Even the composite hull couldn’t withstand it, and when the hull started to give way, it fouled the repelatron radiators."

Mr. Swift gave a wry look. "It seems we have some tough redesign work ahead of us."

"We sure do," Tom nodded. "And it’s already started up in my head. For one thing, I’m going to fill-in all the hollow spaces inside the ship, except those needed by the crew, with Tomasite. It won’t solve the problems at the hull-surface, but it’ll prevent frame deformation—and the
Gee!-Oh!
itself will be as solid as bedrock!"

"Genius boy, you just raised my comfort level," chuckled Bud.

"But then there’s the matter of the hull, son," observed Damon Swift. "Off hand, I see no early solution."

Bud said, "Guess you’d better tell Mr. Springthorpe he won’t be getting an aquarium out of Enterprises. Earth deadlines have to give way to
cosmic
deadlines!"

Yet Tom Swift’s eyes were alight with idea! "Not necessarily! Believe it or not, I think
both
big problems may have the same solution!"

"There you go! What have you in mind?" asked Mr. Swift, proud already.

Tom drew in a deep breath. His idea was a challenge in itself! "Dad, do you remember when I was working on how to contain the atomic power capsules for the atomicar? I found an approach that worked, but along the way I started looking at something else."

"Yes, I recall your mentioning an alternative."

"I’ve worked on it intermittently since then, and actually got it made, but production is too difficult and costly right now for practical manufacture and widespread use."