Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (19 page)

"I’m keeping my part of our bargain," said Tom. "You’ll be present during the operation, and there’s a second viewport at the other end and a complete monitoring setup."

"But—to stow me away in the stern—!"

Bud smiled mischievously. "No need to feel bad. The
Gee
doesn’t have a prow or a stern. We treat the two ends without favoritism."

The halves of the geotron slid aside and the three climbed aboard. Tom lockered the beacon objects in the airlock hold, then guided Ruykendahl to his seat. As he shut the compartment hatch, Tom said with the voice of a captain:

"The geotron is a delicate piece of equipment, Nee. For your safety and ours, please don’t leave this compartment."

As the boys passed through the hold again, Bud nodded at two bulky objects standing mutely to one side. "The new-style Fat Men! It’ll take me a little while to get used to them." While redesigning the geotron to make use of the metallumin shell, Tom had also applied the new technology to his deep-sea robot suits, which might have to perform tasks at pressures much greater than ever dared. Every inch of the suit exterior was now protected by its invisible sheath of transparent metal, and the top viewdome had been reconfigured as well. The Fat Men were now also bubble-heads!

Tom signaled the crew via PER, and the geotron was swung out over the waves and lowered gently. As the clamps opened, the vehicle began to plunge like an elevator, but Tom adjusted the repelatron buoyancy factor and the descent of the
Gee
slowed to a stop. "The gravitexes are keeping us mighty steady," Bud observed.

Tom nodded tensely and intercommed back to Ruykendahl, "Everything all right, Nee?"

"Of course! How else? Have we arrived, captain?"

Now, at last, the real undersea search could begin in earnest. With the repelascope aboard Tom felt certain he’d be able to locate the buried crypt, however far the shifting, squeezing earth might’ve carried it from its original location. And he hoped against hope that the light wheel had given enough of a clue to narrow the search. "The harder task might turn out to be scooping up the thing after we find it," the young inventor told his co-geonaut. "If it’s buried as deeply as we think, just paring away the hard materials around it with the mini-lithexor equipment will be quite a challenge."

"Yeah, and then we have to wrestle it aboard with our mechanical Fat Man muscles," Bud agreed wryly. "But—gotta
find
the treasure chest before fretting over digging it up."

The
Gee
swooped downward, and cruised in haste toward the target area. "Nothin’ much on any of the monitors," Bud grumbled.

"Remember, Bud, the repelascope’s imaging process has a very limited range," Tom advised. "We’ll have to lay down a pretty tight search grid over—under!—the seafloor if we expect to run across anything. The X-ians think the cache isn’t much bigger than a refrigerator or large packing crate."

"Maybe it’ll shout out to us if we get close," replied the San Franciscan. "But I’m not just talking about the space cache. The Cobra’s somewhere out there, genius boy. With that anti-energy sheathing on his sub, he could elbow us before we knew he was there!"

"We’re also pretty hard to detect, flyboy, thanks to our antitec coating. Even-steven both ways."

"Yeah..." Bud had more on his mind. "Tom—you really think... I mean, about the crypt... it’s not some kind of data chip or hard drive but more like a living brain?"

Tom grinned at the anxiety in his chum’s voice, so much a contrast to his own scientific excitement. "Maybe it’s something
in between
organic life and artificial mechanism. We’ve seen it before, you know—Exman!"

"True—the visitor from Planet X. But the X-ians themselves don’t seem to know what to make of it."

"Only what it’s for—and that they want it." The youth turned the matter over in his mind. "Do we even know what life
is
, Bud? Really? Is it all just chemical reactions and cellular data processing? Exman was able to sense our thoughts. What exactly was he ‘reading?’ Some kind of energy?

"I have this dreamy notion that the civilization that created the object might not think in terms of mechanical technology, as we humans do, but of ways to artificially reproduce organic systems, such as the brain’s neural memory function. The beacons seem to be like that—inanimate objects that emulate brain structures in order to carry out complex tasks—which is just what brains
do
. Why couldn’t this device, with a name
we
translate as ‘memory crypt,’ be something more like an artificial skull, a kind of self-sustaining
head
with a brain inside it?"

"Pretty weird," breathed Bud. "A
thinking
brain? A
person
?"

"Well... that may be a limitation in
our
thinking. Why couldn’t there be a brain with no self-awareness, no consciousness, devoted entirely to
remembering
? Time could mean nothing to it. Century after century it rifles through its memories, classifying, copying, rearranging according to― "

"
Tom
!"

Dazzling light suffused them, sweeping across the nose viewport of the geotron in alternating brilliance and shadow. The Wheel! "Now we’re seeing it under water and up close!" Tom thrilled. "Nothing on the scope... Bud, we may have been all wrong in our concept of what this is!"

"Huh? How?"

"The wheel of light isn’t some kind of scanning beam generated by the
searchers
—the memory crypt
itself
is producing it, to indicate its presence to anyone who trips its sensor perimeter!"

Bud laughed, equally thrilled. "Man, I was right—it’s a shout out! ‘
Come get me!’
"

"Let’s do it!"

For the first time they could see that the radiating bands not only spread outward but angled upward, as if on the surface of an inverted cone with its point below the floor. The phenomenon disappeared quickly, but Tom had already captured its angles and plotted them on the topographic course computer. "The origin point is nineteen miles dead ahead, as we’d calculated—and several hundred feet beneath the sea bottom."

"Piece of cake for the
Gee
."

When the geotron had approached to within a mile of their target, Tom settled her down upon the barren sandy desert of the seafloor. He swept a broad area with the LRGM detector. Bud caught his expression. "Something?"

"A definite blip at the exact point we figured—an abrupt mass-density gradient. Big!—it may be some kind of protective area of hardened material around the object itself." He turned toward his chum and declared with mounting excitement. "We’ll have to edge up close to use the repelascope. Time to duck underneath!"

Tom tilted the
Gee!-Oh!
and lunged forward and downward. In moments the seafloor was high above them.

The subterrene cruised closer and closer, deeper and deeper, through the hard subocean earth. "The LRGM readings are getting sharper," Tom muttered. "But there’s some kind of unevenness—an area of greater density, then a sudden drop-off. The hardened material is like the wall of a container."

Bud grinned. "Organic emulation, Tom—a seed in a nut shell!"

At last Tom brought the geotron to a stop, a few score feet from the memory crypt’s hardened "shell." He commenced probing with the repelascope.

Both boys gasped softly at what appeared on the monitor. "Good night!" exclaimed Tom. "Open space—a cavern! The surrounding wall must be fantastically strong to resist the pressure down here."

"You’ve matched ’em ton for ton with your metallumin, genius boy—even though they got there a few hundred million years first. Think we can poke our nose inside?"

"I’m sure we can. The
Gee
is built to― "

"What’s happening up in the cabin of the privileged, fellows?" came the intercommed voice of Nee Ruykendahl. "It feels as if we’ve stopped."

"Sorry, Nee," replied Tom. "I’ll send the repelascope picture back to you. I’ll adjust the screen input so you’ll be able to watch the recovery operation. It seems the device may be sitting out in the open; we may not have to use the lithexor to dig it free."

"I’ll be watching with a tiger eye, Tom."

Switching off the intercom, Tom mentioned to Bud, "Don’t worry about Nee, pal—I’ve locked his cabin hatch and disconnected the control system for his end."

"This is turning into
fun
, Skipper!"

Tom nudged the controls and the geotron began a cautious advance. As her nose reached the shell, the vehicle slowed abruptly to a snail-crawl. "Unbelievably hard," Tom murmured. "All extra power is being diverted to the repelatrons. I just hope it’ll be enough."

Bud asked what the wall was made of. Tom responded, "Nothing too unusual. Typical local materials—silicates, calcium, various metals. But it has a distorted, interlaced structure I’ve never seen before. The implanting and embedding of the cache may have generated tremendous heat and force."

It took minutes before the geotron suddenly broke through the inner surface of the barrier and surged forward into open space. As the viewport emerged, it was instantly evident that the human optical system—two pair of eyes—was able to detect features overlooked by the repelascope. "Light!" gasped Bud. "Not much—but even a little’s kind of unexpected!"

Shutting off the cabin lamps, the youths could make out the jagged walls of the cavern. Everywhere were tiny flecks, glowing with every color of the rainbow—a field of stars far underground!

Tom studied the instruments. "Not a radiation effect, thank goodness. You know... I think it’s something called triboluminescence. Certain kinds of crystals can build up internal energy when ‘stressed,’ which they release in the optical range. If that’s the cause, it means these walls can’t be absolutely fixed in place."

"Y-you don’t mean they might start closing in on us, do you?" gulped Bud.

"No. But some sort of change must be going on, a shifting of internal stresses, to replenish the tribo-charges. It’s another sign that the memory crypt isn’t just an inert receptacle, but something active and functioning. Weird as it sounds, it must be constantly rebuilding and restructuring its protective shell in response to even minute shifts in crustal pressures."

"In other words," said Bud with wide eyes, "like a living thing!"

Tom caught the last words but his attention was suddenly riveted elsewhere. "Living thing? Not the only one down here, either!"

Bud followed Tom’s rapt gaze through the viewport. In the dim haze of light they could see movement. Eerie forms swirled about the cavern!

"Oh man!" Bud breathed. "It’s true!
Sea ghosts!
"

The fantastic shapes were barely visible in the dimness, though they possessed a faint luminosity of their own. Yet even as Tom and Bud gaped, they seemed to grow brighter—and brighter! "Living neon tubes!" gasped Bud Barclay.

"I think they’re sensing our presence and making themselves more visible," Tom pronounced. "Or
something
knows we’re here and is making them visible to us."

Under calmer scrutiny the eerie forms weren’t ghosts but aquatic life, swimming about in the water-filled cavern. There were fish large and small, long sinuous bodies like eels, rippling umbrellas of gelatin like jellyfish, even crustaceans waving their grotesque claws and antennae.

They had something in common. The shapes were transparent—glowing outlines with see-through centers! "They may not be
human
ghosts, but they look to me like
fish
ghosts!" insisted Bud.

"They don’t register on any of our instruments," Tom noted. "Bud—they’re an optical phenomenon, like the wheel of light. The crypt must be generating them."

"Pretty lively looking. And three-dimensional. It’s like what your telejector does, Tom."

"That’s the effect," agreed the young inventor. "The method must be completely different, though, to work this well under water." He speculated that the forms were composed of an attenuated "cold plasma" adhering to a template-pattern under the influence of some unknown power. "In other words, they’re real bodies that move and occupy space, rigid but so immaterial that they pass right through ordinary matter. Look—you can see how they go right on through solid rock."

Bud nodded. "Okay. But if they’re artificial, what exactly are they supposed to be? Some of them resemble deep-sea fish, but I don’t recognize most of the things."

"I can identify a few of them," replied the young inventor. "These are reproduced specimens of aquatic life from the time the crypt was set in place 254 million years ago! The crypt must’ve scanned its surroundings and recorded what it saw."

"Fine, but why the playback? Exercise?"

"We may know more when we find the crypt itself. According to the repelascope, the cavern has branches heading off every which way, like a smashed spider."

Tom informed Nee that he and Bud were about to exit in the Fat Men, and briefly contacted Mr. Swift in Shopton via the Private Ear Radio. "What you’re describing is already a momentous discovery," responded Damon Swift. "Incidentally, the space communicators have sent a message asking that we inform them immediately of your findings. I’ll compose an interim report right now."

Activating the video cameras in the hull and switching on the
Gee’s
exterior lamps, Tom led Bud back to the airlock. They donned their Fat Man suits in tense anticipation and cautiously exited. The front half of the geotron penetrated into the cavern, and the midsection hatchway was several yards above the winding, sloping cavern floor. The youths used their suit jets to touch down gently.

"Look at this place!" Bud gaped. The cavern had the appearance of a coral cave, twisting and mounting in every direction with no order that merely human minds could comprehend. The walls were streaked with metallic colors, and shards of crystal intermingled with obsidian black. They were pitted and pockmarked everywhere, with sharp projections and ridges protruding into watery space.

"A lot’s happened to the surrounding crust," Tom declared, awed and fascinated. "At some point this whole mass must have run like a wax candle!—and that was just the beginning."