Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (21 page)

"If the data was transmitted from Las Mambritas, why was your employee still trying to get ahold of the artifacts?" asked Tom.

The Comrade-General stared at Tom impassively for a moment. "A sore point. To be betrayed—dishonor, disrespect. I will not tolerate it."

"I see," Tom murmured. "Halspeth was after the objects on his own."

"An independent side venture, unauthorized, into which he brought another of my scattered workforce, Moreno, conveniently located near the area of sea activity. They had no appreciation for these historic dealings with outer space; they thought only of the vulgar monetary value of these ancient remnants. Imagine, using the horrible kwanggi gas, stolen from my arsenal, to destroy evidence! I will not have my employees
dare
to exploit me. Or, of course, to place my operations at risk.

"And so useless an attempt, easily uncovered. Naturally, Breeman Halspeth is no longer an employee of the Khanate. He has been terminated."

"That’s the word for it," pronounced Bud.

"Who indeed can one trust in this world?" continued Li grandly, evidently enjoying himself. "Not Miss Matopoeia here, who found the strength to set her bitterness aside long enough to feed information to Halspeth. And here she is, a prisoner, to suffer the ultimate fate of prisoners. And elsewhere aboard is Rogerio Moreno with his accomplices, those men in their absurd devil-masks. If there is to be kidnapping and threat, it is
I
who shall order it. At this very moment, in a chamber with walls that are thankfully soundproof, these sad fellows are being debriefed."

As the ranting exposition trailed away, Tom spoke up. "You’ve miscalculated more than once, sir—if it’s any comfort, so have I. The locational data from the beacons was a few hundred million years out of date. You were searching the sea in the wrong area."

"So I reluctantly concluded," nodded the Cobra. "I am big enough to admit error. I should have investigated this business of the sea-lights as you did, obviously. But I finally had the wit to track your big research vessel, and then your tunneling craft. And now all is well."

"It’s not!" blurted the young inventor. "The space cache isn’t what you and your space contacts thought it was. We weren’t able to recover it—search my vehicle if you don’t believe me!

"And now, Li—listen to me! The Planet X communicators are about to do something themselves to the cache, and they warned us to put in some distance. We’re all in immediate danger!"

The Black Cobra regarded Tom gravely. "Hmm! You don’t say. Knowing you for an honest if annoyingly troublesome young man, I suppose I ought to take you seriously." He turned to his armed escort. "Come Varlov, Urnung. Our captives can wait for a time while we put out to sea a bit. We can drag the Swift machine along with us, I’d think."

As they turned as a group, crowding at the narrow hatchway for the briefest moment with Li in the lead, Nee Ruykendahl stepped forward and said sharply: "A moment, Colonel Cobra! If I may say—" Li paused in the hatch, his men jostling up against him—and Ruykendahl struck, barreling into the three with enough muscular force to shove them out into the corridor, stumbling over the raised hatch threshold!

There was grunting and shouting and a single wild gunshot. Tom and Bud surged into action, slamming their foes against the metal bulkheads and allow them to sink down, stunned.

"And another thing," said Nee coolly. He grabbed up a gun and sent a bullet into the leg of one of Li’s men!

"Forget that!" commanded Tom Swift. "We’ve got to get aboard the
Gee
!"

As they began to run, Nee hesitated. He darted back into the compartment and tugged Ona Matopoeia out with him. "Oh, come along, vile woman! We’ll speak words of apology later. You first!"

The corridor and airlock were deserted. As sounds of pursuit began to stir behind them, the four dashed across to the geotron through the linking repelatron bubble and shut the
Gee’s
hatch, immediately drawing together the two ends. On the video screen Tom saw, briefly, the snarling face of Li Ching in his own hatchway; then it closed and the bubble suddenly shrank away.

As Tom settled in at the controls, Bud gasped out: "Skipper, the net― "

"I overlooked the most obvious escape route!"

Tom threw fresh power to the banks of geo-repelatrons and the gravitex devices. Immediately the geotron began to sink straight down into the seafloor! At a depth of fifty feet, the craft began to cruise forward, and then rose up again into the water—free.

Tom glanced at the others. "Now for some fast― "

A shock ran through the geotron as a blinding light overtook them!

The light was dazzling and seemed to emanate from behind them. It had a peculiar quality—it was almost as if the solid earth behind and beneath had become transparent.

Yet in an instant, like a photoflash, it was gone.

"What’s happened?" demanded Ona Matopoeia.

"I can’t explain," Tom said quietly. "But I’ll bet there’s a big hole in the seafloor aft of us."

Yet the young inventor was wrong. Instrumental probes showed no subterranean gap—not even the hollow space of the cavern itself. "Didn’t it work, Tom?" asked Bud. "Couldn’t they transport it after all?"

Tom spoke slowly. "No shaft up to the surface—but nothing else either! They didn’t leave it behind. The sensors read that the
structure
has totally collapsed, fallen apart. There’s nothing left!"

"I don’t get it."

"Bud... they didn’t
intend
to move it after they found out how big it was. They used the Lunite in the beacons to generate the same deatomizing force they produced before, up on Nestria. They decided to completely destroy it—all those answered questions!—to prevent the Others from getting control of it."

Shocked silence was broken by Nee Ruykendahl. "Hmmph! Talk about
obsessive behavior.
" He was looking at his ex-wife.

Back at Enterprises some days later, the Swifts received grim word from John Thurston. The Cobra’s submersible had been located, drifting and silent, in the depths of the Yupanqui Basin. Within was only gray ash and bits of bone and teeth. "The flash-pulse from the crypt must have disabled the sub in some way," Tom told Bud. "Rather than risk the ultimate humiliation of capture, Li must have released the pyrolytic gas."

"The guy’s faked his death before."

"Our special contacts say they were able to make a DNA confirmation of Li’s remains. Moreno’s, too. Want to hear something strange, though? They found some of those carved Easter Island masks in one of the storage lockers—completely intact!"

Bud exhaled a bit of shaken breath. "That ghost-man guy takes care of his own stuff!"

The X-ians had thanked Tom, with little explanation except to reiterate that the memory crypt’s contents would have led to unthinkable dangers. Remembering the old accounts of similar wheels of light elsewhere in the sea, Tom asked them if other such caches might have come to Earth. As half-expected, he received no reply. Nor any advance warning of another strange object heading toward our world,
The Mystery Comet.

Well before the deadline set by the Marmor bequest, Tom and Bud and the Swift family—and Bashalli Prandit, Ed Longstreet, and Chow Winkler—attended the public debut of the Marmor Deep-Sea Aquarium in the waters near the Institute, in Hawaii. The amazing Enterprises-constructed facility was like a huge hollow cylinder of metallumin lying on its side, with a pressurized repelatron-sustained viewing corridor running down its middle from end to end. Lit by Tom’s aqualamps, their gleam visible only to the eyes of human visitors, the strange creatures of the deep swam above and below and on all sides amid the unthinkable pressures of their habitats.

As Cyrus Springthorpe accepted congratulations and gave running commentary to wide-eyed guests, Bud drew Tom aside. "This is quite a deal, genius boy. But all those fish swirling around us― "

"Like the ghost-fish in the cavern. I think so too, pal."

Bud shook his head in a kind of awe, thinking back on what they had encountered. "Hard to imagine—a brain just
sitting
there, like those Easter Island heads—for two hundred million years. Nothing to do but
think
!"

Tom smiled. "Not ‘think’—
remember
! And who are we to say what might please an artificial mind? To contemplate the secrets of the universe... I’m not so sure 254 million years would be long enough!"