Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (6 page)

"
Holy Mo
!" gulped Hank. "We may need your silentenna to calm this down, chief!"

But even as he spoke, the racket began to drop away, piece by piece. The emergency sirens abruptly cut out, and Tom found, to his relief, that the lab equipment responded, one by one, to a simple switchoff or reboot. "Maybe that was a little too much tickle," muttered Tom sheepishly.

"Yeah. But what happened?" demanded Hanson, eyes scanning the lab. "These devices aren’t connected together. Tom, most of them weren’t even switched on!"

"An electromagnetic pulse effect?" suggested Hank.

Frowning, Tom shook his head. "We would have felt something that powerful in our bodies," he noted. "Our bodily ‘wetware’ would have made us human antennas!"

Tom immediately contacted Plant Operations—after cancelling the phone’s shrill whine of
Help
!

"You should be where I am, Tom," declared the harried chief of operations. "Every car in the employee lot is yelping! Idiot anti-theft alarms. Noise and sirens all over Enterprises. And may I remind you, Tom, we are
four miles square
. Sixteen square miles of noise!"

"Thanks, Frank, for handling it."

Phil Radnor in Security also had a report. "This phenomenon wasn’t limited to the plant. It jumped the wall and hit the town too!"

"Good gosh, how far did it go?"

"Radius of a few miles, I guess. Mayor Clyde’s office didn’t waste a second calling me, but it seems the effect faded out just short of downtown."

Hanging up, Tom and his friends puzzled over the phenomenon. The youth mused, "What happened seems to have induced a very brief flow of electric current in circuits of a certain kind, the sort usually found in things like overload sensors and surge limiters—smoke detectors, too."

Hank Sterling was bewildered. "And yet it’s not an electromagnetic pulse. It didn’t affect wiring or circuitry in general..."

"Only certain kinds of configurations," added Arv. "Perhaps specific semiconductor arrays—maybe specific semicon
materials
."

Tom, meanwhile, checked over the various lab instruments for a clue. "Nothing beyond what we just saw."

"Yeah,
saw
with our
ears
!"

The young inventor shrugged slightly. "Some kind of unknown force or energy emanating from Artifact A when I stimulated its calcium circuit. Gosh!—imagine what might have happened if I’d
really
turned on the juice!"

"That much imagination even us
engineers
can’t manage!" joked Arv, and Hank laughingly agreed.

Tom thought it prudent to suspend his investigations of Ruykendahl’s lump for, at least, a decent interval. He talked with his father up in their shared office, and spent some time parrying sharp inquiries from Dan Perkins, editor of the
Shopton Evening Bulletin
. And George Dilling, of Tom Swift Enterprises’ Office of Communications and Public Interest, took a moment to share a few hoarse comments with his two employers.

Chow wheeled in his lunchcart, frowning but trying hard to keep his frown from spreading to his sometimes salty Texas tongue. "Chowder ’n hot dogs," he told Tom and Bud. "Had a little somethin’ else cookin’-up in th’ microwave. Right nice. Then it started in screechin’ at me!"

"Broke your concentration, huh Tex?" asked Bud joshingly.

Chow glared but only said—nothing.

After the big man had stomped away under his western-sun hat, Bud asked his pal if anything had been heard from—or about—Ed Longstreet.

"Nope," replied Tom. Bud saw worry on his face. "Ed’s parents think he’s okay, that it’s probably just a snafu. And since it seems Nee isn’t to be trusted, they could be right."

"Even if he isn’t trying to pull a con, Skipper, maybe he just doesn’t know Ed all that well. That meeting may have come across to Ed as something more casual than Nee intended."

"I don’t know," Tom muttered restlessly. "And I hate not knowing."

"Tell me something
I
don’t know!"

They munched sullenly for a time. Then Bud came up with: "Well, genius boy, now that your lithexor’s wowing them in South Dakota, what’re you working on next?"

Tom smiled. "Mile Brundage called just before lunch, wanting a few more miracles. Actually, dealing with Hidden Resource had already set off a flurry of thoughts. How about a tunneling torpedo?—that
doesn’t
make a tunnel! Is
that
‘invention enough’ for you?"

"Sounds kind of explosive!" chuckled the Californian. "A weapon?"

"No, an automatic robotic prospector that can scout around looking for ores and valuable deposits deep underground—miles deep!"

"Good night! Then again, you can’t go much deeper than the center of the Earth."

"But my earthdrone won’t be anything like the earth blasters," Tom explained. "The blasters create tunnels—that was pretty much the whole idea. The drone will function on the repelatron principle, like the lithexor."

"I guess the lithexor doesn’t make a tunnel, exactly," Bud conceded, "but it
does
make a hole. That’s what it drags the pipe through, right?"

"Sure, but what I have in mind is the next step, a further extension of the approach. What I’m thinking," he went on, "is that I might be able to design a special kind of ‘geo-repelatron’—that would take advantage of the fact that the solid materials of the ground have a degree of springiness and elasticity even under the enormous compressive force of their depth. What if a vehicle could force open a small space on all sides, just big enough for it to slip through, and then allow the compressed earth to spring back into place behind it?"

"Hey, I get it—it
is
like a torpedo. It shoves the water aside as it goes along, but the water just closes back in. I mean—I’ve never heard of a torpedo leaving a hole in the water."

"And the thing is, water is actually a lot
less
elastic than rock—it’s virtually incompressible."

Bud nodded and said with fondness of memory, "Back in high school we once dropped a big water bottle out of third floor window onto the sidewalk. Man! It went off like a bomb! Er—it got me suspended. But Joey Gergus just got a little
wet
."

"Because that water couldn’t compress, you converted nearly all its energy of motion into...
more
motion. In a different direction!"

"I’ll do anything for science, pal."

Tom began to sketch out his ideas for the unmanned earthdrone as Bud and others came and went. The robotic prospector would have a spindle-shape, tapering like an awl in front and in back.
But the geo-repelatrons will have to work very differently from the repelatrons we’ve used before
, he mentally noted.
And the pressures involved!
—

A bleep of the desk phone made Tom jump. "Hello?"

"Tom, this is Nels Gachter. Got something happening in the space communications room."

"Oh? Something coming in through the magnifying antenna?"

"I’ll say!—it’s from your space friends, but the translating computer has fizzled out three times so far. It’s a very long message this time."

Tom set down his pencil. "I’ll be right there!"

The space communications room was adjacent to the airfield control tower. As Tom arrived, Nels waved him over to the monitor output from the computer that used Tom’s "Space Dictionary" to translate the symbolic concepts of the X-ians into something understandable to terrestrials.

Tom glanced over the preliminary results. "Doesn’t make sense," he murmured. "And I don’t think it’s from our usual contacts, either—the scientific group stationed in our solar system. It doesn’t have their usual ‘we are friends’ salutation. I think it’s coming directly from the ones they call their ‘masters,’ the authorities back home on Planet X!"

"Which may not be welcome news," retorted Nels. He knew the X-ians hadn’t always proven themselves reliable friends—as the term was understood among human beings.

"Now that we know it has their quirks of formatting and encoding, I think I can get the computer to make more of it," Tom said hopefully.

In minutes Tom and Nels Gachter were considering a fantastic message from space!

TOM SWIFT. WE HAVE RECEIVED YOUR TRANSMISSION AND COMPREHEND THE MEANING. WE HAVE SOUGHT THIS INFORMATION FOR MANY CYCLES OF TIME. WE NOW KNOW THE LOCATION OF THE MEMORY CRYPT ON YOUR WORLD. OTHERS HAVE ALSO INTERCEPTED THIS DATA FROM YOU. YOU MUST RECOVER THE CRYPT AND CONVEY IT TO US BEFORE THESE OTHERS TO PREVENT DESTRUCTIVE CONSEQUENCES TO BOTH OUR WORLDS!

"YOU’VE done your usual fine job of translation, son," declared Damon Swift as he and Tom pored over the printed output from the imaging oscilloscope, fanfold sheets spread wide over the Swift kitchen table. "I have a few quibbles. But what’s a father without quibbles?"

Tom laughed. "No comment! What quibbles?"

"I see why you used the term
memory crypt,
but it strikes me as a little... romantic. You might as well use a term like
data storage device.
"

"I think this cluster here—" Tom pointed. "—is meant to indicate the idea of ‘old’ or ‘ancient.’ And this one involves termination of complex processes, particularly those involved with living organisms. When we were dealing with the Space Ark problem, we translated it as ‘
death
’!"

"True. Yes, I see—a biological allusion. Not just old data in a container, but― "

"
Dead memory
in a
crypt
! Dad, if anybody is being romantic, it’s the X-ians themselves."

It had been two hours since dinner, two hours of mathematics, logic, and obscure imagery. Even so, the real mystery—the crisis!—remained to be solved. "Let’s consider the basics again," urged Mr. Swift. "Evidently the Ruykendahl artifact functions as something like a prerecorded message, left on Earth many aeons ago by― "

"Persons unknown."

"All it needed was the tiniest pulse of electricity to activate its ‘send’ function. A radically inexplicable force, coded in some manner, flashes out and is intercepted by the space beings."

"They seem to be assuming I transmitted it to them deliberately," Tom noted.

Mr. Swift nodded. "Information about something they have been seeking for some great span of time, a record of data important to them in some way. In fact, important to
others
!—competitors or adversaries."

"Given the huge span of time, I’d guess a different race of extraterrestrials, not just a rival bunch of X-ians. The
Others
may be the race of beings who created the crypt."

"Or the original ‘owners’ may be long extinct. Yes, I agree, Tom," said his father. "And I agree that they are speaking of something grave, destructive consequences. But I don’t agree," the older scientist went on, "with
this
phrase."

Tom was puzzled by the objection. " ‘
We now know the location
’—you think it’s a bad translation?"

"No. But I think it’s incomplete. This modifying symbol has usually signified something like ‘attenuated’ or ‘partial.’ I suggest that we translate it along these lines." He wrote out a line on the paper.

WE HAVE NOW ATTAINED FROM YOU PARTIAL BUT INCOMPLETE DATA AS TO LOCATION

"I see..." Tom murmured. "Yes, I think you’re right, Dad." He looked up suddenly. "In fact, it makes a lot of sense! If Nee is being truthful, there are
two
of these artifacts, intended to fit together like puzzle pieces. You’d need both to encode the complete location coordinates—whatever form they might be rendered in."

"That’s my notion as well." The man smiled. "I make it a policy not to disagree with someone who’s agreeing with me."

They contemplated the matter. But the course of action was already floating before them. Tom said: "Despite this Miss Matopoeia, we have no choice but to take Nee seriously. He can lead us to the waters where he says both objects were found—and maybe more importantly, to the spot in Mexico where he’d arranged to meet Cousin Ed. Whether Ed’s been kidnapped or just sort’ve
misplaced
, if he still has Artifact B, he has the key to finding the memory crypt—and dealing with whatever two-world threat the X-ians are telling us about!"

Contacted early next day, Nee Ruykendahl was suavely impressed by the account Tom provided—an edited account, as Tom saw no reason to mention the apparent danger to two worlds. "
Hie
! My Lord! I am to believe this little paperweight of mine is 250 million years old?"

"According to the retroscope time calculator, it took on its final form in 254,701,000 BC. Approximately."

Nee laughed heartily. "What, only approximately?—well. Can these alien contacts of yours not tell you more about this treasure-chest we are to find? For surely this is an old-fashioned treasure hunt now, with a mysterious pirate map in code!"

Tom nodded at the telephone. "Naturally, we’ve sent a message back asking for more information. The gist of their reply is that they are still decoding the details of the data transmitted by the beacon; by Artifact A."

"Yes, by
my
Artifact A." The young inventor could clearly discern Ruykendahl’s emphasis—as well as the man’s hungry leap at the word
treasure
.

"They haven’t yet provided any real information on the contents of the cache," said Tom. "We only know that it’s of importance to them. As to where it is, they say they expect to provide
some
information soon. But it may be too incomplete to allow us to pinpoint its location."

"Perhaps we should expect nothing better from a piece of machined sea shell," offered the explorer. "But if we should have the other half of our pirate map― "

"That’s why we’re willing to hire you, sir. We need you to guide us to the spot where your ship anchored, where the divers found the artifacts. For all we know, there could be more of them down there, with additional information. Maybe a complete one."

"And of course we must first locate your cousin, if we can." The man seemed to hesitate. "We are likely to find him with the B object still in his possession, I’d think. And we
will
find him. If as one hopes he is still― "