Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (8 page)

"If you were off in town, they could have grabbed and run," observed the Chief.

"But they
didn’t
," stated Ed. "Look, I knew the thing was interesting and possibly some kind of old carving with archaeological value; that’s why I kept it safe with my travel documents and so on. But I sure didn’t have a clue that it might be something somebody would go to any trouble to steal. I mean, you know, it’s obviously not
ancient
—it’s machined."

"It’s older than it looks." Tom took Ed’s Artifact B and examined it, by eye and with a powerful magnifier he carried, folded, in his pocket kit. "I can’t do any real analysis here. But it sure
looks
like the one Nee brought to us, superficially."

Jualéngro raised an eyebrow. "Were you thinking it might be a phony? Counterfeit?"

"I’m thinking a lot of things," responded the Shoptonian wryly. "At the top of the list—what could have been the point of this hoax? What did they hope to accomplish? They went to some effort to induce Mr. Ruykendahl to come to Las Mambritas at a certain time, to a certain spot within a couple miles of where Ed was staying anyway. If you two had kept in touch and Ed hadn’t been in an antisocial ‘mood,’ the meeting might have happened on its own."

"But there
wasn’t
a meeting," Bud pointed out. "They got the two of them close together, but in a way that they wouldn’t actually meet."

"They risked an accidental meeting," muttered Nee.

Ed shook his head. "No, not if they knew my habits. I don’t go into town all that often. I didn’t even know there
was
a library. And they obviously
did
keep track of me, enough to let Nee know I was here in Mambritas."

"If indeed they—whoever—knew your habits, they must have been watching for some time, well before the date of the arranged meeting at the library," Jualéngro commented. "
Sí
. They must have been spying on you since you first arrived in Mexico, Mr. Longstreet, and they may well be continuing to do it."

Ed shrugged. "Weeelllp, I never
noticed
anyone acting like an eye-spy. I suppose the owner here or his son would pick up on my comings and goings."

"Anyone staying here in these bungalows, or living in the general area, could keep track of you easily, without detection," Tom said. "And I think we’ve already run into the person the watchers are reporting to." Tom described the middle-aged man who had seemed to be following them earlier.

Ed could only scratch his balding head. "I think I stopped noticing people like that—tourists in funny clothes—years ago."

It was agreed that Ed, with his portable safe and the artifact, should spend the night protected by the
Sky Queen
’s security system and sturdy hull. Chief Jualéngro called for a couple taxis. After a wide-eyed tour of the famous Flying Lab, she left to return to work with a promise to continue the investigation. "Perhaps I can identify this haunting tourist of ours."

Relaxing in the observation lounge, Ed told the others that he was ready to cut his vacation short. "I guess Mexico’s given me a little too
much
to ‘contemplate.’ After you’ve fitted the two halves together back at Enterprises and run your tests, Tom, I think I’ll move on. Maybe some boating in the South Atlantic."

"We won’t need to fly up to the U.S. to fit the artifacts together," Nee spoke up. "My Artifact A is here with us on the plane. And Tom may wish to amplify a bit on just why these matched objects are so important."

Ed gave his cousin a look of surprise. "You said they’re quite old and made of unusual materials—sounds familiar, doesn’t it?—but is there something more?"

"A lot more!" declared the young inventor. He now related to Ed the fantastic age indicated by the retroscope, and the involvement of the space friends. As before, he held back, for the moment, the more alarming details—in front of Nee Ruykendahl.

Ed’s response was to grin broadly. "Creepin’ crabbies, everything turns to sci-fi! So these lovely lumps are broadcast beacons, like the service that radios map directions to you as you drive."

"Nee here calls them treasure maps," Bud nodded. "But the X-ians haven’t exactly told us what the treasure
is
—that is, why it’s a
treasure
. Sounds to me like just an old abandoned filing cabinet."

"We may know the answer when we link the two pieces together," Tom noted. "Shall we do it?"

"Without the electric current this time, genius boy," Bud warned humorously. "Switching on the
whole
thing could set off beepers from here to Albuquerque."

Tom led them down one deck to the analysis lab cubicle. Cautiously slipping on thick gauntlets of protective material, he removed Artifact A from its locked, shielded container. Taking Ed’s lump in hand, he slowly brought the two segments together as Bud, Nee, and Ed watched in edgy suspense.

The objects touched.

THE WATCHERS saw a look of frustration cloud Tom Swift’s eager face. With a piece in each hand, Tom moved them, turned them, pressed on them. He abruptly set them down on the countertop.

"They don’t fit."

"Jetz!" groaned Bud. "Don’t tell us
that
!"

Tom gestured for his pal to give it a try. Bud did, and the others took their turns. But it was obvious that the objects, similar as they appeared to be, didn’t fit together.

"Too bad," pronounced Ed. "Maybe there are a lot of these beacon-transmitters scattered around on the seafloor, in halves, all a little different."

"Seeking their soul-mates," was Nee’s comment.

"It was always a possibility," Tom admitted. "I was hoping it’d turn out differently. If the X-ians can’t squeeze more data out of the transmission from the first piece, it might be impossible to find the memory crypt without a complete beacon."

"If it still exists," said Ed. "A few million years can be a little
hard
on computers and filing cabinets, even made by aliens."

Ruykendahl exclaimed impatiently, "Pfah! This piece of Longstreet’s must be encoded with
something
! Activate it as you did with the other, Tom, and let your cosmic friends make of it what they will."

Tom looked at the explorer coolly. "I’d rather not put half of Mexico into a state of alarm. Before I do anything further with the objects, I’ll try to get more information from the extraterrestrials."

Nee seemed to deflate. "I wish I possessed your scientific calm. Alas, the celebrated Ruykendahl is not a reasonable man. But that’s all right. Reasonable men do not have such interesting lives."

"Scientists
do
lead pretty humdrum lives," Bud cracked.

Securing the artifacts, they returned to the lounge. "Mind a suggestion, cuz?" offered Ed. "Make Easter Island your next stop. I know you’ll want to use your submersible equipment to search on the ocean bottom, but you might get some sort of lead as to the location of more of the beacons by speaking with a fellow I met there last summer, when the
Wascala
anchored there for a couple days."

"And what might this man know of these ancient objects?" asked Nee with some irritation.

"He’s an expert on native lore and culture," replied Ed. "If there are many of these objects out there, they may turn up in fishing nets now and then, or wash ashore. If you could map out where they’re found, wouldn’t that be a clue as to the location of the crypt? Even if it hasn’t happened in modern times, local myths and traditions sometimes ‘encode,’ in their own way, information about such strange incidents."

Tom agreed enthusiastically. "You’re right! All sorts of discoveries—including caches of artifacts and the buried ruins of lost cities—have been located by sifting through stories and legendary accounts. It’s worth a day or two."

"And if you don’t mind carrying my baggage with you, I might just make Easter Island my next stay," Ed added. "When you fly back to the States, I’ll be your local ear-to-the-ground guy."

"Okay with you, Nee?" asked Bud.

The big adventurer shrugged. "Why not? I was to lead you anyway to the area of the seafloor where we anchored the
Wascala
. Easter Island is not far and along the route. I wish to solve this mystery as much as any of you."

"For the ‘treasure’?" asked Tom bluntly.

"Oh, my young man, I need an income in these days of my public abandonment, true enough," answered Ruykendahl mildly. "But this cache is a scientific matter, not something to be auctioned, even if I had the right to do so. What is at stake here is my image, my fame. Eh? A Ruykendahl adventure! I need to reboot my reputation."

With Bud their pilot, they took off southward. Alone with his chum in the control compartment, Tom contacted the Easter Island authorities to make arrangements and secure the necessary permissions, then spoke to his father in Shopton. He told his son that there had been no further messages from the space beings. "I’ll let Ed’s parents know that their
lack
of worry paid off," promised Damon Swift.

Switching off, Tom turned to Bud. "What do you suppose we’re getting into, flyboy?"

Bud grinned. "Oh, the usual. Which means,
as usual
, I can barely follow what’s going on."

"Someone, maybe Li, found out about Ed’s having the artifact," Tom mused. "He’s probably been keeping tabs on Nee as well—if Nee isn’t part of the plot himself, as Miss Matopoeia suspects."

"The guy has a motive to build everything up to get backing from you and Enterprises, make it sort’ve sensational and a scientific mystery—
that’s
a better hook for Tom Swift than Li’s skyhook!"

The young inventor chuckled. "It’s working! But it’s obviously not
just
some kind of stunt, Bud. It’s a fact that the objects contain Lunite, are incredibly old, and generate some sort of unknown energy. And the space message has to be genuine—the symbol language hasn’t been made public or circulated."

Bud was suddenly serious. "Maybe not to the
public
. But Tom—you’ve been sharing all this Planet X stuff with the U.S. government. They’ve been known to spring leaks now and then."

"Yup—true. And we already suspect that the Black Cobra has managed to connect to some sort of extraterrestrial source, Planet X or otherwise. He may have doped out enough of the space symbols to fake a message. Maybe even intercept our own outgoing messages and respond to them."

"In other words," stated Bud, "the same thing he’s already done to Nee Ruykendahl!"

"If."

"Yeah. If. Man, I
hate
‘if’!"

The flight of the
Queen
was hours long, thousands of miles almost due south over the slowly darkening Pacific to a tiny rock of an island almost equally far from the coast of South America—one of the most isolated spots on the face of the sea.

On the way, Tom read about their destination from reference books in the
Sky Queen
’s library. Called Rapa Nui in the native tongue, the island had been discovered by Dutch Commodore Roggeveen on Easter Sunday, 1722. Like later visitors, he had been astounded and mystified by its hundreds of gigantic stone statues—all with the same weird, sneering face.

Its Polynesian people had had numerous unhappy contacts with outsiders. Many had been carried off by Peruvian slavers in 1862, capturing or killing about half of the island’s population. A handful of escapees returning to the island from Peru had set off an epidemic of smallpox, and tuberculosis spread by missionaries took another quarter of the native population. Violent clan wars further decimated the inhabitants, until only 111 persons remained.

Finally Chile had taken over the island. Now the native descendants numbered several thousand and the minute island was used mainly for sheep raising.

"Those big stone statues—what do they represent?" asked Bud.

"No one knows for sure," Tom replied. "It’s amazing that they could even have been quarried and erected on such a tiny, remote land speck."

Ed remarked quietly, "An unsettling, eerie place. It makes you believe that a pile of rock can feel loneliness. And grief."

Soon the Flying Lab jet-hovered over Easter Island. Cliff-girded and ringed by jagged black lava reefs, the island was green and hilly, interrupted by the craters of the several extinct volcanoes that had given birth to it when the Pacific was newborn.

"Look! There are some of the statues!" Tom said, pointing. The huge pieces lay face down, along a crumbling stone platform near the shore. "I’ve read that they stood on burial platforms, or mausoleums, all around the island," Tom added.

Nee commented, "A number have been set back up in place. Ah, tourism."

Bud landed the
Sky Queen
in a field of jagged black pebbles between the cramped island airport and Easter’s only village, Hanga Roa. A Chilean Navy officer, Lieutenant Moreno, came to meet them in a jeep. "An honor! I am told you are planning some underwater explorations."

"Yes sir. The first goal is to narrow the area of our researches. I’m—er—checking a theory connected with something that may have happened on the ocean floor."

"A volcanic activity perhaps. We are host to many scientists, geologists, archaeologists—some are pleased to live here on Isla de Pascua—that is our official Spanish name—the year round. And of course we are well acquainted with Mr. Ruykendahl and his safari-ship
Wascala
." As Nee looked smugly pleased, Moreno continued: "But our governor is most eager to see the famous Tom Swift. You must accept his invitation to dine with him this evening. Allow me the honor of escorting you to his residence after you are dressed."

"I thought I
was
dressed!" Bud muttered to Tom in a whisper.

As Tom and Bud rode into town in the lieutenant’s jeep, excited islanders, mounted on wiry horses, came galloping toward them. The people were raggedly dressed, but greeted the visitors with gay, friendly smiles.

"
Ia-o-rana
!" they chorused.

At Lieutenant Moreno’s whispered suggestion, the boys called back, "
Ia-o-rana korna
!—Good day, everyone!"—the island’s traditional greeting.