Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire (14 page)

They were in a narrow, high-sided cave of whitish rock, which had apparently linked the crevice to the mysterious source of the gas further below. By occasionally riding the tread-rings up onto the curving walls, it looked as though Terry would be able—barely—to proceed onward and downward.

"Let’s get going!" urged Tom. "The whole secret of the mysterious gas might be at the end of this cave."

Craig objected. "What if Hoplin and his partner are hiding near here?" he warned. "They could seal the cave entrance with a few sticks of dynamite!"

"Why not post one of us as a guard?" Bud suggested. "I can climb back up to the surface if you want, Tom," he offered.

"One man wouldn’t be enough against Hoplin’s gang," Tom reminded his friend. "Look, while we’re down here discussing the question, we could be doing some scouting that will help us later. Let’s just go a bit further and see what we can see. Then I’ll back Terry all the way up to the top, if we don’t find a place to turn around in."

Craig laughed. "Sci-Fi, I’d be a lunatic to try to stop you when you’ve got a whiff of scientific discovery in that nose of yours."

As the tank eased forward into the cave, Tom, Bud, and Craig tingled with anticipation. The last faint traces of bright sunlight were left far behind. The vehicle’s searchlight stabbed the inky darkness.

"The floor of this cave is reasonably level," Tom remarked over the intercom. "I think the uprushing gases must have a scouring, smoothing effect on it, like sandpaper."

"Let’s hope it stays that way," said Craig, "and that the tunnel stays big enough for us to get through."

"Even if we have to wiggle now and then like a worm!" Bud added.

Minutes passed as the terrasphere tank penetrated deeper and deeper into the mysterious corridor. Eventually the explorers arrived at a sharp bend. Tom, about to make the turn, brought the vehicle to a stop so abrupt that it slid several feet.

"What’s up?" Bud intercommed.

For answer, Tom snapped off the spotlight. A ghostly light, much brighter than before, was shining from around the bend.

"Jumping jets!" Bud cried breathlessly. "That glow! It must be from the gas!"

Tom did not agree. "High tide isn’t due for several hours!" he said.

As the explorers stared at the weird glow ahead, Craig suggested fearfully that there might be other people in the cave.

"Not Hoplin and Cameron," remarked Tom. "They’d greet us in darkness and pull a fast one."

Tom still was inclined to think that the ghostly light was a natural phenomenon of the taboo mountain. With this thought in mind, he sent the vehicle forward and rounded the turn.

"Wow!" gasped Bud. "What a sight!"

The cavern walls were glowing with a strange, shimmering phosphorescence. Every bit of rock surface seemed to be aflame with a cold, green-white light. Tom and Bud were instantly reminded of the luminescence they had observed in Tom’s laboratory in Shopton.

"Remarkable!" said Craig, "But it’s sure eerie. What do you think is causing the cave to glow, Tom? Atomic radiation?"

"It must be a secondary reaction to the antiproton gas," the young scientist theorized, "perhaps an effect of the Inertite particles in the rocks." He explained that if the atomic structure of the rock were being excited—pumped full of energy—the release of the energy overload could produce such an emission. "And the walls are definitely radioactive," he said after checking the instruments. "You wouldn’t want to stay down here for too long without antirad protection."

Greatly intrigued by the phenomenon, Tom continued ahead. The corridor of glowing rock stretched for a considerable distance, then stopped abruptly, ending at a solid barrier of rock.

"End of the trail," Bud muttered somberly.

"Maybe not," Tom retorted optimistically. "I’m convinced we’re getting near the source of the mysterious gas. Perhaps it’s originating from a subterranean pit on the other side of that wall. It looks to me that this barrier is new—another effect of my little explosive experiment."

"Pal, you don’t intend trying to dig through this wall?" Bud asked in amazement.

"Not yet," Tom replied. "First, I want to make some careful measurements. It may help me pinpoint the source of the gas. Next time we can come back with real digging equipment and punch our way through."

"Then let’s go!" said Bud. He had gradually become as nervous as Craig about the possibility of danger.

"Just a minute," Tom replied. He checked his suit and helmet. "I want to collect some specimens of this rock to study back in the
Sky Queen
tonight."

"You couldn’t just read a magazine?" Craig jibed wryly.

Tom climbed out of the tank, carrying a pick. Soon the cave was filled with the sound of digging as he cut deep into one wall. Each stroke tore out big chunks of the rock.

"This should be enough," Tom said as he handed up half a dozen pieces to Bud and Craig. "Load these into the cargo bins, will you?"

Tom studied the rock wall for a few minutes more, then climbed back inside the tank, heaving a reluctant sigh. Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, he noted, "High tide is still hours away, but we don’t want to play it too close."

Along the way the terrasphere tank had passed through a wider section of the tunnel. They backed up to this point, and by skillful maneuvering Tom found space to turn the tank completely around. The explorers started their journey out of the cave. Piloting Terry, the young inventor sat in deep thought, wondering if the rock specimens would furnish him with some answers to the scientific puzzle of this cave of the spirit-gods.

"We’re almost out of the cave!" Bud announced at last, seeing a disk of sunlight ahead. In moments Terry surmounted the last pile of rocky rubble and tumbled out into the blinding afternoon sunshine.

"Don’t know about you, Bud," Craig murmured, "but I’m mighty glad to see the sun again." The younger pilot agreed.

They gathered up what was left of the equipment that went with the atomic drill, which had been stacked in the clearing and appeared undisturbed, then drove to the
Sky Queen
camp at impatient speed.

Hank Sterling came ambling up as they piled out of the tank. "Decided not to spend the night, eh?"

"Where we went, they’ve got nothing
but
night!" joked Bud. In the lounge aboard the mighty ship Tom and his friends narrated the story of their unexpected adventure.

"Young man, you are quite a taker of risks," Ry Cully said in a stern voice. "Do give thought to the fact that if anything happens to you, the rest of us will be in serious difficulty."

"Oh, don’t worry, Professor," said Doc Simpson with a wink at Tom. "If anything knocked Tom, Bud, and Craig here out of the picture, commanding the
Sky Queen
would fall to a man of considerable maturity and travel experience."

"Who?" demanded Ry. "Sterling?"

"Chow Winkler!"

Chow played along with the joke. "Sure enough! And I’ve had many a year o’ experience with vehicles ten times more rambunctious than this here Flyin’ Lab! An’ they kin buck, too!"

Professor Cully gave a sheepish look and joined in the laughter.

The blunted earth blaster was carried into the
Queen
’s engineering workshop, which adjoined the hangar hold on the bottom deck. Tom at once took inventory of his supply of spare parts for the earth blaster, and was relieved to find that he had enough to construct another drill-head.

"This is how we’ll be getting through that wall," he told Craig, who was helping him.

"Won’t those penetrator vanes just dissolve again?"

"I hope not. On the drive back I thought up a better way to anchor the Inertite coating to the metal of the blades."

Bud, together with Hanson and Sterling, worked in the
Sky Queen
’s machine shop to clean and recondition the damaged earth blaster. Another heavy coating of Inertite served as the finishing touch. When joined to the new drill-head and tested on some boulders at the edge of the clearing, the new unit functioned as well as the original one.

"We’re all set now," Tom announced wearily, wiping his brow. He felt eyes on him and turned. Chow was standing by the hatch ladder, a disapproving expression on his face.

"Something wrong, Chow?" asked Tom.

"Boss, if’n you’ll pry open them eyelids o’ yours, you’ll see that it’s night out—them lights up there is
stars."

"So?"

"So when’d you plan to eat? Or t’ let Bud an’ Hanson and all the rest feed themselves?"

Surprised, Tom turned to Arv Hanson, who was helping Craig pack away the earth blaster near the test boulder. "Arv, Chow says it’s night. You’re not
hungry,
are you?"

Hanson laughed. "Tom, I could use a Hippo sandwich right about now!"

"We can’t
all
draw on scientific curiosity as a power source, Sci-Fi," admonished Craig sympathetically.

Much embarrassed, Tom agreed to take a break for a late evening supper.

"I know’d you’d say that," remarked Chow. "So I got it all prepared an’ ready on t’ other side o’ the ship."

"You mean outside, in the open?"

Chow snorted humorously. "Cain’t have a good barbecue on th’
inside,
now kin you?" It developed that the talented range cook, with the help of Mandelia Akwabo, had worked out trade relations with some of the less conservative Ogaphabu villagers. "We been tradin’ cooking secrets," Chow declared. "An’ they gave me some fresh meat and fruits and all kinds o’ vegetables, so’s everything in my recipe is the gen-yoo-ine article."

Bud pretended to flinch back in fear. "Did you run the ingredients past Doc Simpson? I want to live to see another sunrise!"

"Buddy boy, one of these days I’m gonna take you serious and head back to Texas," responded Chow. "’N then you’d miss me fer sure!"

Bud chuckled. "Pard, without you, I’d be down to skin and bones in no time."

Chow’s barbecue supper under the stars was indescribable—yet completely delicious. The expeditioners sat comfortably on a big tarp spread out over the ground beneath the forward curve of the great fuselage, where they could look out through the trees and see a purple-black sky glimmering with a million crystalline stars.

"This is wonderful," Doc Simpson murmured. "Even in the twenty-first century, there’s still at least one spot on earth with air that’s fresh and pure."

"Don’t mention it to Tom," Bud joked. "He’ll try to squeeze it into a tank and ship it back home."

As the others relaxed in the warm night air, Tom and Ry Cully boarded the
Sky Queen
to make a preliminary study of the gas that had been caught in the shielded containers. It was released with great care into an Inertite-coated test chamber which was studded with various sophisticated electronic instruments and sensor devices. The results of the initial test revealed some startling facts. The gas proved to give off antiprotons, as Tom had suspected, but he was amazed to learn that it contained traces of a substance with an atomic weight of 286. This value was unknown to the atomic table!

"The properties of this gas are different from anything yet known to science," Tom told his older colleague.

After a further hour of work, Cully said, "Tom, permit me to withdraw any doubt I ever uttered or implied about the value of this expedition. This gas is basically a carbon-fluorine compound, but composed of isotopes never observed in a natural setting. And that new silicon isotope, the one you’ve named Silicoidium—a magnificent paradox! Though my field is geophysics, not chemistry, I know enough to say that what you have here is absolutely revolutionary in its implications."

"But we still have to determine the exact sequence of its chain reaction," Tom commented, modestly setting the superlatives aside. "These samples of gas are ‘spent’—barely sputtering with antiproton generation. The real deal is still down underneath Goaba, on the other side of that barrier of rock."

They continued talking as they exited the physics cubicle. Noticing that it was nearing midnight, Tom decided it was time to bring everyone back on board for the night and lock-up the ship. He and Ry proceeded to the bottom deck and paused at the open hatchway.

"Odd," commented Ry. "I don’t hear anyone. But they don’t seem to have entered the ship."

Tom called out a couple of times and tried the intercom. There was no response.

"You don’t suppose they’ve taken ill from one of Chow’s concoctions—do you?" the Professor speculated nervously.

But a more frightful possibility had occurred to Tom. While they had been working obliviously aboard the Flying Lab, their ruthless enemies might have struck—and eliminated the rest of the expedition!

TOM AND RY frantically searched through the ship for their companions, then went out into the clearing.

"If we’ve been attacked as you suspect, they may still be out there waiting for us!" protested Ryerson Cully.

"I’ve just swept the area with a special kind of radar device," Tom responded crisply. "It can analyze patterns of motion within a range of about half a mile, even among the trees. There’s no sign of any human-like movements. So, Professor, please focus on finding out what happened to our friends!"

"I’ll do my best," he said. "I apologize for my nervousness."

They walked throughout the stony clearing, the radius of which was about twice the length of the
Sky Queen,
looking for clues. It appeared that the residue of supper had been neatly cleared away.

"I think they were all just taking it easy before turning in for the night," murmured Tom. "Look at the folds and indentations on the tarp—it looks like they were sitting in a circle. But then—" Tom pointed to another spot. "It looks like people were dragged across the tarp and out into the clearing, like dead weights."

"P-perhaps they were rendered unconscious in some manner," said Ry softly. The more likely alternative was too terrible to mention.

Inside the ship Tom rushed to the control compartment to establish contact with Swift Enterprises, where it was midday.

"The possibilities are horrible, son, but you’ll only make the situation worse by speculating," Mr. Swift advised his son soberly. "In fact, you simply don’t know what happened."