Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome (15 page)

"Don’t know yet, but we’ll soon find out. Here, take this pouch!"

Neither youth dared think of the awful consequences if the ocean should close in around them. Tom unlocked the platform from the anchoring mechanism and it jolted upward—then slowed ominously as the bubble continued to collapse. He grabbed the sliding lever and opened it several notches. The air bubble expanded a little and the platform began rising faster, but the water pressure was still flattening the bubble.

Suddenly the answer flashed through Tom’s mind. "Bud, I have it!" he exclaimed, as they continued rising. "Must be some kind of pollution in the water. The long-range spectrosensor should be adjusting our radiation to compensate for it. But it’s not taking effect!"

"My brain’s fogged, skipper. Tell me what all that means!"

"It means our bubble’s going flat, and we’ve got to get topside as fast as we dare!"

Trying to ward off another attack of the bends, they rose from the depths with aching slowness, eyeing the repelatron airspace with thudding hearts. By the time they had risen two-hundred feet, the flattening effect had subsided and the bubble had resumed its spherical form. "Relax, pal," said Tom breaking into a wan smile of relief. "We must be above the pollution area now."

Bud blinked hard. "A sinking boat is bad, but I’ll take that any day over a waterlogged bubble!"

They were reeled into the
Sky Queen
, and Tom handed Gib Brownell the dispatch box. The engineer was almost speechless with gratitude, but the young inventor smilingly brushed it aside. "I should be thanking
you,
Gib. You not only gave me a chance to give the new repelatron a real workout, but it seems I have a weak spot to find and fix." Tom opened up the spectrosensor circuitry in one of the lab cubicles aboard the ship, and by the time Hank Sterling announced one minute to landing, he had repaired the problem.

"I didn’t take underwater temperature variations into account," he told Bud. "Unexpected currents can cause big changes in the thermal gradient. Luckily it’ll be easy to build that element into the sensors and the sampler machines."

"Then its sounds like we’re about ready to start workin’ the ole helium mine!" pronounced Bud gleefully. "Right?"

Tom grinned. "Right! As soon as we bring Mr. Bronson up to speed and make a few preparations with Dr. Clisby and Bob Anchor, I’d say we’re ready to start laying the foundations for Helium City!"

As it turned out, it was another week before all preparations were completed, all materials loaded aboard the planes and seacraft that would supply the great operation. But like a long-anticipated Christmas morning, the historic day finally made its appearance on the horizon and the move toward the undersea mountain got underway. A fleet of eight big cargo planes—amphibious models equipped with jet lifters—lined up on the Enterprises airfield. One by one they took to the air on an eastward heading, laden with construction gear, air tanks, lightweight segments of the Tomasite dome, and foundation materials. Piloting the
Sky Queen,
Tom followed them into the air, the big hydrodome repelatron stowed in the hangar-hold.

As usual, Chow Winkler—oral surgery and a swollen jaw behind him—was part of the crew. "Say there, boss," he said gravely. "Got a little somethin’ on m’ mind."

Tom looked up from the stratoship’s controls. "Something serious, Chow?"

"Wa-aal now, guess that depends…"

"On what?"

"On whether you’re
me
or not! I was thinkin’ on what happened to Bud t’other night."

Tom nodded. "He’s lucky. It could have been pretty bad."

"The thing is this," continued the Texan. "Sterling told me I wouldn’t be able t’ use any salt in my cookin’ down in that dome, a’cause it might make a mixture so close to sea water, accidental-like, that that repelly doodad would shoot it right out o’ the bubble! That true?"

The young inventor chuckled fondly. "It’s not likely—we just don’t want to take any unnecessary chances. But I’ll bet a chef like you won’t have any trouble coming up with some tasty—"

"Naw," Chow interrupted, "that ain’t what’s eatin’ at me. It’s jest that I been told all my life I got a heap o’ salt water in this Rio Grande blood of mine. What’s gonna happen to me when you switch that thing on? I don’t think I’m built t’ go flyin’, son!"

Tom’s chuckle became joshing laughter. "That’d be quite a sight! But don’t worry, pard. The newest repelatron model is able to tune itself in a very sensitive way, to precise mixtures and proportions. And it can also be counter-tuned!"

"That’s a relief! Leastways I bet it
would
be if’n I knew what it meant!"

"It means we can not only calibrate the machine to only affect particular solutions and substances, but we can also do the reverse—tell it to
ignore
the nucleonic patterns of certain things we’re sure we want left alone. You see, the field pattern is actually an overlay of a huge number of sub-patterns, and we can filter out some of the ones we don’t need." He explained that the space-wave "mix" of all common biological products and human substances that might appear as traces in water had been carefully recorded into the repelatron’s computer and would be excluded from the repulsion effect. Pure drinking and bathing water would also be immune.

"What about stuff like teeth an’ bones—stuff like that?"

"Don’t forget, Chow—the repelatron can only handle one basic compound or element at a time. As far as this one goes, we only need to be concerned with water-based compounds and solutions."

Chow’s face lit up in relief. "Great! Brand my flyin’ fish, I sure wasn’t lookin’ forward to havin’ to tie myself down afore I went to sleep every night."

Chow went up to his galley on the top deck, inspired to begin experimenting with salt-free dishes. Presently, as the
Queen
passed the limits of the continental shelf, Bud entered the cabin to keep his friend company. "We’re off to that mystery mountain despite our enemies!" he chortled.

"Maybe we’ve seen the last of them," Tom remarked. "I doubt it. Still, the Navy hasn’t found any more of those chests."

"Nor a sign of the
Mad Moby,"
Bud pointed out. "But it’s out there somewhere."

By the middle of the morning the supersonic air fleet had reached the mid-Atlantic. For miles around the ocean was thick with surface craft of all descriptions, including Navy patrol boats circling protectively at the edges.

Tom made contact with Dr. Clisby, aboard the
Sea Hound
with Bob Anchor. The older man’s voice rang with excitement. "My first experience founding a city!" he declared. "Rather puts my sedate life as a chemist in the shade, eh?"

"It’s you two chemists who’ll be keeping us alive, Doctor," responded Tom. "I’m counting on you to do the fine calibrations required to get the sampling equipment up and running. I’m betting our adversaries still have a big store of T-9-E to use against the hydrodome—if we give them a chance."

Bob added his voice to Clisby’s. "We won’t give them that chance, Tom."

Having reached the site of the helium beds, Tom brought the
Sky Queen
down close to the surface of the water, while Enterprises employee Carl Tenn brought the seacopter up into the sunlight, where it hovered on its cushion of air. The side hatch of the Flying Lab opened, and Tom and Bud clambered down onto the flat top of the
Sea Hound,
then down one of the hatches to the fore cabin where they greeted Carl, Bob, and Dr. Clisby. Finally the master repelatron was carefully lowered from the
Queen
’s hangar-hold and stowed in the seacopter. Then the craft submerged again.

Operations had been planned to the last detail. Tom would go first with the repelatron and set up the airspace, and the osmotic atmosphere conditioner, an invention of Tom’s for extracting dissolved oxygen and nitrogen from sea water, would be installed and activated. Next two curving brace-beams of magtritanium metal, crossing like an X at their high points, would be erected. Then would come the mass of paraphernalia for the plastic dome, and finally the rigging for the wells, storage tanks, and the prefabricated dormitory, galley, and office. All the latter equipment would descend from the boats and floating amphibious cargo planes by several of the bubblevators.

Three crewmen went down on anchored bubblevators to assist Tom and Bud in their work, and the solid base-platform for the repelatron was drilled into the great rocky plain that abutted the mountainside and the well-cap. This would be the exact center of the hydrodome—its foundation stone. Until everything was in working order and the atomic reactor module was brought down, the dome repelatron would draw power directly from the
Sea Hound
’s dual atomic piles.

After more than an hour of difficult work in Fat Man suits, the repelatron was finally bolted in place. Tom gave a wave to Clisby and Anchor, watching through the seacopter’s viewport, and shot Bud a glance of highly charged anticipation. Then he threw the power switch and began to manipulate the field controls.

The effect was awesome and instantaneous! A perfect sphere, transparent but lustrous like a giant pearl, leapt into existence around the glowing radiator antenna and began to expand slowly outward. As the walls of the bubble swept past the air-production machinery the osmotic air conditioner was brought on line, drawing in water through a feed pipe electronically isolated from the repelatron field. Fresh, breathable air filled the expanding bubble.

The airspace—now only a partial sphere, as the lower reaches of the field were beneath the ground—grew ever larger, its smooth walls glinting in the worklight beams.

"This is amazing!" remarked one of the engineers, Pete Elliot, as the atmosphere conditioner rapidly went about its work keeping the pressure balanced and comfortable.

"Yeah? Welcome to Swift Enterprises!" retorted Bud through his suit sonophone.

As the perimeter of the bubble attained its planned maximum, the repelatron was readjusted to stabilize the field. Tom then contacted the surface through the relays built into the bubblevator cables—it was time to begin lowering the big metal crossbeams.

By the middle of a long afternoon, two elegant metal tubes, joined at the top, arched gracefully over the circular patch of dry land beneath the sea. With the press of a button, spotlights built into the undersides of the beams turned the airspace bright as day.

"Jetz!" Bud marveled. Then he sonophoned, "Say, Tom, what’s with the red-colored lights up there between the others?"

"Infrared heat lamps," Tom replied. "Don’t forget, pal, down here in Davy Jones’s locker the temperature stays mighty close to freezing all day long. The only reason it didn’t get to us in the bubblevator was that the spotlights supplied a fair amount of warmth. But Helium City needs more than that."

It was at last possible for the dozen or so workers to discard their Fat Men, which they all did gratefully. The several bubblevators remained just beyond the edge of the airspace, allowing them to use the buoyancy effect to move up and down. But when parked on the ocean floor their individual bubbles slightly overlapped the main airspace, creating open portals of entry. Hank Sterling, newly arrived, stepped through one such portal, followed by a wide-eyed Chow Winkler.

"Reporting for duty!" he said with a mock salute. "Now that the brace-beams have been unloaded, I sent the
Sky Queen
on her way." Not equipped for amphibious landing, the Flying Lab needed to return to the mainland before the lifter fuel ran low.

"Man alive! How’re human people ever gonna get used t’ livin’ in a bubble?" muttered Chow. Then he added: "Wa-aal, guess I said the same thing about livin’ up in space—and that’s working out all right."

The next part of the operation was to construct the Tomasite hydrodome itself, which would span the gaps between the metal arches. This was a massive undertaking, but by evening this too had been completed under the guidance of Tom and Hank. Helium City was now enclosed in a dome nearly as far across as the length of a city block! Yet the sea never touched the dome, being held back another several yards beyond.

"A little more work and we’ll be ready to send for the other equipment," said Tom, standing next to Bud and Pete Elliot.

"Huh!" muttered Pete suddenly. "What was that?"

"What was what, Pete?" asked Bud.

"Thought I felt something bounce off my shoulder. Guess not."

A soft thumping sound made them whirl. "Hey, look!" cried one of the workers, pointing. A curved, shiny object lay on the ground.

Tom bent down to examine it—then suddenly jerked his head back, gazing upward in wide-eyed alarm.

"Listen everyone!" Tom shouted. "Make for the seacopter—the bubblevators—anything that’ll protect you!"

"But why?" Bud demanded.

"It’s the dome!
The dome is disintegrating above our heads!"

NOW EVERY pair of eyes was turned upward toward the peak of the hydrodome that curved above them. It was losing transparency, turning white, as if riddled with tiny cracks. Chunks of plastic were starting to peel loose, raining down on them!

Most of the men ran toward the seacopter, which was parked in the open next to the repelatron. They crawled under the protective overhang of its curving, saucer-shaped hull. The metal hull rang with the impact of the falling shards of plastic, and the air was filled with drifting particles—Tomasite dust.

In less than five minutes the two metal beams stood alone like the ribs of a skeleton.
The entire dome had fallen to pieces!

Tom Swift was anguished—crushed. "I can’t understand it! What could have caused this?"

"Jest be glad we’re still here t’ wonder about it!" said Chow, squatting low beneath the overhang.

The heartsick young inventor dashed into the
Sea Hound
with a fragment of the dome, and Clisby and Anchor analyzed it in a Swift Spectroscope, then examined it under a powerful microscope. Dr. Clisby’s face was grim and puzzled when he looked up from the eyepiece. "It seems this wonderful Tomasite of yours has some unanticipated properties. Some of the crystal lattices that give the plastic its strength have changed configuration to an alternate form. The percentage is minute, but the effect is to render the material extremely fragile."