Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector (2 page)

"My thoughts exactly," Bud agreed. "Of course, with different words!"

"He sure seems focused on the gold," Tom added as he entered the hold, which on this preliminary trip was mostly empty. Popping the reinforced door, the youths stepped into the large freight airlock adjoining Hatchway Four.

Tom removed a small circuit-scanner from his pocket and approached a green rectangle painted on the bulkhead. "The main circuitry is here, behind the wall," he explained to Bud. "There’s no actual access port, because we don’t want to introduce a weak point in—"

He interrupted himself as the overhead lights seemed to dim slightly, then returned to full power. "What’s up with that?" Bud asked, looking toward the ceiling nervously.

But Tom had no time to answer. He whirled, startled, as the open door to the hold swung itself shut behind them with a bang. A hissing sound, painfully high-pitched, suddenly filled the chamber, causing the two to wince. As they staggered back in bewilderment, thin jets of water shot downward like crystalline rods from a dozen small openings where the surrounding walls met the ceiling. A spray, rebounding from the airlock deck under tremendous pressure, hit them from all sides with a stinging impact.

"Good gosh!" Tom murmured in horrified disbelief. "The airlock’s being flooded!"

IN SECONDS the ice-cold seawater was lapping at their ankles! Bud stared at his pal in whitefaced fear. "Can’t we turn it off?"

"Not from inside! But maybe the door hasn’t sealed itself."

They sloshed to the door and grabbed its heavy metal handle with four desperate hands. Pressing their feet against the bulkhead, they pulled together with all their strength. Their muscles bulged and the veins in their necks stood out, but the door held. "It’s sealed," Tom panted. "The whole automatic airlock sequence must be running. When we’re flooded to the top, the outer hatch will open."

"Can’t we stop it?"
gasped Bud. "Rip out some wires or something?" His eyes darted about frantically. "But no—no access panels, no controls. Aw
jetz,
Tom!"

Their legs were growing numb as the frothing water rose above their knees. Suddenly Tom grabbed Bud’s arm. "Your shoes! Take them off!"

The young pilot boggled. "Don’t go nuts on me now, Tom!"

"Do it! Hurry! Hand ’em to me!"

Bud complied. The direct contact of the water with his socks made no difference—his feet were as feelingless as lead weights. But plunging his arms and upper body into the freezing water shocked his system from head to toe.

Tom also had ripped off his shoes. He waddled over to one corner, gazing up at the spot where two walls met the ceiling. There the surface was interrupted by an oval opening about the size of two fists. "Boost me up, Bud," he commanded. As Bud did so, Tom pounded first one shoe, then a second, into the opening, one above the other. Almost immediately the youths winced in pain as a jolt of air pressure surged against their eardrums. "Now the other vent!" Tom gasped.

In a moment both oval openings were crammed full of shoe. Tom and Bud pressed their palms over their ears, their eyes slitted with agony. "The rising water is compressing the air," Tom yelled. "We’ve blocked the air outlet ports."

"So now what?" Bud demanded. "Will the backpressure hold back the water?"

"Eventually!"
But Bud grasped the implication. By the time the pressures came into balance, they would be dead! Nevertheless, the rise of the water slowed as the airspace above it shrank. The water was knocking against their chins as they stood on tiptoe, shivering violently and barely holding on to consciousness.

Then, without warning, the water inlet jets choked off. The reassuring sound of pumps reverberated through the chamber as the water level began to fall away. In two minutes they were high and dry, lying on the deck and gasping for breath.

With a click the inner door popped open, and they dragged themselves into the hold. As they lay panting, Bud choked out,
"Wh-what happened?"

"As I hoped... when the ports couldn’t drain off the air and the pressure got too high... the safety backups overrode the controller circuit..."

Bud shook his head, starting to breath normally again. "Great. But what I meant was, what made the circuit go bad in the first place? Sabotage?"

Tom shrugged, but his shrug was an eloquent answer in itself. They both were well aware that their official passenger had spent much of the trip in the rear of the subship, out of sight.

In the pilot’s cabin the other three members of the crew were horrified. "You mean you guys were getting yourselves drowned and crushed back there, and we didn’t have a clue?" gulped Slim Davis.

"I would think some kind of emergency alarm would have gone off," declared Lieutenant Cromwell.

"It should have," said Zimby. "Definitely! It must all be due to that circuitry problem I noticed."

Tom looked out the viewport musingly. "That seems likely. We might have jarred a weak connection when we opened the inner door to go inside. We’ll check it out back in port."

"Back in port? You won’t be completing your survey, then?" demanded Cromwell.

Tom did not respond, but spent a minute checking over the system readouts on the control board. "Nothing else looks suspicious," he stated at last. "We’ll proceed for now."

"It’s your call," Cromwell said indifferently.

Slim Davis had set down the
Deepwing
in a fairly open space that might have been a plaza at the intersection of two boulevards. The mantacopter rested upon flexible tractor treads that extended from the under-hull on pistons.

Zimby asked if Tom and Bud were about to go outside. "A little later, Zim," Tom answered. "It’s really more important to get the mapping done." As he spoke the young inventor was watching Lieutenant Cromwell’s expression from the corner of his eye. Was the man’s frown only Tom’s imagination?

Lifting off to a height of about fifty yards, Slim guided the
Deepwing
along an expanding spiral course, using doppler sonar to map out the lay of the ruins. In an hour they had surveyed the entirety of the city and were elbowing along the cliffs and rocky slopes that surrounded it. Landing again near a complex of big, tumbled structures, Tom and Bud made ready to exit the craft.

Cromwell held up a hand. "Just the two of you?"

"Got a problem with that, Lieutenant?" snapped Bud in a challenging voice.

But Tom spoke soothingly. "It’s his assignment to keep an eye on us, Bud. You’re welcome to join us, sir, if you like. It’s easy to get the hang of the Fat Man suits."

Tom led Bud and Cromwell down a short corridor abutting the hull, stopping where four man-sized metal objects, polished to a silver shine, protruded from the bulkhead as if penetrating right through the ship’s hull. These were the Fat Man suits, midget one-man submersibles that made their way along on jointed mechanical legs. Each suit was equipped with small propulsion jets, robotic arms, and its own independent air supply.

Lieutenant Cromwell gave the suits a skeptical lookover. "You don’t keep them in an airlock?"

"It’s not necessary," Tom explained. "Each suit fits perfectly into an opening in the hull lined with a contoured sealer-flange that can withstand pressures as well as the hull itself. They face inward, with the backside protruding out into the water. As you back away and disconnect, the flange dilates inward along the curve of the suit and closes off the hole. Not a drop leaks through."

"No doubt you’ve tested it out thoroughly," the officer grunted. "Then again, I had assumed the same thing about your airlock." Ignoring the dig, Tom demonstrated how the entire inward-facing half of the Fat Man swung open like a door, allowing the aquanaut to step backwards into the suit. Pulled shut, it would seal itself automatically.

As Cromwell turned to enter his Fat Man, Tom held his hands behind him, out of sight to the Navy man but in full view of Bud. Waggling his fingers to attract his friend’s eye, Tom signed a silent message in ASL, American Sign Language.
Hang back, don’t seal.
Bud coughed, signaling that he understood.

After a few minutes of instruction, Tom swung the suit closed on Cromwell, at the same time surreptitiously opening a small panel and twisting some control knobs beneath it. "All right, Lieutenant. You can switch on the flange release mechanism and start backing out."

Behind the transparent viewdome Cromwell gave a curt nod and his thick-fingered hands moved about on the small control panel before him. "Nothing’s happening," he muttered over the suit’s external speaker.

"I’ll go over it with you again," was Tom’s response. But when he made a show of unsealing the front of the suit, it refused to open!

"What the blazes is wrong, Swift?" demanded Cromwell with rising anger and a trace of panic. "I want out of this thing!"

Calling Bud over—and giving a secret wink—Tom and his chum worked at the problem for several minutes as Lieutenant Cromwell’s face grew redder and oilier. Finally Tom looked up and shook his head. "I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Some part of the mechanism is malfunctioning. I can’t open her up without special tools. But it’s a good thing the problem showed itself while you were still inside the
Deepwing
—I hate to think—"

"Are you trying to tell me I’m trapped inside this can?"
Cromwell interrupted furiously.

"You’re perfectly safe. The air tanks will last until we return to base. We’ll leave immediately, of course."

"Just pull down that little seat behind you, Darrin old boy," put in Bud with a twitch of a mischievous smile. "Take a load off."

The boys turned and hastened up the corridor, leaving Cromwell raging and sputtering behind them. Back in the control cabin, Bud slapped Tom on the back. "Mighty sweet deal, genius boy!" he laughed.

"What’s going on?" asked Zimby.

"We’ve got our mapping data. We’re done here for now. Slim, take us up and out—let’s head home," Tom answered smoothly.

Both Zimby and Slim looked startled. "But why? Where’s Cromwell?" asked Slim.

"In safekeeping."

"In a cool dry place," Bud added. "Should keep fresh for hours."

The mantacopter angled back up through the slot and into open water, then rose the long way to the surface. Slim reversed the pitch of the rotor blades and the
Deepwing
lifted several yards above the low waves, suspended on a cushion of compressed air. Soon they were jetting south of west toward the Enterprises facility on tiny Fearing Island off the coast of Georgia, base for the company’s space missions and many of its unique submersibles.

Tom made numerous attempts to contact Fearing, then Swift Enterprises in Shopton, New York. But the radio replies were garbled, fading, and full of harsh static. "That upper-air storm must be putting out a lot of lightning," was Tom’s analysis. "Anyway, our saboteur—our
suspected
saboteur—won’t be going anywhere until we have a chance to get Security involved."

"But what could the guy have been after?" asked Slim Davis. "Why try to get rid of you two? Is he some kind of foreign spy?"

Tom shrugged. "Beats me. He arrived with all credentials in order, and both Admiral Hopkins and Admiral Krevitt spoke highly of him."

"Maybe so, but my instincts are going off like a four-alarm fire!" Bud declared.

Finally settling into the seacopter dock at Fearing, Tom briefly stuck his head out through one of the small personnel hatches and directed the dock crew to bring an armed security team on the double. When he saw the team approaching by jeep, he went back below.

Cromwell was still red and fuming in his metal egg, but his voice was under control. "We there? Got your tools?"

Tom nodded without speaking and crouched down out of sight. Again twisting the external suit control knobs, he stood up and pulled the suit hatch open. "That did it. Bet you’d like some fresh air up topside."

The man only glared. As they walked briskly past Bud and the others in the control cabin, the young flyer asked softly: "Any
special
orders for the crew, skipper?"

Tom shook his head, keeping his eye on Lieutenant Cromwell, who had practically run across the deck to the hatch ladder. "It’s Rad’s show," he whispered. Phil Radnor, assistant security chief of Swift Enterprises, was making a week-long inspection tour of the Fearing Island security setup.

Tom and Bud followed Cromwell through the hatch. As they trotted down the rampway to the concrete dock, Tom tensed. Radnor awaited them with crossed arms, a burly Fearing security man at either side, hands resting lightly on their holsters.

To Tom’s surprise, Radnor stepped forward and extended a hand toward Lieutenant Cromwell, who glanced at it as if it were a snake, but shook it. "Phil Radnor," said the stocky security man with a friendly smile. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Judson. You’re under arrest."

The man in Navy uniform jerked away his hand. "What’s that?
Arrest?"
He spat out the words, eyes darting wildly. "You’re crazy! I’m—"

"Joe Judson, right arm to Longneck Ebber," said Radnor coolly, motioning his two men forward. In an instant Judson, the phony Cromwell, was handcuffed. "This is where you say things like
This is an outrage.
But spare our ears, okay, Judson?"

The man fell silent. Tom turned to the assistant security chief and gestured toward the prisoner. "Who
is
this man, Rad, and what’s his full name?"

"Not Darrin Cromwell," was Radnor’s grim response. "The real one was kidnapped, along with his Navy pilot, during their Washington stopover en route to Enterprises. They were pistol-whipped and held captive until four hours ago when Federal agents tracked them down. They’re hospitalized. So’s your buddy Dick Halfven, Joe—two bullet wounds. And we’re on the trail of the guy who posed as your pilot."

"Okay, but who
are
they?" Bud demanded. "What’s the deal?"

"We don’t know the deal," said Radnor as Judson was carted off by jeep. "Ebber runs a branch of something called the Mayday Mob. Wise guys—mobsters."

"The Mafia?" Tom inquired.

"No, independents with plenty of nerve and plenty-thick skulls. Or at least that’s their rep—independent practitioners of the fine art of organized crime. But the Feds think they have some new backers. And that’s bad news for you, boss—and for your Atlantis operation!"