Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire (18 page)

"Now the real expedition begins," Tom declared. He paused, gazing off toward the broad, shadowed opening in the mountainside. "I’m taking the terrasphere right into the heart of the caves of nuclear fire!"

"TOM, is there room in that thing for two?" asked Bud with a nod toward the descent sphere.

"Not for two Chow Winklers," Tom replied with a grin. "But for you or I—sure."

"Then let me go with you," Bud said simply. And Tom agreed.

"I was going to ask you anyway, pal," Tom remarked. He added jokingly: "It just wouldn’t
be
a trip down into an antimatter volcano without you!"

This time Arvid Hanson and Mandelia Akwabo remained at the entrance to serve as guards. With the descent sphere snug in its cradle, the tank platform again rumbled down the luminous tunnel with Bud at the controls.

"More signs of digging," Tom noted. "They must have someone playing lookout at the opening. When they see or hear Terry in the distance, the signal is given and they run off to some prepared hiding place."

"A terrible idea just came to me," said Hank. "The members of this gang may not fully understand the implications of the antiproton phenomenon, even with that report they stole from your safe. If they haven’t been wearing sufficient protective gear, Nature will mete out a horrible fate to all of them!"

"I don’t want to feel sorry for these jokers," muttered Craig; "but radiation poisoning is a pretty lousy way to die!"

"I’ll leave a written warning at the mouth of the cave when we leave," Tom resolved. "But I doubt they’ll take it seriously."

At the end of the main tunnel, just before the narrower section that the gases had hollowed out, Bud stopped the tank and the radsuited explorers got out to stretch. Tom had Bud raise the descent sphere a few feet out of its cradle so he could give it a final lookover.

"What is that fastened to the underside?" asked Ry, indicating a flat thick disk with several cuplike hollows in it that was fastened securely to the very bottom of the detachable cabin.

"Inside that instrument package are a number of narrow tubes that can be extended out through those openings," explained Tom. "At the end of each one is a small scoop, along with a stiff wire that can vibrate at a hypersonic rate, just like the earth blaster’s penetrator vanes." He described how the mechanism would allow him to obtain pulverized rock specimens from the walls of the cave as the sphere was lowered. The fine dust would be suctioned up through the tubes into accumulation canisters.

"Excellent!" pronounced the professor. "As a geophysicist I’m most anxious to begin analyzing the bizarre properties of this place. One might say that I am quite beside myself with scientific anticipation."

Chow sidled up to Tom, speaking low. "Say, boss?"

"Yes?"

"That perfesser feller seems right nice. But he sure does talk funny!"

Tom smiled. "You know, you’re right!"

The crew now reentered the vehicle. Tom skillfully maneuvered it through the opening and halted close to the gouged-out edge. At once another large section of the floor cracked and fell away under the forward tread-rings. But the supergyros did their job and kept the long platform level and steady, throwing most of its weight toward the rear, which was on a strong surface.

The group held a brief consultation. Then Sterling assumed his appointed post in the control turret. Cully, Chow, and Craig—Bud had nicknamed them the
three C’s
—would monitor the progress of the descent by means of a television feed from sets of Inertite-shielded cameras mounted on both the tip of the crane boom and the sphere itself.

"It’s a lucky break that the coating you were able to formulate is transparent," remarked Craig.

"I’ll say," Tom responded. "Otherwise we would have had to do this without windows." He explained that the strange ‘nonmatter’ structure of Inertite formed a sort of hyper-fine mesh that allowed photons of light to pass through unimpeded while blocking the massive, destructive antiprotons.

Hank lowered the descent cabin to the flat top of the mobile platform, and Tom and Bud climbed a set of rungs on the side and eased themselves inside through the narrow hatchway in the top of the sphere.

"Man, this
is
going to be a tight fit!" exclaimed Bud. "Looks like we’ll have to lean against the walls all the way down."

Tom chuckled but said soberly, "There’s still time to bail out, Bud. Once we get going, we’ll really be at nature’s mercy. No one knows what is going to happen down there!"

"I know, Tom," said Bud, looking his best friend square in the eye. Then he broke into a grin. "Who will keep you out of trouble if I don’t go?" Bud jested, trying to hide the fact that he felt far from calm.

Tom seated himself behind an array of levers and switches. Temporarily taking control of the platform’s winch motors from Hank, he raised the sphere off the platform. Then he set the crane in motion. As the boom telescoped out foot after foot the cabin rocked gently. In seconds it had cleared the front of the platform.

"Ready, Hank," Tom intercommed. "Control back to you."

"Roger," came the word from the control turret. Continuing to slowly extend the crane boom, Hank swiveled it slightly to center it in the shaft, and the descent cabin swung gently out over the mysterious pit.

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

And indeed it was, a sight like nothing else on the face of the earth—or beneath it; a sight no mortal man had ever seen.

The terrasphere was suspended over a great, round chasm, perhaps a hundred feet broad and many times that in depth. Great fingers of dark stone, like icicles in reverse, thrust upward from the sloping sides and bottom. At intervals up and down the walls of the pit were broad, ragged gashes—the ends of other caves that wormed their ways to unknown destinations in the earth’s crust.

The whole pit was alive with light. The walls were phosphorescent with a luminance like that in the cave from the surface, but here and there could be seen jets of red-gold flame seemingly fed by escaping gases—eternal torches memorializing in advance any who were foolish enough to enter. Like the bleachers at an athletic event, the walls flickered constantly with small, intense flashes, which Tom explained were caused by the collision of residual Exploron particles in the air with grains of stone not protected by Inertite.

But the most fantastic sight was hidden from view until the boys craned their necks next to the curving windows and gazed down straight beneath them.

"There it is, Bud!" Tom breathed.
"Nuclear fire!"

The pit narrowed toward the bottom, then abruptly broadened into a wider gallery that opened on opposite sides into an underground channel. The gallery was half-full of rushing, churning, boiling water—a subterranean river that Tom and Bud knew reached all the way to the far-off ocean. The roiling waters were covered by a sheet of eerie fire, flames that were greenish-white near the water’s surface, lightening to tones of molten gold at their tips. Above the fire, an endless lightning storm raged, jagged blue-white bolts stabbing out at the rock walls without pause, bathing the scene in a harsh, throbbing radiance that hurt the eye.

"It’s like some kind of dream!" murmured Tom. "The surface of the river is acting like a
liquid matter-antimatter reactor,
constantly building up and discharging excess energy!"

Awestruck, Bud asked what happened at high tide.

"You can see that the rocks just above the water line are of a different color from the rest," Tom responded. "The water, or something in it—perhaps even the salt content—produces a nuclear reaction in those rocks, releasing Exploron into the air."

"Do you think all this just started fairly recently, Tom?" Bud inquired, rubbing his dazzled eyes. "I mean, why hasn’t the fuel been used up by now?"

Tom gazed thoughtfully at his friend. "The energy released from the collision of
just one
antiproton with
just one
nucleus of ordinary material is immense. If it weren’t for the Inertite, which must be generated as a byproduct of the basic reaction, the energy would be released all at once, in a blast that would crack the planet in two." He turned to look down again. "This process has been going on since Day One on Earth!"

Tom now directed Hank to begin to slowly play out the cables.
Tom Swift’s descent into the fiery underworld had begun!

As the cabin slowly traveled downward, the adventurers gazed in awe at the unscalable walls of the phosphorescent pit. What beauty of color! The lower they went, the brighter the weird combination of radiant hues became.

"It’s magnificent!" Professor Cully exclaimed over the intercom from the passenger cabin above.

"Brand my radioactive peacocks, an’ thet’s jest on the TV!" added Chow.

Presently Tom checked his depth indicator. "We’re about three hundred feet down.’’

"How deep are we going?" Bud asked.

"I want to stop approximately one hundred feet above the bottom and try to retrieve samples of the reactive rock," Tom replied.

Several minutes later he had Hank check their descent and peered at the flowing river below. It raged and crackled with the brilliance of a fierce fire.

"Sci-Fi, I’d never guess anything like this existed in the world," commed Craig from above. "Utterly fantastic."

"Nothing would stand a chance in that racing water, though," Bud remarked to Tom. "See where it disappears under the mountain—not even headroom!"

"Guess it’ll be quite a while before we see tourists going whitewater-rafting on
that
river!" muttered Tom. Tom now worked his way sideways around the cabin, then put his hands on a special control panel Bud had not noticed before.

"Your rock-scooper control?"

Tom nodded and activated the tube-extender mechanism. After a moment a tube, thick as a garden hose, became visible through the window, stretching out bit by bit from beneath the capsule. It approached to within about two feet of the side of the pit—and then the boys shouted in surprise as a blinding flare of blue-white light burst forth from the rock and enveloped the tube’s scoop-end and hypersonic vane.

"I should have guessed," Tom groaned softly. "Even though we’re not grounded, the metal tubes have too much current capacity. They destabilize the field balance near the wall when they come too close, provoking a discharge."

Bud gulped, gazing at the end of the tube—now just a smoking knot of melted metal. "Tom, if Terry had gotten that close to the side—"

"Right, pal," Tom said, his face white. "That could have been us!"

Tom had Sterling draw the sphere upward in twenty-foot increments, trying the other tubes one by one. There were two more meltdowns. Finally, though, there was only a shower of sparks that seemed not to affect the scoop. Tom fed power into the hypersonic pulverizer, and in a moment reported that he had acquired his first sample of the mysterious Exploron-generating rock.

In the process, a stone about the size of a baseball had become dislodged from the wall. Bud watched as it dropped down to the river and plopped in at one edge, splashing a bit of water up on the bank. "Tom, look at that!" Bud cried. A plume of greenish, luminous vapor rose from the splash-mark. "It’s the gas!" yelled Bud excitedly and fearfully. "The glowing gas!"

Elated, Tom descended lower into the pit, hovering less than forty feet above the river.

"I’m going to obtain some samples of that gas!" he told Bud excitedly. "It may have a different composition from the Exploron we trapped before."

The young scientist had just sucked a sample of the gas through the extended tube when the spherical cabin echoed with a loud, sharp sound, and tilted abruptly. The occupants almost lost their footing, and several lights on the monitoring panel turned an angry red—the color of trouble.

"Bud," commanded Tom, "look through the pane in the overhead hatch and check the cables! This much Exploron in the air may be too much for the Inertite coating to handle!"

Bud scrambled up the small ladder and peered outside. "Good night!" he choked. "One of the cables is broken where it joins the sphere! Another is giving way!"

Frantically Tom clicked on the microphone which connected the cabin with the vehicle above. "Hank!" he shouted. "We’ve lost a cable! Start reeling us in!"

Hank acknowledged and the terrasphere started to rise. They were more than halfway back to the corridor opening when, without warning, the ascent ceased.

"Hank?" Tom intercommed. "What’s wrong? We need to go up to the top!" Almost immediately the descent cabin began to move again. But it did not move upward.

"We’re going down!" Bud cried.

"Sterling!"
Tom shouted into the mike.

There was no response!

He switched com channels in order to raise the passenger compartment. "Can anybody hear me?" Tom cried. "Acknowledge!" There was a burst of static, and Tom suddenly said, "The reaction that released the gas—it’s the anti-electronic effect."

"But why is Hank lowering the sphere?" demanded Bud. "Could it be an electronic malfunction?"

"Tom! Bud!"
crackled a voice from the speaker.

"We hear you, Professor," Tom responded. "We have to be brought up, but Hank isn’t—"

"We’ve just been attacked!" interrupted Cully. "Men with rifles stormed the platform, broke through the dome on the turret—I can see Sterling lying outside on the ground in his radsuit. He’s not moving!"

Cully was abruptly cut off as a new voice broke through.
"Swift, you’re ten times more trouble than you’re worth! Man, I wish that car had laid you out flat!"

"Hoplin?" Tom demanded.

"Pleased to meet you. Now drop dead!"

"What are you—"

"Save it, kid—I don’t have time to talk. The next voice you hear’ll be your own!"

The man growled out a laugh, then broke the connection.

"What’s he going to do to us?" asked Bud with terror in his eyes.

As if in answer, the terrasphere suddenly accelerated downward.

"He’s put the winch on maximum speed!" Tom cried. "He plans to drop us into the water!"