Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter (2 page)

"Just the same, you might pay him a visit, Tom," said Damon Swift, whom Tom greatly resembled.

"But carefully, please," added Tom’s mother.

"We’ll find out what we can," Bud said, emphasizing the word
we
. As Tom’s close companion, it was a rare adventure that Bud did not have a part in.

"And I’ll pass the word to our security division," Bud offered. "Harlan Ames will want to get to work on it right away."

"First we’d better examine the laptop in my lab," Tom cautioned.

Two hours later, in Tom’s sophisticated underground laboratory on the Swift Enterprises grounds, the young inventor unplugged the computer from a bank of test instruments and gave Bud a look that spoke volumes.

"Not good news, is it."

"It confirms what I suspected," Tom replied. "This was deliberate sabotage. Some sort of hyper-complex virus program was entered into the laptop. Everything is gone! And that’s not the worst, pal. It looks like the virus routine was specifically designed to temporarily copy the files to an unreadable drive sector, which was subsequently downloaded and deleted."

Bud shook his head angrily. "So someone has a copy of all your space-symbol translations!"

Tom rammed a fist into the palm of his hand. "And ‘someone’ must be Munson Wickliffe! He’s visited us twice during the last week—Monday, then again yesterday. I’m sure he introduced the virus into the machine the first time, then made the download yesterday afternoon."

"I knew he was a physicist and chemist," Bud mused. "Is he also a computer genius?"

"No," answered Tom. "But he has a large workforce of experts, just as we do here."

The two eighteen-year-old companions hurried off, heading for the plant’s security office in the main administration building, where they described the matter to Harlan Ames, the chief officer.

"Well," said Ames glumly, "I suppose it
has
been a few weeks since our last security breach here at Enterprises, so we’re about due."

Leaving the building the boys hopped into a waiting nanocar—a midget electric vehicle used for quick transport within the walls of the experimental station—and whirred across the grounds of the vast, four-mile-square enclosure of flat-topped modern buildings and gleaming white airstrips.

At the north end of the station, Tom and Bud climbed into one of Enterprises’ VTOL jet heliplanes and roared aloft. A few minutes after landing on Wickliffe’s airstrip in Thessaly they were ushered into the president’s office.

Wickliffe, a six-foot, slender man, with sparse black hair and a high forehead spreading above thick glasses, stepped awkwardly from behind his desk to shake hands. "Hardly expected to see you again so soon, my dear fellow. I was just watching the news account of your announcement. What an incredible moment in human history! Please sit down. What has brought the two of you here?"

As Tom politely explained about the deleted space dictionary, Wickliffe seemed to freeze. He glared at the young inventor coldly. "And you are bringing this matter to my attention because—?"

"Well, sir," said Tom cautiously, "we’re a little stumped at Enterprises over the technical end of the—the incident. With your scientific expertise, I—"

"No," interrupted Wickliffe. "Don’t patronize me with foolishness, Tom. Are you by any chance implying that I might have something to do with destroying your code files?"

"Not at all," said Tom with a frown. "I haven’t said anything of the kind!"

Wickliffe gave a cool smile. "No. Of course you haven’t. Well, I don’t believe I can be of any use to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some important work of my own to take care of."

Tom flushed. "I’m sorry to have bothered you," he said, rising. "Dad and I feel this is a very important matter."

Flying Tom back to Shopton, Bud was steaming. "He just about admitted doing it, Tom! He was toying with you the whole time."

"I can’t waste any more time on it, flyboy. Whatever happened, we’ll have to put it aside for now and work on reassembling the space dictionary before the critical time comes."

"Right—the rocket!" Bud nodded. "Do you have any idea when it’ll get to Earth?"

"Very soon. But whether that means days or weeks, we don’t yet know."

When Tom returned to Shopton, he gave his father a quick report on the unsatisfactory interview while Bud stopped off at Ames’ office.

"Too bad Wickliffe took the wrong attitude," the elder inventor said. "Leaves us as much in the dark as ever."

"Have you started working on another dictionary, Dad?" Tom inquired.

"Yes, I’m scanning-in all the symbols and meanings that I can recall or find in my notes. Of course, we still have the meteor-missile with its inscribed symbols. That will help us, though it won’t be complete. Suppose you gather all you can think of. We certainly were foolish not to make additional copies of our compiled translations."

As Damon Swift exited the office, Bud walked in to report to Tom that the security police were launching a full-scale investigation of the vandalism and apparent theft. Then, trying to cut through the gloom, he asked: "But anyway, genius boy, any new inventions up your sleeve? Remember, I’ve been out of town since we got back from the space outpost with our hides more-or-less intact."

Instantly Tom’s eyes twinkled. "Well, it’s a little too big to go up my sleeve, but I
am
working on something over in Hangar Four. You ought to like it, Bud—it can fly or swim."

"You mean a sort of flying aerosub?"

"No. A diving seacopter."

"Cut the kidding," Bud retorted.

"It’s the truth," Tom continued. "It’ll even crawl around if necessary on tractor treads."

"No fooling!" Bud stared in amazement. "So it’s a ground-crawling helicopter that can travel underwater?"

"Right. In the air the rotor blades drive the air downward, allowing it to hover over the surface of the ground or water on an air-cushion, at a height of about two yards. In water the pitch of the blades is reversed for submerging—like a helicopter pushing down instead of up."

Bud wrinkled his brow humorously. "Okay, that much is clear. But why do it that way? Let me break this to you gently—in boat-building the goal is to keep the ship from sinking, not make it sink faster!"

Tom laughed heartily. "The big advantage of this kind of submersion," he continued, "is that these blades give the ship tremendous agility and maneuverability under water."

Bud perched on a stool. "Your jetmarine was plenty agile, Tom."

"I’m not aiming at raw speed this time, flyboy. You see, this approach eliminates the need for ballast tanks. With the rotors, the seacopter can easily stay at any level beneath the surface the navigator chooses, merely by adjusting the blade pitch. She’ll be wonderfully nimble down in the depths, too, thanks to the interplay of the downward push of the rotors with the ship’s upward buoyancy. Just like the way it’s easier to pull a string than to push it!" Tom now warmed to his subject. "The seacopter has a lightweight, ultrastrong hull constructed on the same principle as our rockets—layers of Tomasite over a rigid mesh of magtritanium alloy."

"She’ll need to resist some real pressure."

"Up to 18,000 pounds per square inch!"

Bud boggled. "It’s not that I don’t want to be a hero, but I’d prefer to be a three-dimensional one!"

"But think of what we could accomplish!" continued Tom. "Humans have rarely penetrated more than three and a half miles beneath the surface, but in places the depth of the ocean floor is almost twice that. The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the planet, but we’ve only mapped about 5 percent of the bottom. Who knows what mineral, chemical, or archeological secrets might be hiding down there—not to mention unknown life forms, as many as
two million
of ’em!"

Walking over to his sliding workbench, Tom touched a concealed button. Instantly a drawing board, with a large blueprint of the seacopter, slid out from the wall.

"Wow!" Bud exclaimed, admiring the drawing of the sleek forty-foot craft. Discus or saucer-shaped, but smoothly tapering fore and aft, the submersible had a wide, circular opening in its center that penetrated the hull from top to bottom. The adjustable propeller-screw, twelve feet in diameter and mounted on a vertical pivot, occupied this space.

Bud noticed that the body of the seacopter was divided into two self-contained sections. Cabins at either end, labeled Compartments A and B—each of which would accommodate three people—were linked by narrow corridors on each side of the rotor well, allowing passengers to walk from one compartment to the other.

The young pilot looked puzzled. "Which is the front end and which is the rear?" he asked.

"Take your choice." Tom laughed. "The ship can travel in either direction. This feature will come in handy should we get into a submarine cave, or other spot in which it’s impossible to turn around. And speaking of safety, the seacopter has positive buoyancy. If the power fails, she’ll just bob up to the surface."

"Great," Bud said with enthusiasm. Then he looked at Tom inquisitively. "But how do you do all this? I mean, how do you propel this contraption once you’re under water?"

Tom pointed to the undersides of the two compartments. In the middle of each section were streamlined, triangular units attached to the craft by a swivel coupling.

"These are jets," he said, "powered by super-heated steam created by atomic reactors, one for each compartment. The seacop won’t be as fast as the jetmarine—no Mach 1 for this baby—but she’ll really move."

"I see," said Bud. "And they’re your steering apparatus?"

"Yes. The jets are on a gimbal system, so they can be rotated through 360 degrees. The steam pressure also drives the turbine that powers the blades, which is inside this thick hub."

Bud nodded. "Very clever, pal—as always." Then he grinned. "So let’s get down to the meat. Or in this case, the fish! What’s all that nimbleness
for,
anyway? Herding whales? Or are you going on an oyster-hunting expedition?"

"You’re nearly right." Tom chuckled. "But instead of diving for pearls, we’re going after gold."

"Explain, chum!"

As Tom stowed the blueprints away, he said, "Well, it’s not entirely a treasure hunt. It’s half undersea exploration, half archaeology. In any event, it’ll take the seacopter into some pretty rough terrain on the ocean bottom."

"Rough terrain?" Bud looked at his friend suspiciously. "Just what is it you plan to go looking for, Tom?"

The young inventor smiled dreamily. "Oh, some old ruins—
very
old, in fact. You might have heard of the place. It’s called Atlantis!"

"ATLANTIS? Come on!" Bud responded as if suspecting a gag. "You’re beginning to sound like that Russian kook who thought she’d found a lost city under the Caribbean! Atlantis is just a myth."

"More than one old ‘myth’ has turned out to be founded on fact," Tom observed. "Troy, for example."

"Well—okay. But does any scientist or archeologist or
anybody
have a clue where it might be?"

Tom nodded soberly at his friend. "A couple friends of mine, George Braun and Hamilton Teller, who are expert oceanographers, have a theory that there may be ancient cities buried under the Atlantic Ocean seabed off the coast of Portugal."

"Buried cities!" Skepticism set aside, Bud’s voice throbbed with interest as he sensed the promise of a new adventure. "You mean
underneath
the ocean floor?"

"That’s the general idea," Tom said. "Ham and George want to search in an area where satellites have shown a gravitational anomaly."

"Uh-
huh!"
responded Bud. "What’s that, a place where gravity pulls sideways instead of down?"

Tom chuckled. "It just means that precise measurements of the earth’s pull show a sharp local variation in the density of the crust. It’s a hint that some sort of unusual geologic activity has gone on there in the recent past."

"Like a lost continent or two?"

"Who knows? And some of the thermometric data—heat readings—could be a clue that large structures are hidden in the same place."

"Under the ocean, even under the bottom," mused Bud. "And way out in the Atlantic."

"That’s right," Tom confirmed. "Anyhow, Ham and George need some kind of versatile undersea craft in which to make their exploration, so I figured a seacopter might be the answer."

"Good figuring, chum!" Bud exclaimed. "Count me in on that trip, will you?"

Tom’s face lit in an affectionate grin. "You’re as good as aboard, Admiral. Matter of fact, I’m making a test cruise tomorrow in one of the seacopter sections. Care to join me?"

"Absolutely! Where we cruising to, Bermuda? Some romantic, exotic spot?"

The young inventor winked. "Pressure Tank 3. Exotic but—"

"Not so romantic," concluded Bud with a wistful sigh.

After Bud left, Tom called George Dilling, Swift Enterprises’ chief of public communications, to ask about the public’s response to the day’s announcement of space life.

"Oh, everyone’s going crazy, as you might expect," Dilling replied. "But the journal reports and press backgrounders all went out without a hitch, and your Dad has been talking to the Washington crowd. Thank goodness we already have our contacts in the Department of Defense."

"Not to mention ‘Collections’," remarked Tom. ‘Collections’ nicknamed a mysterious government security group that seemed able to monitor the activities of Swift Enterprises at will, and had apparently known of the Swifts’ space communications for months. "Incidentally, George, I want to personally apologize for having kept you in the dark about all this until yesterday."

"No hard feelings, Chief," he responded. "You had your reasons. But I expect Rad to be ribbing me about it from now to doomsday!" Dilling was referring to Harlan Ames’ assistant Phil Radnor who, like Ames, had been apprised of the secret from the first.

While Tom was on the phone Mr. Swift had reentered the office with a sheaf of photos of the inscribed shell of the meteor-missile. The young inventor turned to his father. "Let’s start working on those symbols."