Tom Swift and His Jetmarine (17 page)

But the files downloaded directly from Chilcote’s computers were the must frustrating of all.

"He scrambled them," Tom muttered in Bud’s direction.

"Tom Swift, if anybody on earth can unscramble a scrambled egg, it’s you!" said the dark-haired submariner. Tom smiled back, but it was a smile of resignation and near-defeat. Still, the sight of Bud Barclay’s trusting face gave Tom new energy, energy enough to rethink his approach to recovering the data.

It’s all there,
Tom thought.
There’s got to be a way to undo what has been done.

Meanwhile the
Nemo
had been pushed, screaming, to its highest speed, well beyond what had seemed the safety limit earlier that day. They had already broken the day’s speed record by twenty percent!

As the jetmarine again crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, somewhat south of its previous course, Tom startled Bud out of his reverie with a sudden war-cry of triumph. "Broke it!" he cried.

"Broke what?" demanded Bud. "The computer?"

"Chilcote’s scrambler routine! It wasn’t based on a true randomization matrix, but on pseudo-random sequences in the decimal expansion of Pi!"

"I should’ve thought of that myself," remarked Bud dubiously. "So what does it say, skipper?"

Tom manipulated the computer inputs. "Here comes something," he murmured as Bud stood behind him. An image took shape on the screen.

"Blueprints!" Bud exclaimed. "Is it the super-torpedo?"

Tom studied the lines of the image for a moment, then shook his head. "No. This is much too small and slow. I’d say it’s the torpedo he fired toward the jetmarine when she was at SONRC. Let’s keep going."

After what appeared to be a number of working sketches, another complete blueprint flashed into view on the monitor. "That’s more like it!" cried Tom.

This blueprint, carefully detailed and marked FINAL—IMPLEMENTATION APPROVED HC, showed a long, slender cylinder that bulged in the front like the head of a cobra, with narrow v-swept fins at the tail.

"It really does look like a missile," Bud observed. "What makes it go?"

Tom studied the blueprint, brow furrowed in concentration. "This three-sided vane extending from the stern is really a kind of propeller, rotating on an offcenter axis at a tremendous rate. It’s very ingenious—no wonder the torpedo can travel from Trinidad to the U.S. coastline in a matter of hours! Not as fast as the jetmarine, though."

Bud pointed at the forward bulge. "Is that our bomb?"

"Sure is," confirmed Tom. "And it’s not contact activated or triggered by sonar-returns…"

"What then?"

Tom looked up grimly. "A straightforward timing mechanism. It’s going off at 10
no matter what!"

He quickly paged through the remaining data, which consisted of notes in text form. Hope surged as Tom came to the heading TARGET INPUT followed by a string of numbers.

"Latitude and longitude?" suggested Bud.

"Doesn’t look like it," Tom responded slowly. "It must be the guidance settings for the torpedo’s computer. We don’t know how to decipher it."

Tom summoned up a geographical chart on the monitor, showing the southeastern coastline of the United States.

"Okay, genius boy, think like a madman," Bud urged his friend. "Why’s Chilcote doing this?"

"Because…his superiors at ONDAR didn’t believe in his work. He was about to be fired, maybe jailed."

"But we know now his work was valid, right?"

"Yes," said Tom. "So he feels he was treated unjustly—backstabbed. And—" Tom’s brow furrowed. "He wants
revenge,
against ONDAR, against the American scientific community, the image of American science…"

Bud nodded vigorously. "So this is his ‘bolt of vengeance.’ What was it he said?
Neptune wins!
Isn’t there a place called Neptune Beach in Florida?"

"Yes," replied Tom. "Near Jacksonville. But I can’t think of any particular connection to science or ONDAR. But—wait a second." Tom had the computer highlight, on the map, all geographic features that included the word "Neptune." One of them was miles off the eastern coast of Florida—an undersea feature.

Tom read it aloud.
"Neptune Chasma.
It’s a narrow depression, like a channel, in the continental shelf. Runs for miles. It could be used as a route to keep the torpedo in deep water and avoid detection." He followed the channel along, then continued in the same heading beyond its end until his finger crossed the coast—and two printed words. The boys gasped as one.

Cape Canaveral!

Tom immediately brought the
Nemo
to the surface, slowing to a pace safe enough to meet the waves without losing stability. He then contacted Admiral Krevitt.

"Canaveral was one of the possibilities we had identified," agreed the Admiral. "We have no better idea at this point. Do you have a plan, Tom?"

They talked for several minutes. Then the jetmarine submerged and resumed its headlong flight, at maximum acceleration.

Now time became their most immediate enemy. They could calculate the approximate location of the torpedo, and knew when it was set to strike its target. Although the weapon had had a considerable head start, the
Nemo
was much the faster of the two. The gap was closing rapidly. Yet it would still be a close thing.

"We don’t have much of a margin," said Tom. "We’d be relying on dumb luck completely—"

"If not for your idea!" finished Bud.

Tom’s idea was to use the jetmarine’s sonarscope equipment, which normally plotted a safe course for the high-speed craft, as a hypersensitive ear with which to detect the characteristic frequencies of the torpedo’s unique rotor-prop. Weak as these sonic pulses might be, Tom was confident that he could enhance them to such a degree that he would be able to triangulate the position of the torpedo in its course. Meanwhile, Bud would have to pilot the jetmarine hands-on—a nerve-wracking task at their mach-plus rate of travel.

"You can do it, pal," Tom reassured him. "We’ll be well above the bottom. Just watch out for whales!"

"Let them watch out for
me!"
Bud joked, a little breathless.

Their banter shrouded the one fact they were afraid to discuss aloud.
Cape Canaveral was slated to be struck in forty-seven minutes!

A small screen on the instrument panel showed the deadly countdown in neon orange. 46…45…44…

Suddenly a small light flashed green next to the sonarscope readout panel. "We’ve got something!" Tom said.

39…38…37…

"It’s the torpedo—definitely!" Tom declared.

"Let’s go get ’em!"
Bud exclaimed with more bravado than he actually felt.

Using the computer’s calculations based upon the sonarscope inputs, Tom gave direction to Bud as to how to guide the
Nemo
.

31…30…29…

"We’re closing in now," said Tom. He switched on the long-range aqualamp. "I think I see it up ahead."

Tom slightly reduced the hydraulivane’s action, which had the anticipated braking effect.

"That’s it," Bud declared softly. Neither of them was in the mood for elation.
Not only were their lives at stake, but the lives of thousands.

The jetmarine was following the wake of the torpedo, paralleling it from slightly above. The
Nemo
drew closer, and what had been at first just a small dark bead in the distance became the evil mechanism of the blueprint. They had hunted it down. The challenge now: to kill it!

"Tom," said Bud, his voice hushed but tense, "what if the torpedo has some kind of sonar alarm? Maybe we’ll set off the bomb by getting too close."

"We’re invisible to sonar. Tomasite, remember?"

"Oh—right, skipper."

23 minutes remained. And even as Bud registered this fact, the indicator changed to 22.

They now put into operation the rest of Tom’s plan. With a burst of speed, the jetmarine agilely maneuvered close to the hurtling torpedo, station-keeping yards above it, their noses almost even.

"Hold on!" shouted Tom.

He cut all power to the atomolecular engines, which instantly fell silent. Then he gyroed the
Nemo
into a side-roll, as if its long axis were a spindle. This was the moment of greatest danger, carefully simulated by computer but not tried in real life.

It’s one thing to test an invention in the abstract and another to foresee actual experience.

Dad
, Tom thought,
you’re so right!

As Tom threw the jetmarine into its sideways somersault he pressed, at virtually the same instant, one key on his keyboard. An entire bank of indicator lights flooded red. Tom and Bud fought to hold on to the grab-rails inside the nose-dome as the
Nemo
fought to avoid spinning out of control in a deadly spiral—the very image that had floated into Tom’s mind two weeks before, inside the sunken
Vostok
.

And now it was all too terrifyingly real!

"OBVIOUSLY YOU LIVED to tell the tale," said Rita Scheering through a thin curtain of smoke. "Unless I’m talking to a ghost."

"Bud and I left the ghosts behind on the
Vostok,"
replied Tom Swift, easing back in the comfortable chair that faced the table where the journalist was taking notes.

Six days having passed since the
Nemo
returned Tom and Bud to the mainland, Tom had decided to fulfill his promise to give Miss Scheering an exclusive interview for
Backgrounder
magazine. Bud had driven him into Manhattan on the promise that he could duck the interview and spend the time shopping nearby.

"Call me when it’s over!" Bud grinned, dropping Tom off.

Tom and the journalist sat in her tony apartment, three flights up; and when the basic tale had been told, Tom went back again to fill in the gaps.

"Now tell me about this rolling maneuver you made—which strikes me as a little ‘over the top,’ you should pardon the pun." Rita positioned her pen expectantly.

Tom smiled, appreciating the pun. "There was no other way to prevent the device from going off—we couldn’t disarm it, obviously, or blow it out of the water. So we had to use EMP. Know what that means?"

"No."

"Electro-Magnetic Pulse. A nuclear blast produces electromagnetic waves across many frequencies as a byproduct, and the waves are so powerful that they can knock out electrical circuits by induction."

"But you didn’t have a nuclear bomb with you on the
Nemo,"
Rita observed.

"No, but the jetmarine did have an electromagnetic transmitter—namely, the distorter."

"That’s the anti-blackout device?"

"That’s it," Tom replied. "I calculated that, by diverting the ship’s
entire
power load into the distorter’s output generator, the burst would be sufficient to totally disrupt the circuitry in the nose of the torpedo, any and all of it. But there were a couple hitches. As everyone knows, water is an electrical conductor, which means that electromagnetic waves ‘short-out,’ so to speak—they self-cancel and are damped down almost to nothing in a very short distance."

Rita made a note and nodded. "So you had to bring your transmitter right up close to the torpedo’s nose section. Is that it?"

"Exactly. Which brings up problem number two: the plans showed that the torpedo’s electronics were well-shielded, with just one weak point—where the antenna leads poked through, on the top of the hull. And since our transmitter pod was located at the top of the jetmarine’s hull as well, we had to flip over and time the EMP burst precisely. The danger was that we might fry our own power system, which would prevent the gyros from restabilizing the sub. But we were lucky."

"Very!" She puffed on her cigarette and gave the young inventor a tight smile. "So what happened to the torpedo?"

"Its systems failed completely, propulsion included. It ended up half-buried in the sand. Later on we raised it into the Flying Lab with the mega-mag—that’s the latest version of the old Swift giant magnet—and passed it on to the ONDAR people to study. I…"

Tom’s voice trailed off. After a moment he put a hand up to his neck as if choking. He coughed.

"Tom?"

He pointed at the endtable next to him. An ashtray was crowded with cigarette butts.

"Sorry," said Rita, moving the ashtray to her side of the room. "I’m not used to company, and I’m way
too
used to my own bad habits."

Tom looked at her, rubbing his neck, catching his breath. "Thanks, that’s better."

"Now then," Rita said, resuming the interview. "What’s the big picture here? Who is this Rosello? What about Sidney Dansitt?"

There was a long pause, as if the young inventor were trying to assemble all the pieces. "We’ve managed to figure out some of the high points. Start with this guy Donny Rosello. He spent most of his high school years having run-ins with the police."

"Sounds like a bad boy."

"I’d call him unhinged. Somehow Dr. Chilcote ran across him and decided to use him to further his plot—to revenge himself by perfecting the blackout technology the government thought bogus. He planted Rosello in the rooming house where Sid Dansitt was staying in his first year at Grandyke University. The landlady says they became close—obviously Rosello was studying Dansitt, who was known to have money from his family in Baltimore."

"It was about money, then?"

"What isn’t?" said Tom pointedly, with a wry twitch at the corners of his mouth. "Chilcote needed money for several purposes—perfecting his device, purchasing his private base, paying his employees. Rosello wanted money for its own sake. What they pulled off was, basically, a perfect case of identity theft. Donny Rosello becomes Sidney Dansitt after getting rid of the original, which gives him access to Sid’s credit cards, bank accounts, personal jet, and maybe, down the road, money wired by Mom and Dad to bail ‘Sid’ out of jail."

"I can figure it," said Rita. "He has to stay enrolled at Grandyke just in case Dad calls the Dean for a report. But he switches graduate programs and advisers—Grandyke’s a big school, and no one notices that the man called ‘Sid Dansitt’ has a different face."