Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome (7 page)

Alert to any sound of their quarry at the door, they played catch with the beanbag, which was designed to float in the water. There were many misses, but their eyes slowly became accustomed to the relative darkness.

"Where do you suppose he is?" asked Bashalli after many minutes had crept by.

"Oh, I don’t know. You know Tom—always saving the world. Here!" Sandy sent Bashalli a long, high toss. But she had badly miscalculated: it arced over the Pakistani’s head and whapped against the framework tower with a loud
clang!,
flopping down onto the control board next to the tower.

A string of tiny lights flickered to life on the console.

"Sandra, I am not so sure Tom will be delighted with our prank," murmured Bashalli nervously.

"We just have to shut it off again," asserted Sandy with much more confidence than she felt.

Suddenly both girls gasped in surprise. A strange sensation swept over them, a sort of tingling pressure on their skin. "Sandy! I—I’m—"

"Me too!" cried Sandy Swift in alarm, stumbling backwards along the pool bottom.

Some unknown force was pressing down upon them like a great invisible weight, as if trying to push them under the water!

Choking, badly frightened, the girls fought against the smothering force, trying desperately to keep their heads up above the waterline. Feet flat on the bottom they pushed upward with their legs, summoning all their strength. Even so, they could barely withstand the downward pressure. Barely able to keep their faces above water, in minutes they would crumple from fatigue—and drown!

They emitted several screams, but the effort sapped their strength.

"B-Bashi, I’m so—so sorry I—" Then Sandy slipped down another inch and her mouth was beneath the water. Bashi was already immersed to just above her nostrils. She thrashed and struggled for breath.

The lab door opened a crack, then wider. Dazzling sunlight slanted through the room, cut off almost instantly as the door was pulled quietly shut. The girls tried to cry out to the figure, but the effort was useless; they could only manage muffled whimpers as they struggled to stay conscious, to not abandon the fight to live. Their shoulders ached from the dead weight of their arms and hands, forced down to their sides.

The figure did not bother to take a glance at the two pale ovals in the black of the pool. His face covered by a pull-down ski mask, he strode purposefully across the floor to Tom’s invention. He paused as if examining it. Then he reached deep into a pocket and withdrew a length of heavy pipe.

Swinging in a wide, vicious arc, the intruder attacked the machine with a savage fury!

SANDY SWIFT was swimming upstream.

The stream was as wide and as long as a river, and it angled upwards into the sky. She could see through its glassy sides easily. Shopton was below—
there
was the house;
there
was Commerce Avenue—but becoming tiny and distant as she mounted higher. The horizon was curving, but the wrong way, like the back of a saddle. She was struggling. Her arms ached and her head throbbed. But she dared not give up.

Someone was hanging on to her ankles.

It was Bashalli, she knew. Poor Bashalli. She heard the Pakistani coughing, a choking, racking cough.
Oh Bashalli, stop!
she pleaded.
You’re shaking me!
It occurred to her, oddly, that it was she herself who was coughing.

Something, someone, reached down through the water and pulled her up into the harsh thin air by the back of her neck. Then a pale yellow light flooded over her.

As Sandy awoke and finally
knew
she was awake, the first thing she noticed was a faint odor of ether and antiseptic. Her eyelids flickered open and she saw a white coverlet and the rungs of a metal bedstead. With a start, Sandy struggled bolt upright. She was in the Enterprises infirmary!

"Thank heavens you’ve regained consciousness, darling!" murmured a voice nearby. Mr. Swift gripped his daughter’s hand. Then the young plotter realized that her whole family was clustered around the bedside, with Doc Simpson, the plant’s youthful medic, in the background. She forced a wan smile and felt the oxygen mask strapped to her chin.

"We’ve been so worried about you, dear!" her mother said, bending down to kiss her cheek. "Even though Doc Simpson says that you’ll be all right." Tom, his face white, patted her shoulder and nodded.

The medic smiled reassuringly. "Yes, she will be, Mrs. Swift." Then, grinning, he added, "If there’s one thing I’ve learned around here, it’s that you Swifts are hard to keep down!"

Stepping forward, the young physician took Sandy’s wrist and glanced at his watch. Seconds later he said, "Pulse rate normal. Feel hungry?" Sandy indicated the breathing mask, and he gently removed it.

"Don’t worry about me!" she gasped weakly. "Bashalli—what about Bashalli?"

"I am over here," called a shaky voice from the other side of the infirmary. "I will be well when Bud stops squeezing my wrist!"

"Doc says you’re both fine," Tom declared. "You two took in so much water Shopton Water and Power’s charging you an excess usage fee."

"Very
funny," Sandy said. "W-was it you who pulled us out?"

"No," was the reply. "Bash pulled you out—then fainted next to you."

"A flair for the dramatic!" called Bashalli.

Sandy shook her blond head weakly. "I don’t understand. Tom—we couldn’t move! Something was pushing down on us! And then—unless it was part of a dream—someone in a ski mask came in—"

"I know," Tom interrupted her gently. "Your crony in mischief already told us most of it, San. When I came in, my repelatron was in pieces, smashed to bits. Whoever did it was already gone."

Bud approached and gave Sandy a warm squeeze and a kiss on the forehead. "But we owe something to the mad smasher, kid. According to Tom, it’s because he wrecked the machine that you weren’t held under when you blacked out. You floated free."

"I
must
send him a card of thanks," retorted the girl.

"Perhaps it would be better not to talk," her father urged. "Let’s have Chow bring us all some late supper, shall we?"

"Late supper!" Sandy exploded—which set off a fit of coughing. "My goodness, what time
is
it?"

Doc grinned. "About ten at night."

Clucking with concern, Chow provided a light, warm meal—for once a rather conservative one with a clear broth as its centerpiece. "If it ain’t one o’ you, it’s t’ other! You rambunctious kids’re gonna turn my hair gray!"

"Which one?" Bud teased.

Chow pointed. "This nice thick one on the right. The one on the other side done went gray in New Guinea!"

Bashalli’s bed was wheeled up next to Sandy’s, and the whole group of them were able to eat together. "But that hooded figure—in the ski mask!" Sandy said insistently. "Was he caught?"

Mr. Swift shook his head. "I’m afraid not. Harlan has had security guards searching every inch of the plant since Bashalli came to and told us what she had seen. But there was no sign of a stranger anywhere on the grounds."

"Nothing on the patrolscope, either," Tom added, referring to the plant’s sophisticated intruder-alert radar system.

Bud stared at his pal in dismay and groaned. "So the guy must’ve copped one of the radar-trappers—the amulets. That means we must have a subversive right on our own staff!"

"I know, flyboy," said Tom gravely. "The leak in the pressure tank sure looks less and less like an accident."

"The Moby Madmen!" Bashalli exclaimed. "The phantom whale is hiding here at Swift Enterprises somewhere!" Then she giggled. "Please
do
forget I said that. Too much oxygen, doctor."

Overruling her anxious protests, Sandy’s family joined Doc Simpson in urging her to lie back and rest. With a sigh, realizing she still felt shaky and weak, she obeyed. "All right—
just
so Bashi won’t get lonesome. But Tom—?"

"What, sis?"

"That machine of yours—what is it? What did it do to us?"

The young inventor grinned and gave her arm a pat. "It’s called a repelatron. What did it do?
Purt near drowned you, that’s what!"

Sandy’s question was still on Bud’s mind the next day as he stopped by one of Tom’s personal labs, where he knew the young inventor was at work rebuilding his device. Entering, Bud saw that Tom was working side by side with the frail, wisp-haired head of the Enterprises nuclear chemistry section, Dr. Omicron Kupp.

Greeting them, Bud said, "If you feel like a three-minute mental break, Tom, how about telling me how this repelatron works? You’ve been kind of mysterious about it."

"I know," Tom said sheepishly. "But this is one of those inventions that’s pretty hard to explain, pal. If you want the basic version, it—"

Bud held up a hand. "No, no, none of the watered-down stuff, genius boy. Give me a chance to take it all in. I’m working hard to improve my scientific knowledge base. I’ve been reading those books you gave me—maybe not
every
page, but quite a few toward the beginning." He set himself down on a stool facing Tom and Dr. Kupp. "Okay. Ready.
Go!"

Tom bit his lip and glanced at the elder scientist. "Doctor, you used to be a teacher. Why don’t you give my colleague Mr. Barclay here the three-minute course?"

"If you wish," said Kupp with a brusque nod. He squinted in Bud’s direction; it seemed he had failed to notice that the young pilot was in the room. "Tom’s repelatron, eh? It’s rather simple, in fact; basic physical theory. A first-year graduate student could easily master the fundamental concepts." He took up a position next to the white marking board that covered one entire wall of the laboratory, already half-filled with strings of numbers and symbols. "Obviously you’re familiar with the strong nuclear force, eh? Violates the inverse-square propagation law, acts as a shell holding the protons within the atomic nucleus,
et cetera?"

"Right!" Bud said. "Strong nuclear force."

"Now: the repelatron exploits certain principles derived from studies of the Mount Goaba phenomenon, as well as the Jatczak gravitational anomaly manifest on the satellite Nestria…"

"The gravity cube in that cave," commented Bud. "I was there."

"Yes, of course." Kupp squinted about, as if he weren’t quite certain where the interruption had come from. "The standard interpretation originated in the eleventh footnote to the well-known journal article by Meinfeld and Yung, in which the term
‘entrained space-knots’
came to public prominence. We are speaking, then, of a stable field of interlaced twists in the local spacetime pseudo-plenum, extending through six virtual dimensions."

His mouth paused, and he looked vaguely in Bud’s direction. The young pilot smiled broadly and nodded.

"Now then," continued Dr. Kupp. "The conjecture of a relation between this phenomenon—denoted the
spectron field
by Tom Swift in recognition of its paradoxical, ghostlike character, as one might say—and the locus of the strong nuclear force appears well-founded, as I am sure you will agree. The spectron field may be visualized as a series of spherical shells, or layers—"

As Kupp turned his back to make a sketch on the whiteboard, a clanking and rattling in the corridor announced the presence of Chow Winkler and his snack cart. Making a sign to Tom, Bud stepped out the door and in a moment returned with Chow, guiding the rotund cook to a chair. Chow glanced back and forth but appeared willing to listen. Bud resumed his seat, turning slightly to take in Chow as well as Dr. Kupp.

Finishing his illustration, Kupp picked up where he had left off. "—layers which are comprised of tessellated discoidal segments, nodes, if you will, themselves having a spiral form and possessing a fractal character…" He looked up. Bud’s smile was now continuous. Chow sat wide-eyed and immobile. He appeared stunned. "That is to say, each component segment is itself composed of similar such segments, and so forth down to the Planck length. Being spiroforms of even-numbered dimensionality, the field constituents exhibit enantimorphic properties—handedness, you see, eh? Handedness. And thus, just as one’s
right
hand corresponds to the apparent
left
hand of one’s reflection, so it is that correspondence between facing field layers—that is, two fields propagating toward one another from distinct sources—requires that one field be laterally reversed by 180 degrees, as if through a half-rotation."

Bud’s smile, and Chow’s eyes, grew ever broader.

"The consequences, no doubt trivial, are of some practical interest despite their obviousness; to wit, the exchange of momentum between the paired fields by superposition of the nodal vectors, and in consequence between each field and its respective source, anchored to the nuclear shell and entangled therewith. Quite naturally a repulsion effect is evolved, expressed as opposed momenta with respect to the emitters—that is, the repelatron ‘generating antenna,’ as it were, and the array of atoms that constitutes its specific ‘target.’ I will anticipate a question by adding that the field structure is sensitive to nucleon array, as well as gross molar collocation. Hence the effect evolves only with respect to a particular atomic element in a well-defined mixture."

Dr. Kupp ceased to emit sounds, and after a time this was interpreted to signify the conclusion of the lecture. Tom suggested an early lunch, and the elderly scientist departed forthwith with the barest of nods to Bud and Chow. After the scientist had left Bud gently guided Chow back to his cart in the hall, patting him reassuringly on his broad back.

Bud returned, pushing the door shut and leaning against it, facing Tom. Bud’s smile was broad, deep, and granite-like. He slightly raised an eyebrow to his friend.

"The repelatron generates an invisible force that repels whatever it’s tuned to, passing right through everything else like a radio wave," Tom said with an understanding smile of his own. "I’ve got it working on certain mixtures of salt water. Sandy and Bash accidentally developed an adhering layer of the mixture by being in the pool, so the repulsion force affected them."