Into the Abyss (Tom Swift, Young Inventor) (2 page)

They took way too long to answer that one—but then they both cracked up laughing, and I knew they were in. As usual, they were along for the ride, no matter where it took us.

I led them down the hallway, past darkened tanks full of exotic sea creatures, until we reached the door at the far end.

The sign overhead said,
SHARK TANK: EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

“I knew there was something
fishy
about this,” Yo said, cracking a smile.

The door to the room was locked. I set down the metal suitcase I was carrying. Then I reached into my vest pocket and pulled out a sweet little electronic device I’d invented just a few months earlier. I was
glad I’d thought to bring it along with me tonight.

“What’s the matter?” Bud asked. “Key card won’t work?”

I gave him an annoyed look. No, it wouldn’t, as a matter of fact. I hadn’t thought to ask Dr. Harrod if there was a separate code for the shark tank room.

I showed Bud and Yo what was in my hand. It looked like a tiny turtle with blinking red eyes and a digital readout on its shell.

“What in the world is that?” Bud said.

“Ooh, it’s so cute!” Yo said, reaching over to pet it.

“Nah, nah, nah,” I said, yanking it away from her. “Don’t touch. It’s very sensitive.”

“But what is it?” Bud questioned, his hands on his hips.

“I’m glad you asked,” I said, throwing an arm around his shoulder. “It’s a Tom Swift Jr. original—my brand-new electronic key code reader.”

“Wow,” Yo said, still in love with the cute little electronic turtle. That’s so cool! How does it work?”

“Watch this,” I said. I held the turtle to the side of the door, where the lock slot stuck out an inch or so. Then I slipped my key card in and back out of the slot.

The red light on the lock box lit up, signaling that the code on my key card didn’t match the correct one.

Ah, but my handy-dandy turtle mini-code-reader had locked onto the chip inside the lockbox, and it had read the correct code as it was compared to my card’s incorrect one!

Now all I had to do was touch the little wonder-gizmo to my own card, and its magnetized code would change to match.

“Ta-da!” I said, as the doors to the shark chamber slid open for us. “Open, sesame!”

“You are such a show-off,” Bud said.

We all went inside the shark room. Before we realized what was happening, the heavy metal doors swung shut behind us, plunging us into sudden darkness.

“Oh, great,” Bud said. “Now what?”

“No worries,” I said, fishing out my laser flashlight. Shining it around the room, I soon found the circuit-breaker box and turned on the juice.

Ten thousand watts of light flashed on at once.

To avoid being blinded, we had to cover our eyes until they had time to adjust. Then, we looked
around the enormous chamber, with its huge circular tank of water at its center.

“There’s got to be a dimmer box,” I said, still shielding my eyes. I found it and turned the lighting down to a normal level.

I could see now that the water in the tank glowed green, lit from underneath. Dark, sinister shadows circled beneath its calm surface.

Now, the Shopton Aquarium isn’t one of the world’s biggest. Coney Island Aquarium, in Brooklyn, is the state’s premier facility—and there are a few others that have ours beat in most categories.

But as far as sharks go, Shopton is number one.

The tank is forty feet across and thirty feet deep, and it has more varieties of shark mixed together than you’d ever find in nature, or in any of those other aquariums I mentioned.

To get in on the action visitors have to walk down a wide spiral staircase to the tank’s two lower levels. There, they can see the sharks through the thick, plate-glass walls of the tank. It’s well worth a visit—especially at feeding time.

That’s when the keepers throw fish in the water, and the sharks suddenly come to life. In two seconds
they go from swimming slow, lazy circles in the tank to darting from side to side, snatching and grabbing at the food.

Soon, there’s nothing left but a huge cloud of tiny fish pieces. Tiny flakes float slowly down and are eaten by the smaller sea creatures living in the sand and rocks that line the tank’s bottom.

At the end of the demonstration, for a spectacular grand finale, the keepers throw in raw steaks. The blood filters into the water. You can see it—trails of red, like smoke wafting through the water.

Sharks have extremely sensitive noses. They can smell the scent of blood from great distances—some shark species can detect a drop of blood from a mile away. In the confines of the shark tank, the smell of blood drives them into a feeding frenzy.

In this condition, the sharks are truly frightening. Everyone watching thanks their lucky stars for the thick glass wall between them and all those razor-sharp teeth.

Only, in my case, there wasn’t going to be any glass wall. There would be nothing at all, except for my pressure-proof diving suit—and my other incredible new invention—the Swift Kick Shark Zapper.

Bud was leaning over the railing of the tank, peeking down at the circling sharks. This is creeping me out,” he said.

“I wouldn’t lean over the tank like that,” I said. “One of them might take a bite out of you.”

“Whoa!” Bud leaned back in a hurry and stumbled away from the railing.

“I was just messing with you,” I said, laughing.

Sharks don’t usually leap out of the water to snatch a meal, but Bud apparently didn’t know that. Strange—he knows just about everything else.

See, Bud’s a genius—he knows more facts about more subjects than anyone I’ve ever met—but nobody ever mistook him for a daredevil.

“Hey.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re gonna have a great scoop for the
Shopton Gazette
, so just hang with me here, okay?”

“Okay.” He blew out a breath of air, trying to calm down.

Bud writes for our school paper—in fact, he wants to be a writer someday. He’s good, too.

Of course, a lot of his stories are about his adventures with me and Yo. We’ve been in a lot of extreme situations together. Assuming everyone survives
those kinds of things, they make for pretty interesting reading.

“Enough suspense, Tom. What are we here for?”

Yo’s hands were planted on her hips, and she was standing right next to my metal suitcase. Inside was my newest invention—the one we were here to try out.

“I was just about to tell you,” I said. “I would have mentioned it before, but …”

“But you were afraid we’d back out,” Bud said, finishing the sentence for me.

“Well …” I shrugged. “Anyway, let me show you this baby.”

I crouched down and placed my fingertip on the suitcase’s identifier pad. A line of green light moved across its surface from below, scanning my fingerprint. A second later, the case unlocked itself. I opened it.

“Whoa!” Bud said. “What is
that
?”

I could tell Yo was impressed, too, though she didn’t say a word.

“It’s a deep-sea diving suit,” I said.

“Yeah, we can see that,” Bud said. “But what’s it made of?”

The shimmering blue-green metallic material of the suit was unique—patented and secret. “It’s a
carbon-based composite,” I said. “I developed it based on the molecular structure of snakeskin. Um, this is just between us, okay?”

They both nodded. “Of course,” Yo said. “Go on.”

“Snakeskin is incredibly strong, lightweight and flexible—also, carbon-based. With the help of our array of electron microscopes, I reconfigured the carbon molecules, then grew them in a special medium and combined the end-product with Swiftglass—well, it gets a little complicated from there.”

“
Gets
a little complicated?” Bud said. “I’m already lost.”

Genius or not, Bud sometimes has a tough time with the scientific stuff. I have to help him with his homework most of the time, but it’s a fair exchange. All the classes where I’m clueless—history, geography, languages, social studies—well, like I said, he’s a genius … just a very unscientific one.

“Anyway, the really cool part is that the suit—
in theory
, at least—should hold up under pressure as deep as fifteen thousand feet below the surface of the ocean. That would be a new record, by far.”

“Awesome!” Yo said, fingering the material. “But what about breathing? I’ve been scuba diving, and
when you get down deep, I know you can’t stay down as long.”

“Good question, Yo,” I said. “Here’s how.”

I lifted out the suits specially designed air-supply system. It consists of a tank containing, not compressed air, which wouldn’t last you a minute down at fifteen thousand feet, but a unique mixture of oxygen, helium, and other additives.

“With this, plus a specially modified rebreather to recycle the gases,” I said, “a full tank will buy you an hour and a half without refilling.”

“Wow!” Yo said.

That’s a huge advance in deep-sea diving technology,” Bud said. “But don’t you get cold that far down? How do you keep from freezing?”

“Another good question. You stay warm because of a special argon-gas-filled layer between the inside and outside of the suit. It’s super-charged to provide extra insulation.”

“Cool,” Bud said.

I smiled. “You mean warm. And not only could you get that far down, stay down for that long,
and
stay warm while you’re at it, but because I embedded mechanical mercury servos—tiny motors implanted
all over the suit that serve as boosters for your muscles—you should be able to move around pretty normally.”

They looked at me blankly, so I went on explaining. “At fifteen thousand feet, you wouldn’t be able even to move without the servos. Too much pressure.”

“And without the suit?” Bud asked.

“You’d crumple like a piece of paper.”

Yo gave me a piercing look. “Okay, but this shark tank here is only thirty feet deep. You didn’t come here to test out how the suit handles deep-ocean pressure.”

“Aha!” I said, smiling at her. “You’re right, Yo. You’re exactly correct. I brought the suit along for protection—because it’s strong enough to stand up to a shark bite.”

“
In theory
, at least,” Bud said, throwing my own words right back at me.

“Couldn’t you just put the diving suit on a crash dummy and send it down there to get chomped on?” Yo asked. “I mean, why do
you
have to be inside it?”

“Because there’s something attached to the suit, Yo. Something that I need to try out.”

“Something to do with sharks?” Bud guessed.

“Yup. It’s my new ultra-sonic, super-duper Swift Kick Shark Zapper.”

I showed them the control panel on the back of the diving suit’s left glove. “I press here to activate it.”

“What does it do? Give them an electric shock?” Yo asked.

“No—that wouldn’t work too well. Water conducts electricity, remember? I would fry myself, along with all the sharks.”

“Oh. Right.” She giggled, her hand flying to her mouth. “I knew that.”

This zapper’s actually kind of radical—if it works the way I think it will ….”

I was already putting the suit on, with a little help from my friends. The snakeskin-type material is form-fitting and clingy, and putting it on yourself can take awhile.

“How does it work, then?” Bud asked. “In English, please.”

“When a shark comes in to attack, it instinctively closes its eyes—to protect them. With its eyes closed, the shark detects movement using a tiny sensor in its nose, which picks up the electromagnetic waves emitted by its prey.”

“Now
that is cool
,” Bud said. He reached for his notepad, about to write it all down—then stopped, remembering we were dealing with trade secrets.

The actual zapper is embedded in the helmet of the suit,” I said, lifting it up to show them. “It emits an electromagnetic pulse that’s far stronger than what normally comes off a human being. In fact, the pulse is so strong, it overloads the shark’s sensor, causing a painful sensation that drives the shark away.”

“I’m surprised the aquarium gave you permission to try it out,” Yo said. “Ever heard of animal cruelty?”

I waved her off. “It only stuns the shark for an instant. There’s no lasting harm done—and if it works, Yo, think of all the lives it’ll save! Divers, surfers, people wearing life preservers.”

“I guess that’s true,” she said.

“And it could protect the sharks, too,” I added. “Do you know how many sharks are caught by mistake by commercial fishing boats? So many that several shark species are going extinct! But if you put my Swift Kick Shark Zappers on all those miles-long fishing lines, they’ll keep sharks from getting hooked by mistake!”

“
In theory
,” Bud repeated. “Assuming it works.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s what we’re here to find out.”

Reaching into the side compartment of the metal suitcase, I pulled out a wireless receiver/transmitter and handed it to Bud. “Here,” I said. “So we can talk to each other while I’m down there.”

“Okay,” he said. “But what if there’s a problem?”

“What problem could there possibly be? Even if the Zapper’s a bust, the suit will protect me. If it’ll fend off water pressure at fifteen thousand feet, it should be able to deal with the pressure of a shark’s jaws.”

I pointed to the cooler Bud had been carrying. “Open it,” I said.

He did, and lifted out two clear, sealed plastic bags of bloody raw hamburger.

“I’ll take one of those down with me,” I said.

“What?! Are you nuts?” Yo screamed.

I turned back to Bud. “You keep the other bag,” I told him. “In case I use mine up, you can drop it in the tank to keep the sharks excited.”

Bud rolled his eyes. “You are one crazy dude,” he said.

“Yo,” I said, “I’m going to need your help locking
on this helmet. It’s a little tricky with the gloves on.”

“No!” she said, shaking her head violently. “I’m not gonna help you get yourself killed!”

“I’ll be fine, Yo. Hey, you’ve helped me plenty of times before when it wasn’t exactly safe.”

“Nothing this dangerous.”

“Oh really? What about that time at the volcano?”