Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker (15 page)

"Right—Kong Dubya," Tom nodded. "I should call Ham and George and see if they’ve made any progress. They’d planned to stay with Ham’s sister for a while, in Brooklyn."

"I think the answers are a lot closer to Spain than Brooklyn—no offense to a nice borough!"

For all that lay ahead, the two-day cruise was a restful breather for Tom and Bud, and they were almost sorry when it ended at the pier of little Los Quiveres Mercado, a sunbaked hamlet that looked as if it had seen little change since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella—if not Don Quixote. Nevertheless, the quaint bed-and-breakfast they spent the night in offered satellite TV, Wi-Fi, and complimentary internet hookup. "Fiber optical," Tom observed.

As Bud got in some early snoring, Tom used the computer to learn about the town and its minute claim to wispy fame—the oil business. A great deal of money had been spent some thirty years previous to dredge out the sea bottom and build an offshore pumping platform capable of servicing oil-bearing supertankers. The government had funded construction of a petroleum refinery at the coast, to serve a large region. International crisis had led to the virtual abandonment of the enterprise in the late 1970’s. "But they say the refinery is still maintained as an adjunct operation," Tom told himself, "and tankers still dock at the pumping platform." Yet when Tom tried to discover public information on how often this took place, he found no data at all.
It’s just a front
, he thought.

But for what? "Answers tomorrow," he murmured. "maybe!"

TOM AND BUD departed their bed-and-breakfast as the sun was arriving, whirling through the dawn-shadows on a pair of rented bikes. Tom’s Private Ear Radio unit, about the size and shape of an old-style walkie-talkie, was hooked to a beltloop and bounced against his leg as he pedaled.

"It’d be convenient if you could use the PER to call in the cops when we get captured," Bud observed.

"‘When’?"

"Genius boy, at this point in the T&B saga it’s
nothin
’ like an ‘if’!"

Through his laughter Tom reminded his pal that the PER could only contact the particular unit—wherever it might be on or off the earth—that bore the quantum-linked mate to its inserted cartridge. "I’m afraid the local
policia
haven’t joined the quantum club just yet. All cries for help will have to be relayed through Shopton!"

"Then Tom, let’s make a point of being kidnapped in upstate New York."

They rode southwards along a seashore road, little more than a paved path, and encountered no traffic. Three miles from the town limits they stopped, gazing out to sea at a platform of girders and upthrust derricks. "There’s the pumping platform," Tom told Bud. "The delivery conduits must run underwater."

Bud scanned the shoreline in both directions. "So where do they come out?"

"They probably ran them underground."

The youths parked their bicycles in a secluded spot and locked them, then turned their backs to the ocean and trekked inland. They could see the ugly hulk of the refinery a quarter-mile ahead.

Bud said, "Don’t forget my prediction. Whatever the place looks like from a distance, if it’s some kind of secret operation we don’t stand a chance of just walking on in to snoop around."

"Very logical, pal," nodded Tom. "And you’re probably right. But we may get lucky. Or at least we might be able to dope out something from the edge of the property."

"Always the experimenter!"

A barbed-wire fence, the first of several, brought them to a halt. The facility was still more than a football-field distant. They began to walk the perimeter, but found no break in the fence. The several gates were securely locked, and formidable. "How do the workers get in?" Bud mused. "No code box, no intercom. Jetz, I don’t even see a keyhole!"

"I think this place is a great deal more high-tech than meets the eye," Tom murmured.

"So do we try to go further?"

"Yup!"

"I’ll bite, said the fish. How?"

"Like this." Tom bent down and came up with a fist-sized shard of asphalt. He reared back—and hurled it as high and as far as he could in the direction of the refinery.

"I get it," Bud nodded. "If we scare the building it’ll panic and bolt over the fence. Here, let me have some fun too." The former high school football star did some hurling on his own, and Bud’s missiles won the distance. "Feels good, working the kinks out of my frustration. What exactly are we doing?"

Tom let fly with another rock. "Attracting attention. No—actually I’m guessing we’ve had somebody’s attention for quite a while, since we left the road. What we’re attracting is
concern
, by showing that we don’t plan to just walk― "

"
Put it down
!" a voice barked.

The boys whirled—and found themselves face to face with a platoon of armed men! The uniforms the men wore were simple, almost casual, without insignia. Their handguns, however, had a sheen of sophistication. And one of those guns, the speaker’s, was levelly aimed at Tom Swift’s head. "What are you doing here?" the man demanded.

Tom shrugged. "Nothing much. You?"

"Answer."

"We’ll ask the questions!" Bud stated with surreal bravado.

The leader gave a signal, and four more guns were whipped into view. Bud’s bravado turned tentative, but Tom remained calm. "Excuse me," he said, "while I use the phone." Moving slowly so as not to alarm any triggers, the young inventor brought the PER up to his ear and pressed the actuator button. After a moment he noted that a small light had come on—
contact
. "Hi, Mr. Thurston. Rather than making us stand out here looking down gun barrels, how about inviting us in?"

"All right, Tom," came the voice from the speaker. "I’ve signaled Corporal Staveman. You’ll be escorted in."

As they were walked toward an entrance, elaborately concealed among the boulders outside the perimeter fence, Bud shot his friend a familiar look. Tom replied to it. "I’ve been half expecting this, ever since Harlan told me about the link between the
Centurion
and this refinery. It’s all part of Thurston’s CIA operation—or at least he’s running the security. Notice that these men, here on the Spanish coast, are speaking English."

"Not just English," Bud stated. "
American
!"

A long corridor led to a large room full of electronic consoles and video monitors, and a number of men and women in lab coats, quizzical expression on their faces.

There was also John Thurston, the CIA PER unit in his hand. And one other familiar face, offering Tom a familiar hand.

"Hi there, Tom," said Bernt Ahlgren. "Not too surprised to run into you here in our rabbit-hole."

"Unless you plan to throw us into a holding tank, Mr. Ahlgren, I hope you’ll be supplying a few answers."

"A few," replied the communications specialist—and U.S. government agent.

"We’re going to satisfy your curiosity as best we can, Tom," said Mr. Thurston. "And not just because you’ve earned that right by making your way here."

"It seems we need some blue-eyed scientific help," said Ahlgren with a wink.

"Matter of life and death?"

"One of the two, at least."

Thurston waved the boys into swivel chairs. "No need to waste time on pleasantries, or on explanations for things you’ve surely figured out already."

"But I could have gone
wrong
at some point, Mr. Thurston," responded Tom. "I’m only assuming that the target of the group you were monitoring, the ones who transmitted the image, was this place. Or something connected with it, like the tanker, or maybe the guyot."

"Nothing that I told you was a lie," declared Thurston. "I merely refrained from certain elaborations that I had sworn not to disclose."

"You’re a pillar of ethics, Mr. Thurston," said Bud sarcastically. "So what can you guys tell us now?"

"Barclay’s sure puttin’ us in our places, isn’t he, John?" Ahlgren gibed. "Ah, to be young—the world of simple choices and clear conscience."

Thurston focused only on Tom. "The refinery here—I give it no other name—is too well protected to make a reasonable target for what we think is a rather small terrorist cell."

"With an espionage sideline," added Bernt Ahlgren.

Tom asked if the target was the supertanker, and Thurston gave a grim nod. "We knew it would be either the
Centurion
or the Oberjuerge seamount site. We didn’t know which. Obviously our security precautions were inadequate."

"Just who is Tristan Carlow?" demanded Tom.

"A minor player, for all the trouble he caused you in London and Paris. He’s wanted by Interpol for securities fraud and various scams, under his birth name, Kyle Iomenzies. We were unable to snatch him up in London, but if he had lured you to his cronies in Paris, we― "

Tom held up a hand to stop the account. "Guess I make good bait, don’t I?"

Bernt Ahlgren laughed. "The
best
! Oh—and you too, Bud."

"Thanks a heap."

"Are you saying Carlow was working separately from this group you’ve been trailing?" Tom asked Mr. Thurston.

"No," the man replied; "although he arranged certain elements to his personal advantage—a side deal on ransom was part of the inducement package offered him by the spy cell’s leader."

"Who is?"

"We don’t know," admitted the CIA man. "What we know is that they’re after Configuration Eighteen. What you call ‘water X’."

"Then maybe you could tell me something about
that
," Tom suggested coolly.

"Perhaps that would be best," pronounced Thurston. He nodded at a gray-haired woman who had been standing nearby, who nodded in return.

"I’m Paula Jeans, Tom," she said politely. "Let me show you our C-18 at work." She led Tom and Bud to a table with a large beaker upon it. "Looks like ordinary seawater. Tastes like seawater, though I don’t recommend tasting it."

"It’ll never replace Perrier," commented Ahlgren. Noting the reproving glance from Thurston, he added: "Give me a break. I spent the night reading Barclay’s dossier." Which brought a different variety of look from Bud.

"Now some magic," stated Jeans. She heated a small metal bolt over a Bunsen burner until it began to glow red. Then, with a flourish, she held it over the beaker and released the heatproof clamp. The bolt splashed down into the fluid.

Instantly the beaker began to boil furiously from top to bottom!
The boys ducked away as spumes of scalding water erupted from the top.

"Jetz!" Bud gasped. "That’s a mighty big reaction from somethin’ called
water
!"

"It’s
boiling
," pronounced Tom softly, instantly fascinated.

"Not boiling," corrected Paula Jeans with a smile. "It’s
superboiling
."

A column of steam—an impenetrable mushroom cloud—was now rising above the beaker’s mouth and spreading across the ceiling. Forty seconds after the dropping of the bolt, the entire volume of water had completely boiled away! "About a quart, I think," said John Thurston. "One quart of something like seawater, converted in less than a minute into a mass of something like steam."

"
Supersteam
," Jeans added. Bud repeated the word, his gray eyes wide.

"Then what Configuration Eighteen amounts to," said Tom thoughtfully, "is a radically new form of water that gassifies—vaporizes—at a tremendous rate, even at ordinary sea-level air pressure."

"Friend, you’re not ‘radical’
enough
," Bernt Ahlgren declared. "This isn’t my field, but I know what I’ve been told. C-18 is to heat conduction as superconducting wire is to electricity. Raise the temp at one point and the heat spreads all through the water like a spray of bullets."

The young inventor began a puzzled objection. "But you’re only putting in a certain amount of heat energy. Even a red-hot metal bolt wouldn’t have enough― "

"Have you considered, Tom, that water might have more than one natural boiling point?" asked Paula Jeans tartly. "Or to put it another way—that the
true
natural boiling point of water might be
suppressed
by the conditions under which we usually find it?"

Tom chuckled ruefully. "That’s quite a thought, Miss Jeans. Now you’ve got my
brains
boiling."

"I cracked my block quite a ways back," said Bud faintly. "So, okay now, let’s get real expository. Special water that boils at a look. What
good
is it?"

Thurston answered. "Tom thought C-18 might be involved in weaponry. In a sense, Tom, you were quite right. But the field is not military defense, but the ‘weaponry’ of economics and commerce. In essence, NATO is studying the development of a source of motive power to replace petroleum."

"A source that America and America’s allies will control," noted Ahlgren. "Not those others in this world who don’t much care for us and our heathen ways."

"Steam power," Tom stated. "The return of the steam engine."

"Somehow I sorta get all that," Bud put in dryly. "And I can put together the overall picture too. You guys are extracting this weirdo water from a natural source, in that guyot. The
Centurion
makes its delivery rounds, and on the way from Iceland to Norway the circle crosses the guyot, and you load the stuff into one of the big tanks. Eventually it gets pumped off here."

"
Unless
somebody manages to sink the tanker and steal her load," said his pal.

"Ya got it," nodded Bernt Ahlgren. "See, they tell me C-18 has differing properties in differing mass-volumes. It isn’t enough to just study a small sample—you need to fill an olympic-size pool or two. Hence."

Jeans continued, "Trace amounts have been created in lab situations, but the process is far too difficult and expensive to allow for any practical use. The few scientists who were studying the phenomenon were blown away when exploratory oil drilling on the Oberjuerge Seamounts Formation uncorked a geyser of the substance."

"I guess I can understand why something like this would be top secret," said Tom, "and why agents from countries with big investments in oil and petro-commerce might want to get involved."