Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome (2 page)

The water around him was quiet now. Ever the scientist, Tom theorized that the geyser had been caused by the sudden release of a tremendous quantity of gas held under pressure somewhere beneath base of the mountain.

Whether he had been in stunned semiconsciousness for a few seconds or several minutes, Torn did not know. Though he seemed to be resting once again on the sea floor, he could see nothing through the impenetrable darkness of the depths. Only the reflection of his worried face looked back at him from the dome. Even the luminous fishes appeared to have been driven away.

"Where was Dad blown to?" he asked himself worriedly. "And how is he?"

Tom pressed the Fat Man’s exterior light switch, then flipped it back and forth in desperation. There was no response. "Oh, no!" he groaned. His searchlight was out of commission! Trying the sonophone, he received only static in answer to his calls.

Outside the crystal window there was no sign of his father or the
Sea Hound
’s beam. A wave of fear surged through Tom.

Steady, kid!
he told himself.
Getting panicky won’t help!

From the tactile-pressure indicator on the robot arm control panel, Tom could tell that the vacuum flask had been wrenched from his grasp by the undersea geyser. His valuable sample was gone, too! But there was no time to worry about
that.

Working the controls cautiously, Tom maneuvered the Fat Man through a complete 360-degree turn. There was not a glimmer of light from the seacopter. Again and again he repeated his desperate but futile call into his sonophone mike. Getting no response, he finally gave up.
Now what?
Tom wondered fearfully.

Had the subocean upheaval breached the hulls of the
Sea Hound
and his father’s Fat Man suit? If so—Tom couldn’t bear the thought—Slim Davis and Mr. Swift were almost certainly dead!

ALONE and helpless in the depths of the sea, Tom pondered his desperate situation for a moment. Without help from the mother ship, his own plight was serious and his father’s might be worse. In any case, Tom decided, there was no point in lingering on the ocean bottom.

"Well, here goes," he determined, speaking to himself aloud. His words rang hollow and strange inside the metal-rimmed airspace.

Switching off the electronic buoyancy controller and opening a valve by hand, he blew his suit’s ballast tanks and prepared to surface. An elevator feeling in the pit of his stomach told him the Fat Man was zooming upward through the murky depths.

Slowly the blackness outside his curving viewpane lightened into gray. Then the water took on greenish tinges, which finally deepened into a rich blue-green. Tom was somehow comforted by the fish of all description that darted past. Seconds later he broke through the surface with a mighty bound.

"Oh boy, that old sunshine looks good!" Tom exulted.

Peering around, he gave a cry of joy. Less than a hundred yards away, the
Sea Hound
was wallowing in the waves. The float balloon, marking the location of the gas fissure and bearing a small fluttering pennant, was also in sight.

But where was his father?

He was startled as his speaker erupted with, "Tom, is that you? Are you all right?"

"I’m okay, Slim."

"Wish I could say the same," was the reply. "I was thrown against the control board and knocked for a loop. What about your Dad?"

"I—I don’t know," Tom faltered. Suddenly he was struck by a hopeful thought. "But wait—I only came to the surface because I blew my ballast tank. If Dad were knocked out—"

"Right!" exclaimed Slim. "He could be safe in his suit but unconscious, down on the bottom somewhere! Come aboard and I’ll submerge again."

Just then Tom jumped in alarm at a strange metallic sound coming from the wall next to his elbow. Turning around, he saw a small metal cylinder floating close by, the waves knocking it against the Fat Man. The gas sample! Made buoyant by the gas it contained, the flask had drifted up to the surface.

After retrieving the container, Tom steered the Fat Man toward the seacopter, keeping his eyes on the sea around him for any sign that his father had surfaced, perhaps some distance away. A chill of foreboding came over him when he failed to glimpse any trace of the bulbous sub-suit.

Tom rapped on the seacopter’s side-hatch, and it popped open under Slim’s control. In minutes the
Sea Hound
was again plunging down beneath the waves into the darkness below.

The seacopter followed the sharp outline of the undersea mountain to its base, where Tom and Slim could again see the column of rushing bubbles, now broader. The seaquake appeared to have opened the fissure wider.

Slim swept the aqualamp right and left across the sea floor, and brought the craft’s second lamp into play as well. "I don’t see anything, Tom," Slim reported solemnly.

"Dad’s suit might have been buried in the muck," Tom declared. "If so, the SRL should show his location." The sono-resonance locator was an invention of Tom’s which pinpointed solid, hollow underwater objects by inducing and detecting a characteristic "signature" through sonar-type waves.

Tom adjusted the instrument. "This’ll only work if he isn’t buried too deeply," he commented grimly. "Cross your fingers, Slim."

Almost immediately, the device gave forth a hopeful buzzing sound. "Got him!" Slim exclaimed. Following the indication on the dial, the
Sea Hound
approached the base of the mountain, about one hundred yards beyond the gas geyser. A mechanical metal hand protruded limply from the sea-bottom mud!

Determinedly taking command of the situation, Tom used the seacopter’s steam jets to stir up the loose mud and blast it aside. Mr. Swift’s Fat Man suit was soon revealed to view in the murky cloud of particles. Tom donned his suit again, and in minutes he had dragged his father’s suit aboard and pulled the unconscious occupant out into the air. Damon Swift was unconscious, the side of his head badly bruised in two places.

Smelling salts brought about a flutter of eyelids and a weak, choking gasp from Mr. Swift’s lips. "Don’t try to talk, Dad," urged Tom, his face white. "We’ll get you to a hospital in nothing flat."

Surfacing and reversing the pitch of its prop-blades, the
Sea Hound
raced for the nearest port at jet speed, riding its cushion of air a few feet above the rolling waves. Within the hour, Mr. Swift was stable, alert, and sitting upright in a hospital bed in the city of Hamilton, capital of the island of Bermuda.

"His injuries are not too serious, young fellow," said the doctor, standing next to the bed. "A very mild concussion, with no significant subdural hemorrhaging. But you were wise to bring him to us so promptly."

Tom thanked the doctor and clutched his father’s hand, relieved.

For the time being, there was nothing for Tom to do but wait and hope that further tests would disclose no hidden injuries. As the minutes dragged by into hours, the young inventor thought ruefully of the many times when he himself had come face to face with death, not only at sea, but in the desert of New Mexico, the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, and the bleakness of outer space. In his latest adventure, he had used his advanced ultrasonic cycloplane to outwit an unprincipled, avaricious scientist seeking riches in the New Guinea jungle, heedless of the cost to human life. Now Tom was reminded that his projects also put those closest to him in danger.

But all medical signs were positive, and by late afternoon of the following day Tom and Damon Swift had returned to Shopton by means of the
Sky Queen,
Tom’s mammoth Flying Lab, while Slim Davis piloted the
Sea Hound
to its berth on Fearing Island off the coast of Georgia.

Arriving home at last, Tom left his father in the care of his mother and sister Sandra, then drove back to Swift Enterprises. He was anxious to test the composition of the gas sample, which he had carried along with him on the
Sky Queen
.

Checking into the office he shared with his father, the metal flask in hand, he was delighted to find Bud waiting for him.

As they shared a bear hug, Tom exclaimed, "Didn’t expect to see you back till next Monday, flyboy!"

"When Sandy phoned me about your Dad, I figured I’d had enough of rich food and little cable cars ‘climbing halfway to the stars’," replied the dark-haired youth jokingly. "Besides, I feel fine. But how’s your Dad doing?"

Tom gave Bud the reassuring reports, and described the mystery of the undersea mountain and their exciting discovery. "Leave it to you to turn up something wild wherever you go! So if it turns out to be helium, it’s a major find? How come? Is Enterprises planning to get into the party-balloon business?"

Grinning, Tom replied, "Helium’s valuable for quite a bit more than balloons. Nowadays liquified helium, the coldest common substance known, is used to supercool electronic circuits to improve conductivity and make them more sensitive. A plentiful source of the gas would be a real boon to scientific research, and could have big technological implications, too."

"I see," said the young pilot thoughtfully. "And since it’s in international waters, the U.S.A. had better be the firstest with the mostest. But how in the world do you plan on tapping a gas well at the bottom of the ocean? I mean, this goes
way
beyond undersea oil drilling, Tom."

"You’re right, chum. But I have a few ideas."

"You usually do," Bud pronounced. "No, correction—you
always
do!"

Tom winked and stepped over to the wall, where he touched a button. A combination worktable and drafting board slid out from the wall, silently. Tom picked up a sheet of stiff paper on which a number of sketches had been made. "Remember this?"

Bud nodded. "Sure do. You showed it to me in the hospital—if I wasn’t just hallucinating. It’s the pressurized dome you want to set up in the city of gold, for underwater work teams to live in."

"That’s right. I call it a hydrodome—
hydro
means—"

"I know, genius boy. Water. A guy has to know Greek and Latin to work around here!" Bud took the sketch and looked it over again. The proposed structure was a round, bulging tank of metal, about sixty feet in diameter, dotted with circular portholes of the same composite of quartz and Tomasite plastic, called Tomaquartz, used in Swift undersea craft. Deep-sea researchers in protective gear along the lines of the Fat Man suits would use the hydrodome as a workspace and living area while investigating the submarine city and its environs, remaining beneath the sea for weeks or months at a time. They would come and go through an airlock, and oxygen for breathing would be extracted directly from seawater by a new invention of Tom’s. "So what’s the idea? Are you planning to put up a hydrodome next to the helium well?"

"That’s what I’m thinking," confirmed the young inventor. "Of course the depth is much greater, and there could be some other problems, but that’s the direction I’m heading in at present." He added that for the moment he would put exploring the sunken city on the back burner. "This helium-well project needs to have top priority."

"Are you
sure
it’s helium?"

"Come with me, pal, and I’ll test it out!"

The twosome took a ridewalk moving ramp to the chemical technologies building, where Tom released the contents of the flask into the storage chamber of an electron-wave analysis instrument patented as the Swift Spectroscope. Studying the output, a broad grin of excitement inched across Tom’s face. "It’s helium, all right, and very pure too! This is wonderful!"

"Still," remarked Bud doubtfully, "all that water…"

"It’ll be a tough nut to crack," Tom agreed.

Back in Tom’s office, the two close friends chatted about Bud’s vacation in his home town. "Nothing earthshaking," he said. "My Mom and Dad are well, and I spent some time with big brother Dave and big sister Shelley. ’Bout the only interesting thing happened just before I flew back."

"Tell me," Tom urged, and Bud began to narrate the story.

One day, as the California sun had slouched toward twilight, Bud, dressed-up for an evening at the theater, had found himself with free time on his hands. Deciding on impulse to
push the envelope
a bit, he had wandered into the bar adjoining the lobby of the San Francisco Holliston, an elegant old downtown hotel. "I wondered if I’d be carded," Bud said to Tom. "But the bartender didn’t blink an eye, even when I asked for a softdrink."

As he sat sipping his drink—and hiding it with his hand—an attractive young woman some ten years Bud’s senior had drifted down gracefully onto the bar stool next to him. She was well-dressed and well-coiffed, and just as Bud was noticing these facts she turned his way and said hello. Casual conversation grew lengthier ("Really, I was just being polite," Bud explained.) and finally the woman, Amelia, asked Bud if he’d care to join her later in the evening for dinner. Her tone, and the glint in her eyes, suggested that she had more in mind than friendly conversation.

"I really can’t," the youth had said, trying not to turn red or sound flustered. "I have plans—theater tickets."

"Then tomorrow night," Amelia had persisted.

"Listen, I—I’m really flattered, ma’am, but—see, I—"

She had rolled her eyes, not in hurt disappointment but in wry resignation. "I see. San Francisco! I’m
definitely
fishing in the wrong waters."

Bud had laughed. "No, no, it’s just that—I’m not really as old as you think I am. I’m staying with my folks, in fact, and…" He had lowered his voice. "Actually, I shouldn’t even be sitting here."

"Oh my. You’re
that
young? Here I thought you were just
cute."
She had laughed gently—but still with a certain rueful tone.

"I’d say she saw through your sportcoat right down to those football shoulders of yours," commented Tom. "She had you pegged as an athlete who likes to play for fun!"

"Yeah," Bud admitted. "I can’t help it, you know. But she was a nice lady. She laughed at my jokes. Now
that’s
important, Tom!"

Eventually Bud had explained that he lived in Shopton, New York, and was employed as a pilot by the famous Swift Enterprises invention firm. "I’ve even been up in space with Tom Swift," he had said immodestly.