Tom Swift and His Aquatomic Tracker (18 page)

Grinning with excitement, Bud entered the
SnooperSub’s
cramped storage hold, which doubled as an airlock, and swung himself into one of the waiting Fat Men. Sealing the suit, he signalled Tom to open the airlock.

In seconds Tom saw the youth jet past the viewpane and lite on the bottom not far away. The young inventor laughed as Bud made fists at the end of his remotely controlled mechanical arms and swung them about. "Fighting an invisible octopus, pal? Or just flexing to show off?"

"Good workouts start with stretching exercises, aqua-prof!" laughed Bud in return. "These new movement-imitator control gloves are mighty fine. Okay—to work!"

Tom’s joking comments belied a sense of danger that he knew his chum shared in. The
Centurion
hung in watery space like a sunken skyscraper—or a gray ghost of the sea.
We’re invisible to sonar
, Tom thought gravely,
but not to sigh
t.

Bud jetted toward the ship, surveying the nearer side with the beams of his suit lamps. Then the Fat Man became a distant fleck, arcing around the hulk to its hidden side. "I don’t see any sign of damage or leakage," he reported by sonophone. "Hey—
there’s
something that doesn’t come standard!"

"What?"

"A great big box attached to the lower hull on the far side. Jetz, it’s as big as a schoolbus! What do you suppose..."

Tom’s eyes suddenly bulged wide as he grasped the significance of what Bud was seeing! "Bud!—it’s an airlock!
The tanker itself is the hideout
! Get back here!"

Bud did not reply!

Shoving past all thought of danger, Tom reached for the hydraulivane thrust controls—and yelped out as the
SnooperSub
jerked violently to one side. "Good night!" he choked, grabbing at the safety straps on his seat. Was it a seaquake?

Another shock came, twisting the deck and nearly hurling Tom against the viewpane! A loud rasping, clanking sound from the hull—and the hydronaut realized what he was up against.
The Conqueror Worm
had come up from behind! "It’s got hold of the sub!"

Kong Dubya, out of view, seemed intent on shaking the
Snoop
like a dog with a rat in its teeth. Whipped about violently, Tom was unable to reach the sonophone mike, and he watched helplessly as his point of contact with the surface world, the Private Ear unit, clattered away on the lurching deck.
Got to reach it
, he told himself desperately.
Got to call for help—for Bud’s sake too!
He unlatched his safety straps, and another shock sent him somersaulting forward against the control panel. He wilted to the deck, stunned.

His next clear thought was the sound of the
SnooperSub’s
topside hatch being forced open by machinery. Rough hands grabbed him, and blurry faces dragged him up and out into air and the dim bluish light of flickering fluorescent tubes.

As he was being patted down by silent men, Tom fought to clear his head and take stock of where he was. Everything seemed weirdly askew! Metal girders arched over his head at senseless angles, and black metal walls tilted in at him as if they were about to collapse. "Of—of course," he muttered. "I’m inside the ship! And she’s nose-down."

The open space he was in—possibly one of the big tanks—was half full of water. He could see a huge, sliding hatchway panel on one wall poking above the waterline. It was obviously a recent addition, disturbingly parallel to up-and-down as it really was, not the helpless slant of the grounded
Centurion
. He had been led onto an aluminum catwalk that stretched to the top of the bobbing
Snoop
from a roughly gouged opening in the nearest tank-wall. It seemed Tom’s sub and been shoved through the airlock’s outer hatchway by the Worm, and then pulled by cables through the inner hatch, into the compartment’s dock.

Tom noticed another small submarine, of conventional design, floating a distance away. And something else, too—Bud’s Fat Man suit, open and empty. His heart sank.

Three muscular, sun-weathered men stood about him, one holding a revolver. They wore simple, blue-gray work garments. "Do you—speak English?" Tom faltered weakly.

The men said nothing but responded by jerking their captive toward the doorway, into another bizarrely-angled compartment with a makeshift floor suspended in space.

"Bud!"

"Hi, Skipper," was Bud’s listless greeting. Tom saw the bruises that testified his pal hadn’t been an easy catch. As Tom was shoved nearer, Bud said: "It turns out Kong Dubya has babies. Some mini-monster came up out of nowhere and grabbed the Fat Man."

Tom nodded. "I think I encountered the Worm itself—the big one."

"Indeed you did," came a thick voice from above—a useless door yawning open in what seemed to be the ceiling. A man stood looking down at them. He was a courtly looking man in a white suit, with graying dark hair, a look of intense, hawklike concentration on his fleshy face. He had a skinny goatee, a gray spike curving from his chin like a worm.

Professor Petrov Vaxilis!

"Your eyes tell me you recognize me, young sir," he said haughtily. "Here we meet one another,
under
water,
within
water, and in a certain sense—our meeting is
over
water, eh?" He chuckled. "For it is water that draws us together."

"Come on down and shake hands," Bud snapped with threat in his voice. Vaxilis seemed more captor than captive!

Vaxilis turned his eyes to one of his men and nodded. Tom and Bud were stripped and given the operation’s drab work garments in place of their American clothing. "No weapons? No radios? It is as if you had no expectation of becoming prisoners. A pity, though," he continued mockingly, "that neither of you chose to wear your wristwatches. I am told they are, as you say,
quite something
."

"Professor Vaxilis," said Tom in a raw voice, "my friend and I are here because we were trying to rescue you. Everyone—everyone who knows anything about it—assumes you were abducted, if not drowned."

"Of course," he nodded. "Yet as a scientist of vision, you surely know that what ‘everyone’ assumes is quite often wrong. This theatrical business of sinking my
Naiad
was planned with great attention to detail—and to the ever-watchful eyes of the West. I am to serve as an asset to dear Kranjovia as a phantom, out of sight, with the independence of privacy. It was my demand, and even Maurig realizes that brilliant science can not be extracted by torture.

"A nice scheme. I was quite safe and comfortable in my watertight chamber for the two days it took for Stangkreggi—the largest of my transport drones, named for a mythic creature—to tow me here beneath the sea."

The boys did not respond, and Vaxilis called down orders to his men in what Tom presumed was his native language, Kranjov. The two were forced up a swaying rope ladder to a higher level, a hallway almost as steeply canted as a playground slide.

Vaxilis met them with a curt nod. "We were anticipating your arrival for perhaps an hour. Your dwarfish, sluggish vehicle is easy enough to see by telescopic video as it comes over our blue horizon. And my Stangkreggi was already hurrying back from his latest visit to the seamount. Easy enough." After waiting politely for comments that never came, he said: "Now then, Tom Swift, it seems to me you might not have seen Stangkreggi as he came upon you, turned away as you were. I have sent him back to Oberjuerge, alas. But—as I know you like models; I have seen
fotoghima
, photographs, of your office—allow me to give you a treat. Do follow, please. And of course, bringing up the rear, my countrymen and employees Bordyi, the apelike man with the gun, and Theenar, bald Theenar." As he turned to lead the parade, Vaxilis added, "He is very quick, Theenar. The slightest trace of disorderliness, Americans, will result in several inches of sharp steel between your ribs.
Ouch
!—one might say."

The Kranjovian led them into another room with a suspended work-deck, a very large chamber outfitted as a laboratory of some kind. A number of men and women stood about in white coats, regarding the captives in silence. It somehow reminded Tom and Bud of the secret facility in Spain—but at a cockeyed slant.

The Professor plucked an object from a countertop and held it out for Tom to examine. Molded of plastic, it resembled nothing so much as a human spinal column, comprised of a great many small segments with flexible linkages. "Stangkreggi. My own design, perfect for undersea transport and certain kinds of construction. Let me see, now..." He directed Tom’s attention to sawtoothed disks, extending in pairs from the underside of each segment. "
Scurriers
, I call them. Wheels of a sort, but with the axle set in a vertical orientation. Do you see? Angle it, eh, and the part of the disk’s periphery furthest from the main body touches the surface below. They turn, biting into the seafloor, and it is a kind of walking, fast and continuous with ever so many little grasping feet."

The young scientist-inventor was intrigued helplessly in spite of the circumstances. "I see. The scalloped edges act like anchors."

"Thin prongs swing out to grip the bottom with great firmness."

"Yeah," grated Bud, "while you reach up and grab ships to pull under."

Vaxilis smiled almost proudly. "Oh yes, just so. And here along the back, you see the flexible arms and claw-grippers. They are folded down, but can be swung up and extended to great lengths. You will be pleased to hear, young Tom, that Stangkreggi makes good use of a couple of your own creations. His lean inner musculature is based upon that of your giant robots. And within the big lobster-claws, an adaptation of your underwater vacuum-lifter device—for with all his wide reach, Stangkreggi can hardly be expected to embrace an entire supertanker.

"Yet with the strength of Vortoggnas, the Kranjovian Atlas, Stangkreggi had no hesitation in pulling this huge
Centurion
under the waves against its tremendous buoyancy. And then, the great haul across the bottom of the North Sea, to this nice place of refuge. Scarcely one day! Glad I was, when construction was completed and I was able to leave the Kranjovian listening station in Greenland, our much inferior hidden base. Down here I have all I need to study this wonder-water that is my specialty. Including, not to forget, a plentiful supply of the substance itself."

Tom handed the model back to his captor. "Then I take it, Professor Vaxilis, that this is all a Kranjovian operation?"

"No, it is
my
operation! So many years, working for the fool Maurig, an unscientific idiot, earning my petty privileges. For what?—for this, to study what you call Configuration Eighteen." Then he winked broadly. "And also, perhaps a few more privileges and rewards for my patriotic services. All in the deal. Let me show them to you."

As they were herded toward another door, a voice called out from a dimlit corner of the laboratory: "Well, hiya, boys!"

Tom and Bud whirled, and Bud barked out in amazement, "Carlow!"

"Not in jail after all, this clever man," commented Vaxilis in suave tones. "The Parisians could not hold him. Good it is, Tom, to have friends in a position to falsify or destroy evidence."

"I don’t doubt it, Professor."

Vaxilis unlocked a heavy door. The group entered into darkness, and the Kranjovian switched on the lights.

The chamber was crammed with art objects of every description! "I am a
mignar
, a fan, of certain of the classic styles of artistry. Paintings, lovely vases, jeweled chalices—and there!" Vaxilis gestured grandly. "Surely you know that one."

"Surely I
do
," replied Tom coolly. "The Delian Apollo."

"So it really
was
being shipped on the
Centurion
," Bud muttered. "It wasn’t just a hoax."

"There are hoaxes aplenty, but that was not one of them. These objects are a form of payment provided by Maurig. His agents have methodically stolen them from the collectors who stole them originally. I would say, Tom, that they inspire some of my best work."

"You’re a poor excuse for a real scientist, Vaxilis," snapped the young inventor.

Petrov Vaxilis laughed—though his peculiar laugh was soundless. "No, Tom, I am a very good excuse for a scientist. It is as a
person
that I am a somewhat poor excuse. Yet I have made sacrifices, have I not? Sacrifices of things dear to me. My poor family—had our leader not carried out his usual policy of executing the loved ones of traitors, it might have seemed peculiar, hmm?"

"You’re as inhuman as those robot serpents of yours!" Tom spat out in disgust.

Professor Vaxilis stared at the blond youth with eyes like ice, unspeaking. Then he turned and led them out of the room, carefully locking the door behind them. He spoke quietly to the guards, then addressed Tom and Bud without looking at them. "You will be taken to a compartment and placed in irons, as they say aboard ships. You will be fed and watered until the Naval submarine arrives from Serpentopol."

"We’re to be taken to Kranjovia?" demanded Tom.

"You are of some value if placed in meek service to the government. The outside world will believe that you and your craft were lost beneath the North Sea, under inexplicable circumstances. Incidentally," added Vaxilis, "our sensing instruments make me quite confident that you are sending no locator signal, and that you did not transmit word of your discovery to others. And if I am wrong? Pray I am not, for those who attempt rescue will also disappear. I have more power than I have shown you." He gestured sharply to his men, and finished by saying, "It is most unlikely, my boys, that we shall meet again."

The two Shoptonians were herded down twisted corridors to a small compartment, where, as promised, they were placed in ankle chains. The men turned without a last look and locked the door behind them—a metal door with no hint of yield.

After a silence, Bud began to speak in low tones, grim and despondent. "When he said ‘
you
,’ he meant you, Tom. I won’t be taking that sub trip. They don’t have any use for me."

Tom only said, "We’ve been in― "

His friend interrupted. "Tom, we’re in leg irons in a locked room inside a sunken supertanker underneath a glacier in
Iceland
. Please don’t tell me we’ve been in worse situations!" Bud took a few breaths, then gave Tom a look of wry apology. "So what’s the plan?"