Tom Swift and His Jetmarine Read Online Free PDF

high-pressure ordeal.
    A crane arm swung out over the jetmarine and lowered Bud to the main topside hatch in a medical lift-chair. He entered the craft, and Tom soon emerged to shouts and applause, Bud following behind. After they were conveyed out of the tank, Tom was given a preliminary examination by medics from the plant infirmary who declared him fit.
    "Guess I’m lucky this time," Tom said.
    "Guess so," Bud agreed.
    "And now there’s a couple mysteries I’d like solved," Tom continued. "What caused the blackout, and what caused the tank pressure to get screwy?"
    "You think we got another o’ them spies here, boss?" asked Chow.
    Mr. Swift answered. "We can’t rule it out as far as the blackout effect, since it suggests the modus operandi of the Sea Snipers. But there’s a simpler explanation for Tom’s problem in the tank."
    "Way simpler," said Sid Baker, somewhat shamefaced. "When I started to lose consciousness, I remember falling across the pressure controls."
    Tom clapped him on the back reassuringly. "Don’t take it hard, Sid. Now that I’m several inches smaller all the way around, maybe I can buy cheaper clothes!"
    "Say there," said Chow, "mebbe that’d work with me!" The hefty cowpoke angled his chin down to eye his generous waistline.
    As Mr. Swift and the others attended to the reberthing of the jetmarine in the underground hangar, Tom and Bud hurried to the airfield control tower to check the automatic record of the large radarscope mounted there. As Tom played back the data on an auxiliary monitor, Bud looked over his shoulder anxiously. "What do you see, genius boy? Anything with a skull-and-crossbones on it?"
    "No," Tom replied. "Nothing in the sky, and nothing on the ground except a lot of blips that stop moving just before noon."
    "Then maybe it’s an inside job after all," Bud commented.
    "Let’s try another approach," responded the young inventor. "The ground-hugging radar scan doesn’t cut off precisely at the perimeter fence. We get a bit of a reflection for another hundred feet or so, but it’s weak and distorted. But I have some powerful image-enhancement software on my lab computer which I can access remotely, from this terminal."
    "Sweet!" exclaimed Bud with a grin. "So you’ll pump the raw data into your lab computer, and the result will come out here."
    The processing and fine-tuning took only a matter of minutes. A radar shadow from the strip beyond the north perimeter fence began to form on the monitor.
    "There it is!" Tom cried triumphantly, pointing at a squarish blip on the screen.
    "What is it?"
    "A car," Tom replied. "And not a big one, either—maybe a sports car. Look, you can see how it slowed and pulled over on the old Mansburg road."
    "Hardly anybody uses that road," Bud remarked, "not since the new throughway was finished."
    Tom advanced the electronic record slowly, second by second. "There he is, stopped off the road. He’s waiting…oh, he wanted that car to pass by. Look, the reflectance signature changed—he must’ve opened a door on the driver’s side. Getting close to the time now—there! See that flicker?"
    "I guess so," said Bud. "Just barely."
    "The scope was reacting to some kind of interference. It must be the Snipers’ blackout device!"
    "And there he goes!" Bud exclaimed. "Man, he must’ve peeled out at seventy!"
    Tom nodded. "Sure. He stays just long enough to make sure the device had its effect—he probably had binoculars trained on somebody visible on the field—and then he jumps back in his sporty machine and makes his getaway."
    Knowing that it was not possible as of yet to prove that the car that stopped had been involved in a crime, Tom passed his data on to Harlan Ames for "off-the-record" investigation by Enterprises’ security.
    "I’ll share whatever we’ve got with the Shopton PD," Ames said, "and with ONDAR. It’s quite a development, the Sea Snipers trying an attack on land."
    "Yep," Tom agreed. "But fortunately, it doesn’t