Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron Read Online Free PDF Page A

Andes climbing. Then on across the Pacific to Hawaii, with a stop or two. Many find love, even marriage, on such adventures. I myself have found both on occasion."
    Tom tapped the case. "What’s in here?"
    Ruykendahl unlocked and opened it, taking out a small object and placing it in Tom’s hands. The young inventor frowned at it. Fist-sized and very light in weight, it was shaped overall like a truncated pyramid with a square base, made of some rough, pale material. But it was strangely malformed and incomplete. Its shape was as if it had been sliced neatly in half on the vertical diagonal.
    "Let us call this Artifact A , Tom," said Ruykendahl. "We scubaed in shallow waters off Easter Island, a brief stop, four years ago, collecting interesting lava-rocks worn by time, and so on. I naughtily urge my guests to keep an eye out for remnants of lost Lemuria, the Atlantis of the Pacific—as imaginary as much of my reputation, hmm?
    "But strange shapes do turn up. A guest gave me what looked like a chunk of rock that he had found on the bottom and thought interesting—but not so interesting up topside. It was only much later, when I had returned to my home in South Africa, that this rock turned up among my things and I began to consider it. On a hunch I took scalpel to it, removing layer after layer of seafloor encrustation to find this beneath. Clearly it has been made by the hand of man."
    "Yes," Tom agreed. "And if it was covered over it must be very old. It looks as though there is a second part to it, its other half."
    "Quite so," said the adventurer. "A curious sort of thing. Yet I am not an archaeologist, hie ? Perhaps it was just something dropped from a ship, years and years ago. A paperweight. Indeed, it rested upon my bookcase, innocently."
    "Okay," interrupted Bud. "But what about Ed?"
    "On the cruise last summer, again we dived at Easter Island. This time it was Ed Longstreet who found a similar encrusted object. The shape suggested what was beneath, and I told Ed what I just told you. I suggested that he loan his find to me, to take home and put with the other and see if, indeed, they had been made to fit closely. But he was reluctant. He wished to have it more fully cleaned and brought forth, by professionals of his acquaintance in Mexico. He may not have trusted me, sad to say.
    "Yet we have kept in close touch by email message almost daily. At last he told me the object, Artifact B, was ready for the test. I was to bring my half and rendezvous with him on the ninth last, at a certain place in Mexico, the little town of Las Mambritas, not far from Rosarito, on the coast of Baja California."
    "I can guess what comes next," declared Tom. "He didn’t show."
    "He missed the meeting, even after many days of speaking of it, even that very morning."
    "By telephone?"
    "No, Tom, always by email. Of course, I did have some cellphone numbers to reach him, but have only got his voicemail, which tells nothing. He did not show up in this place, a library. The staff knew nothing—no one of that description, no messages left."
    Tom shrugged. "Cousin Ed’s kind of a free spirit, Mr. Ruykendahl. If he was briefly delayed, he may have assumed you’d wait."
    "For days? Don’t think so, hmm? And he has not responded to email since that morning. It is more than two weeks."
    "You know, Ed’s parents live in New York," Bud put in. "We could contact them."
    Ruykendahl shook his head. "What a fine idea! I did so immediately, trying not to alarm them. I have called more than once. There is nothing."
    Tom said quietly, "I see." He was silent for a time, turning the artifact over in his lean hands. "Ed might have allowed word to get around about his object. If someone thought it was valuable..."
    "I am thinking the same as you, Tom. And so my worry."
    "And no one even knows what these things are, or where they come from?" asked Bud.
    "Nor when they were fashioned. They do appear to be machined objects, suggesting a relatively recent