Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron Read Online Free PDF

date. One wonders, what were they doing, lying upon the seafloor, covered by crusty sea debris? How old might they prove to be? Decades? Centuries? Trinkets—or, ah!—something of value to Ed, and to me. And, boys, he does not need the money—but I do."
    Bud scrutinized the object. He commented with a smile, "No little ‘ souvenir of’ inscription. Still, it looks like somebody’s school crafts project to me. I had to carve a fish out of soap."
    Ruykendahl continued unfazed: "I was in Utah, on the slopes. When I read that you were visiting, Tom Swift, in your great jet plane—well, I had wished to get in touch with you, not merely because Ed Longstreet is your cousin, but because you have your camera device which could determine the age of the artifacts."
    "My electronic retroscope," Tom nodded. "I don’t have it here on the ship. But I do have some instruments to look inside the object and give what it’s made of. Have you had it X-rayed?"
    "Yes. But no details of structure could be made out. Of course, one wishes not to carve into it."
    "Do you know anything of the material it’s made from?"
    The man adopted a trace of a smile. "I would ask you to make that determination, if you would."
    Tom led them to the middle-deck lab section, to a cubicle used for chemical analysis and similar work. He set Artifact A beneath the electronic eye of a Swift Spectroscope, and examined the monitor readouts—colored bars and elliptical patterns.
    "So?" Bud asked impatiently.
    Tom looked up but didn’t answer immediately. "Let’s try the leptoscope on it."
    The leptoscope was in effect a combination X-ray, telescope, and super-microscope, using advanced methods to represent details of substances and objects nearly down to the level of the atom. Tom scanned through the object in thin layers, from the outside in. The onlookers waited in silence as the minutes passed and Tom’s frown deepened.
    He switched off the machine with an abrupt movement. "I’m afraid I can’t be of as much help as you hoped, Mr. Ruykendahl."
    "You are ‘Tom’ and I am ‘Nee.’ Can your instruments not penetrate the material?"
    "They penetrate it fine, and I have a preliminary analysis of its composition," Tom declared. "It’s made almost entirely of calcium carbonate—lime."
    Bud made a skeptical noise. "You mean, like sea shells?"
    "Like coral."
    Nee Ruykendahl was as skeptical as Bud. "I am hardly unfamiliar with either of those. Sea shells, coral—yes, they can be quite hard, but despite my tender care I managed to rap against it a few times with my tools, and it is more like metal."
    "Oh, I agree," nodded the young inventor. "Scanning down to the one-angstrom level, the leptoscope shows a complex pattern of molecular chains, all interwoven and ‘knotted,’ so to speak. There are other trace-substances all through it. I think they act as a binding agent, a sort of glue . It would take diamond-tip tools to make much headway into this thing."
    "But Skipper, what is it?" asked Bud. "What’s it for?"
    "I have no idea. It’s uniform throughout, completely solid."
    "You are not saying, I should hope, that this is not manmade after all?" Nee objected. "Not the involuntary artwork of a mollusk!"
    Tom chuckled. "No, I’m sure it’s been artificially produced—or at least artificially worked and cut. It’s a nice bit of molecular engineering, Nee. The best bet is that it’s something made in the last few years and accidentally dropped overboard."
    "But—the thickness of the encrustation― "
    "I can’t explain that. Perhaps it has some sort of odd chemistry that catalyzes biological processes in contact with its surface. If you’ll permit me to take it back to Enterprises, my retroscope may have a better answer."
    Ruykendahl nodded briskly. "Surely. I would be curious to see your methods in action."
    But Tom politely shook his head. "I’m—sorry, sir. We have something of a security alert in effect at the plant right now, and I can’t