Victor Appleton - Tom Swift Jr 07 by And His Diving Seacopter

Author:And His Diving Seacopter [Seacopter, And His Diving]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-12-07T13:36:53+00:00

Tom eyed them with a rueful smile. “I hate to be unfriendly, but I’d just as soon they don’t come poking around our seacopter.”

He talked to them-partly in Spanish and partly in sign language-and after handing out a few coins and presents, finally persuaded them to leave.

The voyagers spent what was left of the daylight in exercising, strolling about, and enjoying the fresh air. To their amazement, the native men returned, carrying armloads of bananas, melons, and vegetables which they forced on the visitors.

“Muchas gracias!” murmured the young inventor, smiling. “Bless “em,” he chuckled as the natives backed away, bowing and grinning. “This will be a real treat for supper.”

At sunup the Ocean Arrow rose from the island. Tom and Bud were now in Compartment B, with the others in Airmo. The craft hovered out over the sea, and finally settled down on the water for a dive.

“If your calculations are right, the city of gold should be somewhere below us,” Tom said on the intercom loudspeaker to the two oceanographers.

He eased forward on the control wheel and the seacopter plummeted downward.

“Fastest dive we’ve made yet, skipper!” said Bud with a glance at the depth gauge.

Tom nodded. “Watch how the colors change outside the windows.”

At first the view was made up mostly of green, blue, and violet. As they sank deeper, both fishes and water faded to a silvery gray. Bit by bit, the ocean darkened before their eyes. At two hundred and fifty fathoms they approached the realm of eternal night-too deep for sunshine to penetrate.

Tom reached out to the control panel and flicked on his powerful undersea searchlight. A fantastic world of deep-water denizens sprang into view under the stabbing yellow glare.

“Aha! Now, things get really interesting!” gloated Ham Teller. Both he and George had paper and pencil ready but were too fascinated to do much note-taking.

The fish that swam past looked like creatures out of a nightmare. All of them seemed to have gaping jaws and long, needlelike teeth. Many trailed long, dangling antennae from various parts of their bodies. Most were black or grayish in color, though a few were red, and at least one that darted into view was a bright electric blue.

Chow gasped. “Put one o’ them critters in a fry pan an’ you’d get a stummick-ache jest lookin’ at it.”

“I believe many of these fish are prehistoric types, long thought extinct,” Ham pointed out.

“For instance, off the mouth of the Congo, fishermen netted one called Crossopterygia that was supposed to have died out two hundred million years ago.”

“You mean it was hiding out in deep water all that time?” Bud quipped.

Ham laughed. “Until that one live specimen was caught, the only trace of that fish known to science were fossilized bones of its ancestors.”

“Let’s turn off the searchlights a minute,” George suggested.

He and Tom flicked off the switches. The darkness outside the windows was broken by eerie phosphorescent gleams darting to and fro.

The boys continued to converse over the intercom. “Well, I’ll be jing-whistled!” said Chow.

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