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Or had Bud and his crew fallen victim to the enemy? At the end of the test period, Bud had prepared to bring the jetmarine to the surface. But just as he was about to blow the ballast tanks, Mel Flagler sang out a warning from the sonarscope. "Whoa! Hold it, skipper! I think we have company on the starboard beam!" Bud jerked his head around in surprise. "You mean the Sea Hound?"
Tom, now seriously worried, took the seacopter down again for another search, hoping that Bud would have switched off the antidetection gear by this time. But neither sonarscope nor listening devices revealed the slightest clue. Tom, Hank, and Arv exchanged fearful glances. Had the jetmarine foundered on the ocean bottom perhaps fouled somehow by Tom's new invention?
Instead, Cox went on, the mysterious craft had proceeded to a point about ten miles offshore where it rendezvoused with another submarine. "And get this, skipper!" Mack Avery put in. "The other sub was undetectable! We were close enough to get a peek at it, but we couldn't ping it on the sonarscope." "That figures," Tom said grimly. "Those frogmen were apparently Brungarians."
We absorb all sonar impulses that hit the ship and transmit them out the opposite side of the hull, instead of letting a ping bounce back and show up on the sonarscope of any hostile sub on the lookout for us." Most of the job, he went on, would be tedious detail work. It would consist of attaching hundreds of mikes and speakers all over the hull to pick up and transmit the sonar pulses.
The sonarscope with its tiny viewing screen was strapped to his left forearm. Another small unit was fastened to the inside of his wrist, with four plungers in finger-tip reach. "What in tarnation's that?" Chow asked. "Simplified controls," Tom explained.
Tom's pulse quickened. "Moving straight toward us," the sonarman added. Tom surrendered the controls to Zimby long enough to dart over and study the sonarscope. "I've a hunch it's Bud," he told the others. His guess proved correct when the unmistakable outline of a jetmarine loomed into view. Tom flicked on the search beam for a moment, and Bud could be seen waving through the cabin window.
"Hmm, let's see," Tom mused as he settled down at his workbench, pencil in hand. "Besides a regular sonarscope, I'll need at least three units for the gear." First, he would need an oscillator to produce the complex pulse. Next, of course, an oscilloscope to check the pulse as it was beamed out. Last but highly important a correlation calculator.
Here Tom had used his spectromarine selector to restore the ancient buildings. Tom, Hank, and Arv went back to the airfield and soon took off in the diving seacopter. Landing on the water, they submerged and began the undersea detection test. Tom manned the sonarscope personally, eager to conduct as careful a search as possible. "Getting any blips, skipper?"
Meanwhile, the sonarman was probing the surrounding waters. "Any pings?" Tom asked. The man shook his head without taking his eyes from the sonarscope. "Nothing yet." Hank Sterling donned a hydrophone headset and listened intently. The silence deepened in the Sea Hound's cabin. Suddenly Hank stiffened and the sonarman cried out: "A blip, skipper! At two o'clock!"
Suddenly the answer came to him a self-propelled underwater grenade! Horrified, Bud jetted forward, tackling the diver at full speed. A split second too late! The grenade went streaking straight toward Tom Swift! Tom's earphones caught the hiss of the approaching grenade. Instantly his eyes darted to the sonarscope on his wrist. A tiny blip of light was moving on the screen!
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