“Wow! A shirt to end all shirts!” Tom chuckled.
“Real high style, eh?” Chow twirled about to display his latest Western creation. The shirt seemed to be made of silvery fishlike scales, which glistened like a rainbow.
“I figured as how this was just the thing fer an ocean jaunt,” Chow added with a grin. “How soon do we take off, boss?”
UNDERSEA SURVEY 27
“As soon as we get the rest of this gear stowed,” Tom replied.
Twenty minutes later the Sky Queen soared toward the ocean. Soon they came in sight of Fearing Island rocket base, a few miles off the coast. Once a barren stretch of sand dunes and scrub-grass, the island was now the Swifts’ top-secret rocket laboratory, guarded by drone planes and radar. It served as the supply base for Tom’s space station and as the launching area for all space flights. Seacopters and jetmarines were also berthed here.
A radio call from Tom brought a sleek, strange-looking craft zooming up to join them.
It was the Sea Hound, latest and largest model of Tom’s amazing diving seacopter. It had an enclosed central rotor, powered by atomic turbines, with reversible-pitch blades for air lift or undersea diving. Superheated steam jets provided forward propulsion in either element.
As the Sea Hound streaked alongside the Flying Lab, two figures in the seacopter’s flight compartment waved to Tom and Bud. One was Hank Sterling, the blond, square-jawed chief pattern-making engineer of Enterprises. The c her was husky Arv Hanson, a talented craftsi an who transformed the blueprints of Tom’s inventions into working models.