Appleton, Victor – Tom Swift Jr 22 – And His Repelatron Skyway

“Then what’s the answer, genius boy?”

Tom shrugged. “Find a way to leapfrog over it, maybe. I’m still hoping to come up with some kind of aerial angle on this project. We don’t have the time to hack a ground road through this whole wilderness if we want to wrap the job up in a short time.”

Resuming their flight, the party soon landed at Copperville in East Ngombia. Here the jungle gave way to rolling savanna, sloping upward to forested highlands still farther beyond.

84 REPELATRON SKYWAY

Copperville itself was a grimy town of iron-roofed huts on the shore of a river. A pall of smoke from the refinery darkened the scene. Farther inland lay a gaping open-pit mine where power shovels and antlike figures were at work.

Cars were waiting to take the Americans to the offices of Afro-Metals, Limited. Hans Macklin, the manager, greeted them. He was a thickset, reddish-haired man of late middle age.

“I’ve heard a great deal about the Swifts’ scientific feats,” he told Tom. “If your engineering skill can link our two provinces, it will be a great boon to Ngombia.”

The visitors were shown through the vast mine workings and the ore-processing plant.

“Is copper your main export?” Tom asked.

Macklin nodded. “So far-but the mineral wealth of this country has hardly been tapped. We have placer gold mining upriver, and valuable deposits of manganese, columbite, and platinum.”

“How is the ore shipped out?” Tom inquired.

“In very crude fashion-carried a long distance in baskets on the men’s shoulders to the end of a road and put in trucks. If and when the highway is built, of course, it will go directly to Princetown and Ngombia’s other ports.”