“In case they don’t, I intend to add alarm signals all along the highway,” Tom decided.
Work proceeded briskly. As the skyway progressed, Tom moved his work camp forward through the jungle to keep pace with construction. He shuttled back and forth by atomicar between the main base at Imbolu and the “end of track.”
A week after the Wanguru episode, Tom flew with Bud to inspect the queer dark stretch of seething, bubbling swamp at close hand. The sinister bog was only about two miles wide where the highway would cross it, but it split the jungle like a black river.
“How do we handle this hot mud?” Bud asked after they had landed.
Tom shrugged. “Plant transmitters on it, somehow. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.”
136 REPELATRON SKYWAY
Tom had already radioed the Sky Queen to join them while the boys were en route in the atomicar. As soon as the huge ship arrived on the scene, Tom tried sinking long wooden piles, using a repelatron beam from the plane to force them downward. But the piles disappeared into the “hot mud”! Next, Tom tried to plumb the swamp with a weighted cable. To his dismay, it unreeled for hundreds of feet with no sign of bottom!
“Good grief!” Bud exclaimed. “How far down does it go-all the way through the earth?”
“Sure seems to,” Tom agreed with a grin. Then he frowned. “This is serious.”
It was clear that the problem called for a brand-new approach, different from anything he had had in mind. Tom dispatched the Queen back to Im-bolu. Meanwhile, he and Bud made camp near the bog and Tom settled down to ponder the problem. How could he set foundations for his transmitters in such a bottomless morass? From the way the pilings had disappeared completely, Tom feared that even a concrete float might, in time, be sucked downward into the bog.