8 AQUATOMIC TRACKER
“How about that boxlike gadget attached to your belt, Tom?” a reporter asked.
“It’s a portable, miniaturized automatic navigator for frogmen that I’ve developed. We’ll be trying it out for the first time.”
“And those handguns?” A TV man signaled his camera to zoom in. “Are they to repel sharks?”
Tom laughed. “No, they’re a new invention of mine-an ‘undersea light switch.’
They emit a chemical that excites luminescent sea organisms and makes them light up the water. Of course, we have battery lamps, too, on our hoods.”
Tom also explained that he and Bud would take turns sleeping-the sleeper to be propelled by jet while attached to his partner by a nylon line.
After final farewells from the Swifts and Newtons, the hydronauts donned fins and adjusted their hoods, then climbed down the dock ladder and descended into the watery depths, amid a blaze of cameras and cheers from the crowd.
They were off at last!
“Here goes, pal!” Bud signaled by sonarphone.
Gunning their jets, the boys speared through the water at torpedo speed.
Both watched raptly the greenish panorama of sea life all around them as their earphones crackled with noise. Fish swarmed through the jungles of seaweed and underwater vegetation. The bottom, glimpsed dimly below, was carpeted with sea anemones, urchins, finger sponges, and mollusks.
“Watch yourself, fly-boy!” Tom warned as he
THE DROWNING ROMAN 9
spotted a Portuguese man-of-war. Bud hastily veered from its stinging tentacles.
As they cruised outward above the sloping continental shelf, the hydronauts began their descent to a depth of sixty feet. Once they sighted a bony hull of an old sailing ship, covered with barnacles and half buried in sand and silt.