The Tom Swift Megapack

by Victor Appleton

  “What is the horsepower?” asked Mr. Damon.

  “I figure on forty-four hundred horsepower. The power must be received from a three thousand-volt direct-current trolley. There are twelve driving-wheels, as you can see. Each pair of drivers will be driven by a twin-motor geared to the axles through a system of flexible spring drive. Remember, I have got to obtain both speed as well as power in this locomotive, for it is being built to pull a passenger train—a fast cross-continent express—to compete with the best passenger equipment in the country.”

  “Bless my combination ticket!” murmured Mr. Damon. “You have picked out some task, and no mistake, Tom Swift.”

  “He’ll do it,” cried Ned, with his usual optimism when Tom had once started on any experimental work. “Of course he will. Just as she stands there now, only half put together, I would be willing to bet a farm that she is a better locomotive than the Jandel patent.”

  “Three cheers!” laughed Tom. “Ned is as enthusiastic as usual. But believe me, friends, we are not going to turn out a better locomotive than the Jandel without both thought and work.”

  His friends’ enthusiasm was heartening, however. No doubt of that. He never let them into his experiment room, any more than he allowed his workmen in there. Aside from his own father, nobody really knew what Tom Swift was doing behind that always-locked door.

  The huge structure of the locomotive was set up on the driving wheels and leading and trailing trucks by Tom’s chief foreman and a picked crew. Just such another locomotive had never been seen anywhere about Shopton. Naturally the men at work on the monster began to speak of it outside the works.

  Not that they betrayed any secrets regarding the locomotive. In fact, as yet none of them knew anything about what Tom intended to do with the big machine. But the story soon circulated that Tom Swift, the young inventor, was about to show all the previous builders of electric locomotives how such machines should be built.

  It was even whispered that Tom’s objective was a two-mile-a-minute locomotive. And when this was publicly known the information was not long in seeping to the ears of certain men who had been keeping as close a watch as they dared on the Swift Construction Company and the activities of Tom himself.

  Ned Newton went to the bank one Friday for money for the payroll of the working and clerical force of the Swift Company. It was an errand he never relegated to any employee.

  Ned had once worked himself in the bank, and naturally he knew many of its employees as well as the officials. With his back to the general waiting room, he sat at the vice president’s desk discussing some minor matter. Only a railing divided the vice president’s enclosure from the long settee on which waiting customers of the bank were seated.

  Ned knew that there were two men directly behind him, whispering together; but he paid no attention to them until he heard this phrase:

  “It’s time to explode in just five hours; then good-night to that invention, whatever it is.”

  This statement might mean almost anything—or nothing. Ordinarily Ned Newton might not have paid any consideration to the words. But “invention” was a term that he could not overlook. His mind then was fixed upon Tom’s invention almost as closely as the mind of the young inventor himself.

  Ned turned around slowly, as though idly, indeed, and tried to see the faces of the two men behind him. One was a small, neatly dressed man of professional appearance. He wore a Vandyke beard and eyeglasses. The other’s face Ned could not see; but as they both rose just then and strolled toward the door of the bank he could observe that the fellow was big and burly.

  Ned wheeled to his friend, the vice president, and asked:

  “Who are those men, Mr. Stanley? Do you know them?”

  The pair were just going out through the revolving door. The vice president craned his neck for a look at them.

  “Don’t know the small man, Ned. But the other is named O’Malley, I believe. Somebody introduced him here and he gets a check cashed occasionally. Not a customer of the bank.”

  At that moment the name “O’Malley” did not mean anything to Ned Newton. But he bade his friend good-bye and went out after the two men. They had disappeared.

  Rad was in the electric runabout, waiting for him. The words spoken by O’Malley (Ned thought it must have been he who spoke of the invention because of his deep voice) continued to disturb Ned’s thought.

  “Rad,” he said, as he got into the runabout, “did you ever hear the name O’Malley?”

  “Sure has,” declared the colored man. “And it’s a bad name and a bad man owns it.”

  “Do you mean that?” exclaimed the financial manager of the Swift Construction Company, with increasing apprehension. “Who is he?”

  “Why, Mr. Newton, don’t you ’member dat man?”

  “Who is he?” repeated Ned.

  “Dat Andy O’Malley is de one what tried to hold up Massa Tom dat time. O’Malley is de man what’s been spyin’ on Massa Tom—”

  “Great grief!” exclaimed Ned, breaking in with excitement. “I’ll drive as fast as I can, Rad. There is something wrong at the works, I do believe!”

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Ned?” demanded Rad. “We just come from dere, and everyt’ing was all right.”

  “I just heard something that O’Malley said. I want to get back in a hurry. I believe that scoundrel is attempting to blow up Tom’s locomotive. We’ve got to get to the works just as quick as we can.”

  CHAPTER XI

  TOUCH AND GO

  The mechanical equipment of the new locomotive was now complete and Tom was establishing the electrical equipment as rapidly as possible. He not only acted as overseer of this work, but in overalls and jumper he was doing a good share of the work himself.

  The weight of the electrical equipment when it was finally set up was not far from two hundred thousand pounds. Altogether, when the oil, sand, and water tanks were filled, the great machine would weigh two hundred and eighty-five tons—a monster indeed!

  “She is going to take a lot of current to run her,” said Tom to his father, who was standing by. “When I come to arrange with the Shopton Electric Company for power, it’s a question if they can give me all I need. And I must have plenty of current to make sure that my motors till the bill.”

  “As your tests will be made in the daytime, the company should be able to furnish the power you need,” rejoined Mr. Swift. “At night, of course, when they must furnish so much light as well as power, it might be difficult for them to give you the proper current.”

  “Forty-four hundred horsepower is a big demand,” went on Tom. “I’ve got to have at least a three-thousand-volt direct-current to feed my motors. I will soon have to take up the matter with the Electric Company.”

  The heavy work of setting the electrical parts of the locomotive had been finished the day previous, and the track-derrick was removed. Tom was engaged in adjusting the more delicate parts of the equipment and had merely stepped down from the cab to speak to Mr. Swift.

  Now he climbed back into the interior of the great machine which, in a general way, looked like a box car. An electric locomotive has not much of the appearance of a steam engine. The machinery is all boxed in and the entire floor of the locomotive is above even the drivers.

  These six pairs of driving wheels were about seventy inches in diameter, while the diameter of the leading and following truck-wheels was but half that number of inches.

  Mr. Swift had turned away from the locomotive when Tom put his head out of the door again.

  “Do you hear that, father?” he demanded in a puzzled tone.

  “Hear what, Tom?” asked the old inventor, looking up.

  “That ticking sound? I declare, I’d think it was one of those death-watch beetles had got in here. Sounds like a big watch ticking. I can’t make it out.”

  “Where is it? What is it?” repeated Mr. Swift. “I hear nothing down here on the floor of the shed.”

  “Well, it gets me,”
muttered Tom, and disappeared again. In a moment he called out: “Say, you fellows! who left his bundle of overalls in here? Better take ’em out to be manicured. Whose are these?”

  Two or three of the mechanics working near looked up from their tasks. Mr. Swift turned back to the door of the cab again.

  “What is the matter now, Tom?” he asked, in added curiosity.

  “That bundle, Dad.”

  Tom once more appeared and addressed the workmen: “Whose bundle of dirty overalls is this in here? Come and take ’em away. They shouldn’t have been left here.”

  “Why, Mr. Tom,” said the foreman who was near, “I didn’t see any soiled overalls in there when I left last evening. Any of you fellows,” he asked the group of hands, “know anything about any overalls?”

  “The bundle is here all right. Pushed back against the third series motors. Come up here, one of you fellows—”

  Suddenly there was a noise at the end of the shed where the door to the offices lay. Two figures burst through from the glass doors and charged down the lanes between the lathes and cranes. Ned Newton led, Rad Sampson, his face a mouse-gray with fear, followed.

  “Massa Tom! Massa Tom!” shouted the colored man. “Look out fo’ de bomb! Look out fo’ de bomb!”

  The foreman sprang toward the high door of the locomotive where Tom stood, staring out. The young inventor, quick as his mind usually functioned, did not understand at all what Eradicate meant.

  “There’s something wrong in there, Mr. Tom!” shouted the foreman. “Come down, sir, and let me get up there and see what it is.”

  But Mr. Barton Swift grasped the meaning of what was going on more quickly than anybody else. Tom’s father, Tom frequently said, had spent so many years investigating chemical and mechanical mysteries that he saw more clearly and more exactly into and through most problems than other people.

  His raised voice now cut through the rumble of machinery and all the other noises of the shop. Even Rad Sampson’s delirious cry was dwarfed by Mr. Swift’s sharp tone:

  “Tom! The ticking of that watch! That means danger!”

  The declaration seemed to rip away a curtain from Tom’s thoughts. Perhaps Rad’s cry about “de bomb” aided the young inventor to understand the peril that threatened.

  The faint ticking sound that had begun to annoy him during the past few minutes betrayed the nature of the threatening peril. Tom swung back from the open doorway of the locomotive cab, reached in to the space between the motors, and seized the bundle of overall stuff that he had previously spied.

  He knew instantly that the rapid ticking came from that bundle. It could be nothing but a time bomb. He had heard of such things and, indeed, had seen one before, an infernal machine which, set like an alarm clock, would go off at a certain time. That indicated time might be an hour hence, or might be within a few seconds! Ned Newton, almost at the spot, shouted to Tom when the latter reappeared with the bundle in his hands:

  “Get down out of that, Tom Swift! Quick! For your life!”

  But Tom was cool enough now. He saw his father’s white, strained face at one side and the young inventor could even smile at him. Behind the foreman was set a barrel of water in which tools were cooled and tempered.

  “Stoop, McAvoy!” Tom shouted, and tossed the bundle from him.

  Had the infernal machine exploded in midair Tom would not have been surprised. But McAvoy dodged, Rad clapped his hands over his ears, and, even Ned Newton halted like a bird-dog at point.

  The bundle splashed into the barrel of water. It sank to the bottom. There was no explosion. When a few seconds had passed the group of excited men began to relax. The barrel was carried carefully to a neighboring field.

  “Fo’ de lawsy sake!” gasped Rad, and got a full breath again.

  “That was touch and go, sure enough,” muttered Ned Newton.

  “Those overalls sure went to the wash, Boss,” declared the foreman. “What was in ’em? And who put ’em in the cab up there?”

  But Tom dropped down the ladder and went to his father. Their hands sought each other and gripped, hard.

  “Better not tell Mary about this,” whispered Tom. “She’s worried enough as it is.”

  “Right, Tom,” agreed the old inventor. “From this time on we cannot be too careful. If there proves to be an infernal machine in that package we may be sure that we are dealing with desperate men. We’ve got to keep our eyes open.”

  “Wide open,” added Ned.

  “I’ll say we have,” said Tom.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE TRY-OUT DAY ARRIVES

  It did not need Ned Newton’s story of what he had overheard at the bank to prove that an attempt had been made to blow to pieces Tom Swift’s electric locomotive before even it had been tested.

  An examination of the water-soaked package in the open yard of the shops of the Swift Construction Company, proved that there was enough explosive in the bomb to blow the shed itself to pieces. But the stopping of the clockwork attachment of course made the bomb harmless.

  “The main thing to be explained,” Tom said, when he and his father and Ned discussed the particulars of the affair, “is not who did it, or what it was done for. Those are comparatively easy questions to answer.”

  “Yes,” agreed Ned. “O’Malley did it, or caused it to be done; and it was an attempt to balk Mr. Bartholomew and the H, & P. A. rather than a direct attack upon the Swift Construction Company.”

  “I am afraid, however,” remarked Mr. Swift, “that Tom has aroused the personal antagonism of this spy from the West. We must not overlook that.”

  “I don’t,” replied the young inventor. “O’Malley has it in for me. No doubt of that. But he could not be sure that I would be hurt by the explosion he arranged for.”

  “True,” said his father.

  “The attempt was against my invention. And O’Malley was doubtless urged to destroy the locomotive that I am building because my success will aid Mr. Bartholomew and his railroad.”

  “Quite agreed,” said Ned. “But—”

  “But the important question,” interrupted Tom, “is this: How did the bomb get into the interior of the electric locomotive? That is the first and most important problem. Its having been done once warns us that it can be done again until our system of guarding the works is changed.”

  “We have five watchmen on the job at night, and the gates are never opened in the daytime to anybody for any purpose without a pass,” declared Ned. “I don’t see how that fellow got in here with the time bomb.”

  “Exactly. It shows that there is a fault in our system somewhere,” said Tom grimly. “We cannot surround the place at night with an armed guard. It would cost too much. Even Koku cannot be everywhere. And I have reason to know that he was wandering about the stockade last night as usual.”

  “The fellow was pretty sharp to slip by,” Ned observed.

  “The stockade is no mean barrier, especially with the rows of barbed wire at the top,” said Mr. Swift.

  “Barbed wire! That’s it!” exclaimed Tom. It was just here that Mr. Damon’s idea for guarding his prize buff Orpingtons came into play in Tom’s scheme of things. “Barbed wire doesn’t seem to keep out spies,” he added slowly. “But believe me, something else will!”

  For Tom to think of a thing was to start action without delay. Immediately he called a gang from the shops and set them to work stringing copper wire along the top of the stockade.

  He was sure that the man who had set the time bomb in place had got into the enclosure over the fence. If he tried the same trick again he was very apt to have the surprise of his life!

  Each night when the shops closed and the watchmen went on duty, a current of electricity was turned into those copper wires entwined with the barbed wire entanglement at the top of the stockade that would certainly double up any marauder who sought to get over the top.

  However, no further attempt was made against Tom’s peace of mind and against his inven
tion during the immediate weeks that followed. The young inventor was so closely engaged in his work that he scarcely left the house or the confines of the shops. Even Mary Nestor saw very little of him.

  But Mary realized fully that at such a time as this Tom must give all his thought and energy to the task in hand. She was proud of Tom’s ability and took a deep interest in his inventions.

  “I want to see the test when you try the locomotive, Tom,” she told him, when she came to the shops the first time to look at the monster locomotive. “What a wonderful thing it is!”

  “Its wonder is yet to be proved,” rejoined the young inventor. “I believe I’ve got the right idea; but nothing is sure as yet.”

  In addition to his mechanical contrivances inside the locomotive, Tom had to arrange for an increased supply of electric power to drive the huge machine around the track that was being built inside the stockade.

  A regular station had to be built for receiving the electricity in a 100,000-volt alternating current and delivering it to the locomotive in a 3,000-volt direct current. Therefore, this station had two functions to perform—reducing the voltage and changing the current from alternating to direct.

  The reduction of the voltage was accomplished as follows: The 100,000-volt alternating current was received through an oil switch and was conveyed to a high-tension current distributor made up of three lines of copper tubing, thus forming the source of power for this station.

  From the current distributor the current was conducted through other oil switches to the transformers—entering at 100,000 volts and emerging at 2,300 volts. Then the current was conducted from the transformers through switches to the motor-generator sets and became the power employed to operate them.

  The motor generator consisted of one alternating current motor driving two direct current generators. The motor Tom established in his station was of the 60-cycle synchronous type, which means that the current changes sixty times each second.

  There were two sets, each generating a 1,500 or 2,000 volt direct current; and the two generators being permanently connected, delivered a combined direct current of 3,000 volts—as high a direct voltage current, Tom knew, as had ever been adopted for railroad work. The current voltage for ordinary street railway work is 550 volts.