The Tom Swift Megapack

by Victor Appleton

  “I could run even this big machine,” Tom explained to Ned Newton, “with a much lighter current. But out there on the Hendrickton & Pas Alos line the transforming stations deliver this high voltage to the locomotives. I want to test mine under similar conditions.”

  “This is going to be an expensive test, Tom,” said Ned, grumbling a little. “The cost-sheets are running high.”

  “We are aiming at a big target,” returned the inventor. “You’ve got to bait with something bigger than sprats to catch a whale, Ned.”

  “Humph! Suppose you don’t catch the whale after all?”

  “Don’t lose hope,” returned Tom, calmly. “I am going after this whale right, believe me! This is one of the biggest contracts—if not the very biggest—we ever tackled.”

  “It looks as if the expense account would run the highest,” admitted the financial manager.

  “All right. Maybe that is so. But I’ll spend the last cent I’ve got to perfect this patent. I am going to beat the Jandels if it is humanly possible to do so.”

  “I can only hope you will, Tom. Why, this track and the overhead trolley equipment is going to cost a small fortune. I had no idea when you signed that contract with Mr. Bartholomew that so much money would have to be spent in merely the experimental stage of the thing.”

  Ned Newton possessed traits of caution that could not be gainsaid. That was one thing that made him such a successful financial manager for the Swift Company. He watched expenditures as closely now as he had when the business was upon a much more limited footing.

  The rails laid along the inside of the stockade made a two-mile track, as well ballasted as any regular railroad right of way. In addition the overhead equipment was costly.

  To eliminate any possibility of the trolley wire breaking, a strong steel cable, called a catenary, was slung just above the trolley wire. To this catenary the trolley wire was suspended by hangers at short intervals.

  These cables were strung from brackets so that a single row of poles could be used, save at the curves, at which cross-span construction was used. The trolley wire itself was of the 4/0 size, and was the largest diameter copper wire ever employed for railroad purposes.

  Several weeks had now passed since the great locomotive had been assembled in the erection shed and the cab of the locomotive completed. It really was a monster machine, and any stranger coming into the place and seeing it for the first time must have marveled at the grim power suggested by the mere bulk of the structure.

  When the day of the first test arrived Tom allowed only his most intimate friends to be present. Mary Nestor accompanied Mr. Swift into the shops at the time appointed, and she was as excited over the outcome of the test as Tom himself.

  Ned Newton and the mechanical force of the shops knocked off work to become spectators at the exhibition. The only other outsider was Mr. Damon.

  “Bless my alternating current!” cried the eccentric gentleman. “I would not miss this for the world. If you tried to shut me out, Tom, I’d climb over the stockade to get in.”

  “You’d better not,” Tom told him, dryly. “If you tried that you’d get a worse shock than any chicken thief will get that tries to steal your buff Orpingtons.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  HOPES AND FEARS

  Tom climbed into the huge cab of the electric locomotive. In fact, the cab was the most of it, for every part of the mechanism save the drivers was covered by the eighty-odd foot structure. From the peak of the pilot to the rear bumper the length was ninety feet and some inches.

  As Tom slid the monster out upon the yard track the small crowd cheered. At least, the locomotive had the power to move, and to the unknowing ones, at least, that seemed a great and wonderful thing.

  What they saw was apparently a box-car—like a mail coach, only with more high windows—ten feet wide, its roof more than fourteen feet from the rails, its locked pantagraph adding two feet more to its height.

  Just what was in the cab—the water and oil tanks, the steam-heating boiler to supply heat and hot water to the train the monster was to draw, the motors and the many other mechanical contrivances—was hidden from the spectators.

  In fact, since completing the electrical equipment of the Hercules 0001, as Tom had named the locomotive, the young inventor had allowed nobody inside the cab, any more than he allowed visitors inside his private workshop. Even Mr. Swift did not know all the results of Tom’s experimental work. In a general way the older inventor knew the trend of his son’s attempts, but the details and the results of Tom’s experiments, the latter told to nobody.

  But as the huge locomotive rolled into the yard and followed the more or less circular track inside the yard fence, it was plain to all of the onlookers that the motive-power was there all right! Just what speed could be coaxed from the feed-cable overhead was another question.

  Nor did Tom Swift try for much speed on this first test of the Hercules 0001. He went around the two-mile track several times before bringing his machine to a stop near the crowd of onlookers. He came to the open door of the cab.

  “One thing is sure, Tom!” shouted Ned. “It do move!”

  “Bless my slippery skates!” exclaimed Mr. Damon, “it slides right along, Tom. You’ve done it, my boy—you’ve done it!”

  “It looks good from where I stand, my son,” said Mr. Barton Swift.

  It was Mary who suspected that Tom was not wholly satisfied—as yet, at least—with the test of the Hercules 0001. She cried:

  “Tom! is it all right?”

  “Nothing is ever all right—that is, not perfect—in this old world, I guess, Mary,” returned the young inventor. “But I am not discouraged. As Ned says, the old contraption ‘do move.’ How fast she’ll move is another thing.”

  “What time did you make?” asked Mr. Swift.

  “Not above fifteen miles an hour.”

  “Whew!” whistled Ned dolefully. “That is a long way from—”

  Tom made an instant motion and Ned’s careless lips were sealed. It was not generally known among the men the speed which Tom hoped to obtain with his new invention.

  “It is a wide shoot at the target, that is true,” Tom said, soberly. “But remember I cannot test it for speed on this short and almost circular track. Right at the start, however, I see that something about the power-feed must be changed.”

  “What is that?” asked Mary, curiously.

  “I have only had rigged here one trolley wire. There must be two attached alternately to the catenary cable. Such a form of twin conductor trolley will permit the collection of a heavy current through the twin contact of the pantagraph with the two trolley wires, and should assure a sparkless collection of the current at any speed. You noticed that when I took the sharper curves there was an aerial exhibition. I want to do away with the fireworks.”

  The fact that the Hercules 0001 was a going and apparently powerful draught engine satisfied most of the onlookers that Tom Swift was on the road to final and overwhelming success. The mechanics, indeed, saw no reason why the locomotive could not be run right out of the yard on the freight track and coupled to the first train going West. Of course, the Hercules 0001 could not be delivered to the Hendrickton & Pas Alos under its own power.

  When the locomotive was run back into the shed and stood once more on the erection track, Tom confessed to Mary and Ned, while Mr. Damon and Mr. Swift were looking through the huge cab, that he was not at all pleased with the action of the machine.

  “I have the best equipment of any electric locomotive on the rails today. I am sure of that,” he said. “The Hercules Three-Oughts-One is not as long as those electric locomotives of the C. M. &. St. P. But that’s all right. I have built mine more compactly and, properly geared, it should have all the power of either the Baldwin-Westinghouse or the Jandel locomotive.”

  “Then, Tom dear, what is wrong?” cried Mary.

  “Speed. That is what troubles me. Have I got anything like the speed I am aiming for?�
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  “Two miles a minute!” breathed Ned Newton. “Some speed, boy!”

  “And must you have such great speed, Tom?” repeated Mary.

  “That is in my contract. Not only that, but to be of much use to the H. & P. A. this locomotive must have such speed—or mighty near it. Of course, under ordinary conditions, two miles a minute for a locomotive and train of heavy freights would burn up the track—maybe melt the flanges and throw everything out of gear.”

  “Why try for it, then?” demanded Mary.

  “It is the power suggested by the possession of such speed that we want in the Hercules Three-Oughts-One. That two miles a minute is a fiction of the imagination, cannot be claimed. It is possible. It is humanly possible. It is coming.”

  “Then you must be the fellow to first accomplish it, Tom Swift,” Ned declared.

  “Of course, if anybody can do it, you can, Tom,” agreed the girl complacently.

  “Thanks—many, many thanks,” laughed the young inventor. “I’d be able to harness the sun and stars, and put a surcingle around the moon if I came up to my friends’ opinion of my ability.

  “Nevertheless, two-miles-a-minute is my objective point, and I do not believe it is visionary. Consider the motor-cycle. Ninety miles an hour has long been possible with that, and some tests have shown a speed of over a hundred and ten. That is not far from my mark.

  “Some Mallet locomotives of the oil-burning type have achieved from eighty-five to ninety-five miles an hour with a heavy load behind them. They are very powerful machines. The Mogul mountain climbers are powerful, too, although they are not built for speed.

  “The electric Goliaths built for the C. M. & St. P., and the Jandels, are both very speedy under certain conditions. The former has a maximum speed of sixty-five miles and the Jandel slightly faster.”

  “But that is only half what that Mr. Bartholomew demands of your invention, Tom!” Mary cried.

  “That is a fact. I must reach twice sixty miles an hour, anyway, to meet his demand and gain that hundred thousand bonus. But I have the advantage of a knowledge of all that has been done before my time in the matter of electrical locomotive construction.”

  “The world do move,” repeated Ned. “You believe that you have the edge on all the other inventors?”

  “Along the line of this development—yes,” said Tom. “I am taking up the work where former experimenters ended theirs. Why shouldn’t I find the right combination to bring about a two-miles-a-minute drive?”

  “Oh, Tom!” cried Mary, with clasped hands, “I hope you do.”

  “I hope I do, too,” said Tom, grimly. “At least, if trying will bring it, success is going to come my way.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  SPEED

  More than four months had passed since the contract had been signed, when Tom made his first yard-test of the Hercules 0001. For a month nothing had been seen or heard of Andy O’Malley, whose identity as the spy, set by Montagne Lewis to cripple Tom’s attempt to help the Hendrickton & Pas Alos Railroad, had been determined beyond any doubt.

  The private inquiry agent that Tom had engaged to find O’Malley had been unsuccessful in his work. The spy had disappeared from Shopton and the vicinity. Nevertheless, the inventor did not for a moment overlook the possibility that the enemy might again strike.

  Every night the electric current was turned into the wires that capped the stockade of the Swift Construction Company enclosure. Koku beat a path around the enclosure at night, getting such short sleep as he seemed to need in the forenoon.

  “Dat crazy cannibal,” grumbled Rad, “got it in his haid dat he’s gwine to he’p Massa Tom by walkin’ out o’ nights like he was dis here Western, de great sprinter, Ma lawsy me! Koku ain’t got brains enough to fill up a hic’ry nut shell. Dat he ain’t.”

  Nothing anybody else could do for Tom ever satisfied Rad. The colored man fully believed that he was the only person really necessary for Tom’s success and peace of mind. In fact, Rad thought that even Ned Newton’s duties as financial manager of the firm were scarcely of as much importance.

  When he heard that Tom was going West, after a time, with the electric locomotive, to try it out on the tracks of the H. & P. A., Rad was quite sure that if he did not go along, the test would not come out right.

  “O’ course yo’ll need me, Massa Tom,” he said, confidently. “Couldn’t git along widout me nohow. Yo’ knows, sir, I allus has to go ’long wid yo’ to fix things.”

  “Don’t you think father will need you here, Rad?” Tom asked the faithful old fellow. “You’re getting old—”

  “Me gittin’ old?” cried, the colored man. “Huh! Yo’ don’t know ’bout dis here chile. I don’t purpose ever to git old. I been gray-haided since befo’ yo’ was born; but I ain’t old yit!”

  Mr. Damon chanced to be present at this conversation, and he was highly amused, yet somewhat impressed, too, by the colored man’s statement.

  “Bless my own antiquity!” he exclaimed. “I agree with Rad, Tom. It’s us old fellows who know what to do when an emergency of any kind arises. Experience teaches more than inspiration.”

  “Oh,” said Tom, laughing, “I do not deny the value of old friends at any stage of the game.”

  “Bless my roving nature! I am glad to hear you say that. For I tell you right now, Tom, I want to be out there when you make your final test of the locomotive.”

  “Do you mean that you will go West when I take out the Hercules Three-Oughts-One?” cried Tom.

  “It’s just what I want to do. Bless my traveling bag, Tom! I mean to be present at your final triumph.”

  “What will happen to your buff Orpingtons while you are gone?” asked the young inventor, gravely.

  “I have got my servant trained to look after those chickens,” declared Mr. Damon. “And this invention of yours is really more important than even my buff Orpingtons.”

  “Just the same,” remarked Tom to his eccentric friend, when Rad had left the room. “I’ve got to fix it so that Eradicate stays at home with father. He doesn’t really know how old and broken he is—poor fellow.”

  “His heart is green, Tom. That’s what is the matter with Rad.”

  “He is a loyal old fellow. But I shall take Koku with me, not Rad,” and the young inventor spoke decidedly. “And that is going to trouble poor Rad a lot.”

  The prospect of going West, however, was not the main subject of Tom’s thoughts at this time. As the weeks passed and the end of the six months of experiment came nearer, the inventor was more and more troubled by the principal difficulty which had from the first confronted him. Speed.

  That was the mark he had set himself. A maximum speed of two miles a minute on a level track for the Hercules 0001. With the speed already attained by both steam and electric locomotives in the more recent past, this was by no means an impossible attainment, as Tom quite well knew.

  But he became convinced that the conditions under which he labored made it impossible for him to be positive of just how great a speed on a straight, level track his invention would attain.

  There was no electrified stretch of railroad near Shopton on which the Hercules 0001 might be tested. The track inside the Swift Company’s enclosure did not offer the conditions the inventor needed. He felt balked.

  “I believe I have hit the right idea in my improvements on the Jandel patents,” he told Ned Newton when they were discussing the matter. “But believing is one thing. Knowing is another!”

  “Theoretically it works out all right, I suppose?” questioned Ned.

  “Quite. I can prove on paper that I’ve got the speed. But that isn’t enough. You can see that.”

  “Impossible to be sure on the trackage already built here, Tom?”

  “I haven’t dared give her all she’ll take,” grumbled Tom. “If I did, I fear she’d jump the rails and I’d have a wreck on my hands.”

  “And maybe kill yourself!” exclaimed Ned. “You want to have a care.”


  “Oh, that’s all right! I’ve taken risks before. I don’t want to risk the safety of the locomotive, which is more important. That machine has cost us a lot of money.”

  “I’ll say so!” agreed Ned. “You’ll have to wait till you can get the locomotive out there on the H. & P. A. tracks before you get a fair speed-test.”

  “And suppose instead of a triumph it is a fiasco?” Tom said, doubtfully. “I tell you straight, Ned: I never was so uncertain about the outcome of one of my inventions since I began dabbling with motive-power.”

  “We could build several miles of straight track in the waste ground behind the works,” Ned said, thoughtfully.

  “Not a chance! There is neither time nor money for such work. Besides, I should have to rebuild my transforming station if I supplied longer conduit wires with current.”

  “You don’t really consider that you have failed, do you, Tom?” and Ned’s anxiety made his voice sound very woeful indeed.

  “I tell you that my belief doesn’t satisfy me. I hate to go West without being sure—positive. I want to know! I have tried the locomotive out in the yard half a dozen times. It runs like a fine watch. There doesn’t seem to be a thing the matter with it now. But what speed can I attain?”

  “I don’t see but you’ll have to risk it, Tom.”

  “I mean to give her one more test. I’ll run her out tonight when there is nobody about but the watchmen—and you, if you want to come. I’ll arrange with the Electric Company for all the current they can spare. By ginger! I’ve got to take some risk.”

  “By the way, Tom,” said his chum, “did it ever strike you as odd that that private detective agency never got any trace of O’Malley?”

  “Well, he’s gone away. We needn’t worry about him. Maybe the detective wasn’t very smart, at that.”

  “And yet he was here in town after you put the inquiry on foot. I saw him in the bank. He came there occasionally. And either he, or somebody he hired, placed that bomb in the locomotive.”

  “All those being facts, what of it?”