Tom Swift and His Giant Robot by Victor Appleton II Read Free Book Online Page B

remarked. "After all, my real name is Budworth!"
    Tom gestured toward a sliding door in the wall of the lab. "Inside that cubicle is a big, deep vat of the stuff, almost like a well. I remodeled one of the pressure tanks, because I wanted to have a fair amount ready-made and on-hand. What I’m going to do is give Robo Boy a kind of ‘transfusion,’ replacing an earlier formula plastic with the latest batch, which is far superior. You can help me if you like."
    "Sure," Bud replied. "Will we need to put on any protective gear?"
    "No, that’s part of the beauty of Herculesium. The particles won’t bond with living cells at all, inside or outside. It hardly sticks to anything; you can just brush it off."
    The two close friends worked together for hours, barely taking a break to wolf down Chow’s luncheon of sandwiches and sodas. Then, as the shadows began to deepen across Swift Enterprises, Bud reminded Tom that they had promised to meet the girls for dinner at TinCanz, a new restaurant and dance club on the Lake Carlopa shoreline.
    "Why don’t you go on ahead, pal," said Tom, his mind still on his work. "You drove in separately, anyway. I’ll shower and change here at the plant and meet up with you three later on."
    "Okay," Bud responded, adding: "But don’t pull the absent-minded-professor routine and show up late—Bashalli might bean you with a jar of coffee beans!"
    Seeing that he was near the end of the meticulous "transfusion," Tom worked for another half-hour, then closed-up and secured the access panels on his machine man and left the lab, locking it with his electronic key. The ridewalk—a conveyor-belt transport system that criss-crossed the four-mile-square plant—had carried Tom almost a mile toward the administration building when he suddenly groaned. He had forgotten to have Robo Boy lie flat on the lab floor to help the newly injected Herculesium powder "settle" evenly.
    "Man, maybe I am getting absent-minded!" he muttered, stepping across to the adjacent ridewalk, which moved in the opposite direction.
    Back inside the lab, he activated the control console, inserted the appropriate disk, and manipulated the control dials. The headless robot obediently crouched down, then smoothly rocked back and flattened himself against the tiled floor.
    "Good boy!" Tom whispered affectionately, approaching the recumbent form.
    Just then there came a slight sound—the faint scuff of a shoe against the floor. A cloth, reeking of chemicals, was whipped across Tom’s mouth and nostrils by arms that came from behind him. He gasped, twice, and then collapsed helplessly, legs like rubber. Unconsciousness passed across him like the shadow of a cloud.
    Tom’s eyes fluttered open.
    He seemed to be standing upright in a warm darkness that pressed against him from all sides.
    What in the world…? came his confused thoughts.
    His arms were at his sides. He tried to move them and discovered that they were unbound. Yet they moved against a strange, molasses-like resistance, which the young inventor could also feel against the rest of his body up to his jaw. And as his arms moved, he seemed to sink down further into the yielding material. Now it was almost touching his lower lip.
    Suddenly he understood! He was suspended upright in the vat of Herculesium powder in the cubicle that adjoined the lab. The ultra-fine substance was acting like quicksand, and Tom was sinking fast!
     
CHAPTER 8
AN INTERRUPTED EVENING
    TOM TRIED shouting for help loud and long, with little expectation that it would do any good. He quickly determined, from the echo of his voice, that the cubicle door panel had been shut. No one would be able to hear him.
    His brain churning furiously, he tried to remember every detail of the lab, the cubicle, and the vat. Was there something that could help him haul himself free of the powder before he suffocated?
    By effort of will he calmed himself, taking care to keep all movement to a minimum. Tom remembered that