Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid by Victor Appleton II Read Free Book Online

silent. Presently Hank Sterling said thoughtfully: “You know, it’s a mighty big coincidence when you think about it—the hatch slamming, the tunnel starting up, just at the moment Tom Swift is inside. If it’s one of those personal attacks we all seem to get every second Tuesday, my question is: how did they know?”
    Tom nodded ruefully. “As Bud says, great question! If this is the work of enemies, they’d have to know several things—my own movements, more or less in real time; how to close the hatch; how to activate the tunnel... and all of it remotely. You might say they’d have to be... all-seeing!
    “But Harlan Ames’s crew went over the whole lab building personally, starting with the lab itself, before Bud and I even left the room.” Ames was the experienced head of Enterprises Security. “The TeleTec and other instruments showed nothing, no hidden cameras, no relays, no transmitters. Nothing!”
    “Then Nothing’s got a grudge against Tom Swift!” Hank observed.
    “It’s just like what happened on Fearing Island,” said the youth. “Some kind of effect produced by remote control—by the ‘all-seeing’ Ninth Light.”
    Suddenly Arv Hanson gave a sharp handclap. “Hey, I don’t know about this ‘Light,’ but I think I know what must have happened in the lab!”
    “What?”
    “Skipper, this new control console is wireless—WiFi! The controls aren’t physically connected to the tunnel mechanisms!”
    “Good gosh!” Tom blurted. “I forgot all about it! If someone knew the security-signature, he might be able to access the relay transponders on the tunnel directly and override the board. He could command the system to shut and seal the hatch, and then fire up the pumps and compressors!”
    “But could it be done from a distance? Maybe outside the plant completely?”
    “I’d say it’s possible,” replied Hank. “This test building isn’t shielded-up like the big hangar. But you’d have to have cracked the ‘permission’ code that’s always running behind any control signal from the console.”
    “Just as the raiders did with the aquatometers,” Tom noted grimly. “Raiders from nowhere, with no motive, and a great big fear of something called u’umat !”
    That afternoon, paper-working in the administrative office, Tom received a call from the Department of Historic Language Studies at nearby Grandyke University. “Hi, Professor Simallen,” he said excited. “Did you find out something about that charm symbol?”
    “Oh yes, Tom, it wasn’t difficult,” she replied. “It’s a stylized combination of two letters in Middle-Persian—Arabic, basically.”
    “What do the letters mean?”
    “They don’t constitute a word, but they were adopted to signify a certain phrase—”
    “The Ninth Light?” Tom prompted, rushing in.
    “The what? No. It’s idiomatic; the original sense of it might be rendered as ‘ seek in faith all paths ’.”
    “A religious motto, maybe?”
    “Yes, associated with a very tiny sect called the Qalqaram.”
    “I see,” responded Tom. “By any chance—does the sect have something to do with a region up near the Himalayas, in Bangladesh? I’m told it’s called ‘the handful of sultans’.”
    Dr. Simallen chuckled. “Well, you seem to already know most of what I’m telling you! The sect first emerged in what we now call Afghanistan, back in the 1200’s. But it was only practiced to any great extent in a small region just below Nepal and Bhutan. But Tom—Qalqaram was never any sort of important religious movement. I suppose you could call it a cult. The only reason it survived beyond the death of its founder, Eid-F’lqa Qalq’r, is that it was briefly adopted as the state religion in one of the so-called princely states. With the death of the Rajah who had proclaimed it, it was abandoned and forgotten.”
    “What was the principality called?”
    “Gureshpal. A pitiful thing, about the size of Monaco.”
    “Does Gureshpal