Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron Read Online Free PDF Page B

allow visitors onto the grounds." As the older man sputtered, Tom added shrewdly. "Of course, if you’re suspicious of my motives, I can understand. There may be other places to take it for answers."
    "Let us both set suspicion to the side," replied the adventurer with a narrowed gaze. "I have no motive to do wrong against you, Tom. And as for your doing wrong to me, you lack my sort of animal cunning, clearly, so I think Artifact A will return to me promptly. I am traveling at the moment; I will telephone in a few days."
    The Sky Queen returned to the ground, and Nee Ruykendahl left.
    "He’s not like I expected," Bud remarked. "The TV series didn’t do him justice. He’s a lot seedier in person."
    Tom nodded, adding wryly, "Maybe we all are. But chum—I didn’t tell Nee everything I found with the instruments."
    "Something weird?"
    "Something that might make the two artifacts very valuable—and might have been behind whatever happened to Ed."
    Bud’s face lost its humor and grew tense. He had come to regard Tom’s cousin as a friend. "Sounds like you think he was kidnapped."
    "Yes, or― "
    "Let’s leave it at kidnapped ," Bud retorted. He picked up the small object and held it before his gray eyes. "What was it you found, Skipper? What makes it valuable?"
    "What makes it valuable is what it’s made of—not the lime, but some of the trace substances," Tom pronounced. "Bud, I’m pretty sure Artifact A comes from someplace other than Earth!"
     
CHAPTER 4
VISITOR’s WARNING
    BUD BARCLAY took it in for a moment. "We’ve seen quite a few ‘artifacts’ from outer space already, pal."
    The meteor-missile that had borne the symbol-language of the space friends to our world had been only the first such artifact. The beings had sent other vehicles, and traces of ancient alien visitation had turned up in the Yucatan jungles and beneath the Atlantic. The extraterrestrials—home planet undisclosed, they had become known as the X-ians—seemed unable to give an account of their history, or even their physical form. The abstractions of mathematics, the basis of their attempts to communicate, were unsuited for certain specifics. And it seemed in addition that the Planet X dwellers didn’t care to tip whatever they used as a hand.
    Tom agreed with Bud and said thoughtfully, "I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the Space Friends or not, but the substance I’ve detected is Lunite."
    Bud gulped. "From Little Luna? Then it must be connected to the SF’s—they’re the ones who moved Little Luna into orbit in the first place!" In an astounding feat of unexplained technology, the beings had steered a small asteroid, now known as Nestria, into orbit between the earth and the moon. Leading a rocket expedition to the moonlet, Tom had been able to establish a breathable atmosphere for the human visitors, and Nestria now sported a thriving colony of scientists from many nations.
    Unique to Nestria was a semi-crystalline metal, never found on our planet, which Tom had named Lunite. The metal had proven its worth as a key part of repelatron technology.
    But it had another, fearsome property. "Whether the Lunite metal in this artifact—long nanotubules scattered all through it, barely detectable—was mined by the X-ians or not, it most likely came from somewhere in space. And because it’s Lunite we’re talking about," Tom continued tensely, "the two artifacts aren’t just scientifically interesting, but dangerous."
    "Hunh? Why?"
    "Have you forgotten what Lunite can do?—what those two hunks of Lunite I held in my hands did?"
    Bud hadn’t! "Jetz! It can disintegrate things !"
    "The deatomization effect," nodded the young space explorer. "We have no idea how to control it, but we do know Lunite is involved in producing it."
    "Tom—could the artifact be some sort of weapon ?"
    "Could be," was the reply. "If so..." For a moment Tom seemed to be struggling with an idea, a disturbing one. "The Black Cobra has