Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space Read Online Free PDF

the two youths had pulled up next to the streamlined hull, its chrome sheen now mottled with sooty black from reentry. The secondary parachute was spread out along the beach; the winds from the lake had caught the chute and pushed the rocket up onto the shore, just out of the water.
    They got out of the truck and Bud pointed. "Looks like the dome visor opened all right. I can see the battery."
    But as Tom neared the rocket, he was stunned to see a strange glow through the special glass of the dome. Instantly he dropped to the earth, yelling:
    "Bud! Hit the ground and cover your eyes!"

CHAPTER 5
A VOLTAGE VICTORY
    BUD FLUNG HIMSELF headlong in the sand after Tom. Both boys shielded their eyes with their arms. A split second later came a blinding flash of light from the rocket!
    Even with their eyelids squeezed shut, they saw the dazzling brilliance of the glare. As the light faded away, Tom opened his eyes cautiously and saw Bud scrambling to his feet. "What in the name of aerodynamics was that?" gasped the athletic young pilot.
    Tom half-smiled wryly and said, "Crazy as it may sound, that flash of light proved our experiment is a big success.
    "How so?"
    "Come here, pal. I’ll show you." Tom led the way to the burned-out rocket and pointed to the now-blackened dome porthole. "Notice what’s happened to the metal frame around the quartz window!" he remarked.
    "Wow!" Bud exclaimed. "Fused solid to the metal shell of the rocket! The heat from that flash must have been terrific."
    "Right," Tom agreed. "Which means our battery picked up a sizable charge out there in space."
    Bud responded enthusiastically. "Then this foil you developed is going to work?"
    "Well, the sol-alloy did become energized by the solar radiation," Tom explained. "In other words, a big percentage of its free electrons were energized to a highly excited state and trapped at the surface of the metal foil. But the trouble is that they didn’t stay trapped."
    "You mean the battery is still shorting out somehow?"
    Tom nodded. "That’s what caused the discharge flash. Apparently even this alternate formulation of sol-alloy is very unstable when it’s in a charged state. So now the problem is to figure out a desensitizer for the stuff—something to keep it from discharging all of a sudden as it did just now."
    "Sort of a tranquilizer, huh? I see."
    Using the small crane attached to the long truckbed, Tom and Bud loaded the rocket fuselage onto the truck and ferried it back to Swift Enterprises, to the laboratory building. Tom and Bud stood by, watching through goggles, as a welder used an acetylene torch to cut apart the fused sections. Then Tom removed the sol-alloy from the battery inside the rocket and held it up to the light. The once-shiny metal foil was covered with a dull-gray coating.
    "It oxidized completely when that flash occurred," Tom muttered.
    "Cheer up, pal," Bud said, clapping him on the back. "Just be glad you didn’t oxidize along with it."
    Tom pulled away from his pal. "What do you mean, cheer up? I feel fine." Startled by this response, Bud was silent for a moment, his eyebrows raised. Then Tom seemed to pass on to another thought completely. "If a commercial battery ever failed that way," he said, "no buyer would touch another with a ten-foot pole. It could ruin our whole market overnight."
    During the next few days, Tom used the advanced facilities of Swift Enterprises to work on a desensitizer, which proved a surprisingly daunting task. As the weekend approached, the skies a dull gray and snow threatening, the young inventor struggled over his problem. But at last he felt that he had it licked. Late Saturday night, Bud came to watch him complete the assembly of a battery to be used in the new test.
    "Hey, what happened to the color of your sol-alloy?" he asked with a puzzled look. "It’s darker than it was."
    "That’s because of the desensitizer I’ve mixed with it, so that the stuff won’t pop off like an old flash bulb the