Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space Read Online Free PDF Page B

second it gets exposed to air," Tom replied.
    The young inventor explained that he had used as a desensitizing agent a trace amount of a transition metal sulfide, incorporating it in the sol-alloy when it was smelted. "And now we’ll put together a four-cell battery," he said.
    "What happens if the sol-alloy oxidizes again?" Bud asked.
    "Back to the proverbial drawing board. But I don’t think that will happen this time."
    Tom rolled up four sheets of the sol-alloy and inserted them into cylindrical cells along with granules of a substance he had invented which he called catalium. Then he filled the cells with liquid ammonia under pressure. As each cell was filled, Tom sealed it off. Finally, when all the cells were ready, he assembled them in a battery case made of Herculesium, a lightweight malleable material with amazing electrical-conduction properties.
    He handed it to Bud who gave a surprised whistle. "Genius boy, this is so light a child could lift it easily. Man, wait until the automobile makers get wind of this!"
    At noon Monday, Tom and Bud eagerly watched from the control tower as the second experimental rocket took off, carrying the new battery. Tom glanced at his wrist watch. "Well, here’s hoping," he muttered to Bud. "This time we gave the parachute an extra checkout. If this test—"
    He was interrupted by a voice shouting his name. "Tom! Come in here quick!"
    The boys whirled around to see Nels Gachter beckoning to them from another room, an excited look on his face. Gachter was Enterprises’ chief of communications science.
    "What’s up, Nels? Anything wrong?" Tom asked as he and Bud made a dash to investigate.
    "Nothing to do with the rocket. It’s the space video-oscillograph! A message is coming through from your space friends!"
    Tom and Bud looked at one another excitedly. Gachter referred to the mysterious beings from another planet who had been communicating with the Swifts by mathematical symbols, intermittently, for many months now. The first message had arrived on a strange missile, invisible to radar, which had plunged into the grounds of Swift Enterprises like an oversize meteor. Since then several communications had been received and decoded by Tom and his father, and responses had been successfully transmitted back. The two Swifts had kept a record of all the symbols and had compiled a computerized dictionary. The messages indicated that the senders were intelligent beings who had mastered the problems of space travel—except one. They wished to visit the earth but were unable to endure some unexplained feature of our planetary environment.
    When Tom and Bud reached the video-oscillograph, they saw a series of weird symbols appearing on the screen. The earlier parts of the message had already been recorded automatically for extended study.
    "Howlin’ headwinds!" Bud cried out. "That machine’s going crazy!" The impulses were coming through stronger and faster than ever before. Tom recognized many of them at a glance from previous messages.
    Suddenly an odd symbol which Tom had never seen before began to take shape on the scope. But before his eyes could fully register its shape, the screen went dead!
    Tom groaned as he and Gachter checked the instrument hastily. "It’s not the oscillograph itself—the pulses were coming through with so much power that they burned out the limiters in the magnifying antenna!"
    "At least you got the first part of the message. What does it say?" Bud asked impatiently.
    "Give me time," replied the young inventor. "There are many new configurations in the symbols, so it may take awhile to translate this." He made a digital disk of the received symbols for later study.
    As Tom and Bud left the room, Daylene McMurdo called over, "Tom, that rocket just touched down on runway two. Where do you want it?"
    "The big test lab, please," responded Tom. "I’ll head there right now."
    At the lab, Tom made sure the rocket was grounded against any dangerous electrical