"Appleton, Victor - Tom Swift Jr 12 - In the Race to the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Appleton Victor)

guests on a tour of Enterprises. Meanwhile, Tom and Bud headed for Tom's
gleaming, glass-fronted laboratory.
"What's next, genius boy?" Bud asked as they reached it.
"Back to work on my new spaceship repelatron," Tom replied.
"Brief me again on it, will you?" the husky young flier urged.
Tom grinned. "Well, if you've ever looked through a spectroscope, you know
that every substance gives off its own special kind of radiation."
Bud nodded. "Sort of a rainbow trade-mark."
"The word is spectrum, remember chum?" Torn said.
"Okay, professor. And your repelatron detects this radiation and generates a
counterwave which is exactly out of phase with it. So when you aim it at a
substance, the counterwave acts as a repelling force. It pushes the substance
away, just as opposite poles of a magnet repel each other."
"Correct, Bud."
"But," his pal objected, "the repelatrons you've built so far just repel one
particular substance- like water. Now you're going to build a machine which will
repel anything in the solar system?"
"Right. That's my big problem. It will have to work for all the ninety-two
natural elements."
Bud whistled. "Pretty neat, pal! But what happens if you want to change
course?"
Tom turned toward the mock-up of the space-
26 THE RACE TO THE MOON
ship. He pointed to the dish-shaped antennas which ran on circular tracks
around the ship. "We can beam out repulsion waves on any of these three
directional radiators. By swiveling them around, we can line up on any object in
space and give ourselves a kick in the right direction."
"Suppose you're traveling on the dark side of the moon," Bud objected, "or
some place where you can't get power from the sun to work the repelatron. Then
what?"
"Chances are we'd still have enough momentum to carry us out of the
moon's shadow," Tom replied. "But just in case we want to maneuver or change
direction in the dark, the ship will have auxiliary rockets. They'll also be used to
assist us on take-off."
Bud watched in amazement as the young inventor sat down and dashed off
pages of diagrams and calculations. An hour later Tom phoned Art Wiltessa, one
of the Swifts' highly rated young engineers.
"Can you drop over to the lab, Art?" he asked. "Got another hurry-up project
for you."
"Sure thing, skipper," Art promised.
Wiltessa arrived five minutes later. Tom showed him the diagrams, and Art
promised to develop a working model of the repelatron's control board as fast as
possible.
"One thing you still haven't explained, Tom," Bud remarked after the engineer
left them.
"What's that?"
"How are you going to draw power from the
A SOLAR EXPERIMENT 27
sun to operate your repelatron? Wouldn't your solar batteries do the job just
as well?"