Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite by Victor Appleton II Read Free Book Online Page A

Queen flew south at transonic speed, and quick hours later landed at Fearing Island on its cushion of jet lifters.
    Two hours afterwards a big cargo plane followed, loaded with heavy equipment for the expedition. At the same time, other planes were being rolled out across the island airfield, while mechanics scurried about in the glare of powerful floodlights, unloading their cargoes and carting them to the waiting Titan .
    As Tom watched the final loading routine, Bud walked over. Like Tom, he already wore the emergency pressure suit that the astronauts would use as a precaution during the flight. "Skipper, that new ship of yours doesn’t look much bigger than the Star Spear . How’s she going to carry such a big crew—and all those crates and machines?"
    Tom grinned. "Guess I never really gave you my customary explanation of how it works."
    "I’ve been waiting!" Bud joked. "All I know is, the Titan has some kind of atomic motor. What does she run on, liquid uranium?"
    Tom’s grin became a chuckle. "No, something much easier to handle—oxygen!"
    "You mean plain old air?"
    "The business part of air, anyway," said Tom. "Most of the main central fuselage is tank divided into sections, like a honeycomb, containing oxygen, which we’ve super-pressurized without liquifying it."
    "Like the air tanks inside the underwater Fat Man suits, right?"
    "Same technique. We needed a gas to serve as a thrust-medium, and oxygen made perfect sense, as we’d need to bring some along anyway to breathe until the atmos-maker is set up."
    "So where do the atoms come in?"
    Tom drew an imaginary diagram in mid-air. "Pushed by its own pressure, the oxygen flows into a special chamber below the atomic reactor, where the gas is exposed to concentrated ionizing radiation produced in the reactor—high gamma rays, mostly. The radiation knocks electrons loose in the gas, which gives it a powerful electrical charge. The charged oxygen molecules repel one another, much more forcefully than the explosion produced by fuel combustion in standard rocket engines."
    "And there’s your thrust," nodded Tom’s pal. "Sounds like the Titan will give you a lot more ‘bang for your buck’."
    "Right," Tom confirmed. "That’s why the crew section of the ship can be so much larger than the little two-person compartment in the nose of the Star Spear. "
    In appearance the Titan was very different from any spacecraft yet launched. Its rather squat central fuselage was cylindrical and bullet-shaped, with the single thrust exhaust nozzle, extending down beneath it, flaring widely like the horn of a trumpet. This portion of the ship held the tanks, reactor, and engine apparatus. The habitable section of the ship was completely separated from the central cylinder, skirting its lower third like a flat-sided doughnut complete with a hole in the middle. The outside-facing wall of the crew module was a continuous transparent viewpane stretching all the way around, and large storage bins were built into the floor and ceiling of the module. There was no launch tower or gantry: the ship rested on its launch pad atop four stubby landing legs.
    Tom added, "If you want more details about the Titan , speak to Rafe Franzenberg. He was Dad’s main assistant in the design, which Enterprises did under contract with the government. I was just a kid back then."
    "A kid inventor, you mean!" Bud proclaimed. "While I was hanging out on the Jungle Gym, you were inventing luminous wallpaper and left-handed coffee mugs!"
    Presently Tom received word from the loading foreman that that all equipment and supplies were aboard and safely stowed. It was time for the crew of thirteen to board the spaceship.
    "Lead the way, sky boy!" chortled Bud.
    The youths approached the silver-gleaming craft, pinned in a webwork of floodlight beams. Stepping onto a small platform, the boys rode several yards up the ship’s side, to one of the Titan ’s three loading hatches. On the way, Tom pointed out that