“Well, brand my rocket roost!” the chunky, good-natured cook exclaimed, opening the door. “Say, how kin you nighthawks do with so little sleep? Now down where I come from-”
“Yes, I know,” Bud stopped him. “You mean you sleep all day and all night, too,” he needled.
“Nothin* o’ the sort,” said the indignant cook. “Say, where’s Tom?”
“He went to the lab to put the kicker to bed,” Bud gibed. “Has to tie his ‘baby’
down for the night.”
The kicker was a rocket-fuel energizer. It consisted of a yard-long section of ten-inch pipe, tapering at each end into the smaller piping of the fuel lines. The bulge was loosely packed with a metallic oxide catalyst and covered at both ends with platinum gauze niters.
Tom’s invention, using an alcohol-liquid-oxygen fuel combination, was designed to absorb the hyper-powerful radiation of the sun and shoot this solar energy into the liquid-oxygen supply, converting it into highly explosive, poisonous, blue liquid ozone.
With the help of the kicker, Tom’s fuel would be much more efficient than any other combination yet known. In addition to the enormous combustion heat of alcohol and liquid oxygen, he would get additional thrust from the decomposition of the ozone and would decrease mass ratio.
THE FUEL KICKER 15
Back at the laboratory, Tom was far from being sleepy. The excitement of the past hour had stimulated his thinking.
“This might be a good time to write up my daily record for Dad,” he decided.
Tom, like all good scientists, kept a day-to-day record of his new ideas, the progress of his inventions, and his data and calculations. These records already filled several volumes. Part of it told the story of the building of his flying laboratory, Sky Queen, and his adventures while prospecting for radioactive ore in the Andes.