Quieting his fears momentarily he turned his attention to Bud, who had just opened his eyes and was weakly trying to sit up.
“Where are we?” he asked groggily. “Are Sandy and Phyl okay?”
Tom smiled, relieved that his friend was going to be all right. “We’re seven hundred miles away from our friends,” he said, and told him about the knockout and the defective coupling. “Say,” he cried suddenly, “here comes something on the oscilloscope!”
Bud, still half-conscious, was not interested. But Tom’s eyes were focused on a mathematical symbol which was forming on the screen.
“A message from our space friends!” he exclaimed. Noting that the figure was different from
180 TOM SWIFT AND HIS ROCKET SHIP
the first one on the previous messages, he added, “I wonder if they’re inviting us to meet them.”
“Stop kidding,” Bud murmured.
“There’s a second figure!” Tom cried.
As he reached for the planet dictionary, Tom suddenly realized that it was extremely warm in the cabin. At first he thought that this was the natural result of their jets attaining such unprecedented speed. But by split seconds the pilot’s canopy grew hotter and hotter.
“It’s over 100 degrees in here!” Bud said. “Anything wrong?”
Tom looked at the cabin thermometer. It had climbed to 122 degrees and was still rising!
Pointing to a gauge, Tom cried, “The kicker isn’t working! No wonder we haven’t been accelerating properly.”
“It’s reading 850 now!” Bud exclaimed in alarm, knowing the gauge was expected to drop from a reading of 050 to 035 an instant after the fuel invention was put into operation. The fuel was streaming through the by-pass unchecked!