“You see,” he continued, “the blanket of air around the earth protects us from most of the harmful radiation, but out in space the sun’s rays are so strong they’re deadly. That’s why we have these shutters for the viewing ports. But since we have another one on the other wall, we’ll be able to look out most of the time from one of them. No, we won’t miss a thing,” Bud concluded.
“I thought it was dark as night up in space,” Sandy remarked.
“True, when you’re out of the planets’ atmospheres. But we might pick up the lights of spaceships from Mars, for instance,” Bud replied. He grinned. “So it will be easy to avoid a crash.”
Sandy and Phyl were very sober. The more they saw, the less convinced the girls were that they
THE FIRST TEST 41
wanted to have Tom and Bud hurtling off into space.
“Cheer up!” Bud laughed on the way to the ground. “This evening we’re going to have fun and forget the rocket.”
“Good,” said Phyl. “When do we start?”
“As soon as we find Tom.”
The young inventor, meanwhile, had been having an interesting talk with his father about communicating with a group they thought lived on Mars, who had sent a message to the Swifts. A huge, meteorlike object, obviously planned by a keen intellect, and bearing mathematical symbols had made a pin-point landing a short time ago at the Swift Enterprises plant at Shopton.
After weeks of work by the two inventors, the symbols had been interpreted as a message saying that these planet dwellers had conquered the problem of space travel. But they were unable to invent a means of penetrating the dense atmosphere of Earth and wanted the Swifts to send them a solution.