“The shock seemed to come from aft,” Tom said, “not outside. Do you fellows want to come with me while I investigate?” He looked at Sterling and Hanson.
“Bud, keep her on the same heading,” he directed his friend.
After checking the panels and seeing that all the jets were okay, the young scientist and his friends retraced their steps aft.
“We’ll look in the lab,” he said. “The trouble might have originated there.”
Tom slid back the heavy door of the soundproofed laboratory. A cloud of sickening fumes poured out into the passageway. Tom recognized them at once.
“It’s hydrofluoric acid!” he cried. “I’ll get gas masks!”
The acrid fumes were already burning the tissue in his throat as he ran, coughing, to get the masks from a corridor closet.
“Someone must have loosened that acid container,” he said to himself as he pulled out the masks. “It never could have spilled otherwise!”
Running back to the laboratory, he handed two masks to his friends and quickly adjusted his own.
“Come on!” he urged. “If we don’t neutralize that stuff, it’ll eat a hole right through the ship. And if our pressure system fails and our air runs out at this height, we’re finished!”
CHAPTER 13
A STARTLING ASCENT
AS TOM RUSHED into the laboratory with Sterling and Hanson, he saw that a large quantity of spilled, fuming acid had already eaten a hole in the floor and penetrated to the lower deck of the plane. It could very well have carried to the vulnerable fuselage!
He dove for a locker, grabbed three packages of slaked lime, and handed one package to Sterling and one to Hanson.