“What’s the matter, pal? Seventy thousand feet too much for you?”
“It’s the way you come down, Tom. My stomach feels as if I’d left it in space.”
“It’s all for science,” Tom said, chuckling, as he guided the craft in a sweeping arc toward the town of Shopton.
Bud smiled. “Next time you’re going so high to test out a gimmick for that giant robot of yours, Tom, why don’t you take the old rivet-head himself along?”
“Smile when you call my robot names,” Tom growled with mock ferocity.
Both boys looked like well-padded fullbacks with oversized helmets. Inside their flight gear, however, they were quite different. Tom, lean, tall, and with a blond crew cut, had a serious look in his deep-set blue eyes as he scanned the horizon. Bud, a skilled pilot himself, was not as tall as Tom, but he had shoulders like a hammer thrower and the open, frank face of an athlete who liked to play for fun.
“The worst is over,” Tom called through his mike. “But keep buckled in tight.
I’m making another dive before I take her in. But I warn you, next time we’re going higher, where we’ll get hit harder by cosmic rays. It’ll be a better test of the effect of radiation on the relotrol.”
Tom glanced at a black metal box with three dials resting in his lap. It contained the receiver of a control instrument to be used in connection with the giant robot he was building. Tom had partially completed the mechanical giant to be used for repairs and maintenance in a new atomic energy plant which his father was building. The relotrol would relay radio impulses needed to guide the robot working in areas of the plant where the radiation would be fatal to human beings.