Suddenly Bud, who was standing in the open doorway, cried out, “Look!
There she blows!”
No binoculars nor telescope was needed to see the white-hot geyser of molten iron that shot straight up in the air from the open shaft!
Tom’s heart was hammering wildly. The sudden climax to his long months of work and planning left him dizzy and breathless with excitement. Above the cheers and clamor of the men, he could hear Bud shouting again and again: “You’ve done it, Tom! You’ve done it!”
The gushing jet of molten iron made a white-hot arc as it plunged down into the hollowed-out artificial lake.
“What I wanna know is how d’ you turn the stuff off, after you’ve got enough?” asked Chow in an awe-stricken voice.
“It ought to stop in a few minutes of its own accord,” explained Tom. “As the metal cools, it’ll seal off the hole made by the blaster, by forming a plug of solid iron.”
206 TOM SWIFT AND HIS ATOMIC BLASTER
But the flow seemed endless, and the level of metal inside the lake kept rising rapidly.
For a time there was fear that Tom’s calculations about the time might be wrong-that the outpour
7
MOLTEN TRIUMPH
207
might continue indefinitely. But in twenty-five minutes the gush of molten iron dwindled and finally stopped, as though it had been choked off by the turning of a giant throttle.
208 TOM SWIFT AND HIS ATOMIC BLASTER
Grabbing a long-handled ladle, Tom hurried to the lake to skim off some of the top layer of the tons of metal that had not yet completely congealed.
Then he rushed to his laboratory to analyze the sample.