“Can you drop over to the lab, Art?” he asked. “Got another hurry-up project for you.”
“Sure thing, skipper,” Art promised.
Wiltessa arrived five minutes later. Tom showed him the diagrams, and Art promised to develop a working model of the repelatron’s control board as fast as possible.
“One thing you still haven’t explained, Tom,” Bud remarked after the engineer left them.
“What’s that?”
“How are you going to draw power from the
A SOLAR EXPERIMENT 27
sun to operate your repelatron? Wouldn’t your solar batteries do the job just as well?”
Tom shook his head. “They just soak up power from the sun’s visible light rays. But that’s only a small part of the sun’s total output. For this job, I’ll need to tap all the energy we can get, including the rays above ultraviolet and below infrared.”
“You mean a lot of it’s going to waste?”
“Sure is, pal.” Tom whipped out his slide rule. “If we could harness all the sun’s energy, down here on this earth, we’d get more than three horsepower from every square foot of surface exposed to the sunshine.”
“Then grab it, Tom.” Bud grinned. “But how do you tap all this power?”
“Remember those big gadgets like searchlights on the spaceship cabin?”
Tom asked.
Bud nodded.
“Well, those are the conversion units which will collect the sun’s energy and change it into electricity by photochemical action.”
“Whoa!” Bud groaned. “You’re already out of my league. Just tell me one thing. Will it work?”
Chuckling, Tom took out an electronic key and beamed open the door of a steel wall cabinet. “Stick around, chum. We’ll find out.”