Appleton, Victor – Tom Swift Jr 16 – And the Cosmic Astronauts

Tom had to admit the mystery had him

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stumped, for the moment at least. In the meantime, he decided to resume work on the gravitex for his space kite, and on a motor scooter hurried to his laboratory.

As he assembled the materials on his workbench, the young inventor smiled.

“Guess I’ll have to play this by ear,” he thought. “I’m trying to do something I can’t even fully explain to myself!”

Tom reflected that gravity can be considered as a form of radiation even though its nature is not yet clearly understood by scientists.

“But I’m sure that my device will be able to concentrate the strength of radiation by electromagnetic action,” he said to himself.

First, Tom shaped the direction cone of his gravitex on a metal-spinning lathe. Next, he molded a number of lightweight plastic balls and removed the air inside them with a vacuum pump. He then wound the balls with many turns of fine, insulated silver wire, just as if he were winding up balls of knitting wool.

“Guess I’ll call these gravitol spheres,” Tom decided, jotting down this name on his working sketch.

The spheres were mounted around the neck of the direction cone, then connected by cable to the electronic component through a power control unit.

When power was turned on, the electricity would flow through the fine silver wires and create

THE MYSTERIOUS ICEBERG 41

rapidly rotating magnetic flux inside the gravitol spheres.

Other circuits had to be wired and adjustments made. When the setup was finished, Tom bolted his gravitex to a platform, the cone pointing upward. Above this, he attached a weight to a spring balance which had a dial to indicate the force of gravity.