At noon Chow Winkler brought the two boys a lunch of hot chicken sandwiches and cherry pie. The old Westerner was curious about the invention.
“Brand my cactus salad, what’s that contraption?” he asked. “Looks like a fancy brooder for raisin’ biddies!”
Tom could not suppress a smile. “Actually it’s a-well, a sort of weight-reducing machine.”
“Hot ziggety!” the hefty chef exclaimed. “How about me usin’ it first, boss?”
Tom told him the truth before the joke went any further. The cook went off with his lunch cart, mystified but impressed.
As the boys finished their dessert, Bud asked, “Will your gravitex be hard to fix? I mean, so the same trouble won’t happen again.”
“No. I can either mount it higher on the test stand, so I won’t be inside the reduced-gravity shadow when I operate it-or I can just hook up a remote control.
Guess that’ll be simpler.”
After the remote-control lead had been installed, Tom tried the gravitex again. Bud was
DESTINATION OUTPOST 45
astounded when he saw how much the pull was increased on the suspended weight.
“This is the ‘string’ for my space kite,” Tom explained. “Of course with the amplifying circuits in the gravitex controls, I’ll be able to step up the gravitational attraction on the craft many thousands of times.”
“I still haven’t seen this space kite of yours,” Bud reminded the young inventor.
“Hey, that’s right,” Tom said. “I’ll take you over and show you the model. But first I’ll phone Felix Wong to come here and see this.”
He demonstrated the gravitex to the young Chinese-American engineer, then asked him to build a full-scale replica for installation in the space kite. “Will do, skipper,” Felix promised.