Free Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates by Victor Appleton II

forth through the air, colliding with one another, shattering into fragments—and changing by the second into a hail of deadly bullets!
CHAPTER 10
A MEETING IN THE STRATOSPHERE
    "GET DOWN!" Tom ordered as he sank to his haunches. "Make for the hallway and shut the door!" The young inventor gave Bud a look that stifled the young Californian’s instinctive protest. He and Hanson complied, protecting their heads with their arms.
    Tom had realized immediately that his new invention was the behind the chaos. Unexpectedly, with no warning, the powerful magnetic forces were grappling all smaller, lighter objects in the vicinity and propelling them through the air in what Tom now observed to be wild back-and-forth loops, always returning to the same position—then darting away again!
    The phenomenon had become a whirling cloud of shrapnel. Tom wormed his way across the tiled floor to the test stand and tried to reach up to the control board—then drew his hand back down with a cry of pain. Flying fragments of shattered test tubes had raked across the top of his hand, drawing blood!
    Okay! he told himself, his muscles knotting as he steeled them for the pain to come. I’ll have to cut the power over at—
    And then, abruptly, came a ragged crash all across the room. In unison the streaking shards had dropped limply to the floor! The banging roar was replaced by dead silence.
    After a moment a white face beneath a floppy lock of black hair poked through the doorway. "Uh —T-Tom? Are you ... "
    "I’m fine," Tom called out, rising to his feet. "Just a scrape on my hand."
    "Was it the magnetic deflector?" ask Arv as he and Bud cautiously reentered the lab.
    Tom nodded wryly and said, "And I didn’t even get a chance to play hero by disabling it."
    Bud looked surprised. "Yeah? So what did stop it?"
    "I guess you could say it stopped itself," was Tom’s reply. "Look at that gouge-mark on the control panel. One of the fragments rammed the off button!"
    Arv’s nod came with a wry snort. "Another day, another lab trashed. I take it this wasn’t part of your demonstration?"
    Tom chuckled. "Well, it demonstrated something to me , at least. The thing works—but it goes critical at the slightest fluctuation in power input."
    "Shouldn’t be hard to fix," commented the modelmaker. Tom agreed.
    "That’s great. But... er, Tom," began Bud. "There is one more thing ... "
    "What’s that, flyboy?"
    "Buried somewhere in this big mess is—my car keys!"
    Finally retreating to his design workshop, Tom spent the waning hours of the day working up the layout of the drone rocket which he hoped would crash through the disintegration barrier and return a sample to Earth. The rocket was to be shielded with a heavy coating of Tomasite and Inertite laminated with asbestalon, a heat-insulating material which Tom had devised for his atomic earth blaster. But none of this matters at all unless the antimatter granules can be pushed aside by the magnetic deflector , Tom reminded himself. As a further difficulty, the protective field would have to have a weak spot, an opening through which the sample would be funneled into its special container within the rocket fuselage.
    After a call home and a late supper, Tom bunked down in the room adjoining his workshop and fell asleep instantly. When Bud came to rouse him, Tom blinked at the clock in disbelief. It was 11:30 in the morning!
    "Good night!" gulped Tom.
    "You mean good morning , pal!" replied Bud with a grin. "But anyway, I’m afraid you’re gonna have to gulp down your brunch on the run."
    "Huh? How come?"
    "I came looking you up because Phil Radnor asked me to. He told me he just took a call on the security office’s PER unit from a guy named John Thurston at the CIA!"
    Tom swung upright, senses engaged. "Thurston at the CIA? We’ve worked with him before —you’ve met him, Bud. In fact, he was one of the people Dad talked to in connection with that EMP pulse that disrupted defense