Free Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express by Victor Appleton II

Emda paused musingly. "But of course—Neo-Aurium is also rare and difficult to obtain."
    "But somebody did it," Chow pronounced. "Sure did—right outta th’ soggy ground next to the city o’ gold. Right under our noses!"
    Tom knew that the westerner felt very sure that Andor Emda was in league with that Somebody. And Chow has good instincts about people , Tom thought. The youth felt inclined to trust the well-vetted visitor. But not all the way. Not with their lives. Tom didn’t need Chow Winkler to put him on the alert.
    After the usual quick flight and smooth-as-silk landing, the small group elevatored up into the Challenger ’s cubelike cabin module, suspended amid the encircling rings that held the repelatron force radiators. "This thing’s huge —quite a sight!" enthused Andy. "Just compare this to the old Mercury capsule in the Smithsonian."
    "Yeah," said Bud, "it’s about the size of a dining room chair. Even the base of the Apollo capsule isn’t much bigger than my kitchen table!"
    Sue Fresnell chimed in with wide eyes. "Progress in the Space Age has been fantastic, hasn’t it? And now we have Tom’s Cosmotron Express to look forward to."
    "Is the Starward construction keeping to schedule?" Emda asked Tom.
    The young inventor answered wryly, seating himself before the command deck’s main control panel. "Is there really a schedule ? What we usually have is a target date and a lot of scrambling! But we’re looking OK for the Grand Tour mission."
    Emda nodded his understanding. "The Dyaune was stalled for years, you know. It was Nattan Volj and his coterie of engineers who got the job done. That’s one reason for his followers’ worshipful attitude."
    "The Starward was originally designed to be a repelatron vehicle all the way, with scores of our new-style repelatrons built right into the hull," Tom explained. "Design began right after we completed the Pacific mission in the subocean geotron.
    "But when we were experimenting with my time-transformer apparatus—for the dyna-4 capsule—we detected an unexpected effect, a kind of ‘momentum backlash’ that showed how we were grabbing and stretching the fabric of spacetime. That led to the cosmotron spacedriver and a whole new approach to the ship."
    Bud grinned. "Now our marvelous magical trons have been demoted to standby equipment."
    "It’s more than that, though," declared Tom. "We have to use the repelatrons in the vicinity of large, massive bodies because the asymmetrical distortion of the spacetime gradient—they call it the curve of the ‘gravity well’—prevents the spacedriver effect from spreading evenly across the volume of the ship."
    "In other words," said Emda, "the momentum tide isn’t flat enough."
    "Exactly—and we’ve dealt with a similar problem in the dyna-4 capsule as well. The unevenness would impose a shearing stress on the Starward , as if the forces were trying to turn it inside out."
    Bud chuckled with his own personal wryness. "Believe me, genius boy and I got enough of that on our first space flight, when we had a little encounter with a mini black hole."
    " More than enough, I’d guess," said young Bob Jeffers, already a veteran of space.
    "And that’s why we’ll be heading for the outer solar system on the shakedown cruise," Tom concluded, "out in the flatter part of the sun’s gravity well."
    Tom’s and Bud’s hands knew their jobs well, and it took only minutes for the Challenger to rise through Earth’s veil of air and plunge into the stark blackness of space. Tom said, "As we get away from Earth—we’re not in freefall and we still have most of our weight—we’ll accelerate up to 1 G, then hold constant to the midpoint."
    Andy Emda flashed a broad grin. "Comfort and luxury all the way to the moon! We didn’t have either in the Dyaune back when we were in a race against this very ship. I never dreamed I’d see things from the reverse angle!—or even return to space at all."
    Susan Fresnell, an