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Page 27
CHAPTER IX
AFTER A SPY
Curious as it may seem, Eradicate, the oldest and certainly not
the most energetic of the party assembled in the experiment room,
was the first to recover himself and arise. Tottering to his feet
he gave one look at the testing block, whence the motor had torn
itself. Then he looked at the prostrate figures around him, none
of them hurt, but all stunned and very much startled. Then the
gaze of Eradicate traveled to the hole in the roof. It was a
gaping, ragged hole, for the motor was heavy and the roof of
flimsy material. And then the colored man exclaimed:
"Good land ob massy! Did I do dat?"
His tone was one of such startled contrition, and so tragic,
that Tom Swift, rueful as he felt over the failure of his
experiment and the danger they had all been in, could not help
laughing.
"I take it, hearing that from you, Tom, that we're all right,"
said Ned Newton, as he recovered himself and brushed some dirt
off his coat. Ned was a natty dresser.
"Yes, we seem to be all right," replied Tom slowly. "I can't
say what damage the flying motor has done outside, but--"
"Bless my insurance policy! but what happened?" asked Mr.
Damon. "I saw Eradicate pull on that lever as you told him to,
Tom, and then things all went topsy-turvy! Did he pull the wrong
handle?"
"No, it wasn't Rad's fault at all," said Tom. "The trouble was,
as I guess I'll find when I investigate, that I put too much
power into the motor, and the muffler didn't give any chance for
the accumulated exhaust gases to expand and escape. I didn't
allow for that, and they simply backed up, compressed and
exploded. I guess that's the whole explanation."
"I'm inclined to agree with you, Son," said Mr. Swift dryly.
"Don't try to get rid of all the noise at once. Eliminate it by
degrees and it will be safer."
"I guess so," agreed Tom.
By this time a score of workmen from the other shops had
congregated around the one though the roof of which the motor had
been blown. Tom opened the door to assure Jackson and the others
that no one was hurt, and then the young inventor saw the
exploded motor had buried in the dirt a short distance away from
the experiment building.
"Lucky none of us were standing over it when it went up," said
Tom, as he made an inspection of the broken machine. "We'd have
gone through the roof with it."
"She certainly went sailing!" commented Ned. "Must have been a
lot of power there, Tom."
And this was evidenced by the bent and twisted rods that had
held the motor to the testing block, and by the cylinders, some
of which were torn apart as though made of paper instead of heavy
steel. But for the fact that all the force of the explosion was
directly upward, instead of at the sides, none might have been
left alive in the shop. All had escaped most fortunately, and
they realized this.
"Well," queried Ned, as Tom gave orders to have the damaged
machine removed and the roof repaired, "does this end the
wonderful silent motor, Tom?"
"End it! What do you mean--"
"I mean are you going to experiment any further?"
"Why, of course! Just because I've had one failure doesn't mean
that I'm going to give up. Especially when I know what the matter
was--not leaving any vent for the escaping gases. Why this isn't
anything. When I was perfecting my giant cannon I was nearly
blown up more than once, and you remember how we got stuck in the
submarine."
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