Tom Swift and The Asteroid Pirates

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1963. first. Hardcover. Good. Charles Brey. First edition. Yellow spine pictorial cover, with some fading and wear; spine is lightly bumped; corners worn / bumped with cardboard showing. Black and white pictorial end papers (Tom looking out window of scientific lab at jet), Tom Swift titles on back to #20, Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober. Rear paste down and end paper has some black ink splotches. Pages clean and unmarked. Grosset and Dunlap hard cover, without dust jacket as issued, first edition 1963, 178 pages, illustrated by Charles Brey. 8vo (7.5"" x 5"") Tom Swift and The Asteroid Pirates, The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures #21, by Jim Lawrence writing as Victor Appleton II. A violent explosion in space touches off one of the most thrill-packed adventures in Tom Swift Jr.'s scientific career. The appalling news that a cargo rocket has disintegrated while en route with vital supplies to Swift Enterprises' research base on the asteroid, Nestria, sounds a grim warning that the lives of Nestria's personnel are at stake. To rescue the marooned men, Tom undertakes a hazardous voyage to Nestria, only to find the way blocked by an invisible barrier of deadly radiation created by an unknown enemy whose objective is possession of the base. Tension mounts at Swift Enterprises when a mysterious Oriental is shot while attempting to warn Tom that his life is in danger from the Black Cobra. The Oriental's mumbled warning, plus some revealing data collected by United States Intelligence, sends Tom winging to a secret fortress in South America for the first encounter with his inscrutable foe. But the decisive encounter is destined to take place in space. How Tom uses his new invention, the magnetic deflector, to crack the radiation barrier around Nestria, and how the young space scientist and his crewmen pit their wits and courage against the asteroid pirates and their diabolical leader, the Black Cobra, will hold every reader breathless with suspense.