“And where will the waste products-such as the slug casings-go?” Hanson asked.
“Tom’s robot will carry them out through a tunnel to an underground lake we’ve made. In that way, no living thing can be contaminated by the radioactive waste.”
Next, Mr. Swift took them outdoors to a small concrete structure located at a short distance from the pile plant.
“This is where Tom and the other operators will receive reports from the robot and send him orders,” Mr. Swift explained.
From the outside the structure resembled a gun pillbox more than a control house. Within, however, the function of the building was obvious, with its large color-television screen, surrounded by loudspeakers and banks of oscillographs.
Control knobs and buttons were set into a huge desk-height panel. Hank Sterling and Arv Hanson examined the large racks of amplifiers with interest.
Tom now showed them the tape library. “These
116 TOM SWIFT AND HIS GIANT ROBOT
tapes will be a real boon to the robot’s operator,” he said. “They’ll do away with the necessity of direct control on routine acts and motions of the robot. In fact, we can feed in any of more than a thousand different tapes with directions to get him out of every difficulty we’ve been able to foresee. But when something unexpected comes up, the operator will have to take over.”
“It’s amazing,” Hanson commented. “I’m beginning to have a lot of respect for that giant robot as well as his inventor.”
“Thanks.” Tom laughed. “Well, I guess we’ve seen all we can today.
Tomorrow I start work with Stan Lee.”
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