“Okey-doke, boss!”
Waddling along as fast as his paunch and high-heeled cowboy boots would permit, Chow led the way to his private white-tiled kitchen.
“They was sittin’ right there, Tom,” he said, pointing to his electronic range.
“No wonder!” Tom made a quick examination of the stove and the pans. “The electronic circuits here in your range must have picked up the output signal from our receiving station by inductive resonance. Then the pans acted as detectors and broadcast the messages just as if they were coming through a speaker.”
Chow stared at the young inventor, open-mouthed. “Brand my skillet, I don’t savvy a word you’re sayin’, but it sure sounds bad!”
“It could be very bad,” Tom replied. “If your stove could pick up those secret messages, our enemies might do the same thing!”
Dashing to the communications building, he
RADIO LEAK 91
reported the trouble to the radio crew. “The stuff Chow heard was already decoded, so the radiation must have been coming either from our decoder output or the audio output amplifier,” Tom said.
All messages sent or received by Swift Enterprises were transmitted in scrambled form. Incoming messages were decoded automatically, then printed on Tom’s radityper, recorded on tape, or audioed directly over speaker or headphones.
“Dave Brogard installed a new decoder system for us two days ago,” one of the radiomen reported. “It may have some bugs in it.”
On Tom’s orders, he phoned Dave, one of the Swifts’ electrical engineers, to rush to the plant immediately. Meanwhile, Tom himself began to check the whole receiving system.