“Wonderful, son!” Mr. Swift exclaimed. “I hope I can do as well with this artificial sense of sight I’m working on.”
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146 THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X
Another hour went by before Mr. Swift was ready to test his own arrangement.
“You’ve probably heard of the experiments conducted with blind persons,” he told Tom. “By stimulating the right part of their brain with a lead from a cathode-ray-tube device, an awareness of light and dark can be restored.”
Tom nodded.
“Well, I’m using the same principle,” Mr. Swift went on, “but with a sort of television camera scanning setup.”
He asked Tom to draw the drapes and shut off the room lights, throwing the laboratory into complete darkness, except for the weirdly glowing “brain” in the glass sphere. Then Mr. Swift shone a flashlight at the scanner. The brain responded by glowing more brightly itself!
Next, after the drapes were opened again and the overhead fluorescent lights switched on, Mr. Swift painted a pattern of black-and-white stripes on a large piece of cardboard. He held this up to the scanner.
Visible ripples of brightness and less-brightness passed through the glowing ball of energy inside the sphere. It was reproducing the striped pattern!
“Dad, that’s amazing!” Tom said with real admiration.
Mr. Swift shook his head. “Pretty crude, I’m afraid. The brain energy by itself can’t take the
AN URGENT WARNING 147
place of a picture tube in a TV receiver. What we need is an analog computer to sum up the scanning pattern picked up by the camera tube and then pass this information along in code form.”