“Great balls o’ fire!” Chow gulped as Tom turned off the set. “I sure hope all o’ those poor folks in cars got away safe!”
Tom rushed to a wall shelf and pulled out a book on geology. He leafed quickly to a section dealing with known earthquake faults and the distribution of quakes. When he looked up at the others, his face was grim.
“What’s wrong, skipper?” Bud asked tensely.
“That quake,” Tom replied, “wasn’t in a patterned zone any more than the Faber one was!”
Chow’s jaw dropped open in a comic look of dismay. “You mean this here ole earth we live on is gettin’ all busted up an’ twisted around inside?”
“I wish I knew, Chow!” Tom paced worriedly about the office. “It just seems queer to me that both of those quakes should have destroyed vital defense factories!”
On a sudden impulse, Tom snatched up the telephone. His two companions listened as he put through a call to the FBI in Washington. Within moments, a friend at the Bureau, Wes Norris, came on the line.
“Look, Wes,” Tom said, “is there any chance this quake that just happened at Medfield and the earlier one at Faber Electronics might have 36 THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X
been caused by underground H-bomb blasts?”
“As a matter of fact, we’re checking on that very possibility,” Norris replied.
“In other words, sabotage. Things are pretty hot around here since that news on Medfield came in, so I can’t talk much right now, Tom. But I can tell you this,”
Wes concluded, “we are investigating, and I do mean thoroughly 1”
Bud and Chow were shocked when Tom reported his conversation with the FBI agent.