In that case, the young inventor reflected, it was only a freak of nature that the Faber and nose-cone factories had been wrecked by the shock. But in BRUNGARIAN COUP 49
spite of the seismographic clues, Tom was not entirely convinced. A nagging doubt still buzzed in the back of his mind.
The next morning Tom hurried off to his private glass-walled laboratory at Enterprises, eager to continue work on his container, or robot body, for the brain from space.
Tom frowned as he studied the rough sketch he had drawn in his office the afternoon before. “This setup’s full of bugs!” he muttered.
Nevertheless, Tom decided, the basic idea was sound. Grabbing pencil and slide rule, he began to dash off page after page of diagrams and equations.
“Chow down!” boomed a foghorn voice. Chow Winkler, wearing a white chef’s hat, wheeled a lunch cart into the lab.
“Oh … thanks.” Tom scarcely looked up from his work as the cook set out an appetizing meal of Texas hash, milk, and deep-dish apple pie on the bench beside the young inventor’s papers. Grumbling under his breath, Chow sauntered out.
Tom went on working intently between mouth-fuls. In another hour he finished a set of pilot drawings. Then he called Hank Sterling and Arvid Hanson and asked them to come to the laboratory.
They listened with keen interest as Tom explained his latest creation.
50 THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X
“No telling if it will work when the energy arrives from space,” Tom said, “but I think everything tracks okay. Hank, get these plans blueprinted and assign an electronics group to the project. You’d better handle the hardware yourself.”