“The radio set just blew up in my face,” Tom explained. “Fortunately, the equipment was transistorized mostly with printed circuits. Otherwise,” he added, “I might have been badly cut by slivers of glass from the exploding vacuum tubes.”
As it was, the young inventor had suffered only 73
74 THE VISITOR FROM PLANET X
a few slight scratches and a bruise on the temple from a piece of the shattered housing. Bud swabbed Tom’s injuries with antiseptic from the first-aid cabinet while Chow poured out glasses of grape juice.
“What caused it, Tom?” Bud asked as they paused to sip the fruit drink.
“Good question,” Tom replied. “Frankly, I don’t know.” But he was wondering if the set might have been sabotaged.
Tom was still eager to get in touch with his father and telephoned the electronics department to bring another set to his laboratory. Chow left just as the new set arrived.
Tom hooked it up quickly, donned a set of goggles, and tuned to the space-station frequency. Then he picked up the microphone and stepped well back from the set, waving Bud out of range at the same time.
“Tom Swift calling Outpost! … Come in, please I”
A moment later came another explosion! The new set had also blown up!
“Good night!” Bud gasped in a stunned voice. “Don’t tell me that’s just a coincidence!”
Tom shrugged. “We can certainly rule out the possibility that anything was wrong with the radio itself. Every set is checked before it leaves the electronics department.”
“So where does that leave us?” Bud persisted.
THE CAVE MONSTER 75