“Hm.”
Without another word, Jackson opened his satchel, took out a picklock, and proceeded to probe at the inner mechanism of the lock. After ten minutes of frowning effort, he gave up with a puzzled look.
Jackson stared at the lock silently, then said, “Of course, this is the nearest thing to an unpicka-ble lock ever made-but ordinarily I’d have it open in two minutes.”
“Want to try the inside door?” Tom suggested.
“Might as well.”
They walked into the apartment, and Jackson repeated his routine on the second door lock. But this too resisted his efforts.
“I guess you made those locks a little too good,” Tom said with a chuckle.
Jackson shook his head in mystification. “It’s certainly odd,” he mused.
“Were you doing some experiment that would have ‘frozen’ the lock mechanisms?”
Tom confessed with a grin, “I did have a liquid-helium leak in there yesterday afternoon,
MYSTERIOUS MARKINGS 75
and it got chilly enough to freeze a brass monkey.” Seeing that Jackson was taking him seriously, Tom added hastily, “But of course I realize you’re not talking about that kind of a freeze-up.”
The locksmith opened his tool satchel again. “Looks as though I’ll have to take the whole thing apart,” he announced.
The mechanism was so complicated that it took him almost half an hour to remove it from the door. Tom immediately took the device into his laboratory and went over all the parts with a small hand-vacuum cleaner. They yielded only a tiny amount of dust and other particles. Nevertheless, Tom emptied them into a test tube. He also scraped several smears of grease from the lubricated parts onto a glass slide. Then he analyzed all the material under a Swift spectroscope.
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