“Nothing unusual here,” he muttered.
Tom picked up the lock mechanism again and went over it with a magnifying glass.
“Hey! Here’s something!” he thought, noting that the exposed metal surfaces showed peculiar scorings-wavy-looking scratch marks that seemed too regular to be accidental. The tracings were so faint that Tom would have missed them had he not been using a magnifying glass.
He thought, “Could the experiments with my anti-inverse-square-wave generator or the Private Ear radios have caused such scorings? I sure don’t 76 MEGASCOPE SPACE PROBER
see how. On the other hand, certain forms of radiation do have odd effects which are still unexplored by science.”
Meanwhile, Open Door Jack had removed the lock from the other door to the laboratory.
“Let me see it,” Tom said.
He examined the lock mechanism under his magnifying glass. This, too, showed the same peculiar scorings. Tom handed the lock back to Open Door Jack, who took it off to his workshop, saying he would try to repair it.
After the locksmith had gone, Tom stood for a few moments lost in thought.
His eyes wandered absently about the laboratory. Suddenly he noticed something that had escaped his attention before.
A number of metal objects in the room were topsy-turvy! A metal rack of test tubes had fallen on its side, cracking a couple of the glasses. A soldering gun and other tools lay on the floor and several trays of screws and fittings had spilled off the hardware shelves.
Tom pounced eagerly on this fresh evidence. But none of the metal items, so far as he could find, showed the scorings he had noticed on the locks.
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