“What a terrific meal!” Tom smiled at his mother. “I’ll bet I ate too much to sleep tonight!”
Mr. Swift chuckled and laid down his napkin. “No danger, son, if you’re as tired as I am.”
Tom was. By nine-thirty that evening he was in bed, deep in slumber. By the next morning he was greatly refreshed.
In his laboratory Tom eagerly plunged back to work on the final stage of his megascope space
138 MEGASCOPE SPACE PROBER
prober. He was engaged in a delicate transistor assembly job when Chow Winkler came in at noon, wheeling a lunch cart.
“Chow down, buckaroo!” he announced cheerfully. “Pitch in while the vittles are hot!”
Tom grinned, “Okay, since you’re twisting my arm, old-timer.”
While Tom ate, Chow plied him with questions about his latest invention.
“You say you’re goin’ to get sky pictures with that thingamajig when it’s all done?” Chow asked.
Tom nodded. “This is the last part of my space prober. It’ll be sort of a radiation lens.”
“Like on a camera?” Chow scowled and scratched his bald head in perplexity. “Brand my cactus salad, I thought lenses was made out o’ glass!”
“That’s right. I was just using a figure of speech,” Tom explained. “What I meant was, this will serve the same purpose as the lens of a camera or the objective lens of a telescope. Here, I’ll show you.”
Using chalk and a blackboard, Tom sketched a simple diagram of a camera to show Chow how the lens bent the light to form an image on the film. Then he diagramed the way in which his prober would beam three radio waves out into space. Two of these would cancel out at the wave-REPORT FROM SWEDEN 139
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