“What gives, genius boy?”
“Our detectors are reporting traces of plutonium 239.”
“Maybe we’re picking up our own trail,” Bud suggested. “Don’t forget, we combed this whole area before in the Sea Hound.”
Tom shook his head. “Our reactor uses Swifto-nium. Must be from another sub-maybe one of the Navy nukes that searched for the Centurion.”
At a depth of little more than a hundred feet, the Sea Hound leveled off on a roughly southwesterly course. At once the seacopter went into a series of wild gyrations! The occupants of the cabin were almost hurled off their feet.
“Roarin” rockets!” Bud screeched, grabbing a stanchion. “Is this thing going crazy?”
Tom hastily switched to manual steering-but the tracker’s output scopes appeared to have gone dead! Baffled, the young inventor began a quick 100 AQUATOMIC TRACKER
trouble-shooting check of the circuitry. An hour later he still had not traced the cause.
“This beats me,” Tom confessed.
“Maybe that radioactivity made the detectors blow a fuse,” one crewman suggested.
“No, it wasn’t an electrical breakdown. This looks to me more like a nervous breakdown.”
Bud stared at Tom. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I mean it. Computers do go haywire sometimes and exhibit behavior resembling a nervous breakdown in humans. It may happen when, for some reason, they can’t process the information they’re being fed-or if they’re given an impossible problem to solve. Something like that must have happened to the coincidence analyzer or the compound trace synthesizer.”
Tom switched on the aquatomic tracker again. But as before, its output oscillated wildly and after a few moments ceased to register.
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