THE HIDDEN KEY 121
“What can we do, Harlan?”
“Horst must be tied up with some rival manufacturer,” Ames reasoned.
“Probably the same outfit behind that anonymous phone call.”
“Any leads on that yet?” Tom asked.
“Just one. The private operatives I hired say Teletron, Incorporated, is rumored to have a stereo TV in the tooling-up stage. Their set will give a three-dimensional depth to the screen, but viewers must wear special glasses.”
“Who’s the head of the company?” asked Tom.
“A man named Alan Fosburg.”
“We’ll have a talk with him first thing in the morning,” the young inventor decided.
At eight a.m. Tom and Ames took off by helijet for Teletron’s main plant.
Fosburg, a big, balding man, received them in his office. Tom came straight to the point. In cold, angry words he told of the phone call offering to buy his new 3-D TV system, and Horst’s attempts to frighten and blackmail him into a deal.
Fosburg was red-faced and perspiring. “I’ll admit I was the one who made that phone call,” he confessed. “But I had a good reason.”
“Name it!” Ames snapped.
“Horst is a freelance electronics engineer. He invented a stereo-vision TV
set which Teletron was going to produce,” Fosburg explained. “Then we learned Tom Swift was working on a new 3-D system. Our set would have been outdated even before it hit the market. In desperation I T22 3-D TELEJECTOR
made that anonymous call, hoping to swing some deal that would save the money we had sunk into tooling up for the stereo-vision set.”
“And when that failed,” Tom said accusingly, “you sicked Horst himself on me.”
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