Once returned to Kingston's official building, the leader set his operatives to checking the supercritical masses in the vain hope of locating one of them that existed in the stolen laboratory.
Bronson's statement that he wanted a detector did not mean none existed. All forms of communication require the two main components—generator and detector. Kingston's men, to track down the stolen laboratory, merely tuned through the space-resonant bands, stopping every time they hit a response so that they could check the neighborhood visually.
What Bronson wanted was not a mere detector. He wanted some means of knowing definitely when the subcritical masses of his own space-resonant elements were reassembled. This is comparable to a device that will register whenever a radio transmitter is turned on, regardless of frequency or location.
Bronson knew that the tuning qualities of the space-resonant effects depended mostly on the mass of the crystals. He knew the mass of his own stuff but that had been formed to serve as fluorescent material and the amount of the space-resonant elements in that mass was uncertain—especially in view of the fact that Earth One was still to learn of the space-resonant bands.
So Bronson's knowledge of the mass of his own crystal did not include the proportion of these new elements and therefore he had little knowledge of how the divided masses would resonate.
It was quite a project—but it had to be done.
CHAPTER XIII
To Find the Plan
Cautiously, Virginia entered the laboratory and peered over Ed Bronson's shoulder. "What are those?" she asked.