Later, at the Swifts' house, Tom received a telephone call from Chief Slater. He reported that the two prisoners were known hoodlums from a nearby city.
"They claim they were hired for this job last night by a stranger who spoke with an accent," Slater went on. "According to their story, they never even got a look at his face, and they had no idea he was an enemy agent."
"Sounds reasonable," Tom agreed. "It's not likely Mirov's Brungarian henchmen would endanger their whole setup by taking any cheap gunmen into their confidence."
Chief Slater also reported that Len Unger was still at large. "But the FBI will probably pick him up soon," he added.
"I sure hope so," Tom said.
A ten-hour sleep that night proved a fine tonic. Tom awoke the next morning feeling entirely refreshed, and after a hearty breakfast, hurried off to the plant. Here he plunged into work on his quality analyzer sonar.
Much of the circuitry was assigned to the electronics department. The finished boards and sub-assemblies were fed back to Tom in his private laboratory. He himself assembled the major units.
At lunchtime, over a bowl of chili and crackers, Tom recalled another problem. "We'll need an undetectable sub to test my analyzer," he mused. "That means a repeat job of rigging all those transducers. Whew! I'd better get busy on that plastic sheathing."
As soon as he had eaten, Tom phoned Arv Hanson, who arrived at the lab in a few moments.
"You remember that idea I mentioned to Danny about molding all the transducers into a single continuous plastic sheet?" As Arv nodded, Tom went on, "Let's try it, using Tomasite as the plastic."