The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning.
“Plenty of that sabotage stuff,” growled the Chief. “Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off’d have to wait till new ones got made—and that’s more time for more sabotage.”
Joe said carefully: “I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?”
The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.
“The gyros have to be rebalanced,” said Joe. “They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that. They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center of gravity somewhere else. Right?”
The Chief said irritably: “No other way to do it! No other way!”
“I saw one,” said Joe. “When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield, they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers of gravity and spun around them!”
The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.
“By the holy mud turtle!” he grunted. “I get it!”