In the center of the room was an orderly jumble of shiny black geometric solids, laced together with wires and bars of silver, the whole mounted on a polished ebony platform. It was handsome, in a bizarre sort of way; but certainly it did not look like any electronic gear Dolan had ever seen, and he had seen almost all there was, at one time or another.
He studied it carefully, turning it this way and that in his mind, trying to find some familiar feature to grasp it by. There was none.
"Well," he asked skeptically, "what is it? What does it do?"
Brown shook his head. "The purpose of the machine must remain secret," he said firmly. "We think the trouble may be superficial, some minor thing an expert could quickly repair; and we wish you to work on it from that viewpoint, without inquiring into its purpose."
"I see," Dolan said noncommittally. The whole business was screwy. For two cents, he thought—
He glanced at the girl. She sat quietly on a chair, hands folded demurely in her lap, watching him, practising her specialty. Well, maybe, he thought, it wouldn't hurt to look, as long as he was here anyway.
He walked over to the equipment and bent to examine it. The silver conductors seemed to be uninsulated, although in places they were closely paired. He frowned and scratched tentatively at one with his fingernail. The metal showed bright. There was a slight tarnish, that was all, no insulation.
He noticed something else. Back of the equipment, at an angle unnoticeable from the side he had first approached, were several cut and dangling wires, some of which had been partially replaced by quite ordinary high tension cable. Spread about on the floor were lengths and coils of wire.
"You've been working on it yourselves?" he asked Brown.
"No, no. As I told you, we are not technicians. Before we contacted you, we had already tried another man. He proved unsatisfactory. We, uh, paid him off and sought a better qualified person."