"Where? What are you talking about?"
Devon picked up a soldering iron that was plugged in, but lying unused in its holder. "This." His finger pointed to a delicate, silver line that traced its way along the entire length of the cord.
"I never saw any bug tracks like that before," said Kennely. "Look, here's more of the stuff." Kennely pointed to an almost invisible line of it on a small electric wrench.
Devon traced it along the cord into the conduit. They moved back to the section occupied by the machine tools. On each, they found thin silver lines running to the various elements. When they looked closely, the entire floor seemed crosscrossed with the threads. They went out to the materials storeroom and found the stuff swarming over the floor and up on the sides of the huge packing case that housed the unknown machine monster.
Mac came up as they looked over the maze of threads.
"Find anything?"
Devon shook his head. "You ought to spray the place with DDT. It looks like bugs are swarming all over you, leaving these trails."
Mac took a chisel and scraped at some of the stuff. "That's only a minor difficulty. We've been swearing at it for a week now. It won't come off anything, and no one can find out where it comes from. Why don't you make a project out of it? It would be about as useful as some of the dingbats you design."
"What's in the big box?" said Devon.
"Heaven only knows. I haven't had time to look. It came in with an order of materials several days ago. An engineer's gadget for his project, I guess, but nobody's claimed it yet. If they don't pretty soon, I'm going to ship it back where it came from."