The other engineers gathered around now, gaping at the excellence of the color television. Devon returned to his own prosaic setup. He'd have to get busy and push some of these weather stations out the door before he got cut off at the pockets. Webber, the chief engineer, wasn't happy with the lack of progress on the project, which was budgeted at one hundred thousand dollars with no wartime cost-plus, either.
Devon glanced over the beautifully arranged array of dials and indicators on the viewing panel. He checked the mounting of the scanner tube.
Something was wrong. Then he saw it — so obvious that he'd had to look three times in the same spot before it registered. There was an extra row of instruments on the viewing panel. He stared at them and swore to himself. Why couldn't they follow a blueprint down in the model shop?
What he saw was incomprehensible. On the unscheduled row of meters was the designation: Prognostication.
Groups of dials with variable time scales indicated pressure, temperature, and relative humidity, and precipitation rates.
Brian Kennely came up quietly. "Nice job on yours, too," he said. "Tried it out yet?"
"Some yokel down there is trying to be funny! Look —"
"So you did put in a forecast unit! I didn't know."
"Of course not! There isn't any such animal. Somebody's painted a panel and put some dials on it. I can take a joke, but they've loused up the whole layout and Webber wants this stuff by the end of the week."
" Mine works," said Kennely, calmly drawing on his pipe.