The next afternoon, Lewis called me at the office.
“Where’d you get that thing?” he asked.
“Found it,” I said.
“Have any idea what it is?”
“Nope,” I told him cheerfully. “That’s why I gave it to you.”
“It’s powered in some way and it’s meant to measure something. That depression in the side must be a gauge. Colour seems to be used as an indicator. At any rate, the colour line in the depression keeps changing all the time. Not much, but enough so you can say there’s some change.”
“Next thing is to find out what it’s measuring.”
“Joe, do you know where you can get another of them?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s this way,” he said. “We’d like to get into this one, to see what makes it tick, but we can’t find any way to open it. We could break into it, probably, but we’re afraid to do that. We might damage it. Or it might explode. If we had another …”