Sandy, long since safe at the hangar, began to work out his puzzle.
“Somebody was in this hangar the day Jeff made his pretended forced landing,” he told himself. “We saw him. It wasn’t a mistake. We all saw him and that proves he wasn’t just a trick of light in the hangar.”
More than that, he deduced, the man had vanished and yet, after he was gone, there had come that unexpected descent of the rolling door which had first made them think themselves trapped. Sandy argued, and with good common sense, that a ghost, in broad sunny daylight, was a silly way to account for the man. He also felt that it was equally unjust to credit the drop of the door to gravity. Friction drums are not designed to allow the ropes on them to slip, especially if there is no jolt or jar to shake them.
“But the switches that control the motor for the drum are right out on the wall in plain sight,” he told himself, moving over toward them, since the rolling door was left wide open when the amphibian was taken out. “Yes, here they all are—this one up for lifting the door, and down to drop it. And that switch was in the neutral—‘off’—position when we were first here—and it’s in neutral now.”
He tapped the metal with the rubber end of his fountain pan and then shook its vulcanite grip-handle, to see if jarring it caused any possible particles of wire or of metal to make a contact.
“That’s not the way it’s done,” he decided.
He stood before the small switch panel, considering the problem.
His eyes, in that position, were almost on a level with the pole-pieces to which wires were joined to enable the switch metal, when thrust between the flat pole contacts, to make contact and complete the electrical circuit.
“Hm-m-m-m!” Sandy emitted a long, reflective exclamation.
“I never saw double wires—and twisted around each other, at that,” he remarked under his breath. “No—I’m not quite right. The two wires aren’t twisted around each other. One wire is twined around the other.”