's sleep and felt normal again. Over Doc Simpson's protests, he
insisted upon dressing and hurrying over to his laboratory.

Here he found his father working intently amid a jumble of mechanical
parts, tools, and electronic equipment. Nearby stood Exman with a panel
open in his upper body, exposing the controls and output equipment.

"Hi, Dad!" Tom exclaimed as he strode into the laboratory. "What's doing
with Ole Think Box?"

Mr. Swift looked up with a smile of relief. "'Morning, son! All well
again? That's wonderful! I'm just giving Exman an artificial speech
mechanism. He's already briefed us via the electronic brain on the
situation in Brungaria. But I thought it would be even better if he
could tell us in person."

Details on the earthquake plot, Mr. Swift went on, had already been
reported to the Defense Department. Tom's raid on Balala Island had
effectively blocked further quake attempts.

The Brungarian rebels had become enraged by their failure to extract
Exman's secrets, and had decided to disintegrate the robot creature and
its brain energy. But the youthful Brungarian loyalist group had kept
them so busy with resistance outbreaks that they had delayed too long.

"Lucky thing!" Tom put in with an affectionate grin at Exman. "If they
had started to destroy him half an hour sooner, it might have been
pretty sad for Ole Think Box!"

Tom was intrigued by his father's design for an artificial speech
mechanism. After talking it over, they decided that Tom would go to work
on a central computer device to integrate all the senses. He would also
provide Exman with "ears," which would be sound-reception equipment. Mr.
Swift, meanwhile, would continue work on the speech mechanism and also
perfect the seeing equipment he had started earlier.

The day sped by as the two Swifts worked with feverish intensity. Lunch
was eaten from their workbenches, but the inventors reluctantly halted
at dinnertime.

After a tasty meal of fried chicken at home with Mrs. Swift and Sandy,
both Toms returned to the plant. Father and son labored until well past
midnight on their experiments. Then they snatched a few hours of sleep
and resumed their tasks early the next morning.

By early afternoon an atmosphere of excitement pervaded Enterprises. The
visitor from Planet X would soon be able to communicate directly with
his earth friends! Bud, Chow, Hank Sterling, Arv Hanson, and Art
Wiltessa gathered in the laboratory, along with s