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"Got it, skipper," Arv said tersely. "It'll take overtime to set up the job in the plastics department. But we ought to be rolling out the sheeting Tuesday." "That's swell, Arv! Thanks!" By midmorning Tuesday, Tom had his quality analyzer sonar completed and was showing Bud how the units worked. "Boy, it looks simple enough the way you explain it, prof!" Bud said admiringly.
"We decided that they were probably sonar equipment of some type," Scotty said. "But we couldn't figure out what they were for." "Easy," Steve said. "Although you couldn't know, of course. They were for spotting submarines." Rick stared. Submarines? Steve saw his look of bewilderment. "It happens that our new atomic-powered submarines are conducting manuevers in this area. Does that help?"
Besides his mask, electronic breathing device, density-control unit, and ion drive, the wearer would now need at least three major additions first, sonar-blinding equipment with electronic control; second, amplifying equipment to camouflage the wearer's noise under water; and, third, a portable quality analyzer sonar. "Whew! The miniaturizing job alone will be a king-sized headache!"
"What's not absorbed will return as an echo. I'm also going to modify our receivers. But I've still not worked that out." Bud nodded, his forehead puckered in a look of concentration. "So ?" "So our sonar picks up all that hash, and by means of a computer setup filters out the sub's real echo from the shadow reflections." "Hey! Sounds pretty cute," Bud said. Tom broke into a dry chuckle.
Tom awoke the next morning feeling entirely refreshed, and after a hearty breakfast, hurried off to the plant. Here he plunged into work on his quality analyzer sonar. Much of the circuitry was assigned to the electronics department. The finished boards and sub-assemblies were fed back to Tom in his private laboratory. He himself assembled the major units.
We absorb all sonar impulses that hit the ship and transmit them out the opposite side of the hull, instead of letting a ping bounce back and show up on the sonarscope of any hostile sub on the lookout for us." Most of the job, he went on, would be tedious detail work. It would consist of attaching hundreds of mikes and speakers all over the hull to pick up and transmit the sonar pulses.
By machine-spacing the transmitting and the receiving transducers as closely together as possible, with minimum clearance, the plastic coating could do an even better job of absorbing sonar pings than the hand-rigged model. "And the leads from all the transducers can be combined into a single flat tape," Tom ended. "That'll make it simple to hook up with the electronic control unit inside."
It would be necessary to spot the receivers and transmitters all over the hull of the submarine. An invisible sub one that sonar pulses would seem to pass right through, as if nothing were there! "Seems so simple now that I have the key!" Tom said to himself elatedly.
Most important at the moment, the vitamin would be a great boon in carrying out search and digging operations for the Jupiter prober. With fresh enthusiasm, Tom returned to his laboratory to work on the new sonar gear. In his own mind, he had already named it a "quality analyzer sonar," since that exactly described the way it would function.
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