Dr. Albert Demming was a blond massive man with startlingly blue eyes. As Chief Cybernetic Engineer it was not his duty to supervise an individual control installation personally; but General Biotics was something special.
He did not dwarf Thornton Henniger, Chief Steward of General Biotics. Henniger matched him in height and thickness of chest—and in instinctive dislike.
They stood on the narrow control room balcony with their backs to the windows that overlooked the thousand-acre plant. In the center of the chamber before them was the fifty-foot control central with its sterile glass walls. In the exact center of this chamber, amid the mass of machinery that it held, a platinum box no more than half a cubic foot in volume rested upon a supporting pedestal.
The men’s eyes were on that
