Free Tom Swift and His Giant Robot by Victor Appleton II

food and reminding him of the need to get a proper amount of rest. Tom accepted the advice with a polite smile—and politely ignored it.
    At three o’clock on the dot, Bud Barclay came banging on Tom’s laboratory door, with Sandy and Bashalli in tow. They were dressed in their bright tennis whites and had racquets in hand. Tom answered via the intercom on the wall by the door. "Come on in!"
    The three entered, surprised to find the lab in complete darkness. "Pull the door closed, will you?" called out Tom. They did so, and immediately the darkness was swept aside by arrays of tiny, intense colored lights clustered in two places across the room.
    "Is that the robot?" asked Sandy, her eyes not yet accustomed to the dimness.
    "Not robot," came Tom’s voice, switching on the overhead lights. "Robots!"
    Two identical giant robots stood side by side against the wall!
    "Oh!" cried Bashalli. "The machine has multiplied!"
    "And not only that, it’s grown a head!" observed Bud with a surprised laugh.
    Now assembled in final form, the two automatons were a spectacular, and somewhat eerie, sight to behold. They stood a hulking ten feet tall, almost brushing the ceiling, like dark suits of armor decked out with twin galaxies of tiny lights. Their arms and legs seemed disproportionately thick in comparison to their rounded torsos, giving them the appearance of overmuscled body-builders. Their hands sported three extra-long, triple-jointed fingers, with stubby ball-tipped "thumbs" at both ends of the contoured disks that served as palms. The double thumbs could close-in like a vice.
    But the most arresting features of the twin giant robots were their new heads. Though somewhat drum-shaped, the heads extended backwards a ways and were flattened on top and in front, the result resembling a futuristic computer monitor mounted on a flexible neck. There were circular domelike bulges in place of "ears," and slender crystalline rods extending forward in place of "eyes." There was even a sort of "mouth" in the form of a series of narrow vertical slots at the lower front of the heads, like a grillwork.
    "Look at that big mouth!" laughed Bashalli. "And will they provide snappy patter and witty sayings, like the robots do on television?"
    "Not this model, Bash," replied Tom. "Those slots are intake and exhaust vents for the cooling system."
    He young inventor spent several minutes explaining how the robots’ mechanical muscles worked, as he had to Bud the other day. Then he moved on to an account of the automatons’ sensory apparatus. "Those little domes on either side of the heads are radomes— transmitter-receivers for a mini radar system that allows the robots to map obstacles perfectly. And those two rods sticking out from the front—"
    "Lasers?" interjected Bud.
    "You’re close," Tom responded. "They’re multifrequency photon-drivers—you can think of them as the robots’ headlights. The special light they emit is mostly above and below the optical range, so we only see it as a faint glow inside the rods themselves. But it gives our guys unusually minute visual input, through small photo-receptors on their shoulders which constitute their real ‘eyes’—in stereo, too! They also have a sort of sense of touch—there are edge detectors and pressure sensors built into the hands and fingers."
    Tom now operated the control console and had one of the robots bow down. "They’re so tall it’s hard to see from our angle, but there’s a little stubby antenna on top of each head which links the internal relotrol to the control panel here. No cable is needed anymore, and I’m working up a handheld remote."
    "When did you make the second one, Tom?" Sandy inquired. "And which one is our stagestruck star Robo Boy?"
    "I’ve had a second body under construction all along, Sis," was Tom’s answer. "But there was no need to ship it along to the Citadel. As for which one is which—Robo Boy is on the left—I think." Tom laughed. "They’re