Word: alarming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...intense heat and smoke, but half a dozen other technicians, some wearing face masks and asbestos gloves, raced to help. One or two would try to wrench open the hatch, then fall back from the scorching heat while others struggled with it. Six minutes after the cry of alarm, the hatch sprang open. A blast of hot air shot out, followed by suffocating clouds of smoke...
...subject for four fervent minutes, devoting more detail to the subject than any other single item except the war. He outlined a "Safe Streets and Crime Control Act" that would offer federal grants to local governments to help pay for statewide "master plan" crime control, new communications and alarm systems, new crime laboratories and police academies. The President also surprised Congress with a proposal to combine in a single Department of Business and Labor the interrelated and often overlapping functions of the less than potent Commerce and Labor Departments. Though the plan had enthusiastic backing from both Commerce Secretary John...
...gang members were vocationally talented; they drilled 48 holes to remove a panel in a stout oak door of the Dulwich College museum without tripping an alarm attached to the frame. Their taste in art was impeccable; they snatched eight old masters worth some $7,000,000, including three Rembrandts (among them the widely admired A Girl at a Window). What they had not figured out was who would pay them for their night's work. The college was heavily in debt, and in no position to afford a ransom. None of the works were insured, a fact that...
...augmented by such modern escape foilers as "electronic proximity detectors" installed atop prison walls and "Geophone Vibration detectors" buried outside to pick up the first errant footfall. Another gadget that appealed to the committee would virtually turn every cell into a weighing machine rigged to set off an alarm when a prisoner's poundage is missing...
...also overbearing. Like a TV situation-comedy writer, Lodge tailors his story and his characters to fit a loose collection of gags. The suspicion rises that he thought up the gags first. It is funny, of course, to see firemen swarm through the museum library on a false alarm, hosing down the stray scholar's pipe. But they are dispossessed figures like TV actors left standing on the studio stage while the scenery is being shifted for the next guffaw-in full view of the camera...