"It's all right, Mike!" I yelled across his screaming. "It's off now!"
"No! No! No!" he gibbered. "They're coming through the helmet! Take it
away! Take it away!"
I knew I had to get that helmet off, much as I didn't like getting near
him. I reached for the buckle, but he kept whipping his head about so I
had trouble catching it and had to bend over him.
Suddenly a long arm snaked around my neck and jerked me off balance.
Then a ham-sized fist clipped my chin before I could even get my guard
up.
* * * * *
When I came to I was in the cushions with the air turned on full. The
release valve wasn't in my hand where it should have been.
"Mike!" I yelled.
He put his tongue between his lips and made a rude noise. He was
patching the rubberized fabric of the other set of cushions, the ones
in which he had been confined, and on his face was that wild look I had
seen before when a good brawl was in prospect.
"Mike!" I pleaded. "You can't do this to me!"
"No? If Polly hadn't reminded me of this I'd be in there yet."
He held up the shamrock good luck pin Polly had given him, a little
thing he kept pinned to his coveralls at all times. He had managed to
unfasten it and puncture the pneumatic cushions.
But I had no good luck pin. I lay there helpless with all the stories
I'd ever heard about the supernormal cleverness of lunatics running
through my brain. I knew it would be three days, maybe four, before
Bill returned. No chance of help from him.
Mike opened the Hustic case, whistling off key as he moved around,
and replaced the original bar and tube shield and condenser with his
homemade parts. Then he got to work on the bar with my delicate and
expensive set of instrument files ruining them completely on the soft
copper alloy.
"Be quiet, lunatic!" he barked every time I protested.
He spent hours filing on that bar, putting on the helmet and testing,
then filing some more. And there was absolutely nothing I could do. He
had so much air pressure in my cushions I couldn't even squirm.
At last he tested once more, and this time snapped the set off almost
at once with a smile of satisfaction.
Next he started tracing the secondary power circuits, but he didn't
get very far. Every time the Professor had come up with a new idea we
had rewired the _Banshee_, running new leads through the bulkheads but
leaving the old circuits in place. The original wiring diagrams were
nothing but propaganda by now, with the up-to-date dope all in my head
and Bill's.
I must have been getting hysterical from being pinned there so
helplessly with a lunatic at large, for when he got into the metal
rat's nest behind the meter panel I laughed. Then I wished I hadn't.
"Swede," he said earnestly. "I want to double the voltage and step up
the amperage by eight on the direct current. I want the frequency of
the AC boosted to at least 850 cycles, and I need at least two thousand
ehrenhafts on the magnetic flux leads."