_Biography_
_Pope John XXIII: Pastoral Prince_
_Science Fiction_
_Unwise Child_
_Books by "Robert Randall"_
_The Shrouded Planet_
_The Dawning Light_
_"Robert Randall" is a pseudonym used on books written in collaboration
with Robert Silverberg._
With sincere appreciation,
this book is dedicated
to
TIM and NATALIE
who waited ...
and waited ...
and waited ...
and waited for it.
1
The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot of
ways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the Angel.
They'd done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the job
thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Their
mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angel
into account.
There is a section of New York's Manhattan Island, down on the lower
West Side, that has been known, for over a century, as "Radio Row." All
through this section are stores, large and small, where every kind of
electronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or designed
to order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye Quainte Olde
Elecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as vacuum-tube FM
radios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television sets. And, if you
want them, transmitters to match, so you can watch the antiques work.
Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the business
district, near West 112th Street--a very posh suite of rooms on the
fiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking the
two-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine. The glowing sign on the door of the suite said, very simply:
M. R. GABRIEL
POWER DESIGN
But, once or twice a week, Mike the Angel liked to take off and prowl
around Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn't work too
late, but, on this particular afternoon, he'd been in his office until
after six o'clock, working on some papers for the Interstellar
Commission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop left
open was Harry MacDougal's.
That didn't matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry's was the place
he had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal's establishment was
hardly more than a hole in the wall--a narrow, long hallway between two
larger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of Ye
Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of every
vintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn't been
manufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry's was
the place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled, filled
helter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of which would
have been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert and a
historian.
Old Harry didn't need labels or a system. He was a small, lean, bony,
sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of '37, landed
in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been
west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than
fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of a
robot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, and
he'd squint one eye closed, stare at the end of his nose with the other,
and say:
"An M-1993 thermodyne hexode, eh? Ah. Um. Aye, I got one. Picked it up a
couple years back. Put it-- Let ma see, now...."
And he'd go to his wall ladder, push it along that narrow hallway,
moving boxes aside as he went, and stop somewhere along the wall. Then
he'd scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, and
come out with the article in question. He'd blow the dust off it, polish
it with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: "Here 'tis. Thought I
had one. Let's go back in the back and give her a test."
On the other hand, if he didn't have what you wanted, he'd shake his
head just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: "What d'ye want it
for?" And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the piece
you wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something else
that would do the job as well or better.
In either case, he always insisted that the piece be tested. He refused
either to buy or sell something that didn't work. So you'd follow him
down that long hallway to the lab in the rear, where all the testing
equipment was. The lab, too, was cluttered, but in a different way. Out
front, the stuff was dead; back here, there was power coursing through
the ionic veins and metallic nerves of the half-living machines. Things
were labeled in neat, accurate script--not for Old Harry's benefit, but
for the edification of his customers, so they wouldn't put their fingers
in the wrong places. He never had to worry about whether his customers
knew enough to fend for themselves; a few minutes spent in talking was
enough to tell Harry whether a man knew enough about the science and art
of electronics and sub-electronics to be trusted in the lab. If you
didn't measure up, you didn't get invited to the lab, even to watch a
test.
But he had very few people like that; nobody came into Harry MacDougal's
place unless he was pretty sure of what he wanted and how he wanted to
use it.
On the other hand, there were very few men whom Harry would allow into
the lab unescorted. Mike the Angel was one of them.
Meet Mike the Angel. Full name: Michael Raphael Gabriel. (His mother had
tagged that on him at the time of his baptism, which had made his father
wince in anticipated compassion, but there had been nothing for him to
say--not in the middle of the ceremony.)
Naturally, he had been tagged "Mike the Angel." Six feet seven. Two
hundred sixty pounds. Thirty-four years of age. Hair: golden yellow.
Eyes: deep blue. Cash value of holdings: well into eight figures.
Credit: almost unlimited. Marital status: highly eligible, if the right
woman could tackle him.
Mike the Angel pushed open the door to Harry MacDougal's shop and took
off his hat to brush the raindrops from it. Farther uptown, the streets
were covered with clear plastic roofing, but that kind of comfort
stopped at Fifty-third Street.
There was no one in sight in the long, narrow store, so Mike the Angel
looked up at the ceiling, where he knew the eye was hidden.
"Harry?" he said.
"I see you, lad," said a voice from the air. "You got here just in time.
I'm closin' up. Lock the door, would ye?"
"Sure, Harry." Mike turned around, pressed the locking switch, and heard
it snap satisfactorily.
"Okay, Mike," said Harry MacDougal's voice. "Come on back. I hope ye
brought that bottle of scotch I asked for."
Mike the Angel made his way back between the towering tiers of bins as
he answered. "Sure did, Harry. When did I ever forget you?"
And, as he moved toward the rear of the store, Mike the Angel casually
reached into his coat pocket and triggered the switch of a small but
fantastically powerful mechanism that he always carried when he walked
the streets of New York at night.
He was headed straight into trouble, and he knew it. And he hoped he was
ready for it.
2
Mike the Angel kept his hand in his pocket, his thumb on a little plate
that was set in the side of the small mechanism that was concealed
therein. As he neared the door, the little plate began to vibrate,
making a buzz which could only be felt, not heard. Mike sighed to
himself. Vibroblades were all the rage this season.
He pushed open the rear door rapidly and stepped inside. It was just
what he'd expected. His eyes saw and his brain recorded the whole scene
in the fraction of a second before he moved. In that fraction of a
second, he took in the situation, appraised it, planned his strategy,
and launched into his plan of action.
Harry MacDougal was sitting at his workbench, near the controls of the
eye that watched the shop when he was in the lab. He was hunched over a
little, his small, bright eyes peering steadily at Mike the Angel from
beneath shaggy, silvered brows. There was no pleading in those
eyes--only confidence.
Next to Old Harry was a kid--sixteen, maybe seventeen. He had the JD
stamp on his face: a look of cold, hard arrogance that barely concealed
the uncertainty and fear beneath. One hand was at Harry's back, and
Mike knew that the kid was holding a vibroblade at the old man's spine.
At the same time, the buzzing against his thumb told Mike the Angel
something else. There was a vibroblade much nearer his body than the one
in the kid's hand.
That meant that there was another young punk behind him.
All this took Mike the Angel about one quarter of a second to
assimilate. Then he jumped.
Had the intruders been adults, Mike would have handled the entire
situation in a completely different way. Adults, unless they are
mentally or emotionally retarded, do not usually react or behave like
children. Adolescents can, do, and _must_--for the very simple reason
that they have not yet had time to learn to react as adults.
Had the intruders been adults, and had Mike the Angel behaved the way he
did, he might conceivably have died that night. As it was, the kids
never had a chance.
Mike didn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of the punk behind
him. He leaped, instead, straight for the kid in the dead-black suede
zipsuit who was holding the vibroblade against Harry MacDougal's spine.
And the kid reacted exactly as Mike the Angel had hoped, prayed, and
predicted he would.
The kid defended himself.
An adult, in a situation where he has one known enemy at his mercy and
is being attacked by a second, will quickly put the first out of the way
in order to leave himself free to deal with the second. There is no
sense in leaving your flank wide open just to oppose a frontal attack.
If the kid had been an adult, Harry MacDougal would have died there and
then. An adult would simply have slashed his vibroblade through the old
man's spine and brought it to bear on Mike the Angel.
But not the kid. He jumped back, eyes widening, to face his oncoming
opponent in an open space. He was no coward, that kid, and he knew how
to handle a vibroblade. In his own unwise, suicidal way, he was
perfectly capable of proving himself. He held out the point of that
shimmering metal shaft, ready to parry any offensive thrust that Mike
the Angel might make.
If Mike had had a vibroblade himself, and if there hadn't been another
punk at his back, Mike might have taken care of the kid that way. As it
was, he had no choice but to use another way.
He threw himself full on the point of the scintillating vibroblade.
A vibroblade is a nasty weapon. Originally designed as a surgeon's tool,
its special steel blade moves in and out of the heavy hilt at speeds
from two hundred to two thousand vibrations per second, depending on the
size and the use to which it is to be put. Make it eight inches long,
add serrated, diamond-pointed teeth, and you have the man-killing
vibroblade. Its danger is in its power; that shivering blade can cut
through flesh, cartilage, and bone with almost no effort. It's a knife
with power steering.
But that kind of power can be a weakness as well as a strength.
The little gadget that Mike the Angel carried did more than just detect
the nearby operation of a vibroblade. It was also a defense. The gadget
focused a high-density magnetic field on any vibroblade that came
anywhere within six inches of Mike's body.
In that field, the steel blade simply couldn't move. It was as though it
had been caught in a vise. The blade no longer vibrated; it had become
nothing more than an overly fancy bread knife.
The trouble was that the power unit in the heavy hilt simply wouldn't
accept the fact that the blade was immovable. That power unit was in
there to move something, and by heaven, _something_ had to move.
The hilt jerked and bucked in the kid's hand, taking skin with it. Then
it began to smoke and burn under the overload. The plastic shell cracked
and hot copper and silver splattered out of it. The kid screamed as the
molten metal burned his hand.
Mike the Angel put a hand against the kid's chest and shoved. As the boy
toppled backward, Mike turned to face the other boy.
Only it wasn't a boy.
She was wearing gold lip paint and had sprayed her hair blue, but she
knew how to handle a vibroblade at least as well as her boy friend had.
Just as Mike the Angel turned, she lunged forward, aiming for the small
of his back.
And she, too, screamed as she lost her blade in a flash of heat.
Then she grabbed for something in her pocket. Regretfully, Mike the
Angel brought the edge of his hand down against the side of her neck in
a paralyzing, but not deadly, rabbit punch. She dropped, senseless, and
a small gun spilled out of the waist pocket of her zipsuit and skittered
across the floor. Mike paused only long enough to make sure she was out,
then he turned back to his first opponent.
As he had anticipated, Harry MacDougal had taken charge. The kid was
sprawled flat on the floor, and Old Harry was holding a shock gun in his
hand.
Mike the Angel took a deep breath.
"Yer trousers are on fire," said Harry.
Mike yelped as he felt the heat, and he began slapping at the smoldering
spots where the molten metal from the vibroblades had hit his clothing.
He wasn't afire; modern clothing doesn't flame up--but it can get pretty
hot when you splash liquid copper on it.
"Damn!" said Mike the Angel. "New suit, too."
"You're a fast thinker, laddie," said Old Harry.
"You don't need to flatter me, Harry," said Mike the Angel. "When an old
teetotaler like you asks a man if he's brought some scotch, the man's a
fool if he doesn't know there's trouble afoot." He gave his leg a final
slap and said: "What happened? Are there any more of them?"
"Don't know. Might be." The old man waved at his control panel. "My
instruments are workin' again!" He gestured at the floor. "I'm nae sure
how they did it, but somehow they managed to blank out ma instruments
just long enough to get inside. Their mistake was in not lockin' the
front door."
Mike the Angel was busy searching the two unconscious kids. He looked
up. "Neither of them is carrying any equipment in their clothing--at
least, not anything that's self-powered. If they've got pickup circuits
built into the cloth, there must be more of them outside."
"Aye. Likely. We'll see."
Suddenly, there was a soft _ping! ping! ping!_ from an instrument on the
bench.
Harry glanced quickly at the receiving screen that was connected with
the multitude of eyes that were hidden around the area of his shop. Then
a smile came over his small brown face.
"Cops," he said. "Time they got here."
3
Sergeant Cowder looked the room over and took a drag from his cigarette.
"Well, that's that. Now--what happened?" He looked from Mike the Angel
to Harry MacDougal and back again. Both of them appeared to be thinking.
"All right," he said quietly, "let me guess, then."
Old Harry waved a hand. "Oh no, Sergeant; 'twon't be necessary. I think
Mr. Gabriel was just waiting for me to start, because he wasn't here
when the two rapscallions came in, and I was just tryin' to figure out
where to begin. We're not bein' unco-operative. Let's see now--" He
gazed at the ceiling as though trying to collect his thoughts. He knew
perfectly well that the police sergeant was recording everything he
said.
The sergeant sighed. "Look, Harry, you're not on trial. I know perfectly
well that you've got this place bugged to a fare-thee-well. So does
every shop operator on Radio Row. If you didn't, the JD gangs would have
cleaned you all out long ago."
Harry kept looking at the ceiling, and Mike the Angel smiled quietly at
his fingernails.
The detective sergeant sighed again. "Sure, we'd like to have some of
the gadgets that you and the other operators on the Row have worked out,
Harry. But I'm in no position to take 'em away from you. Besides, we
have some stuff that you'd like to have, too, so that makes us pretty
much even. If we started confiscating illegal equipment from you, the
JD's would swoop in here, take your legitimate equipment, bug it up, and
they'd be driving us all nuts within a week. So long as you don't use
illegal equipment illegally, the department will leave you alone."
Old Harry grinned. "Well, now, that's very nice of you, Sergeant. But I
don't have anything illegal--no robotics stuff or anything like that.
Oh, I'll admit I've a couple of eyes here and there to watch my shop,
but eyes aren't illegal."
The detective glanced around the room with a practiced eye and then
looked blandly back at the little Scotsman. Harry MacDougal was lying,
and the sergeant knew it. And Harry knew the sergeant knew it.
Sergeant Cowder sighed for a third time and looked at the Scot. "Okay.
So what happened?"
Harry's face became serious. "They came in about six-thirty. First I
knew of it, one of the kids--the boy--stepped out of that closet over
there and put a vibroblade at my back. I'd come back here to get a small
resistor, and all of a sudden there he was."
Mike the Angel frowned, but he didn't say anything.
"None of your equipment registered anything?" asked the detective.
"Not a thing, Sergeant," said Harry. "They've got something new, all
right. The kid must ha' come in through the back door, there. And I'd
ha' been willin' to bet ma life that no human bein' could ha' walked in
here without ma knowin' it before he got within ten feet o' that door.
Look."
He got up, walked over to the back door, and opened it. It opened into
what looked at first to be a totally dark room. Then the sergeant saw
that there was a dead-black wall a few feet from the open door.
"That's a light trap," said Harry. "Same as they have in photographic
darkrooms. To get from this door to the outer door that leads into the
alley, you got to turn two corners and walk about thirty feet. Even I,
masel', couldn't walk through it without settin' off half a dozen
alarms. Any kind of light would set off the bugs; so would the heat
radiation from the human body."
"How about the front?" Sergeant Cowder asked. "Anyone could get in from
the front."
Harry's grin became grim. "Not unless I go with 'em. And not even then
if I don't want 'em to."
"It was kind of you to let us in," said the detective mildly.
"A pleasure," said Harry. "But I wish I knew how that kid got in."
"Well, he did--somehow," Cowder said. "What happened after he came out
of the closet?"
"He made me let the girl in. They were goin' to open up the rear
completely and take my stuff out that way. They'd ha' done it, too, if
Mr. Gabriel hadn't come along."
Detective Sergeant Cowder looked at Mike the Angel. "About what time was
that, Mr. Gabriel?"
"About six thirty-five," Mike told him. "The kids probably hadn't been
here more than a few minutes."
Harry MacDougal nodded in silent corroboration.
"Then what happened?" asked the detective.
Mike told him a carefully edited version of what had occurred, leaving
out the existence of the little gadget he was carrying in his pocket.
The sergeant listened patiently and unbelievingly through the whole
recital. Mike the Angel grinned to himself; he knew what part of the
story seemed queer to the cop.
He was right. Cowder said: "Now, wait a minute. What caused those
vibroblades to burn up that way?"
"Must have been faulty," Mike the Angel said innocently.
"Both of them?" Sergeant Cowder asked skeptically. "At the same time?"
"Oh no. Thirty seconds apart, I'd guess."
"Very interesting. Very." He started to say something else, but a
uniformed officer stuck his head in through the doorway that led to the
front of the shop.
"We combed the whole area, Sergeant. Not a soul around. But from the
looks of the alley, there must have been a small truck parked in there
not too long ago."
Cowder nodded. "Makes sense. Those JD's wouldn't have tried this unless
they intended to take everything they could put their hands on, and they
certainly couldn't have put all this in their pockets." He rubbed one
big finger over the tip of his nose. "Okay, Barton, that's all. Take
those two kids to the hospital and book 'em in the detention ward. I
want to talk to them when they wake up."
The cop nodded and left.
Sergeant Cowder looked back at Harry. "Your alarm to the precinct
station went off at six thirty-six. I figure that whoever was on the
outside, in that truck, knew something had gone wrong as soon as the
fight started in here. He--or they--shut off whatever they were using to
suppress the alarm system and took off before we got here. They sure
must have moved fast."
"Must have," agreed Harry. "Is there anything else, Sergeant?"
Cowder shook his head. "Not right now. I'll get in touch with you later,
if I need you."
Harry and Mike the Angel followed him through the front of the shop to
the front door. At the door, Cowder turned.
"Well, good night. Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Gabriel. I wish some
of our cops had had your luck."
"How so?" asked Mike the Angel.
"If more vibroblades would blow up at opportune moments, we'd have fewer
butchered policemen."
Mike the Angel shook his head. "Not really. If their vibros started
burning out every time they came near a cop, the JD's would just start
using something else. You can't win in this game."
Cowder nodded glumly. "It's a losing proposition any way you look at
it.... Well, good night again." He stepped out, and Old Harry closed and
locked the door behind him.
Mike the Angel said: "Come on, Harry; I want to find something." He
began walking back down the long, narrow shop toward the rear again.
Harry followed, looking mystified.