"You know which one of these bins is nearest to your main control cable.
Start looking. See if you find anything queer."
Old Harry walked over to a nearby bin, pulled it open, and looked
inside. He closed it, pulled open another. He found the gadget on the
third try. It was a plastic case, six by six by eight, and it still
smelled of hot insulation, although the case itself was barely warm.
"What is it?" Harry asked in wonder.
"It's the gizmo that turned your equipment off. When I passed by it, my
own gadget must have blown it. I knew the police couldn't have made it
here between the time of the fight and the time they showed up. They
must have had at least an extra minute. Besides, I didn't think anyone
could build an instrument that would blank out everything at long range.
It had to be something near your main cable. I think you'll find a
metallic oscillator in there. Analyze it. Might be useful."
Harry turned the box over in his hands. "Probably has a timer in it to
start it.... Well.... That helps."
"What do you mean?"
"I've got a pretty good idea who put it here. Older kid. Nineteen--maybe
twenty. Seemed like a nice lad, too. Didn't take him for a JD. Can't
trust anyone these days. Thanks, Mike. If I find anything new in here,
I'll let you know."
"Do that," said Mike the Angel. "And, as a personal favor, I'll show you
how to build my own super-duper, extra-special, anti-vibroblade defense
unit."
Old Harry grinned, crinkling up his wizened face in a mass of fine
wrinkles. "You'd better think up a shorter name than that for it,
laddie; I could probably build one in less time than it takes you to say
it."
"Want to bet?"
"I'll bet you twenty I can do it in twenty-four hours."
"Twenty it is, Harry. I'll sell you mine this time tomorrow for twenty
bucks."
Harry shook his head. "I'll trade you mine for yours, plus twenty." Then
his eyes twinkled. "And speaking of money, didn't you come down here to
buy something?"
Mike the Angel laughed. "You're not going to like it. I came down to get
a dozen plastic-core resistors."
"What size?"
Mike told him, and Old Harry went over to the proper bin, pulled them
out, all properly boxed, and handed them to him.
"That'll be four dollars," he said.
Mike the Angel paid up with a smile. "You don't happen to have a
hundred-thousand-unit microcryotron stack, do you?"
"Ain't s'posed to," said Harry MacDougal. "If I did, I wouldn't sell it
to you. But, as a matter of cold fact, I do happen to have one. Use it
for a paperweight. I'll give it to you for nothing, because it don't
work, anyhow."
"Maybe I can fix it," said Mike the Angel, "as long as you're giving it
to me. How come it doesn't work?"
"Just a second, laddie," said Harry. He scuttled to the rear of the shop
and came back with a ready-wrapped package measuring five by five by
four. He handed it to Mike the Angel and said: "It's a present. Thanks
for helping me out of a tight spot."
Mike said something deprecative of his own efforts and took the package.
If it were in working order it would have been worth close to three
hundred dollars--more than that on the black market. If it was broken,
though, it was no good to Mike. A microcryotron unit is almost
impossible to fix if it breaks down. But Mike took it because he didn't
want to hurt Old Harry's feelings by refusing a present.
"Thanks, Harry," he said. "Happen to know why it doesn't work?"
Harry's face crinkled again in his all-over smile. "Sure, Mike. It ain't
plugged in."
4
Mike the Angel did not believe in commuting. Being a bachelor, he could
afford to indulge in that belief. In his suite of offices on 112th
Street, there was one door marked "M. R. Gabriel." Behind that door was
his private secretary's office, which acted as an effective barrier
between himself and the various employees of the firm. Behind the
secretary's office was his own office.
There was still another door in his inner office, a plain, unmarked door
that looked as though it might conceal a closet.
It didn't. It was the door to a veddy, veddy expensive apartment with
equally expensive appointments. One wall, thirty feet long and ten feet
high, was a nearly invisible, dustproof slab of polished, optically flat
glass that gave the observer the feeling that there was nothing between
him and the city street, five hundred feet below.
The lights of the city, coming through the wall, gave the room plenty of
illumination after sunset, but the simple flick of a switch could
polarize it black, allowing perfect privacy.
The furniture was massive, heavily braced, and well upholstered. It had
to be; Mike the Angel liked to flop into chairs, and his two hundred and
sixty pounds gave chairs a lot of punishment.
On one of the opaque walls was Dali's original "Eucharist," with its
muffled, robed figures looking oddly luminous in the queer combination
of city lights and interior illumination. Farther back, a Valois gleamed
metallically above the shadowed bas-reliefs of its depths.
It was the kind of apartment Mike the Angel liked. He could sleep, if
necessary, on a park bench or in a trench, but he didn't see any reason
for doing so if he could sleep on a five-hundred-dollar floater.
As he had passed through each door, he had checked them carefully. His
electrokey had a special circuit that lighted up a tiny glow lamp in the
key handle if the lock had been tampered with. None of them had.
He opened the final door, went into his apartment, and locked the door
behind him, as he had locked the others. Then he turned on the lights,
peeled off his raincoat, and plopped himself into a chair to unwrap the
microcryotron stack he had picked up at Harry's.
Theoretically, Harry wasn't supposed to sell the things. They were still
difficult to make, and they were supposed to be used only by persons who
were authorized to build robot brains, since that's what the stack
was--a part of a robot brain. Mike could have put his hands on one
legally, provided he'd wanted to wait for six or eight months to clear
up the red tape. Actually, the big robotics companies didn't want
amateurs fooling around with robots; they'd much rather build the robots
themselves and rent them out. They couldn't make do-it-yourself projects
impossible, but they could make them difficult.
In a way, there was some good done. So far, the JD's hadn't gone into
big-scale robotics. Self-controlled bombs could be rather nasty.
Adult criminals, of course, already had them. But an adult criminal who
had the money to invest in robotic components, or went to the trouble to
steal them, had something more lucrative in mind than street fights or
robbing barrooms. To crack a bank, for instance, took a cleverly
constructed, well-designed robot and plenty of ingenuity on the part of
the operator.
Mike the Angel didn't want to make bombs or automatic bankrobbers; he
just wanted to fiddle with the stack, see what it would do. He turned it
over in his hands a couple of times, then shrugged, got up, went over to
his closet, and put the thing away. There wasn't anything he could do
with it until he'd bought a cryostat--a liquid helium refrigerator. A
cryotron functions only at temperatures near absolute zero.
The phone chimed.