"Please. I'll hold on."
Mike the Angel barely made it in time. He went to the door that led to
his office, opened it, stepped through, and closed it behind him just as
the blast went off.
The door shuddered behind Mike, but it didn't give. Mike's apartment was
reasonably soundproof, but it wasn't built to take the kind of explosion
that would shake the door that Mike the Angel had just closed. It was a
two-inch-thick slab of armor steel on heavy, precision-bearing hinges.
So was every other door in the suite. It wasn't quite a bank-vault door,
but it would do. Any explosion that could shake it was a real doozy.
Mike the Angel spun around and looked at the door. It was just a trifle
warped, and faint tendrils of vapor were curling around the edge where
the seal had been broken. Mike sniffed, then turned and ran. He opened a
drawer in his desk and took out a big roll of electrostatic tape. Then
he took a deep breath, went back to the door, and slapped on a strip of
the one-inch tape, running it all around the edge of the door. Then he
went into the outer office while the air conditioners cleaned out his
private office.
He went over to one of the phones near the autofile and punched for the
operator. "I had a long-distance call coming in here from the Right
Excellent Basil Wallingford, Minister for Spatial Affairs, Capitol City.
We were cut off."
"One moment please." A slight pause. "His Excellency is here, Mr.
Gabriel."
Wallingford's face came back on the screen. It had lost some of its
ruddiness. "What happened?" he asked.
"You tell me, Wally," Mike snapped. "Did you see anything at all?"
"All I saw was that big pane of glass break. It fell into a thousand
pieces, and then something exploded and the phone went dead."
"The glass broke first?"
"That's right."
Mike sighed. "Good. I was afraid that maybe someone had planted that
bomb, rather than fired it in. I'd hate to think anyone could get into
my place without my knowing it."
"Who's gunning for you?"
"I wish I knew. Look, Wally, can you wait until tomorrow for those
specs? I want to get hold of the police."
"Certainly. Nothing urgent. It can wait. I'll call you again tomorrow
evening." The screen blanked.
Mike glanced at the wall clock and then punched a number on the phone. A
pretty girl in a blue uniform came on the screen.
"Police Central," she said. "May I help you?"
"I'd like to speak to Detective Sergeant William Cowder, please," Mike
said. "Just tell him that Mr. Gabriel has more problems."
She looked puzzled, but she nodded, and pretty soon her image blanked
out. The screen stayed blank, but Sergeant Cowder's voice came over the
speaker. "What is it, Mr. Gabriel?"
He was evidently speaking from a pocket phone.
"Attempted murder," said Mike the Angel. "A few minutes ago a bomb was
set off in my apartment. I think it was a rocket, and I know it was
heavily laced with hydrogen cyanide. That's Suite 5000, Timmins
Building, up on 112th Street. I called you because I have a hunch it's
connected with the incident at Harry's earlier this evening."
"Timmins Building, eh? I'll be right up."
Cowder cut off with a sharp click, and Mike the Angel looked quizzically
at the dead screen. Was he imagining things, or was there a peculiar
note in Cowder's voice?
Two minutes later he got his answer.
5
Mike the Angel was sitting behind his desk in his private office when
the announcer chimed. Mike narrowed his eyes and turned on his door
screen, which connected with an eye in the outer door of the suite. Who
could it be this time?
It was Sergeant Cowder.
"You got here fast," said Mike, thumbing the unlocker. "Come on back to
my office."
The sergeant came through the outer office while Mike watched him on the
screen. Not until the officer finally pushed open the door to Mike's own
office did Mike the Angel look up from the screen.
"I repeat," said Mike, "you got here fast."
"I wasn't far away," said Cowder. "Where's the damage?"
Mike jerked a thumb toward the door to his apartment, still sealed with
tape. "In there."
"Have you been back in there yet?"
"Nope," said Mike. "I didn't want to disturb anything. I figured maybe
your lab boys could tell where the rocket came from."
"What happened?" the cop asked.
Mike told him, omitting nothing except the details of his conversation
with Wallingford.
"The way I see it," he finished, "whoever it was phoned me to make sure
I was in the room and then went out and fired a rocket at my window."
"What makes you think it was a JD?" Cowder asked.
"Well, Sergeant, if I were going to do the job, I'd put my launcher in
some place where I could see that my victim was inside, without having
to call him. But if I couldn't do that, I'd aim the launcher and set it
to fire by remote control. Then I'd go to the phone, call him, and fire
the rocket while he was on the phone. I'd be sure of getting him that
way. The way it was done smacks of a kid's trick."
Cowder looked at the door. "Think we can go in there now? The HCN ought
to have cleared out by now."
Mike stood up from behind his desk. "I imagine it's pretty clear. I
checked the air conditioners; they're still working, and the filters are
efficient enough to take care of an awful lot of hydrogen cyanide.
Besides, the window is open. But--shouldn't we wait for the lab men?"
Cowder shook his head. "Not necessary. They'll be up in a few minutes,
but they'll probably just confirm what we already know. Peel that tape
off, will you?"
Mike took his ionizer from the top of the desk, walked over to the door,
and began running it over the tape. It fell off and slithered to the
floor. As he worked, he said:
"You think you know where the rocket was fired from?"
"Almost positive," said Cowder. "We got a call a few minutes back from
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine."
The last of the tape fell off, and Mike opened the door. It didn't work
easily, but it did open. The odor of bitter almonds was so faint that it
might actually have been imagination.
Cowder pointed out the shattered window at the gray spire of the
cathedral. "There's your launching site. We don't know how they got up
there, but they managed."
"They?"
"Two of them. When they tried to leave, a couple of priests and two
officers of the Cathedral Police spotted them. The kids dropped their
launcher and two unfired rockets, and then tried to run for it. Result:
one dead kid, one getaway. One of the cops got a bad gash on his arm
from a vibroblade, and one of the priests got it in the abdomen. He'll
live, but he's in bad shape."
Mike said something under his breath that might have been an oath,
except that it avoided all mention of the Deity. Then he added that
Name, in a different tone of voice.
"I agree," said Cowder. "You think you know why they did it?"
Mike looked around at his apartment. At first glance it appeared to be a
total loss, but closer inspection showed that most of the damage had
been restricted to glass and ceramics. The furniture had been tumbled
around but not badly damaged. The war head of the rocket had evidently
been of the concussion-and-gas type, without much fragmentation.
"I think I know why, yes," Mike said, turning back to the sergeant. "I
had a funny feeling all the way home from Harry's. Nothing I could lay
my finger on, really. I tried to see if I was being followed, but I
didn't spot anyone. There were plenty of kids on the subway.
"It's my guess that the kids knew who I was. If they cased Harry's as
thoroughly as it seems they did, they must have seen me go in and out
several times. They knew that it was my fault that two of their members
got picked up, so they decided to teach me a lesson. One of them must
have come up here, even before I left Harry's. The other followed me,
just to make sure I was really coming home. Since he knew where I was
going, he didn't have to stick too close, so I didn't spot him in the
crowd. He might even have gone on up to 116th Street so that I wouldn't
see him get off at 110th."
"Sounds reasonable," Cowder agreed. "We know who the kids are. The
uniformed squads are rounding up the whole bunch for questioning. They
call themselves--you'll get a laugh out of this!--they call themselves
the Rocketeers."
"I'm fracturing my funny bone," said Mike the Angel. "The thing that
gets me is this revenge business, though. Kids don't usually go that far
out for fellow gang members."
"Not usually," the sergeant said, "but this is a little different. The
girl you caught and the boy who got killed over at the cathedral are
brother and sister."
"That explains it," Mike said. "Rough family, eh?"
Sergeant Cowder shook his head. "Not really. The parents are respectable
and fairly well off. Larchmont's the name. The kids are Susan and
Herbert--Sue and Bert to you. Bert's sixteen, Sue's seventeen. They were
pretty thick, I gather: real brother and sister team."
"Good family, bad kids," Mike muttered. He had wandered over to the wall
to look at his Dali. It had fallen to the floor, but it wasn't hurt. The
Valois was bent, but it could be fixed up easily enough.
"I wonder," Mike said, picking up the head of a smashed figurine and
looking at it. "I wonder if the so-called sociologists have any
explanation for it?"
"Sure," Cowder said. "Same one they've been giving for more decades than
I'd care to think of. The mother was married before. Divorced her
husband, married Larchmont. But she had a boy by her first husband."
"Broken home and sibling rivalry? _Pfui!_ And if it wasn't that, the
sociologists would find another excuse," Mike said angrily.
"Funny thing is that the older half brother was a perfectly respectable
kid. Made good grades in school, joined the Space Service, has a
perfectly clean record. And yet _he_ was the product of the broken home,
not the two younger kids."
Mike laughed dryly. "_That_ ought to be food for high sociological
thought."
The door announcer chimed again, and Cowder said: "That's probably the
lab boys. I told them to come over here as soon as they could finish up
at the cathedral."
Mike checked his screen and when Cowder identified the men at the door,
Mike let them in.
The short, chubby man in the lead, who was introduced as Perkins, spoke
to Sergeant Cowder first. "We checked one of those rockets. Almost a
professional job. TNT war head, surrounded by a jacket filled with
liquid HCN and a phosphate inhibitor to prevent polymerization. Nasty
things." He swung round to Mike. "You're lucky you weren't in the room,
or you'd just be part of the wreckage, Mr. Gabriel."
"I know," said Mike the Angel. "Well, the room's all yours. It probably
won't tell you much."
"Probably not," said Perkins, "but we'll see. Come on, boys."
Mike the Angel tapped Cowder on the shoulder. "I'd like to talk to you
for a minute."
Cowder nodded, and Mike led the way back into his private office. He
opened his desk drawer and took out the little pack that housed the
workings of the vibroblade shield.
"That accident you were talking about, Sergeant--the one that made those
vibroblades blow, remember? I got to thinking that maybe this could have
caused it. I think that with a little more power, it might even vaporize
a high-speed bullet. But I'd advise you to wear asbestos clothing."
Cowder took the thing and looked at it. "Thanks, Mr. Gabriel," he said
honestly. "Maybe the kids will go on to using something else if
vibroblades don't work, but I think I'd prefer a rocket in the head to
being carved by a vibro."
"To be honest," Mike said, "I think the vibro is just a fad among the
JD's now, anyway. You know--if you're one of the real biggies, you carry
a vibro. A year from now, it might be shock guns, but right now you're
chicken if you carry anything but a vibroblade."
Cowder dropped the shield generator into his coat pocket. "Thanks again,
Mr. Gabriel. We'll do you a favor sometime."
6
The firm of M. R. GABRIEL, POWER DESIGN was not a giant corporation, but
it did pretty well for a one-man show. The outer office was a gantlet
that Mike the Angel had to run when he came in the next morning after
having spent the night at a hotel. There was a mixed and ragged chorus
of "Good morning, Mr. Gabriel" as he passed through. Mike gave the nod
to each of them and was stopped four times for small details before he
finally made his way to his own office.
His secretary was waiting for him. She was short, bony, and plain of
face. She had a figure like an ironing board and the soul of a Ramsden
calculator. Mike the Angel liked her that way; it avoided complications.
"Good morning, Mr. Gabriel," she said. "What the hell happened here?"
She waved at the warped door and the ribbons of electrostatic tape that
still lay in curls on the floor.
Mike told her, and she listened to his recitation without any change of
expression. "I'm very glad you weren't hurt," she said when he had
finished. "What are you going to do about the apartment?"
Mike opened the heavy door and looked at the wreckage inside. Through
the gaping hole of the shattered window, he could see the towering
spires of the two-hundred-year-old Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
"Get Larry Beasley on the phone, Helen. I've forgotten his number, but
you'll find him listed under 'Interior Decorators.' He has the original
plans and designs on file. Tell him to get them out; I want this place
fixed up just like it was."
"But what if someone else...." She gestured toward the broken window and
the cathedral spires beyond.
"When you're through talking to Beasley," Mike went on, "see if you can
get Bishop Brennan on the phone and switch him to my desk."
"Yes, sir," she said.
Within two hours workmen were busily cleaning up the wreckage in Mike
the Angel's apartment, and the round, plump figure of Larry Beasley was
walking around pompously while his artistic but businesslike brain made
estimates. Mike had also reached an agreement with the bishop whereby
special vaultlike doors would be fitted into the stairwells leading up
to the towers at Mike's expense. They were to have facings of bronze so
that they could be decorated to blend with the Gothic decor of the
church, but the bronze would be backed by heavy steel. Nobody would blow
_those_ down in a hurry.
Since the wrecked living room was a flurry of activity and his office
had become a thoroughfare, Mike the Angel retired to his bedroom to
think. He took with him the microcryotron stack he had picked up at Old
Harry's the night before.
"For something that doesn't look like much," he said aloud to the
stack, "you have caused me a hell of a lot of trouble."
Old Harry, he knew, wouldn't be caught dead selling the things. In the
first place, it was strictly illegal to deal in the components of
robotic brains. In the second place, they were so difficult to get, even
on the black market, that the few that came into Old Harry's hands went
into the defenses of his own shop. Mike the Angel had only wanted to
borrow one to take a good look at it. He had read up on all the
literature about microcryotrons, but he'd never actually seen one
before.
He had reason to be curious about microcryotrons. There was something
definitely screwy going on in Antarctica.
Nearly two years before, the UN Government, in the person of Minister
Wallingford himself, had asked Mike's firm--which meant Mike the Angel
himself--to design the power drive and the thrust converters for a
spaceship. On the face of it, there was nothing at all unusual in that.
Such jobs were routine for M. R. Gabriel.
But when the specifications arrived, Mike the Angel had begun to wonder
what the devil was going on. The spaceship _William Branchell_ was to be
built on the surface of Earth--and yet it was to be a much larger ship
than any that had ever before been built on the ground. Usually, an
interstellar vessel that large was built in orbit around the Earth,
where the designers didn't have to worry about gravitational pull. Such
a ship never landed, any more than an ocean liner was ever beached--not
on purpose, anyway. The passengers and cargo were taken up by smaller
vessels and brought down the same way when the liner arrived at her
destination.
Aside from the tremendous energy required to lift such a vessel free of
a planet's surface, there was also the magnetic field of the planet to
consider. The drive tubes tended to wander and become erratic if they
were forced to cut through the magnetic field of a planet.
Therefore, Question One: Why wasn't the _Branchell_ being built in
space?
Part of the answer, Mike knew, lay in the specifications for the
construction of Cargo Hold One. For one thing, it was huge. For another,
it was heavily insulated. For a third, it was built like a tank for
holding liquids. All very well and good; possibly someone wanted to
carry a cargo of cold lemonade or iced tea. That would be pretty stupid,
maybe, but it wouldn't be mysterious.
The mystery lay in the fact that Cargo Hold One had _already been
built_. The _Branchell_ was to be built _around_ it! And that didn't
exactly jibe with Mike the Angel's ideas of the proper way to build a
spaceship. It was not quite the same as building a seagoing vessel
around an oil tank in the middle of Texas, but it was close enough to
bother Mike the Angel.
Therefore, Question Two: Why was the _Branchell_ being built around
Cargo Hold One?
Which led to Question Three: What was _in_ Cargo Hold One?
For the answer to that question, he had one very good hint. The density
of the contents of Cargo Hold One was listed in the specs as being
one-point-seven-two-six grams per cubic centimeter. And that, Mike
happened to know, was the density of a cryotronic brain, which is 90 per
cent liquid helium and 10 per cent tantalum and niobium, by volume.
He looked at the microcryotron stack in his hand. It was a
one-hundred-kilounit stack. The possible connections within it were
factorial one hundred thousand. All it needed was to be immersed in its
bath of liquid helium to make the metals superconducting, and it would
be ready to go to work.
A friend of his who worked for Computer Corporation of Earth had built a
robot once, using just such a stack. The robot was designed to play
poker. He had fed in all the rules of play and added all the data from
Oesterveldt's _On Poker_. It took Mike the Angel exactly one hour to
figure out how to beat it.
As long as Mike played rationally, the machine had a slight edge, since
it had a perfect memory and could compute faster than Mike could. But it
would not, could not learn how to bluff. As soon as Mike started
bluffing, the robot went into a tizzy.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the robot had known nothing whatever
about bluffing. That would have made it easy for Mike. All he'd have had
to do was keep on feeding in chips until the robot folded.
But the robot _did_ know about bluffing. The trouble is that bluffing is
essentially illogical, and the robot had no rules whatsoever to go by to
judge whether Mike was bluffing or not. It finally decided to make its
decisions by chance, judging by Mike's past performance at bluffing.
When it did, Mike quit bluffing and cleaned it out fast.
That caused such utter confusion in the random circuits that Mike's
friend had had to spend a week cleaning up the robot's little mind.
But what would be the purpose of building a brain as gigantic as the one
in Cargo Hold One? And why build a spaceship around it?
Like a pig roasting on an automatic spit, the problem kept turning over
and over in Mike's mind. And, like the roasting pig, the time eventually
came when it was done.
Once it is set in operation, a properly operating robot brain can
neither be shut off nor dismantled. Not, that is, unless you want to
lose all of the data and processes you've fed into it.
Now, suppose the Computer Corporation of Earth had built a giant-sized
brain. (Never mind _why_--just suppose.) And suppose they wanted to take
it off Earth, but didn't want to lose all the data that had been pumped
into it. (Again, never mind _why_--just suppose.)
Very well, then. _If_ such a brain had been built, and _if_ it was
necessary to take it off Earth, and _if_ the data in it was so precious
that the brain could not be shut off or dismantled, _then_ the thing to
do would be to build a ship around it.
Oh _yeah_?
Mike the Angel stared at the microcryotron stack and asked:
"Now, tell me, pal, just why would anyone want a brain that big? And
what is so blasted important about it?"
The stack said not a word.
The phone chimed. Mike the Angel thumbed the switch, and his secretary's
face appeared on the screen. "Minister Wallingford is on the line, Mr.
Gabriel."
"Put him on," said Mike the Angel.
Basil Wallingford's ruddy face came on. "I see you're still alive," he
said. "What in the bloody blazes happened last night?"
Mike sighed and told him. "In other words," he ended up, "just the usual
sort of JD stuff we have to put up with these days. Nothing new, and
nothing to worry about."
"You almost got killed," Wallingford pointed out.
"A miss is as good as a mile," Mike said with cheerful inanity. "Thanks
to your phone call, I was as safe as if I'd been in my own home," he
added with utter illogic.
"You can afford to laugh," Wallingford said grimly. "I can't. I've
already lost one man."