Von Liegnitz scooped the cards off the table and began shuffling them.
"Exactly. As long as Snookums gets his questions answered, he keeps
himself busy. Our young boot ensign has been assigned to the duty of
keeping that mechanical Peeping Tom out of our hair for an hour. By
then, it will be lunch time." He cleared his throat. "We still need a
fourth."
"If you ask me," said Lieutenant Keku, "we need a fifth. Let's play
poker instead."
Jakob von Liegnitz nodded and offered the cards for a cut.
"Deal 'em," said Mike the Angel.
A few minutes less than an hour later, Ensign Vaneski slid open the door
to the wardroom and was greeted by a triune chorus of hellos.
"Sirs," said Vaneski with pseudo formality, "I have done my duty,
exhausting as it was. I demand satisfaction."
Lieutenant Keku, upon seeing Mike the Angel dealt a second eight,
flipped over his up cards and folded.
"Satisfaction?" he asked the ensign.
Vaneski nodded. "One hand of showdown for five clams. I have been
playing encyclopedia for that hunk of animated machinery for an hour.
That's above and beyond the call of duty."
"Raise a half," said Mike the Angel.
"Call," said von Liegnitz.
"Three eights," said Mike, flipping his hole card.
Von Liegnitz shrugged, folded his cards, and watched solemnly while Mike
pulled in the pot.
"Vaneski wants to play showdown for a fiver," said Keku.
Mike the Angel frowned at the ensign for a moment, then relaxed and
nodded. "Not my game," he said, "but if the Answerman wants a chance to
catch up, it's okay with me."
The four men each tossed a five spot into the center of the table and
then cut for deal. Mike got it and started dealing--five cards, face up,
for the pot.
When three cards apiece had been dealt, young Vaneski was ahead with a
king high. On the fourth round he grinned when he got a second king and
Mike dealt himself an ace.
On the fifth round Vaneski got a three, and his face froze as Mike dealt
himself a second ace.
Mike reached for the twenty.
"You deal yourself a mean hand, Commander," said Vaneski evenly.
Mike glanced at him sharply, but there was only a wry grin on the young
ensign's face.
"Luck of the idiot," said Mike as he pocketed the twenty. "It's time for
lunch."
"Next time," said Keku firmly, "I'll take the Answerman watch, Mike. You
and this kraut are too lucky for me."
"If I lose any more to the Angel," von Liegnitz said calmly, "I will be
a very sour kraut. But right now, I'm quite hungry."
Mike prowled around the Power Section that afternoon with a worry
nagging at the back of his mind. He couldn't exactly put his finger on
what was bothering him, and he finally put it down to just plain nerves.
And then he began to feel something--physically.
Within thirty seconds after it began, long before most of the others had
noticed it, Mike the Angel recognized it for what it was. Half a minute
after that, everyone aboard could feel it.
A two-cycle-per-second beat note is inaudible to the human ear. If the
human tympanum can't wiggle any faster than that, the auditory nerves
refuse to transmit the message. The wiggle has to be three or four
octaves above that before the nerves will have anything to do with it.
But if the beat note has enough energy in it, a man doesn't have to hear
it--he can _feel_ it.
The bugs weren't all out of the _Brainchild_, by any means, and the men
knew it. She had taken a devil of a strain on the take-off, and
something was about due to weaken.
It was the external field around the hull that had decided to goof off
this time. It developed a nice, unpleasant two-cycle throb that
threatened to shake the ship apart. It built up rapidly and then leveled
off, giving everyone aboard the feeling that his lunch and his stomach
would soon part company.
The crew was used to it. They'd been on shakedown cruises before, and
they knew that on an interstellar vessel the word "shakedown" can have a
very literal meaning. The beat note wasn't dangerous, but it wasn't
pleasant, either.
Within five minutes everybody aboard had the galloping collywobbles and
the twittering jitters.
Mike and his power crew all knew what to do. They took their stations
and started to work. They had barely started when Captain Quill's voice
came over the intercom.
"Power Section, this is the bridge. How long before we stop this beat
note?"
"No way of telling, sir," said Mike, without taking his eyes off the
meter bank. "Check A-77," he muttered in an aside to Multhaus.
"Can you give me a prognosis?" persisted Quill.
Mike frowned. This wasn't like Black Bart. He knew what the prognosis
was as well as Mike did. "Actually, sir, there's no way of knowing. The
old _Gainsway_ shook like this for eight days before they spotted the
tubes that were causing a four-cycle beat."
"Why can't we spot it right off?" Quill asked.
Mike got it then. Fitzhugh was listening in. Quill wanted Mike the Angel
to substantiate his own statements to the roboticist.
"There are sixteen generator tubes in the hull--two at each end of the
four diagonals of an imaginary cube surrounding the ship. At least two
of them are out of phase; that means that every one of them may have to
be balanced against every other one, and that would make a hundred and
twenty checks. It will take ten minutes if we hit it lucky and find the
bad tubes in the first two tries, and about twenty hours if we hit on
the last try.
"That, of course, is presuming that there are only two out. If there are
three...." He let it hang.
Mike grinned as Dr. Morris Fitzhugh's voice came over the intercom,
confirming his diagnosis of the situation.
"Isn't there any other way?" asked Fitzhugh worriedly. "Can't we stop
the ship and check them, so that we won't be subjected to this?"
"'Fraid not," answered Mike. "In the first place, cutting the external
field would be dangerous, if not deadly. The abrupt deceleration
wouldn't be good for us, even with the internal field operating. In the
second place, we couldn't check the field tubes if they weren't
operating. You can't tell a bad tube just by looking at it. They'd still
have to be balanced against each other, and that would take the same
amount of time as it is going to take anyway, and with the same effects
on the ship. I'm sorry, but we'll just have to put up with it."
"Well, for Heaven's sake do the best you can," Fitzhugh said in a
worried voice. "This beat is shaking Snookums' brain. God knows what
damage it may do unless it's stopped within a very few minutes!"
"I'll do the best I can," said Mike the Angel carefully. "So will every
man in my crew. But about all anyone can do is wish us luck and let us
work."
"Yes," said Dr. Fitzhugh slowly. "Yes. I understand. Thank you,
Commander."
Mike the Angel nodded curtly and went back to work.
Things weren't bad enough as they were. They had to get worse. The
_Brainchild_ had been built too fast, and in too unorthodox a manner.
The steady two-cycle throb did more damage than it would normally have
done aboard a non-experimental ship.
Twelve minutes after the throb started, a feeder valve in the
pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation
that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was
damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be
dropped while the more dangerous flaw was tackled.
Multhaus plugged in an emergency board and began to compensate by hand
while the others searched frantically for the trouble.
Hand compensation of feeder-valve oscillation is pure intuition; if you
wait until the meters show that damping is necessary, it may be too
late--you have to second-guess the machine and figure out what's coming
_before_ it happens and compensate then. You not only have to judge
time, but magnitude; overcompensation is ruinous, too.
Multhaus, the Chief Powerman's Mate, sat behind the emergency board, a
vernier dial in each hand and both eyes on an oscilloscope screen. His
red, beefy face was corded and knotted with tension, and his skin
glistened with oily perspiration. He didn't say a word, and his fingers
barely moved as he held a green line reasonably steady on that screen.
Mike the Angel, using unangelic language in a steady, muttering stream,
worked to find the circuit that held the secret of the ruinous feedback
tendency, while other powermen plugged and unplugged meter jacks,
flipped switches, and juggled tools.
In the midst of all this, in rolled Snookums.
Whether Snookums knew that his own existence was in danger is
problematical. Like the human brain, his own had no pain or sensory
circuits within it; in addition, his knowledge of robotics was small--he
didn't even know that his brain was in Cargo Hold One. He thought it was
in his head, if he thought about it at all.
Nonetheless, he knew _something_ was wrong, and as soon as his
"curiosity" circuits were activated, he set out in search of the
trouble, his little treads rolling at high speed.
Leda Crannon saw him heading down a companionway and called after him.
"Where are you going, Snookums?"
"Looking for data," answered Snookums, slowing a little.
"Wait! I'll come with you!"
Leda Crannon knew perfectly well what effect the throb might have on
Snookums' brain, and when something cracked, she wanted to see what
effect it might have on the behavior of the little robot. Like a hound
after a fox, she followed him through the corridors of the ship.
Up companionways and down, in and out of storerooms, staterooms, control
rooms, and washrooms Snookums scurried, oblivious to the consternation
that sometimes erupted at his sudden appearance. At certain selected
spots, Snookums would stop, put his metal arms on floors and walls,
pause, and then go zooming off in another direction with Leda Crannon
only paces behind him, trying to explain to crewmen as best she could.
If Snookums had been capable of emotion--and Leda Crannon was not as
sure as the roboticists that he wasn't--she would have sworn that he was
having the time of his life.
Seventeen minutes after the throb had begun, Snookums rolled into Power
Section and came to a halt. Something else was wrong.
At first he just stopped by the door and soaked in data. Mike's
muttering; the clipped, staccato conversation of the power crew; the
noises of the tools; the deep throb of the ship itself; the underlying
oddness of the engine vibrations--all these were fed into his
microphonic ears. The scene itself was transmitted to his brain and
recorded. The cryotronic maze in the depths of the ship chewed the whole
thing over. Snookums acted.
Leda Crannon, who had lost ground in trying to keep up with Snookums'
whirling treads, came to the door of Power Section too late to stop the
robot's entrance. She didn't dare call out, because she knew that to do
so would interrupt the men's vital work. All she could do was lean
against the doorjamb and try to catch her breath.
Snookums rolled over to the board where Multhaus was sitting and watched
over his shoulder for perhaps thirty seconds. The crewmen eyed him, but
they were much too busy to do anything. Besides, they were used to his
presence by this time.
Then, in one quick tour of the room, Snookums glanced at every meter in
the place. Not just at the regular operating meters, but also at the
meters in the testing equipment that the power crew had jack-plugged in.
Mike the Angel looked around as he heard the soft purring of the
caterpillar treads. His glance took in both Snookums and Leda Crannon,
who was still gasping at the door. He watched Leda for the space of
three deep breaths, tore his eyes away, looked at what Snookums was
doing, then said: "Get him out of here!" in a stage whisper to Leda.
Snookums was looking over the notations on the meter readings for the
previous few minutes. He had simply picked them up from the desk where
one of the computermen was working and scanned them rapidly before
handing them back.
Before Leda could say anything, Snookums rolled over to Mike the Angel
and said: "Check the lead between the 391-JF and the big DK-37. I think
you'll find that the piping is in phase with the two-cycle note, and
it's become warped and stretched. It's about half a millimeter off--plus
or minus a tenth. The pulse is reaching the DK-37 about four degrees
off, and the gate is closing before it all gets through. That's forcing
the regulator circuit to overcompensate, and...."
Mike didn't listen to any more. He didn't know whether Snookums knew
what he was talking about or not, but he did know that the thing the
robot had mentioned would have had just such an effect.
Mike strode rapidly across the room and flipped up the shield housing
the assembly Snookums had mentioned. The lead was definitely askew.
Mike the Angel snapped orders, and the power crewmen descended on the
scene of the trouble.
Snookums went right on delivering his interpretation of the data, but
everyone ignored him while they worked. Being ignored didn't bother
Snookums in the least.
"... and that, in turn, is making the feeder valve field oscillate," he
finished up, nearly five minutes later.
Mike was glad that Snookums had pinpointed the trouble first and then
had gone on to show why the defect was causing the observed result. He
could just as easily have started with the offending oscillation and
reached the bit about the faulty lead at the end of his speech, except
that he had been built to do it the other way around. Snookums made the
deduction in his superfast mind and then reeled it off backward, as it
were, going from conclusion to premises.
Otherwise, he might have been too late.
The repair didn't take long, once Snookums had found just what needed
repairing. When the job was over, Mike the Angel wiped his hands on a
rag and stood up.
"Thanks, Snookums," he said honestly. "You've been a great help."