The intercom clicked on. "Power Section, this is the bridge." It was
Black Bart. "Are my senses playing me false, or have you stopped that
beat note?"
"All secure, sir," said Mike the Angel. "The system is stable now."
"How many tubes were goofing?"
"Three of them."
"_Three!_" There was astonishment in the captain's voice. "How did you
ever solve a three-tube beat in that short a time?"
Mike the Angel grinned up at the eye in the wall.
"Nothing to it, sir," he said. "A child could have done it."
13
Leda Crannon sat down on the edge of the bunk in Mike the Angel's
stateroom, accepted the cigarette and light that Mike had proffered, and
waited while Mike poured a couple of cups of coffee from the insul-jug
on his desk.
"I wish I could offer you something stronger, but I'm not much of a
drinker myself, so I don't usually take advantage of the officer's
prerogative to smuggle liquor aboard," he said as he handed her the cup.
She smiled up at him. "That's all right; I rarely drink, and when I do,
it's either wine or a _very_ diluted highball. Right now, this coffee
will do me more good."
Mike heard footsteps coming down the companionway. He glanced out
through the door, which he had deliberately left open. Ensign Vaneski
walked by, glanced in, grinned, and went on his way. The kid had good
sense, Mike thought. He hoped any other passers-by would stay out while
he talked to Leda.
"Does a thing like that happen often?" the girl asked. "Not the fast
solution; I mean the beat note."
"No," said Mike the Angel. "Once the system is stabilized, the tubes
tend to keep each other in line. But because of that very tendency, an
offbeat tube won't show itself for a while. The system tries to keep the
bad ones in phase in spite of themselves. But eventually one of them
sort of rebels, and that frees any of the others that are offbeat, so
the bad ones all show at once and we can spot them. When we get all the
bad ones adjusted, the system remains stable for the operating life of
the system."
"And that's the purpose of a shakedown cruise?"
"One of the reasons," agreed Mike. "If the tubes are going to act up,
they'll do it in the first five hundred operating hours--except in
unusual cases. That's one of the things that bothered me about the way
this crate was hashed together."