"Mostly I answered questions for Dr. Fitzhugh," said Snook.u.ms. "He asked me thirty-eight questions. He said I was a great help. I"m nice, too."

"Sure you are, darling," said Miss Crannon.

"Ye G.o.ds," muttered Mike the Angel.

"What"s the trouble, Commander?" the girl asked, widening her blue eyes.

"Nothing," said Mike the Angel, looking at her innocently with eyes that were equally blue. "Not a single solitary thing. Snook.u.ms is a sweet little tyke, isn"t he?"

Leda Crannon gave him a glorious smile. "I think so. And a lot of fun, too."

Very seriously, Mike patted Snook.u.ms on his shiny steel skull. "How old are you, little boy?"

Leda Crannon"s eyes narrowed, but Mike pretended not to notice while Snook.u.ms said: "Eight years, two months, one day, seven hours, thirty-three minutes and--ten seconds. But I am not a little boy. I am a robot."

Mike suppressed an impulse to ask him if he had informed Leda Crannon of that fact. Mike had been watching the girl for the past three days (at least, when he"d had the time to watch) and he"d been bothered by the girl"s maternal att.i.tude toward Snook.u.ms. She seemed to have wrapped herself up entirely in the little robot. Of course, that might simply be her method of avoiding Mike the Angel, but Mike didn"t quite believe that.

"Come along to your room, dear," said Leda. Then she looked again at Mike. "If you"ll wait just a moment, Commander," she said rather stiffly, "I"d like to talk to you."

Mike the Angel touched his forehead in a gentlemanly salute. "Later, perhaps, Miss Crannon. Right now, I have to go to the Power Section to prepare for take-off. We"re really going to have fun lifting this brute against a full Earth gee without rockets."

"Later, then," she said evenly, and hurried off down the corridor with Snook.u.ms.

Mike headed the other way with a sigh of relief. As of right then, he didn"t feel like being given an ear-reaming lecture by a beautiful redhead. He beetled it toward the Power Section.

Chief Powerman"s Mate Multhaus was probably the only man in the crew who came close to being as big as Mike the Angel. Multhaus was two inches shorter than Mike"s six-seven, but he weighed in at two-ninety. As a powerman, he was tops, and he gave the impression that, as far as power was concerned, he could have supplied the ship himself by turning the crank on a hand generator.

But neither Mike nor Multhaus approached the size of the Supply Officer, Lieutenant Keku. Keku was an absolute giant. Six-eight, three hundred fifty pounds, and very little of it fat.

When Mike the Angel opened the door of the Power Section"s instrument room, he came upon a strange sight. Lieutenant Keku and Chief Multhaus were seated across a table from each other, each with his right elbow on the table, their right hands clasped. The muscles in both ma.s.sive arms stood out beneath the scarlet tunics. Neither man was moving.

"Games, children?" asked Mike gently.

_Whap!_ The chief"s arm slammed to the table with a bang that sounded as if the table had shattered. Multhaus had allowed Mike"s entrance to distract him, while Lieutenant Keku had held out just an instant longer.

Both men leaped to their feet, Multhaus valiantly trying not to nurse his bruised hand.

"Sorry, sir," said Multhaus. "We were just--"

"Ne" mind. I saw. Who usually wins?" Mike asked.

Lieutenant Keku grinned. "Usually he does, Commander. All this beef doesn"t help much against a guy who really has pull. And Chief Multhaus has it."

Mike looked into the big man"s brown eyes. "Try doing push-ups. With all your weight, it"d really put brawn into you. Sit down and light up.

We"ve got time before take-off. That is, we do if Multhaus has everything ready for the check-off."

"I"m ready any time you are, sir," Multhaus said, easing himself into a chair.

"We"ll have a cigarette and then run "em through."

Keku settled his bulk into a chair and fired up a cigarette. Mike sat on the edge of the table.

"Philip Keku," Mike said musingly. "Just out of curiosity, what kind of a name is Keku?"

"Damfino," said the lieutenant. "Sounds Oriental, doesn"t it?"

Mike looked the man over carefully, but rapidly. "But you"re not Oriental--or at least, not much. You look Polynesian to me."

"Hit it right on the head, Commander. Hawaiian. My real name"s Kekuanaoa, but n.o.body could p.r.o.nounce it, so I shortened it to Keku when I came in the Service."

Mike gave a short laugh. "That accounts for your size. Kekuanaoa. A branch of the old Hawaiian royal family, as I recall."

"That"s right." The big Hawaiian grinned. "I"ve got a kid sister that weighs as much as you. And my granddad kicked off at ninety-four weighing a comfortable four-ten."

"What"d he die of, sir?" Multhaus asked curiously.

"Concussion and multiple fractures. He slammed a Ford-Studebaker into a palm tree at ninety miles an hour. Crazy old ox; he was bigger than the dam" automobile."

The laughter of three big men filled the instrument room.

After a few more minutes of bull throwing, Keku ground out his cigarette and stood up. "I"d better get to my post; Black Bart will be calling down any minute."

At that instant the PA system came alive.

"_Now hear this! Now hear this! Take-off in fifteen minutes! Take-off in fifteen minutes!_"

Keku grinned, saluted Mike the Angel, and walked out the door.

Multhaus gazed after him, looking at the closed door.

"A blinking prophet, Commander," he said. "A blinking prophet."

The take-off of the _Brainchild_ was not so easy as it might have appeared to anyone who watched it from the outside. As far as the exterior observers were concerned, it seemed to lift into the air with a loud, thrumming noise, like a huge elevator rising in an invisible shaft.

It had been built in a deep pit in the polar ice, built around the huge cryotronic stack that was Snook.u.ms" brain. As it rose, electric motors slid back the roof that covered the pit, and the howling Antarctic winds roared around it.

Unperturbed, it went on rising.

Inside, Mike the Angel and Chief Multhaus watched worriedly as the meters wiggled their needles dangerously close to the overload mark. The thrumming of the ship as it fought its way up against the pull of Earth"s gravity and through the Earth"s magnetic field, using the fabric of s.p.a.ce itself as the fulcrum against which it applied its power, was like the vibration of a note struck somewhere near the bottom of a piano keyboard, or the rumble of a contra ba.s.soon.

As the intensity of the gravitational field decreased, the velocity of the ship increased--not linearly, but logarithmically. She shrieked through the upper atmosphere, quivering like a live thing, and emerged at last into relatively empty s.p.a.ce. When she reached a velocity of a little over thirty miles per second--relative to the sun, and perpendicular to the solar ecliptic--Mike the Angel ordered her engines cut back to the lowest power possible which would still retain the one-gee interior gravity of the ship and keep the anti-acceleration fields intact.

"How does she look, Multhaus?" he asked.