"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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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. n.o.body 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ceship. 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 s.p.a.ceship _William Branch.e.l.l_ 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 pa.s.sengers 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 _Branch.e.l.l_ being built in s.p.a.ce?

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 _Branch.e.l.l_ 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 s.p.a.ceship. 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 _Branch.e.l.l_ 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 s.p.a.ceship around it?