Unwise Child Read online

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  Unwise Child

  RANDALL GARRETT

  DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

  1962

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblanceto actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  _Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-13524__Copyright (C) 1962 by Randall Garrett__All Rights Reserved_

  _Printed in the United States of America__First Edition_

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note | | | | Extensive search has failed to find any evidence that the | | U.S. copyright of this publication has been renewed. | +--------------------------------------------------------------+

  BOOKS BY RANDALL GARRETT

  _Biography__Pope John XXIII: Pastoral Prince_

  _Science Fiction__Unwise Child_

  _Books by "Robert Randall"_

  _The Shrouded Planet__The Dawning Light_

  _"Robert Randall" is a pseudonym used on books written in collaborationwith Robert Silverberg._

  With sincere appreciation,this book is dedicatedtoTIM and NATALIEwho waited ...and waited ...and waited ...and waited for it.

  1

  The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot ofways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the Angel.

  They'd done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the jobthoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Theirmistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angelinto account.

  There is a section of New York's Manhattan Island, down on the lowerWest Side, that has been known, for over a century, as "Radio Row." Allthrough this section are stores, large and small, where every kind ofelectronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or designedto order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye Quainte OldeElecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as vacuum-tube FMradios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television sets. And, if youwant them, transmitters to match, so you can watch the antiques work.

  Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the businessdistrict, near West 112th Street--a very posh suite of rooms on thefiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking thetwo-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John theDivine. The glowing sign on the door of the suite said, very simply:

  M. R. GABRIEL POWER DESIGN

  But, once or twice a week, Mike the Angel liked to take off and prowlaround Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn't work toolate, but, on this particular afternoon, he'd been in his office untilafter six o'clock, working on some papers for the InterstellarCommission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop leftopen was Harry MacDougal's.

  That didn't matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry's was the placehe had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal's establishment washardly more than a hole in the wall--a narrow, long hallway between twolarger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of YeQuainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of everyvintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn't beenmanufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry's wasthe place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled, filledhelter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of which wouldhave been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert and ahistorian.

  Old Harry didn't need labels or a system. He was a small, lean, bony,sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of '37, landedin New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never beenwest of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more thanfifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of arobot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, andhe'd squint one eye closed, stare at the end of his nose with the other,and say:

  "An M-1993 thermodyne hexode, eh? Ah. Um. Aye, I got one. Picked it up acouple years back. Put it-- Let ma see, now...."

  And he'd go to his wall ladder, push it along that narrow hallway,moving boxes aside as he went, and stop somewhere along the wall. Thenhe'd scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, andcome out with the article in question. He'd blow the dust off it, polishit with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: "Here 'tis. Thought Ihad one. Let's go back in the back and give her a test."

  On the other hand, if he didn't have what you wanted, he'd shake hishead just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: "What d'ye want itfor?" And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the pieceyou wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something elsethat would do the job as well or better.

  In either case, he always insisted that the piece be tested. He refusedeither to buy or sell something that didn't work. So you'd follow himdown that long hallway to the lab in the rear, where all the testingequipment was. The lab, too, was cluttered, but in a different way. Outfront, the stuff was dead; back here, there was power coursing throughthe ionic veins and metallic nerves of the half-living machines. Thingswere labeled in neat, accurate script--not for Old Harry's benefit, butfor the edification of his customers, so they wouldn't put their fingersin the wrong places. He never had to worry about whether his customersknew enough to fend for themselves; a few minutes spent in talking wasenough to tell Harry whether a man knew enough about the science and artof electronics and sub-electronics to be trusted in the lab. If youdidn't measure up, you didn't get invited to the lab, even to watch atest.

  But he had very few people like that; nobody came into Harry MacDougal'splace unless he was pretty sure of what he wanted and how he wanted touse it.

  On the other hand, there were very few men whom Harry would allow intothe lab unescorted. Mike the Angel was one of them.

  Meet Mike the Angel. Full name: Michael Raphael Gabriel. (His mother hadtagged that on him at the time of his baptism, which had made his fatherwince in anticipated compassion, but there had been nothing for him tosay--not in the middle of the ceremony.)

  Naturally, he had been tagged "Mike the Angel." Six feet seven. Twohundred sixty pounds. Thirty-four years of age. Hair: golden yellow.Eyes: deep blue. Cash value of holdings: well into eight figures.Credit: almost unlimited. Marital status: highly eligible, if the rightwoman could tackle him.

  Mike the Angel pushed open the door to Harry MacDougal's shop and tookoff his hat to brush the raindrops from it. Farther uptown, the streetswere covered with clear plastic roofing, but that kind of comfortstopped at Fifty-third Street.

  There was no one in sight in the long, narrow store, so Mike the Angellooked up at the ceiling, where he knew the eye was hidden.

  "Harry?" he said.

  "I see you, lad," said a voice from the air. "You got here just in time.I'm closin' up. Lock the door, would ye?"

  "Sure, Harry." Mike turned around, pressed the locking switch, and heardit snap satisfactorily.

  "Okay, Mike," said Harry MacDougal's voice. "Come on back. I hope yebrought that bottle of scotch I asked for."

  Mike the Angel made his way back between the towering tiers of bins ashe answered. "Sure did, Harry. When did I ever forget you?"

  And, as he moved toward the rear of the store, Mike the Angel casuallyreached into his coat pocket and triggered the switch of a small butfantastically powerful mechanism that he always carried when he walkedthe streets of New York at night.

  He was headed straight into trouble, and he knew it. And he hoped he wasready for it.