Unwise Child Page 4

  4

  Mike the Angel did not believe in commuting. Being a bachelor, he couldafford to indulge in that belief. In his suite of offices on 112thStreet, there was one door marked "M. R. Gabriel." Behind that door washis private secretary's office, which acted as an effective barrierbetween himself and the various employees of the firm. Behind thesecretary's office was his own office.

  There was still another door in his inner office, a plain, unmarked doorthat looked as though it might conceal a closet.

  It didn't. It was the door to a veddy, veddy expensive apartment withequally expensive appointments. One wall, thirty feet long and ten feethigh, was a nearly invisible, dustproof slab of polished, optically flatglass that gave the observer the feeling that there was nothing betweenhim and the city street, five hundred feet below.

  The lights of the city, coming through the wall, gave the room plenty ofillumination after sunset, but the simple flick of a switch couldpolarize it black, allowing perfect privacy.

  The furniture was massive, heavily braced, and well upholstered. It hadto be; Mike the Angel liked to flop into chairs, and his two hundred andsixty pounds gave chairs a lot of punishment.

  On one of the opaque walls was Dali's original "Eucharist," with itsmuffled, robed figures looking oddly luminous in the queer combinationof city lights and interior illumination. Farther back, a Valois gleamedmetallically above the shadowed bas-reliefs of its depths.

  It was the kind of apartment Mike the Angel liked. He could sleep, ifnecessary, on a park bench or in a trench, but he didn't see any reasonfor doing so if he could sleep on a five-hundred-dollar floater.

  As he had passed through each door, he had checked them carefully. Hiselectrokey had a special circuit that lighted up a tiny glow lamp in thekey handle if the lock had been tampered with. None of them had.

  He opened the final door, went into his apartment, and locked the doorbehind him, as he had locked the others. Then he turned on the lights,peeled off his raincoat, and plopped himself into a chair to unwrap themicrocryotron stack he had picked up at Harry's.

  Theoretically, Harry wasn't supposed to sell the things. They were stilldifficult to make, and they were supposed to be used only by persons whowere authorized to build robot brains, since that's what the stackwas--a part of a robot brain. Mike could have put his hands on onelegally, provided he'd wanted to wait for six or eight months to clearup the red tape. Actually, the big robotics companies didn't wantamateurs fooling around with robots; they'd much rather build the robotsthemselves and rent them out. They couldn't make do-it-yourself projectsimpossible, but they could make them difficult.

  In a way, there was some good done. So far, the JD's hadn't gone intobig-scale robotics. Self-controlled bombs could be rather nasty.

  Adult criminals, of course, already had them. But an adult criminal whohad the money to invest in robotic components, or went to the trouble tosteal them, had something more lucrative in mind than street fights orrobbing barrooms. To crack a bank, for instance, took a cleverlyconstructed, well-designed robot and plenty of ingenuity on the part ofthe operator.

  Mike the Angel didn't want to make bombs or automatic bankrobbers; hejust wanted to fiddle with the stack, see what it would do. He turned itover in his hands a couple of times, then shrugged, got up, went over tohis closet, and put the thing away. There wasn't anything he could dowith it until he'd bought a cryostat--a liquid helium refrigerator. Acryotron functions only at temperatures near absolute zero.

  The phone chimed.

  Mike went over to it, punched the switch, and said: "Gabriel speaking."

  No image formed on the screen. A voice said: "Sorry, wrong number."There was a slight click, and the phone went dead. Mike shrugged andpunched the cutoff. Sounded like a woman. He vaguely wished he couldhave seen her face.

  Mike got up and walked back to his easy chair. He had no sooner sat downthan the phone chimed again. Damn!

  Up again. Back to the phone.

  "Gabriel speaking."

  Again, no image formed.

  "Look, lady," Mike said, "why don't you look up the number you wantinstead of bothering me?"

  Suddenly there was an image. It was the face of an elderly man with amild, reddish face, white hair, and a cold look in his pale blue eyes.It was Basil Wallingford, the Minister for Spatial Affairs.

  He said: "Mike, I wasn't aware that your position was such that youcould afford to be rude to a Portfolio of the Earth Government." Hisvoice was flat, without either anger or humor.

  "I'm not sure it is, myself," admitted Mike the Angel, "but I do thebest I can with the tools I have to work with. I didn't know it was you,Wally. I just had some wrong-number trouble. Sorry."

  "Mf.... Well.... I called to tell you that the _Branchell_ is ready foryour final inspection. Or will be, that is, in a week."

  "My final inspection?" Mike the Angel arched his heavy golden-blondeyebrows. "Hell, Wally, Serge Paulvitch is on the job down there, isn'the? You don't need _my_ okay. If Serge says it's ready to go, it's readyto go. Or is there some kind of trouble you haven't mentioned yet?"

  "No; no trouble," said Wallingford. "But the power plant on that shipwas built according to your designs--not Mr. Paulvitch's. The Bureau ofSpace feels that you should give them the final check."

  Mike knew when to argue and when not to, and he knew that this was onetime when it wouldn't do him the slightest good. "All right," he saidresignedly. "I don't like Antarctica and never will, but I guess I canstand it for a few days."

  "Fine. One more thing. Do you have a copy of the thrust specificationsfor Cargo Hold One? Our copy got garbled in transmission, and thereseems to be a discrepancy in the figures."

  Mike nodded. "Sure. They're in my office. Want me to get them now?"

  "Please. I'll hold on."

  Mike the Angel barely made it in time. He went to the door that led tohis office, opened it, stepped through, and closed it behind him just asthe blast went off.

  The door shuddered behind Mike, but it didn't give. Mike's apartment wasreasonably soundproof, but it wasn't built to take the kind of explosionthat would shake the door that Mike the Angel had just closed. It was atwo-inch-thick slab of armor steel on heavy, precision-bearing hinges.So was every other door in the suite. It wasn't quite a bank-vault door,but it would do. Any explosion that could shake it was a real doozy.

  Mike the Angel spun around and looked at the door. It was just a triflewarped, and faint tendrils of vapor were curling around the edge wherethe seal had been broken. Mike sniffed, then turned and ran. He opened adrawer in his desk and took out a big roll of electrostatic tape. Thenhe took a deep breath, went back to the door, and slapped on a strip ofthe one-inch tape, running it all around the edge of the door. Then hewent into the outer office while the air conditioners cleaned out hisprivate office.

  He went over to one of the phones near the autofile and punched for theoperator. "I had a long-distance call coming in here from the RightExcellent Basil Wallingford, Minister for Spatial Affairs, Capitol City.We were cut off."

  "One moment please." A slight pause. "His Excellency is here, Mr.Gabriel."

  Wallingford's face came back on the screen. It had lost some of itsruddiness. "What happened?" he asked.

  "You tell me, Wally," Mike snapped. "Did you see anything at all?"

  "All I saw was that big pane of glass break. It fell into a thousandpieces, and then something exploded and the phone went dead."

  "The glass broke first?"

  "That's right."

  Mike sighed. "Good. I was afraid that maybe someone had planted thatbomb, rather than fired it in. I'd hate to think anyone could get intomy place without my knowing it."

  "Who's gunning for you?"

  "I wish I knew. Look, Wally, can you wait until tomorrow for thosespecs? I want to get hold of the police."

  "Certainly. Nothing urgent. It can wait. I'll call you again tomorrowevening." The screen blanked.

  Mike glanced at the wall clock and
then punched a number on the phone. Apretty girl in a blue uniform came on the screen.

  "Police Central," she said. "May I help you?"

  "I'd like to speak to Detective Sergeant William Cowder, please," Mikesaid. "Just tell him that Mr. Gabriel has more problems."

  She looked puzzled, but she nodded, and pretty soon her image blankedout. The screen stayed blank, but Sergeant Cowder's voice came over thespeaker. "What is it, Mr. Gabriel?"

  He was evidently speaking from a pocket phone.

  "Attempted murder," said Mike the Angel. "A few minutes ago a bomb wasset off in my apartment. I think it was a rocket, and I know it washeavily laced with hydrogen cyanide. That's Suite 5000, TimminsBuilding, up on 112th Street. I called you because I have a hunch it'sconnected with the incident at Harry's earlier this evening."

  "Timmins Building, eh? I'll be right up."

  Cowder cut off with a sharp click, and Mike the Angel looked quizzicallyat the dead screen. Was he imagining things, or was there a peculiarnote in Cowder's voice?

  Two minutes later he got his answer.