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Unwise Child
Unwise Child
RANDALL GARRETT
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
1962
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to 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_
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Transcriber's Note | |
| | Extensive search has failed to find any evidence that the | |
U.S. copyright of this publication has been renewed. |
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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
collaboration with Robert Silverberg._
With sincere appreciation, this book is dedicated to TIM and NATALIE
who 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
of ways, 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 job
thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it. Their
mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the Angel
into account.
There is a section of New York's Manhattan Island, down on the lower
West Side, that has been known, for over a century, as "Radio Row."
All through this section are stores, large and small, where every kind
of electronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or
designed to order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye
Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as
vacuum-tube FM radios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television
sets. And, if you want them, transmitters to match, so you can watch
the antiques work.
Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the business
district, near West 112th Street--a very posh suite of rooms on the
fiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking the
two-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine. 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 prowl
around Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn't work too
late, but, on this particular afternoon, he'd been in his office until
after six o'clock, working on some papers for the Interstellar
Commission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop
left open was Harry MacDougal's.
That didn't matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry's was the place
he had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal's establishment was
hardly more than a hole in the wall--a narrow, long hallway between
two larger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of
Ye Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of
every vintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn't been
manufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry's
was the place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled,
filled helter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of
which would have been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert
and a historian.
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, landed
in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been
west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than
fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of a
robot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, and
he'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
a couple 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. Then
he'd scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, and
come out with the article in question. He'd blow the dust off it,
polish it with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: "Here 'tis.
Thought I had 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 his
head just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: "What d'ye want it
for?" And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the piece
you wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something else
that would do the job as well or better.
In either case, he always insisted that the piece be tested. He
refused either to buy or sell something that didn't work. So you'd
follow him down that long hallway to the lab in the rear, where all
the testing equipment was. The lab, too, was cluttered, but in a
different way. Out front, the stuff was dead; back here, there was
power coursing through the ionic veins and metallic nerves of the
half-living machines. Things were labeled in neat, accurate
script--not for Old Harry's benefit, but for the edification of his
customers, so they wouldn't put their fingers in the wrong places. He
never had to worry about whether his customers knew enough to fend for
themselves; a few minutes spent in talking was enough to tell Harry
whether a man knew enough about the science and art of electronics and
sub-electronics to be trusted in the lab. If you didn't measure up,
you didn't get invited to the lab, even to watch a test.
But he had very few people like that; nobody came into Harry
MacDougal's place unless he was pretty sure of what he wanted and how
he wanted to use it.
On the other hand, there were very few men whom Harry would allow into
the lab unescorted. Mike the Angel was one of them.
Meet Mike the Angel. Full name: Michael Raphael Gabriel. (His mother
had tagged that on him at the time of his baptism, which had made his
father wince in anticipated compassion, but there had been nothing for
him to say--not in the middle of the ceremony.)
Naturally, he had been tagged "Mike the Angel." Six feet seven. Two
hundred 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
right woman could tackle him.
Mike the Angel pushed open the door to Harry MacDougal's shop and took
off his hat to brush the raindrops from it. Farther uptown, the
streets were covered with clear plastic roofing, but that kind of
comfort stopped at Fifty-third Street.
There was no one in sight in the long, narrow store, so Mike the Angel
looked 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
heard it snap satisfactorily.
"Okay, Mike," said Harry MacDougal's voice. "Come on back. I hope ye
brought that bottle of scotch I asked for."
Mike the Angel made his way back between the towering tiers of bins as
he answered. "Sure did, Harry. When did I ever forget you?"
And, as he moved toward the rear of the store, Mike the Angel casually
reached into his coat pocket and triggered the switch of a small but
fantastically powerful mechanism that he always carried when he walked
the streets of New York at night.
He was headed straight into trouble, and he knew it. And he hoped he
was ready for it.