Part 19 (1/2)

”By the beard of my sainted maiden aunt,” said Chief Multhaus in awe. ”A three-tube offbeat solved in less than half an hour! If that isn't a record, I'll dye my uniform black and join the Chaplains' Corps.”

Leda Crannon, looking tired but somehow pleased, said softly: ”May I come in?”

Mike the Angel grinned. ”Sure. Maybe you can--”

The intercom clicked on. ”Power Section, this is the bridge.” It was Black Bart. ”Are my senses playing me false, or have you stopped that beat note?”

”All secure, sir,” said Mike the Angel. ”The system is stable now.”

”How many tubes were goofing?”

”Three of them.”

”_Three!_” There was astonishment in the captain's voice. ”How did you ever solve a three-tube beat in that short a time?”

Mike the Angel grinned up at the eye in the wall.

”Nothing to it, sir,” he said. ”A child could have done it.”

13

Leda Crannon sat down on the edge of the bunk in Mike the Angel's stateroom, accepted the cigarette and light that Mike had proffered, and waited while Mike poured a couple of cups of coffee from the insul-jug on his desk.

”I wish I could offer you something stronger, but I'm not much of a drinker myself, so I don't usually take advantage of the officer's prerogative to smuggle liquor aboard,” he said as he handed her the cup.

She smiled up at him. ”That's all right; I rarely drink, and when I do, it's either wine or a _very_ diluted highball. Right now, this coffee will do me more good.”

Mike heard footsteps coming down the companionway. He glanced out through the door, which he had deliberately left open. Ensign Vaneski walked by, glanced in, grinned, and went on his way. The kid had good sense, Mike thought. He hoped any other pa.s.sers-by would stay out while he talked to Leda.

”Does a thing like that happen often?” the girl asked. ”Not the fast solution; I mean the beat note.”

”No,” said Mike the Angel. ”Once the system is stabilized, the tubes tend to keep each other in line. But because of that very tendency, an offbeat tube won't show itself for a while. The system tries to keep the bad ones in phase in spite of themselves. But eventually one of them sort of rebels, and that frees any of the others that are offbeat, so the bad ones all show at once and we can spot them. When we get all the bad ones adjusted, the system remains stable for the operating life of the system.”

”And that's the purpose of a shakedown cruise?”

”One of the reasons,” agreed Mike. ”If the tubes are going to act up, they'll do it in the first five hundred operating hours--except in unusual cases. That's one of the things that bothered me about the way this crate was hashed together.”

Her blue eyes widened. ”I thought this was a well-built s.h.i.+p.”

”Oh, it is, it is--all things considered. It isn't dangerous, if that's what you're worried about. But it sure as the devil is expensively wasteful.”

She nodded and sipped at her coffee. ”I know that. But I don't see any other way it could have been done.”

”Neither do I, right off the bat,” Mike admitted. He took a good swallow of the hot liquid in his cup and said: ”I wanted to ask you two questions. First, what was it that Snook.u.ms was doing just before he came into the Power Section? Black Bart said he'd been galloping all over the s.h.i.+p, with you at his heels.”

Her infectious smile came back. ”He was playing seismograph. He was simply checking the intensity of the vibrations at different points in the s.h.i.+p. That gave him part of the data he needed to tell you which of the tubes were acting up.”

”I'm beginning to think,” said Mike, ”that we'll have to start building a big brain aboard every s.h.i.+p--that is, if we can learn enough about such monsters from Snook.u.ms.”