He put his tongue between his lips and made a rude noise. He was patching the rubberized fabric of the other set of cushions, the ones in which he had been confined, and on his face was that wild look I had seen before when a good brawl was in prospect.
"Mike!" I pleaded. "You can't do this to me!"
"No? If Polly hadn't reminded me of this I'd be in there yet."
He held up the shamrock good luck pin Polly had given him, a little thing he kept pinned to his coveralls at all times. He had managed to unfasten it and puncture the pneumatic cushions.
But I had no good luck pin. I lay there helpless with all the stories I'd ever heard about the supernormal cleverness of lunatics running through my brain. I knew it would be three days, maybe four, before Bill returned. No chance of help from him.
Mike opened the Hustic case, whistling off key as he moved around, and replaced the original bar and tube shield and condenser with his homemade parts. Then he got to work on the bar with my delicate and expensive set of instrument files ruining them completely on the soft copper alloy.
"Be quiet, lunatic!" he barked every time I protested.
He spent hours filing on that bar, putting on the helmet and testing, then filing some more. And there was absolutely nothing I could do. He had so much air pressure in my cushions I couldn't even squirm.
At last he tested once more, and this time snapped the set off almost at once with a smile of satisfaction.
Next he started tracing the secondary power circuits, but he didn't get very far. Every time the Professor had come up with a new idea we had rewired the Banshee, running new leads through the bulkheads but leaving the old circuits in place. The original wiring diagrams were nothing but propaganda by now, with the up-to-date dope all in my head and Bill's.