“What’d you say?” Mike had asked.
Keku had spread his hands and said: “I gave him the usual formula about not being positive of my data, then I told him that you were known as Mike the Angel and were well known in the power field.”
Multhaus reported that Snookums had wanted to know what their destination was. The chief’s only possible answer, of course, had been: “I don’t have that data, Snookums.”
Dr. Morris Fitzhugh had become more worried-looking than usual and had confided to Mike that he, too, wondered why Snookums was asking such peculiar questions.
“All he’ll tell me,” the roboticist had reported, wrinkling up his face, “was that he was collecting data. But he flatly refused, even when ordered, to tell me what he needed the data for.”
Mike stayed away from Leda Crannon as much as possible; shipboard was no place to try to conduct a romance. Not that he deliberately avoided her in such a manner as to give offense, but he tried to appear busy at all times.
She was busy, too. Keeping herd on Snookums was becoming something of a problem. She had never attempted to watch him all the time. In the first place, it was physically impossible; in the second place, she didn’t think Snookums would develop properly if he were to be kept under constant supervision. But now, for the first time, she didn’t have the foggiest notion of what was going on inside the robot’s mind, and she couldn’t find out. It puzzled and worried her, and between herself and Dr. Fitzhugh there were several long conferences on Snookums’ peculiar behavior.
Mike the Angel found himself waiting for something to happen. He hadn’t the slightest notion what it was that he was waiting for, but he was as certain of its coming as he was of the fact that the Earth was an oblate spheroid.
But he certainly didn’t expect it to begin the way it did.
A quiet evening bridge game is hardly the place for a riot to start.