“Good morning, Mr. Gabriel,” she said. “What the hell happened here?” She waved at the warped door and the ribbons of electrostatic tape that still lay in curls on the floor.
Mike told her, and she listened to his recitation without any change of expression. “I’m very glad you weren’t hurt,” she said when he had finished. “What are you going to do about the apartment?”
Mike opened the heavy door and looked at the wreckage inside. Through the gaping hole of the shattered window, he could see the towering spires of the two-hundred-year-old Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “Get Larry Beasley on the phone, Helen. I’ve forgotten his number, but you’ll find him listed under ‘Interior Decorators.’ He has the original plans and designs on file. Tell him to get them out; I want this place fixed up just like it was.”
“But what if someone else....” She gestured toward the broken window and the cathedral spires beyond.
“When you’re through talking to Beasley,” Mike went on, “see if you can get Bishop Brennan on the phone and switch him to my desk.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Within two hours workmen were busily cleaning up the wreckage in Mike the Angel’s apartment, and the round, plump figure of Larry Beasley was walking around pompously while his artistic but businesslike brain made estimates. Mike had also reached an agreement with the bishop whereby special vaultlike doors would be fitted into the stairwells leading up to the towers at Mike’s expense. They were to have facings of bronze so that they could be decorated to blend with the Gothic decor of the church, but the bronze would be backed by heavy steel. Nobody would blow those down in a hurry.
Since the wrecked living room was a flurry of activity and his office had become a thoroughfare, Mike the Angel retired to his bedroom to think. He took with him the microcryotron stack he had picked up at Old Harry’s the night before.
“For something that doesn’t look like much,” he said aloud to the stack, “you have caused me a hell of a lot of trouble.”
Old Harry, he knew, wouldn’t be caught dead selling the things. In the first place, it was strictly illegal to deal in the components of robotic brains. In the second place, they were so difficult to get, even on the black market, that the few that came into Old Harry’s hands went into the defenses of his own shop. Mike the Angel had only wanted to borrow one to take a good look at it. He had read up on all the literature about microcryotrons, but he’d never actually seen one before.