Mike glanced at him sharply, but there was only a wry grin on the young ensign’s face.
“Luck of the idiot,” said Mike as he pocketed the twenty. “It’s time for lunch.”
“Next time,” said Keku firmly, “I’ll take the Answerman watch, Mike. You and this kraut are too lucky for me.”
“If I lose any more to the Angel,” von Liegnitz said calmly, “I will be a very sour kraut. But right now, I’m quite hungry.”
Mike prowled around the Power Section that afternoon with a worry nagging at the back of his mind. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on what was bothering him, and he finally put it down to just plain nerves.
And then he began to feel something—physically.
Within thirty seconds after it began, long before most of the others had noticed it, Mike the Angel recognized it for what it was. Half a minute after that, everyone aboard could feel it.
A two-cycle-per-second beat note is inaudible to the human ear. If the human tympanum can’t wiggle any faster than that, the auditory nerves refuse to transmit the message. The wiggle has to be three or four octaves above that before the nerves will have anything to do with it. But if the beat note has enough energy in it, a man doesn’t have to hear it—he can feel it.
The bugs weren’t all out of the Brainchild, by any means, and the men knew it. She had taken a devil of a strain on the take-off, and something was about due to weaken.
It was the external field around the hull that had decided to goof off this time. It developed a nice, unpleasant two-cycle throb that threatened to shake the ship apart. It built up rapidly and then leveled off, giving everyone aboard the feeling that his lunch and his stomach would soon part company.