“That, of course, is presuming that there are only two out. If there are three....” He let it hang.
Mike grinned as Dr. Morris Fitzhugh’s voice came over the intercom, confirming his diagnosis of the situation.
“Isn’t there any other way?” asked Fitzhugh worriedly. “Can’t we stop the ship and check them, so that we won’t be subjected to this?”
“’Fraid not,” answered Mike. “In the first place, cutting the external field would be dangerous, if not deadly. The abrupt deceleration wouldn’t be good for us, even with the internal field operating. In the second place, we couldn’t check the field tubes if they weren’t operating. You can’t tell a bad tube just by looking at it. They’d still have to be balanced against each other, and that would take the same amount of time as it is going to take anyway, and with the same effects on the ship. I’m sorry, but we’ll just have to put up with it.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake do the best you can,” Fitzhugh said in a worried voice. “This beat is shaking Snookums’ brain. God knows what damage it may do unless it’s stopped within a very few minutes!”
“I’ll do the best I can,” said Mike the Angel carefully. “So will every man in my crew. But about all anyone can do is wish us luck and let us work.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Fitzhugh slowly. “Yes. I understand. Thank you, Commander.”
Mike the Angel nodded curtly and went back to work.
Things weren’t bad enough as they were. They had to get worse. The Brainchild had been built too fast, and in too unorthodox a manner. The steady two-cycle throb did more damage than it would normally have done aboard a non-experimental ship.
Twelve minutes after the throb started, a feeder valve in the pre-induction energy chamber developed a positive-feedback oscillation that threatened to blow out the whole pre-induction stage unless it was damped. The search for the out-of-phase external field tubes had to be dropped while the more dangerous flaw was tackled.