“No,” said Mike the Angel. “Once the system is stabilized, the tubes tend to keep each other in line. But because of that very tendency, an offbeat tube won’t show itself for a while. The system tries to keep the bad ones in phase in spite of themselves. But eventually one of them sort of rebels, and that frees any of the others that are offbeat, so the bad ones all show at once and we can spot them. When we get all the bad ones adjusted, the system remains stable for the operating life of the system.”
“And that’s the purpose of a shakedown cruise?”
“One of the reasons,” agreed Mike. “If the tubes are going to act up, they’ll do it in the first five hundred operating hours—except in unusual cases. That’s one of the things that bothered me about the way this crate was hashed together.”
Her blue eyes widened. “I thought this was a well-built ship.”
“Oh, it is, it is—all things considered. It isn’t dangerous, if that’s what you’re worried about. But it sure as the devil is expensively wasteful.”
She nodded and sipped at her coffee. “I know that. But I don’t see any other way it could have been done.”
“Neither do I, right off the bat,” Mike admitted. He took a good swallow of the hot liquid in his cup and said: “I wanted to ask you two questions. First, what was it that Snookums was doing just before he came into the Power Section? Black Bart said he’d been galloping all over the ship, with you at his heels.”
Her infectious smile came back. “He was playing seismograph. He was simply checking the intensity of the vibrations at different points in the ship. That gave him part of the data he needed to tell you which of the tubes were acting up.”
“I’m beginning to think,” said Mike, “that we’ll have to start building a big brain aboard every ship—that is, if we can learn enough about such monsters from Snookums.”
“What was the other question?” Leda asked.