k into a chair and fired up a cigarette. Mike sat on
the edge of the table.

"Philip Keku," Mike said musingly. "Just out of curiosity, what kind of
a name is Keku?"

"Damfino," said the lieutenant. "Sounds Oriental, doesn't it?"

Mike looked the man over carefully, but rapidly. "But you're not
Oriental--or at least, not much. You look Polynesian to me."

"Hit it right on the head, Commander. Hawaiian. My real name's
Kekuanaoa, but nobody could pronounce it, so I shortened it to Keku when
I came in the Service."

Mike gave a short laugh. "That accounts for your size. Kekuanaoa. A
branch of the old Hawaiian royal family, as I recall."

"That's right." The big Hawaiian grinned. "I've got a kid sister that
weighs as much as you. And my granddad kicked off at ninety-four
weighing a comfortable four-ten."

"What'd he die of, sir?" Multhaus asked curiously.

"Concussion and multiple fractures. He slammed a Ford-Studebaker into a
palm tree at ninety miles an hour. Crazy old ox; he was bigger than the
dam' automobile."

The laughter of three big men filled the instrument room.

After a few more minutes of bull throwing, Keku ground out his cigarette
and stood up. "I'd better get to my post; Black Bart will be calling
down any minute."

At that instant the PA system came alive.

"_Now hear this! Now hear this! Take-off in fifteen minutes! Take-off in
fifteen minutes!_"

Keku grinned, saluted Mike the Angel, and walked out the door.

Multhaus gazed after him, looking at the closed door.

"A blinking prophet, Commander," he said. "A blinking prophet."

* * * * *

The take-off of the _Brainchild_ was not so easy as it might have
appeared to anyone who watched it from the outside. As far as the
exterior observers were concerned, it seemed to lift into the air with
a loud, thrumming noise, like a huge elevator rising in an invisible
shaft.

It had been built in a deep pit in the polar ice, built around the huge
cryotronic stack that was Snookums' brain. As it rose, electric motors
slid back the roof that covered the pit, and the howling Antarctic winds
roared around it.

Unperturbed, it went on rising.

Inside, Mike the Angel and Chief Multhaus watched worriedly as the
meters wiggled their needles dangerously close to the overload mark. The
thrumming of the ship as it fought its way up against the pull of
Earth's gravity and through the Earth's magnetic field, using the fabric