s section are stores, large and small, where every kind of
electronic and sub-electronic device can be bought, ordered, or designed
to order. There is even an old antique shop, known as Ye Quainte Olde
Elecktronicks Shoppe, where you can buy such oddities as vacuum-tube FM
radios and twenty-four-inch cathode-ray television sets. And, if you
want them, transmitters to match, so you can watch the antiques work.

Mike the Angel had an uptown office in the heart of the business
district, near West 112th Street--a very posh suite of rooms on the
fiftieth floor of the half-mile-high Timmins Building, overlooking the
two-hundred-year-old Gothic edifice of the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine. The glowing sign on the door of the suite said, very simply:

M. R. GABRIEL
POWER DESIGN

But, once or twice a week, Mike the Angel liked to take off and prowl
around Radio Row, just shopping around. Usually, he didn't work too
late, but, on this particular afternoon, he'd been in his office until
after six o'clock, working on some papers for the Interstellar
Commission. So, by the time he got down to Radio Row, the only shop left
open was Harry MacDougal's.

That didn't matter much to Mike the Angel, since Harry's was the place
he had intended to go, anyway. Harry MacDougal's establishment was
hardly more than a hole in the wall--a narrow, long hallway between two
larger stores. Although not a specialist, like the proprietor of Ye
Quainte Olde Elecktronicks Shoppe, Harry did carry equipment of every
vintage and every make. If you wanted something that hadn't been
manufactured in decades, and perhaps never made in quantity, Harry's was
the place to go. The walls were lined with bins, all unlabeled, filled
helter-skelter with every imaginable kind of gadget, most of which would
have been hard to recognize unless you were both an expert and a
historian.

Old Harry didn't need labels or a system. He was a small, lean, bony,
sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of '37, landed
in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been
west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than
fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind like that of a
robot filing cabinet. Ask him for a particular piece of equipment, and
he'd squint one eye closed, stare at the end of his nose with the other,
and say:

"An M-1993 thermodyne hexode, eh? Ah. Um. Aye, I got one. Picked it up a
couple yea