rkmen were busily cleaning up the wreckage in Mike
the Angel's apartment, and the round, plump figure of Larry Beasley was
walking around pompously while his artistic but businesslike brain made
estimates. Mike had also reached an agreement with the bishop whereby
special vaultlike doors would be fitted into the stairwells leading up
to the towers at Mike's expense. They were to have facings of bronze so
that they could be decorated to blend with the Gothic decor of the
church, but the bronze would be backed by heavy steel. Nobody would blow
_those_ down in a hurry.

Since the wrecked living room was a flurry of activity and his office
had become a thoroughfare, Mike the Angel retired to his bedroom to
think. He took with him the microcryotron stack he had picked up at Old
Harry's the night before.

"For something that doesn't look like much," he said aloud to the
stack, "you have caused me a hell of a lot of trouble."

Old Harry, he knew, wouldn't be caught dead selling the things. In the
first place, it was strictly illegal to deal in the components of
robotic brains. In the second place, they were so difficult to get, even
on the black market, that the few that came into Old Harry's hands went
into the defenses of his own shop. Mike the Angel had only wanted to
borrow one to take a good look at it. He had read up on all the
literature about microcryotrons, but he'd never actually seen one
before.

He had reason to be curious about microcryotrons. There was something
definitely screwy going on in Antarctica.

Nearly two years before, the UN Government, in the person of Minister
Wallingford himself, had asked Mike's firm--which meant Mike the Angel
himself--to design the power drive and the thrust converters for a
spaceship. On the face of it, there was nothing at all unusual in that.
Such jobs were routine for M. R. Gabriel.

But when the specifications arrived, Mike the Angel had begun to wonder
what the devil was going on. The spaceship _William Branchell_ was to be
built on the surface of Earth--and yet it was to be a much larger ship
than any that had ever before been built on the ground. Usually, an
interstellar vessel that large was built in orbit around the Earth,
where the designers didn't have to worry about gravitational pull. Such
a ship never landed, any more than an ocean liner was ever beached--not
on purpose, anyway. The passengers and cargo were taken up by smaller
vessels and brought down the s