Unwise Child

Unwise Child, by Gordon
Randall Garrett

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Title: Unwise Child
Author: Gordon Randall Garrett
Release Date: November 5, 2007 [EBook #23335]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Unwise Child
RANDALL GARRETT

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
1962
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-13524 Copyright ©
1962 by Randall Garrett All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America First Edition
Transcriber's Note Extensive search has failed to find any evidence that
the U.S. copyright of this publication has been renewed.
BOOKS BY RANDALL GARRETT
Biography Pope John XXIII: Pastoral Prince
Science Fiction Unwise Child
Books by "Robert Randall"
The Shrouded Planet The Dawning Light
"Robert Randall" is a pseudonym used on books written in
collaboration with Robert Silverberg.
With sincere appreciation, this book is dedicated to TIM and
NATALIE who waited ... and waited ... and waited ... and waited for it.

1
The kids who tried to jump Mike the Angel were bright enough in a lot
of ways, but they made a bad mistake when they tangled with Mike the
Angel.
They'd done their preliminary work well enough. They had cased the

job thoroughly, and they had built the equipment to take care of it.
Their mistake was not in their planning; it was in not taking Mike the
Angel into account.
There is a section of New York's Manhattan Island, down on the lower
West Side, that has been known, for over a century, as "Radio Row."
All through this 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 years back. Put it-- Let ma see, now...."
And he'd go to his wall ladder, push it along that narrow hallway,
moving boxes aside as he