Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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 (C) 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