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 went, and stop somewhere along the wall. Then
he'd scramble up the ladder, pull out a bin, fumble around in it, and
come out with the article in question. He'd blow the dust off it, polish
it with a rag, scramble down the ladder, and say: "Here 'tis. Thought I
had one. Let's go back in the back and give her a test."
On the other hand, if he didn't have what you wanted, he'd shake his
head just a trifle, then squint up at you and say: "What d'ye want it
for?" And if you could tell him what you planned to do with the piece
you wanted, nine times out of ten he could come up with something else
that would do the job as well or better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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