ame way when the liner arrived at her
destination.

Aside from the tremendous energy required to lift such a vessel free of
a planet's surface, there was also the magnetic field of the planet to
consider. The drive tubes tended to wander and become erratic if they
were forced to cut through the magnetic field of a planet.

Therefore, Question One: Why wasn't the _Branchell_ being built in
space?

Part of the answer, Mike knew, lay in the specifications for the
construction of Cargo Hold One. For one thing, it was huge. For another,
it was heavily insulated. For a third, it was built like a tank for
holding liquids. All very well and good; possibly someone wanted to
carry a cargo of cold lemonade or iced tea. That would be pretty stupid,
maybe, but it wouldn't be mysterious.

The mystery lay in the fact that Cargo Hold One had _already been
built_. The _Branchell_ was to be built _around_ it! And that didn't
exactly jibe with Mike the Angel's ideas of the proper way to build a
spaceship. It was not quite the same as building a seagoing vessel
around an oil tank in the middle of Texas, but it was close enough to
bother Mike the Angel.

Therefore, Question Two: Why was the _Branchell_ being built around
Cargo Hold One?

Which led to Question Three: What was _in_ Cargo Hold One?

For the answer to that question, he had one very good hint. The density
of the contents of Cargo Hold One was listed in the specs as being
one-point-seven-two-six grams per cubic centimeter. And that, Mike
happened to know, was the density of a cryotronic brain, which is 90 per
cent liquid helium and 10 per cent tantalum and niobium, by volume.

He looked at the microcryotron stack in his hand. It was a
one-hundred-kilounit stack. The possible connections within it were
factorial one hundred thousand. All it needed was to be immersed in its
bath of liquid helium to make the metals superconducting, and it would
be ready to go to work.

A friend of his who worked for Computer Corporation of Earth had built a
robot once, using just such a stack. The robot was designed to play
poker. He had fed in all the rules of play and added all the data from
Oesterveldt's _On Poker_. It took Mike the Angel exactly one hour to
figure out how to beat it.

As long as Mike played rationally, the machine had a slight edge, since
it had a perfect memory and could compute faster than Mike could. But it
would not, could not learn how to bluff. As soon as Mike