He moved slowly up the stairs. He was a big man, tall and heavy with most of the weight in his arms and shoulders. Near the corner at the top, he paused, listening in the darkness. "_Afraid to come up, Johnny?_" Steel jumped. He flattened against the wall. The hoarse voice wasn't three feet from his ear. His finger took up the slack in his pistol's trigger. "Your boys got in some pretty good target practice on me this afternoon, didn't they, Johnny?" The voice came from just around the corner. Steel felt the sweat trickling down his neck despite the cold. "You wouldn't tell 'em to take it easy, huh--that I was an old chum of yours?" Steel finally found his voice. "Floyd, you killed two guards in that Radium Bank. I came up here to try to reason with you--because you used to be my best friend. Tell me who The Bear is--and I'll do my best to help you at the trial." A husky laugh echoed in the dark corridor. "You know I'm no squealer, Johnny." But now there was a faintly preoccupied tone in the voice. Then Steel heard the faintest scrape of a foot on the corridor floor. "Floyd!" Steel pled. "Listen to reason!" He paused a moment, listening. But only a moment. Then he backed quickly and silently several steps down stairs. He left the right wall and quickly crouched over against the left. The next instant, he saw a hand flick around the corner at the head of the stairs. A volt pistol roared, blasting the spot where he had been standing. As the building trembled with the explosion, a figure appeared around the corner, looking down the stairs. "Floyd! For God's sake--!" Steel cried. Instantly, the pistol in the figure's hand whipped toward Steel's voice. And Steel couldn't take another chance. He fired. The figure hung there a moment like a clubbed ox. Then it crumpled to the floor. * * * * * Steel lowered his pistol slowly. Big shoulders sagging, he walked slowly up the steps. There were tears in his eyes as he stood there looking down at the shadowed form on the floor. Around him he felt the familiar walls of the old deserted building in which as small boys they'd played cops and robbers together. They had played together in that very street outside, grown up together in that cold miserable place of eternal twilight that was the slums of New York City in 8646 A.D. What chance did a kid have in that environment! Only by sheer luck had he himself been sent to an orphanage in the warm lower levels instead of to a reformatory. It wasn't Floyd's fault that he lay here dead by a policeman's gun. It was the fault of Ninetieth Century civilization. Looking down at the friend he'd been forced to kill, Steel knew that somehow, if it took him the rest of his life, he had to brighten that shadowed world in the street outside--and he declared a private war against the gangsters who led its kids astray.... He walked down the steps and called to his men. "Come on up. It's all over."