Before we left the lighted elevator car, we took a quick nose count.
Besides the Kivelsons, there were five _Javelin_ men--Ramón Llewellyn,
Abdullah Monnahan, Abe Clifford, Cesário Vieira, and a whitebeard
named Piet Dumont. Al Devis had been with us when we crashed the door
out of the meeting room, but he'd fallen by the way. We had a couple
of flashlights, so, after sending the car down to Bottom Level, we
picked our way up the zigzag iron stairs to the catwalk, under the
seventy-foot ceiling, and sat down in the dark.
Joe Kivelson was fretting about what would happen to the rest of his
men.
"Fine captain I am, running out and leaving them!"
"If they couldn't keep up, that's their tough luck," Oscar Fujisawa
told him. "You brought out all you could. If you'd waited any longer,
none of us would have gotten out."
"They won't bother with them," I added. "You and Tom and Oscar, here,
are the ones they want."
Joe was still letting himself be argued into thinking he had done the
right thing when we saw the lights of a lorry coming from uptown at
ceiling level. A moment later, it backed to the catwalk, and Bish Ware
stuck his head out from the pilot's seat.
"Where do you gentlemen wish to go?" he asked.
"To the _Javelin_," Joe said instantly.
"Huh-uh," Oscar disagreed. "That's the first place they'll look.
That'll be all right for Ramón and the others, but if they catch you
and Tom, they'll shoot you and call it self-defense, or take you in
and beat both of you to a jelly. This'll blow over in fifteen or
twenty hours, but I'm not going anywhere near my ship, now."
"Drop us off on Second Level Down, about Eighth Street and a couple of
blocks from the docks," the mate, Llewellyn, said. "We'll borrow some
weapons from Patel the Pawnbroker and then circulate around and see
what's going on. But you and Joe and Oscar had better go underground
for a while."
"The _Times_," I said. "We have a whole pillar-building to ourselves;
we could hide half the population."
That was decided upon. We all piled into the lorry, and Bish took it
to an inconspicuous place on the Second Level and let down. Ramón
Llewellyn and the others got out. Then we went up to Main City Level.
We passed within a few blocks of Hunters' Hall. There was a lot of
noise, but no shooting.
Joe Kivelson didn't have anything to say, on the trip, but he kept
looking at the pilot's seat in perplexity and apprehension. I think
he expected Bish to try to ram the lorry through every building we
passed by or over.
We found Dad in the editorial department on the top floor, feeding
voice-tape to Julio while the latter made master sheets for
teleprinting. I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened that he
hadn't gotten from my radio. Dad cluck-clucked in disapproval, either
at my getting into a fight, assaulting an officer, or, literally,
throwing money away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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