"Do exactly as I do," whispered Sadie after they had progressed for several blocks up a flag-draped boulevard. "We've got to make our get-away." "But aren't we...?" Despite himself, Frank was a bit carried away by the pomp and circumstance of the martial music and the gaily-dressed, cheering throngs which lined the way. "I never had a chance...." "I do believe, Frank," the girl teased him, "that if you had made your pile when you first came to Wildoatia you'd be a Big Shot today. Well, you'll have no chance to taste the fleshpots and I'm the only houri you're going to have any traffic with tonight. Besides, we wouldn't stand a chance of escaping recognition in the police lineup at City Hall.... Now!" * * * * * She hurled herself into the crowd lining the street, sprinted for an alley with the patrolman at her heels. They plunged into darkness just as a burst of gunfire sent splinters flying about their heads. [Illustration: Sadie hurled herself into the crowd, as a patrolman looked up, with gun raised.] "That was close," gasped the girl. "The Shots certainly have their guard up these days." She seized Frank's hand and raced with him along a narrow way which was slippery with garbage and rank with stenches. "Here we are. Sharp right.... Now left.... Last time I came through here I had a broken arm. But you should have seen the Concentrator who gave it to me.... Wup! This is the place." She dived into a tumbledown liquor store. "Sadie Thompson," she snapped at the blinking proprietor; "we're tailed." The fellow jerked a thumb toward a curtain at the back of the shop. They ducked behind the cloth, plunged down a flight of stairs and landed, plop, in a sewer. Wading against a flood of filth, beating off tarks which squeaked and slavered at them, they advanced blindly. A quarter of a mile "up-stream" they found a door marked by a phosphorescent glow. They dragged themselves through it and into an empty chamber which bore the word, _Baths_, on an inner door. After scrubbing some of the sewage off each other and changing to clean overalls, which they found in a locker, Sadie pressed a concealed button in a series of dots and dashes. A door opened in the wall, revealing a corridor hewn out of rock. They went through it until they reached a room occupied by a man with one arm and a hideously disfigured face. "Jack!" cried the girl. "I hoped you'd be on duty. This is Captain Sage; you've heard of him. The Shots are tearing the town apart to find us. Can you put us up for the night?" As the one-armed man nodded she rattled on: "We hear the Shots have something better than Plutonium." Again the nod. "Know where their labs are located?" Jack picked up a pencil, wrote a sentence and handed her the pad. "Somewhere under the Polar Sea?" Sadie frowned. "Not much chance of hitting a hideout like that with a V-60. How far along are they?"