He turned and looked toward the freight lift. It was coming down again, with Falk and his men unconscious on it, knocked senseless by bludgeons of inaudible sound, and a half a dozen of the 'copter-borne raiders, all wearing the white robes and hoods of the Independent-Conservative storm troops. He swung his rifle up and began squeezing the trigger, remembering to first make sure that the fire-control lever was set forward for semiauto, and remembering his advice to Goodkin, that morning. By the time the platform had stopped, all the men in white robes were either dead or wounded, and none of the unconscious Literates' guards along with them had been injured. The medic who had come with Cardon, assisted by a couple of the office force, got the casualties sorted out. There was nothing that could be done about the men who had been sono-stunned; in half an hour or so, they would recover consciousness with no ill effects that a couple of headache tablets wouldn't set right. The situation, while bad, was not immediately desperate. If the white-clad raiders controlled the top landing stage, they were pinned down by the firearms and sono guns of the defenders, below, who were in a position to stop anything that came down the escalators or the lift shaft. The fate of the first party was proof of that. And the very magnitude of the riot guaranteed that somebody on the outside, city police, State guards, or even Consolidated States regulars, would be taking a hand shortly. The air attack and 'copter-landing on the roof had been excellent tactics, but it had been a serious policy-blunder. As long as the disturbance had been confined to the interior of the store, the city police could shrug it off as another minor riot on property supposed to be protected by private police, and do nothing about it. The rocket-attack on the top landing stage and the spectacular explosion of the fireworks temporarily stored there, however, was something that simply couldn't be concealed or dismissed. The cloud of varicolored smoke alone must have been visible all over the five original boroughs of the older New York, and there were probably rumors of atom-bombing going around. "What gets me," Slater, who must have been thinking about the same thing, said to Cardon, "is where they got hold of those two fighter-bombers. That kind of stuff isn't supposed to be in private hands."