Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the
murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the
Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a
man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur's
pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its
way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to
crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary
off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which
surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.
There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in
the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the
Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he
got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his
forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man's
neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistol shots and
hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought
valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where
there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to
scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards' bodies and head
toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch
Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and
leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the other man. A gun
flashed, but then there was only squirming struggle on the floor.
Mike the midget, inside the Platform, found one bloodied, panting,
sobbing man who somehow had gotten inside. And Mike brought down a
spanner from a ladder step, and swarmed upon his half-conscious victim,
and hit him again, and then stayed on guard until somebody arrived who
was big enough to carry the saboteur away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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