ell, you take what men you can spare--a couple of your cops, and a
couple of the office crew--arm them with pistols, carbines, clubs,
whatever you please, and take them down to the basement. Gather up
all the warehouse gang, down there, and arm them. And as soon as you
get to the basement, send the elevator back up here. That's our life
line; we can't risk having it captured. You'll organize flying squads
to go up into the store from the basement. Bust up any trouble that
seems to be getting started, if you can, but your main mission will be
to rescue store police, Literates, Literates' guards, and store help,
and get them back to the basement. They'll be picked up from there and
brought up here on the elevator." He picked up a pad from a desk and
wrote a few lines on it. "Show this to any Literate you meet; get
Literate Hopkinson to countersign it for you, when you find him. Tell
him we want his whole gang up here as soon as possible."

"How about getting help from outside?" Claire asked. "The city police,
or--"

"City police won't lift a finger," Prestonby told her. "They never
help anybody who has a private police force; they have too much to do
protecting John Q. Citizen. Hutschnecker; suppose you call
Radical-Socialist campaign headquarters; tell them to rush some of
their Lone Rangers around here--"

* * * * *

[Illustration:]

Russell M. Latterman was lunching in the store restaurant, at a table
next the thick glass partition, where he could look out across
Confectionery and Pastries toward the Tobacco Shoppe and the Liquor
Department. There were two ways of looking at it, of course. He was
occupying a table that might have been used by a customer, but, on the
other hand, he was known by sight to many of the customers, and the
fact that he was eating here had some advertising value, and he could
keep his eye on the business going on around him. Off in the distance,
he caught the white flash of a Literate smock at one of the counters;
one of the new crew sent in to replace the ones Bayne had pulled out.
He was glad and at the same time disturbed. He had had his doubts
about staging a Literates' strike, and he was almost positive that
Wilton Joyner had known nothing about it. The whole thing had been
Harvey Graves' idea. There was a serious question of Literate ethics
involved, to say nothing of the effect on the public. The trick of
forcing Claire Pelton to reveal her secret Li