teracy was all right,
although he wished that it had been Frank Cardon who had opened that
safe. Or did he? Cardon would have brazened it out, claimed to have
memorized the combination after having learned it by observation, and
would probably have gotten away with it. But that silly girl had lost
her head afterward, and had gone on to brand herself, irrevocably, as
a Literate.

One of the waitresses was hurrying toward him, almost falling over
herself in excitement. She began talking when she was ten feet from
the table.

"Mr. Latterman! Mr. Latterman!" she was calling to him. "A terrible
fight, down in Chinaware--!"

"Well, what do we have store police for?" he demanded. "They can take
care of it. Now be quiet, Madge; don't get the customers excited!"

He returned to his lunch, watching, with satisfaction, the crowd that
was packing into the Liquor Department, next to the restaurant. That
special loss-leader, Old Atom-Bomb Rye, had been a good idea. In the
first place, the stuff was fit for nothing but cleaning drains and
removing varnish; if he were Pelton, he would have fired that fool
buyer who got them overstocked on it. But the audio-advertiser,
outside, was reiterating: "_Choice whiskies, two hundred dollars a
sixth and up!_" and pulling in the customers, who, when they
discovered that the two-hundred-dollar bargain was Old Atom-Bomb, were
shelling out five hundred to a grand a sixth for good liquor.

He finished his coffee and got to his feet. Be a good idea to look in
on Liquor, and see how things were going. The department was getting
more and more crowded every minute; three customers were entering for
every one who left.

On the way, he passed two women, and caught a snatch of conversation:

"Don't go down on the third floor, for Heaven's sake ... terrible
fight ... smashing everything up--"

Worried, he continued into Liquor, and the looks of the crowd there
increased his worries. Too many men between twenty and thirty, all
dressed alike, looking alike, talking and acting alike. It looked like
a goon-gang infiltration, and he was beginning to see why Harvey
Graves had wanted the Literates pulled out, and why Joyner, bound by
ethics to do nothing against the commercial interests of Pelton's, had
known nothing about it. He started toward a counter, to speak to a
clerk, but one of the stocky, quietly-dressed young men stepped in
front of him.

"Gimme a bottle of Atom-Bomb," he said. "Don't bother