They dropped the lift hastily;
Slater jumped off when it was still six feet above the floor, and
began shouting orders.

"Falk: take ten men and get to the head of this lift-shaft! Burdick,
Levine: get as many men as you can in thirty seconds, and get up to
the head of the escalator! Diaz: go down and tell Sternberg to bring
all his gang up here!"

Cardon caught up a rifle and rummaged for a bandolier of ammunition,
losing about a minute in the search. The delay was fortunate; when he
got to the escalators, he was met by a rush of men hurrying down the
ascending spiral or jumping over onto the descending one.

"Sono guns!" one of them was shouting. "They have the escalator head
covered; you'll get knocked out before you get off the spiral!"

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 sh