r
stabbed at the button but stopped before it made contact. He stared down
with bulging eyes at the little black box of death peeping out of his
waistband.

Jon hadn't waited for the reaction. He pushed backward from the desk and
stopped to grab the stolen pinch bar off the floor. A mighty one-legged
leap brought him to the locked closet; he stabbed the bar into the space
between the door and frame and heaved.

Coleman was just starting to struggle the bomb out of his pants when the
action was over. The closet open, Jon seized the heavy strap holding the
second bomb on the rummy's chest and snapped it like a thread. He threw
the bomb into Coleman's corner, giving the man one more thing to worry
about. It had cost him a leg, but Jon had escaped the bomb threat
without injuring a human. Now he had to get to a phone and make that
call.

Coleman stopped tugging at the bomb and plunged his hand into the desk
drawer for a gun. The returning men would block the door soon, the only
other exit from the room was a frosted-glass window that opened onto the
mammoth bay of the warehouse.

Jon Venex plunged through the window in a welter of flying glass. The
heavy thud of a recoilless .75 came from the room behind him and a
foot-long section of metal window frame leaped outward. Another slug
screamed by the robot's head as he scrambled toward the rear door of the
warehouse.

He was a bare thirty feet away from the back entrance when the giant
door hissed shut on silent rollers. All the doors would have closed at
the same time, the thud of running feet indicated that they would be
guarded as well. Jon hopped a section of packing cases and crouched out
of sight.

He looked up over his head, there stretched a webbing of steel supports,
crossing and recrossing until they joined the flat expanse of the roof.
To human eyes the shadows there deepened into obscurity, but the
infra-red from a network of steam pipes gave Jon all the illumination he
needed.

The men would be quartering the floor of the warehouse soon, his only
chance to escape recapture or death would be over their heads. Besides
this, he was hampered by the loss of his leg. In the rafters he could
use his arms for faster and easier travel.

Jon was just pulling himself up to one of the topmost cross beams when
a hoarse shout from below was followed by a stream of bullets. They tore
through the thin roof, one slug clanged off the steel beam under his
body. Waiting u