ht, watching everything coolly.
No cop was near him. In the dim light the place looked like a scene
from hell, a special hell for policemen.

Malone wove through battling hordes to the edge, and came out a few
feet away from Mike Fueyo.

Fueyo didn't see him. He was looking at Boyd instead--still stumbling
back and forth as the teen-ager baiting him winked on and off in front
of him and behind him. He was laughing.

Malone came up silently from behind. The trip seemed to take hours. He
was being very quiet, although he was reasonably sure that even if he
yelled he wouldn't be heard. But he didn't want to take the slightest
chance.

He sprang on Mike, and attached the handcuffs to his wrist and to
Mike's wrist within ten seconds.

"Ha!" he said involuntarily. "Now come with me!"

He gave his end of the handcuffs a tremendous yank.

He started to stagger, trailing an empty cuff behind him, flailing his
arms wildly. Ahead of him he could see a big cop with an upraised
billy. Malone tried to alter his course, but it was too late. He
skidded helplessly into the cop, who jerked round and swung the billy
automatically. Malone said: "Ugh," as he caught the blow on the
cheekbone, bounced off the cop and kept going.

He careened past a blur of figures, trying to avoid hard surfaces and
other human beings. But there was--

Oh, no, Malone thought. Lynch.

Lynch was ready to swing. His fist was cocked, and he was heading for
one of the teen-agers with murder in his eye. Malone knew their paths
were going to intersect. "Watch out," he yelled. "Watch out, it's me!
Stop me! Somebody stop me!" He went completely unheard.

Lynch swung and missed, hitting a cop who had been hiding behind the
teen-ager. The cop went down to join the wounded, and Lynch roared
like a bull and swung around, looking for more enemies.

That was when Malone hit him.

Long afterward, he remembered Lynch's hat sailing through the air, and
landing in the center of a struggling mass of policemen. He remembered
Lynch saying, "So there you are!" and swinging before he looked.

He remembered the blow on the chin.

And then he remembered falling, and falling, and falling. Somewhere
there was a voice: "Where the hell are they? They've disappeared for
good."

And then, for long seconds, nothing.

He woke up with a headache, but it wasn't too bad. Surprisingly, not
much time had passed; he got up and dusted off his trousers, looking
around at the bat