Day. Maybe historians, a couple of centuries from now,
would call me an important primary source, and if Cesario's religion
was right, maybe I'd be one of them, saying, "Well, after all, is
Boyd such a reliable source? He was only seventeen years old at the
time."

Finally, after a lot of yelling and confusion, the Rebel Army got
moving. We all went up to Main City Level and went down Broadway,
spreading out side streets when we began running into the cordon that
had been thrown around Hunters' Hall. They were mostly men from the
waterfront who hadn't gotten to the wax fire, and they must have
stripped the guns off half the ships in the harbor and mounted them on
lorries or cargo skids.

Nobody, not even Joe Kivelson, wanted to begin with any massed frontal
attack on Hunters' Hall.

"We'll have to bombard the place," he was saying. "We try to rush it
and we'll lose half our gang before we get in. One man with good cover
and a machine gun's good for a couple of hundred in the open."

"Bish may be inside," I mentioned.

"Yes," Oscar said, "and even aside from that, that building was built
with our money. Let's don't burn the house down to get rid of the
cockroaches."

"Well, how are you going to do it, then?" Joe wanted to know. Rule out
frontal attack and Joe's at the end of his tactics.

"You stay up here. Keep them amused with a little smallarms fire at
the windows and so on. I'll take about a dozen men and go down to
Second Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple of
skins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out."

That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing how
much wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in on
some of the smoke. I mentioned that if we got into the building and up
to Main City Level, we'd need some way of signaling to avoid being
shot by our own gang, and got the wave-length combination of the
Pequod scout boat, which Joe and Oscar were using for a command car.
Oscar picked ten or twelve men, and they got into a lorry and went
uptown and down a vehicle shaft to Second Level. I followed in my
jeep, even after Oscar and his crowd let down and got out, and hovered
behind them as they advanced on foot to Hunters' Hall.

The Second Level Down was the vehicle storage, where the derricks and
other equipment had been kept. It was empty now except for a
workbench, a hand forge and some other things like that, a few drums
of l