ubricant, and several piles of sheet metal. Oscar and his men got
inside and I followed, going up to the ceiling. I was the one who saw
the man lying back of a pile of sheet metal, and called their
attention.

He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and a
pistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple of
Oscar's followers, dragging him out, said:

"He's been sleep-gassed."

Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been on
guard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight.

I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been what
had gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weapons
on Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it looked
to me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used it
to knock out our guard. Taken if off his body, I guessed. That crowd
wasn't any more interested in taking prisoners alive than we were.

We laid the man on a workbench and put a rolled-up sack under his head
for a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't think
we were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close to
my gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and none
of them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to.

The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any of
them. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hear
firing outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked my
handphone.

"We're in," I said when Joe Kivelson answered. "Stop the shooting;
we're coming up to the vehicle port."

"Might as well. Nobody's paying any attention to it," he said.

The firing slacked off as the word was passed around the perimeter,
and finally it stopped entirely. We went up into the open arched
vehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half a
dozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing.

"We're going up," I said. "They've all lammed out. The place is
empty."

"You don't know that," Oscar chided. "It might be bulging with
Ravick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down."

Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren't
running, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush by
starting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that I
wasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of us
went over and looked behind the