“He’s absolutely right, Guido,” Claire told the sergeant. “Do whatever he tells you.”
Sergeant Coccozello looked at him, awaiting orders.
“We can’t commit our reserves in that Chinaware Department fight; we need them up here. Where are they, now, and how many?”
“Thirteen, counting myself and the man in there.” He nodded toward the room where Chester Pelton lay in drugged sleep. “In the squad room, on the floor below.”
“And for the mob below to get up here?”
“Two escalators, sir, northeast and southwest corners of office country. And we got some new counters that Mr. Latterman had built, that didn’t get put out in time for the sale. We can use them to build barricades, if we have to.”
“How about a ’copter attack on the roof?”
Coccozello grinned. “I’d like to see that, now, Literate. We got plenty of A-A equipment up there—four 7-mm machine guns, two 12-mm’s, and one 20-mm auto-cannon. We could hold off the State Guard with that.”
“That isn’t saying much, but they’re not even that good. So it’ll be the escalators. Think, now, sergeant. Fires, burglary, holdups—”
The sergeant’s grin widened. “High-pressure fire hose, one at the head of each escalator, and a couple more that can be dragged over from other outlets. Say we put two men on each hose, lying down at the head of the escalators. And we got plenty of firearms; we can arm some of these clerks, up here—”
“All right; do that. And put out an emergency call, by inter-department telephone, not by public address, to floorwalkers from the fifth floor down, to gather up all male clerks and other store personnel in their departments, arm them with anything they can find, and rush them to Chinaware. Tell them to shout ‘Pelton!’ when they hit the mob, to avoid breaking each others’ heads in the confusion, and tell them they’re expected to hold the Chinaware and Glassware departments themselves, without any help from the store police.”
“Why not?” Claire wanted to know.
“That’s how battles come to happen at the wrong time and place,” Prestonby told her. “Two small detachments collide, and each sends back for reinforcements, and the next thing anybody knows, there’s a full-size battle going on where nobody wants to fight one. We’re going to fight our main battle at the head of the escalators from the twelfth floor.”
“You’ve done this sort of work before, Literate,” Coccozello grinned. “You talk like a storm-troop captain. What else?”
“Well, so far, we’ve just been talking defense. We need to take the offensive, ourselves.” He glanced around. “Is there a freight elevator from this block to the basement?”
“Yeah. Wait till I see.” Coccozello went to the TV-screen and dialed. “Yeah, and the elevator’s up here, too,” he said.
“Well, you take what men you can spare—a couple of your cops, and a couple of the office crew—arm them with pistols, carbines, clubs, whatever you please, and take them down to the basement. Gather up all the warehouse gang, down there, and arm them. And as soon as you get to the basement, send the elevator back up here. That’s our life line; we can’t risk having it captured. You’ll organize flying squads to go up into the store from the basement. Bust up any trouble that seems to be getting started, if you can, but your main mission will be to rescue store police, Literates, Literates’ guards, and store help, and get them back to the basement. They’ll be picked up from there and brought up here on the elevator.” He picked up a pad from a desk and wrote a few lines on it. “Show this to any Literate you meet; get Literate Hopkinson to countersign it for you, when you find him. Tell him we want his whole gang up here as soon as possible.”
“How about getting help from outside?” Claire asked. “The city police, or—”
“City police won’t lift a finger,” Prestonby told her. “They never help anybody who has a private police force; they have too much to do protecting John Q. Citizen. Hutschnecker; suppose you call Radical-Socialist campaign headquarters; tell them to rush some of their Lone Rangers around here—”
Russell M. Latterman was lunching in the store restaurant, at a table next the thick glass partition, where he could look out across Confectionery and Pastries toward the Tobacco Shoppe and the Liquor Department. There were two ways of looking at it, of course. He was occupying a table that might have been used by a customer, but, on the other hand, he was known by sight to many of the customers, and the fact that he was eating here had some advertising value, and he could keep his eye on the business going on around him. Off in the distance, he caught the white flash of a Literate smock at one of the counters; one of the new crew sent in to replace the ones Bayne had pulled out. He was glad and at the same time disturbed. He had had his doubts about staging a Literates’ strike, and he was almost positive that Wilton Joyner had known nothing about it. The whole thing had been Harvey Graves’ idea. There was a serious question of Literate ethics involved, to say nothing of the effect on the public. The trick of forcing Claire Pelton to reveal her secret Literacy was all right, although he wished that it had been Frank Cardon who had opened that safe. Or did he? Cardon would have brazened it out, claimed to have memorized the combination after having learned it by observation, and would probably have gotten away with it. But that silly girl had lost her head afterward, and had gone on to brand herself, irrevocably, as a Literate.
One of the waitresses was hurrying toward him, almost falling over herself in excitement. She began talking
