“Mr. Latterman! Mr. Latterman!” she was calling to him. “A terrible fight, down in Chinaware—!”
“Well, what do we have store police for?” he demanded. “They can take care of it. Now be quiet, Madge; don’t get the customers excited!”
He returned to his lunch, watching, with satisfaction, the crowd that was packing into the Liquor Department, next to the restaurant. That special loss-leader, Old Atom-Bomb Rye, had been a good idea. In the first place, the stuff was fit for nothing but cleaning drains and removing varnish; if he were Pelton, he would have fired that fool buyer who got them overstocked on it. But the audio-advertiser, outside, was reiterating: “Choice whiskies, two hundred dollars a sixth and up!” and pulling in the customers, who, when they discovered that the two-hundred-dollar bargain was Old Atom-Bomb, were shelling out five hundred to a grand a sixth for good liquor.
He finished his coffee and got to his feet. Be a good idea to look in on Liquor, and see how things were going. The department was getting more and more crowded every minute; three customers were entering for every one who left.
On the way, he passed two women, and caught a snatch of conversation:
“Don’t go down on the third floor, for Heaven’s sake … terrible fight … smashing everything up—”
Worried, he continued into Liquor, and the looks of the crowd there increased his worries. Too many men between twenty and thirty, all dressed alike, looking alike, talking and acting alike. It looked like a goon-gang infiltration, and he was beginning to see why Harvey Graves had wanted the Literates pulled out, and why Joyner, bound by ethics to do nothing against the commercial interests of Pelton’s, had known nothing about it. He started toward a counter, to speak to a clerk, but one of the stocky, quietly-dressed young men stepped in front of him.
“Gimme a bottle of Atom-Bomb,” he said. “Don’t bother wrapping it.”
“Yes, sir.” The clerk seemed worried, too. He got the bottle and set it on the counter. “That’ll be two C, sir.”
“I see you’re wearing a Radical-Socialist button,” the customer commented. “Because you want to, or because Chet Pelton makes you?”
“Mr. Pelton never interferes with his employees’ political convictions,” the clerk replied loyally.
Saying nothing, the customer took the bottle, swung it by the neck, and smashed it over the clerk’s head, knocking him senseless.
“That’s all that rotgut’s good for,” the customer said, jumping over the counter. “All right, boys; help yourselves!”
For a surprisingly long time, the riot was localized in China, where it had begun. Using, alternately, three TV-pickups around the scene of the disturbance, Prestonby watched its progress, and watched successive details of store personnel, armed with clubs and a few knives and sono pistols, hit the riot, shouting their battle cry, and vanish. They were, of course, lambs of sacrifice, however unlamblike their conduct. They were buying time, and they were drawing groups of goons into the action in China and Glassware who might have been making trouble elsewhere.
There was an outbreak on the sixth floor, in Liquor; Claire, touring the store on the other TV-screen, spotted it and called his attention to it. Back of the shattered glass partition, a mob of men were snatching bottles from the shelves and tossing them out to the crowd. One of the clerks, in his gray uniform jacket, was lying unconscious outside. While Prestonby watched, another, and another, came flying out the doorway. A fourth victim, in ordinary business clothes, tattered and disheveled, came flying out after them, to land in a heap, stunned for an instant, and then pick himself up. Prestonby laughed heartily when he recognized Literate—undercover—First Class Russell M. Latterman.
“I ought to have anticipated that,” he said. “Any time there’s a riot, the liquor stores are the first things looted. The liquor stores, and the—Claire! See what’s going on in Sporting Goods!”
Sporting Goods, between Tools & Hardware and Toys, on the fifth floor, was swamped. One of the clerks was lying on the floor in a puddle of blood, past any help; none of the others were in sight. The gun racks and pistol cases were being cleaned out systematically. This had been organized in advance. There were four or five men working industriously wiping grease out of bores and actions before handing out firearms, and a couple more making sure that the right cartridges went with each weapon. Somebody had brought a small grinding wheel over from Tools and plugged it in, and was grinding points on the foils and épées. Others were collecting baseball bats, golf clubs, and football helmets and catchers’ masks. The Tool Department was being stripped of everything that could be used as a weapon, too.
The whole store, by this time, was an approximation of Mutiny in a Madhouse. Dressgoods was being looted by a howling mob of women, who were pulling bolts of material from shelves and fighting among themselves over them. Somebody had turned on the electric fans, and long streams of flimsy fabric were blowing about like a surrealist maypole dance. Somebody in Household Furnishings had turned on a couple of fans, too, and a mob of hoodlums were opening cans of paint and throwing them into the fan blades.
The little Antiques Department, in a corner of the fourth floor back of the Gift Shoppe, was an island of peace in the general chaos. There was only one way into it, and one of the clerks, who had gotten himself into a suit of Fifteenth Century battle armor, was standing in the entrance, leaning on a two-hand sword. There was blood on the long blade, and more blood splashed on the floor in front of him. He was being left entirely alone.
Hutschnecker, called to the telephone, spoke briefly, listened for a while, spoke again in hearty thanks, and hung up.
“Macy & Gimbel’s,” he told Prestonby. “They heard about our trouble—probably one of their price-spotters phoned in about it—and they’re offering to send twenty
