So what"s the difference?"
"Shut up!" Mike roared.
"You ain"t telling me to shut up!"
"Me either," Silvo yelled. "You think you"re a great big big-shot! You think you"re king of the world!"
"Who figured out the Vanish?" Mike screamed. "You"d all be a bunch of b.u.ms if I hadn"t showed you that! And you know it! You"d all--"
"Don"t give us that," Silvo said. "We"d have been able to do it, same as you. Like you said, anybody who"s got talent could do it. There were guys you tried to teach--"
"Sure," said a fourth voice. "Listen, Fueyo, you"re so bright--so why don"t you try teaching it to somebody who don"t have the talent?"
"Yeah," said voice number five. "You think you could teach that flashy sister of yours the Vanish?"
"You shut up about my sister, Phil!" Mike screamed.
"So what"s so great about her?"
"She got that book back from the Fed," Mike said. "That"s what. It"s enough!"
"h.e.l.l," a voice said, "any dame with a little--"
"Shut your G.o.dd.a.m.n face before I shut it for you!"
Malone couldn"t tell who was yelling what at who after a minute. They all seemed unhappy about being on the run from the police, and they were all tired of being cooped up in a warehouse under Mike"s orders.
Mike was the only person they could take it out on--and Mike was under heavy attack.
Two of the boys, surprisingly, seemed to side with him. The other five were trying to outshout them. Malone wondered if it would become a fight, and then realized that these kids could hardly fight each other when the one who was losing could always fade out.
He leaned over and whispered to Dorothea and Boyd, "Let"s sneak up there while the argument"s going on."
"But--" Boyd began.
"Less chance of their noticing us," Malone explained, and Started forward.
They tiptoed up the stairs and got behind a pile of crates in the shadows, while invective roared around them. This floor was lit by a single small bulb hanging from a socket in the ceiling. The windows were hung with heavy blankets to keep the light from shining out.
The kids didn"t notice anything except each other. Malone took a couple of deep breaths and began to look around.
All things considered, he thought, the kids had fixed the place up pretty nicely. The unused warehouse had practically been made over into an apartment. There were chairs, beds, tables, and everything else in the line of furnishings for which the kids could conceivably have any use. There were even some floor lamps scattered around, but they weren"t plugged in. Malone guessed that a job would have to be done on the warehouse wiring to get the floor lamps in operation, and the kids just hadn"t got around to it yet.
By now the boys were practically standing toe-to-toe, ripping air-blueing epithets at each other. Not a single hand was lifted.
Malone stared at them for a second, then turned to Dorothea. "We"ll wait till they calm down a little," he whispered. "Then you go out and talk to them. Tell them we won"t hurt them or lock them up or anything. All we want to do is talk to them for awhile."
"All right," she whispered back.
"They can vanish any time they want to," Malone said, "so there"s no reason for them not to listen to--"
He stopped suddenly, listening. Over the shouting, screaming, and cursing of the kids, he heard motion on the floor below.
Cops?
It couldn"t be, he told himself. But when he took out his radiophone, his hands were shaking a little.
Lynch"s voice was already coming over it when Malone thumbed it on.
"...so hang on, Malone! I repeat: We heard the ruckus, and we"re coming in! We"re on our way! Hang on, Malone!"
The voice stopped. There was a click.
Malone stared at the handset, fascinated and horrified. He swallowed.
"No, Lynch!" he whispered, afraid to talk any louder for fear the kids would hear him. "No! Don"t come up. Go away. Repeat: Go away! Stay away, Lynch!"
It was no use. The radiophone was dead.
Lynch, apparently thinking Malone"s set had been smashed in the fight, or else that Malone was unconscious, had shut his own receiver off.
There was absolutely nothing that Malone could do.
The kids were still yelling at the top of their voices, but the thundering of heavy, flat feet galumphing up from the lower depths couldn"t be ignored for long. All the boys noticed it at about the same time. They jerked their heads round to face the stairway. Malone and his compatriots crouched lower behind the boxes.
Mike Fueyo was the first to speak. "Don"t vanish yet," he snapped.
"Let"s see who it is."
The internal dissent among the Silent Spooks disappeared as if it had never been, as they faced a common foe. Once again they fell naturally under Fueyo"s leadership. "If it"s cops," he said, "we"ll give "em the gra.s.shopper play we worked out. We"ll show "em."
"They can"t fool with us," another boy said. "Sure. The gra.s.shopper play."
It was cops, all right. Lieutenant Lynch ran up the stairs waving his billy in a heroic fashion, followed by a horde of blue-clad officers.
"Where"s Malone?" Lynch shouted as he came through the doorway.
"Where"s your what?" Mike yelled back, and the fight was on.
Later, Malone thought that he should have been surprised, but he wasn"t. There wasn"t any time to be surprised. The kids didn"t disappear.
They spread out over the floor of the room easily and lightly, and the cops charged them in a great blundering ma.s.s.
Naturally, the kids winked out one by one--and re-formed in the center of the cops" muddle. Malone saw one cop raise his billy and swing it at Mike. Mike watched it come down and vanished at the last instant.
The cop"s billy descended on the head of another cop, standing just behind where Mike had been.
The second cop, blinded by the blow on his head, swung back and hit the first cop. Meanwhile, Mike was somewhere else.
Malone stayed crouched behind the boxes. Dorothea stood up and shouted, "Mike! Mike! We just want to talk to you!"
Unfortunately, the police were making such a racket that this could not be heard more than a foot or so from the speaker. Lynch himself charged into the ma.s.s, swinging his billy and his free fist, and laying others out one after the other. Pretty soon the floor was littered with cops. Lynch was doing yeoman duty, but it was hard to tell what side he was on.