"Brouha batouli, nibo. Nibo!" cried the Shah piteously. "Nibo!"
The truck meshed its gears and disappeared into the smoke.
"I say," said Halyard thickly.
"Finnerty!" cried a short, fat man in thick glasses from the door of the saloon. "The state police are trying to break through the Griffin Boulevard roadblock! Who've we got for reinforcements?"
Finnerty's eyes widened, and he ran his hands through his hair. "Sent back two stragglers, and that's it. The VFW and the Knights of Pythias wandered off, and the Masons never did show up. Tell them we haven't got any reserves!"
A geyser of flame and shattered masonry spouted from the Ilium Works across the river, and Halyard saw that where the Stars and Stripes had flown over the works manager's office, a white flag now snapped in the smoky wind.
"For chrissake!" said Finnerty. "Get the Moose and Elks on the radio and tell them to quit it. They're supposed to occupy the Works, not atomize it."
"Baker Dog Three," said Lasher into a microphone. "Baker Dog Three. Protect all equipment in the Works until decision can be made as to proper disposition. Can you hear me, Baker Dog Three?"
The crowd by the saloon fell silent, to hear the reply of the Moose and Elks above the shushing noise of the loudspeaker.
"Baker Dog Three - did you hear me?" shouted Lasher.
"Zowie!" came a faraway cry in the speaker, and another volcano erupted in the Works.
"Lubbock!" said Finnerty. "Take over. I'm going over there to teach those babies a little discipline. We'll see who's running this show!" He climbed into a car, and sped across the bridge to the Works.
"Salt Lake City is ours!" shouted another radio operator inside the saloon.
"Oakland and Salt Lake and Ilium so far!" said Lasher. "What about Pittsburgh?"
"No reply."
"Pittsburgh's the key," said Lasher. "Keep trying." He glanced to the south over his shoulder, and a look of horror crossed his face. "Who set the museum on fire?" He shouted into his microphone desperately, "All posts! All posts! Protect all property! Vandalism and looting will be punished by death. Attention all posts - can you hear me?"
Silence.
"Moose? Elks? Knights of Pythias? VFW? Eagles? Hello! Anybody - can you hear me? Hello!"
Silence.
"Proteus!" called an Arab, staggering up to the saloon door, brandishing a bottle. "Where'sh Proteus? Give us a word."
Paul, haggard and aged, appeared beside Lasher in the saloon door. "God help us, gentlemen," he said slowly. "God help us. If we've won, it means that now the hard part begins."
"Jesus - you'd think we losht," said the Arab. "Shorry now I ashked for a word."
"Lou!"
"Right here," said the drunk Arab.
"Lou, boy - we forgot the bakery. Still poopin' out bread like nobody's business."
"Can't have it doin' that," said Lou. "Le'sh go knock the crap out of it."
"Listen, wait," said Paul. "We'll need the bakery."
"Machine, ain't it?" said Lou.
"Yes, sure, but there's no sense in - "
"Then le'sh go knock the crap out of it. And, by God, here'sh ol' Al to go with us. Where you been, y'ol' horse-thief?"
"Blew up the goddam sewage 'sposal plant," said Al proudly.
" 'At's the shtuff! Give the friggin' worl' back to the friggin' people."
Chapter Thirty-Four
"I DON'T understand about Pittsburgh," said Finnerty. "I knew Seattle and Minneapolis were touch-and-go, but Pittsburgh!"
"And St. Louis and Chicago," said Paul, shaking his head.
"And Birmingham and Boston and New York," said Lasher, smiling sadly. He seemed curiously at peace, inexplicably satisfied.
"Pfft!" said Finnerty.
"Ilium came off like clockwork, anyway, and Salt Lake and Oakland," said Professor von Neumann. "So I think we can say that the theory of attack was essentially valid. The execution, of course, was something else again."
"It always is," said Lasher.
"What makes you so cheery?" said Paul.
"Would a good cry make you feel better, Doctor?" said Lasher.
"Now all we have to do is close ranks with Salt Lake City and Oakland, and strangle the country into submission," said Finnerty.
"I wish now we'd sent one of our Ilium people out to get EPICAC," said von Neumann. "EPICAC was worth three Pittsburghs."
"Too bad about the Roswell Moose, all right," said Lasher. "D-71 said they were crazy about the idea of getting EPICAC."
"Too crazy," said Paul.
"Nitro's tricky enough stuff, without having crazy men trying to get it into Coke bottles," said Finnerty.
The four thought-chiefs of the Ghost Shirt Society were seated about what had once been Paul's desk, the works manager's desk in the Ilium Works.
The revolution was not yet a day old. It was early in the morning, before sunrise, but here and there burning buildings made patches of Ilium as bright and hot as tropical noon.
"I wish they'd attack, and get it over with," said Paul.
"It'll take them a little while to get their nerve back, after what the Knights of Kandahar did to the state police on Griffin Boulevard," said Finnerty. He sighed. "By God, if only we'd had a few more outfits like that in Pittsburgh -"
"And St. Louis," said Paul, "and Seattle and Minneapolis and Boston and -"
"Let's talk about something else," said Finnerty. "How's the arm, Paul?"
"Not bad," said Paul, stroking the makeshift splint. The Messiah of the Ghost Shirt Society had had his left arm broken by a rock while exercising his magnetism on a crowd interested in seeing the power station blown up. "How's the head, Professor?"
"Ringing," said von Neumann, adjusting his bandage. He had been struck by the Sacred Mace of The Order of the Aurora Borealis while giving a crowd reasons for not felling a two-hundred-foot radio tower.
"Glockenspiel or carillon?" said Lasher. "And how are your own contusions and abrasions, Ed?"
Finnerty twisted his neck and raised his arms experimentally. "Nothing, really. If the pain gets any worse, I can simply kill myself." He had been floored and trampled by stampeding Moose and Elks while explaining that the Works should be kept intact until a cool decision could be made as to which machines should be destroyed, which retained.
Fire spurted skyward from Homestead.
"Keeping the map right up to the minute, Professor?" said Lasher.
Professor von Neumann looked out at the new blaze through field glasses, and made a black X on the map before him. "Post office, most likely."
The map of the city had been clean and crackling at the start of the campaign, with a dozen small red circles indicating the primary objectives of the Ilium Putsch: the police station, the courthouse, communications centers, sites for roadblocks, the Ilium Works. After these objectives were taken, with a minimum of bloodshed and damage, the plan of operations declared, the systematic replacement of automatic control devices by human beings was to begin. The more important of these secondary objectives were circled in green.
But now the map was smudged and limp. Overlying the scattered constellation of red and green circles was a black, continuous smear of X's that marked what had been taken, and, moreover, destroyed.
Lasher glanced at his watch. "I've got 4 A.M. That right?"
"Who knows?" said Finnerty.
"Can't you see the City Hall clock from there?"
"They got that hours ago."
"And they're likely to be after your watch any minute," said Paul. "Better put it back in your pocket."
"What gets me are the specialists," said Finnerty. "Some guys seem to have it in for just one kind of machine, and leave everything else alone. There's a little colored guy going around town with a shotgun, blasting nothing but those little traffic safety boxes."