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An electric motor. If he could cause a short-circuit in that and blow the fuse, maybe the lights in here would go out, and give him a shot at dropping unseen to the floor. Then he could hide in with the equipment down there and see what happened next.

It was better than just hanging around, so what the hell. He hunched himself a little closer to the motor, till he was nearly wrapped around it, and gave it some close scrutiny.

That should be it, right there, a pair of wires that emerged from a box in the ceiling and attached to screws on the top rear of the motor. If he could cross those wires — without electrocuting himself — the motor and some fuse somewhere should both go blooey.

So what he needed was metal. Any on his person? None, naturally. He looked around on the motor for anything that looked both loose and unessential, but there wasn’t anything. The framework he was sharing with the motor also had no usable spare parts. He looked up, mostly to give God a long-suffering look, and saw nails sticking out of the floorboards above his head. Here and there throughout the room nails had been driven in from above, maybe something to do with partitions up there, and some of them stuck down more than an inch on the underside.

One of the nice long ones was just within reach. Grofield took off his right glove and reached out and up, grasping the nail between thumb and forefinger. He pulled, slowly bending the nail this way. It didn’t want to come, but he was insistent, and when he had it at about a forty-five-degree angle he pushed it away again. Then pulled it back, pushed it away, pulled it back. The longer he did it the easier it got, and the nail became warm against his finger and thumb, and then hot, and then just about too hot to touch, and then at long long last it snapped, and he was left holding a piece of nail about one and one-quarter inch long.

Now was the tricky part. He didn’t want to go through all this clever stuff and then zap himself. Being extremely careful, he rested the sharp point of the nail against one of the two screws holding the wire on the top of the motor. He had the point nested in the groove of the screw, and angled the screw so it would, with any luck, fall over onto the other screw. He bit his lower lip, held his breath, moved his feet up so they were against the iron strip down there and he was ready to drop the instant darkness fell, he licked his lips, swallowed, let the nail go, it fell on the other screw, and the door began to open.

Would nothing work right? He was so exasperated he almost asked the question aloud. First he’d tried to ride the garage door to the second floor and wound up hanging from the first-floor ceiling. Now all he’d wanted to do was blow one stinking fuse, and here came the door again.

Also one of the guards. Grofield heard him running down the corridor in this direction.

It was irritation more than anything else that guided what he did next. He grabbed his chest-support iron strip in both hands, kicked loose from the other strip, swung down like Tarzan out of a tree, and as the guard came running in Grofield kicked him in the face with both feet.

The guard did a very interesting thing. While his feet proceeded to run up an imaginary hill, his head fell backward, so that for one insane instant he was lying horizontal in midair, a good four feet off the floor, as though he’d been left there by an absentminded magician. But then Grofield’s tired hands lost their grip on the length of iron, he sat on the guard’s stomach, and the two of them fell to the floor, the guard breaking Grofield’s fall.

The machine gun, the machine gun, the machine gun. The guard had come in toting the thing at port arms, and it had gone flying somewhere when Grofield had turned violent. Now Grofield scrambled around in a frantic circle on the unconscious guard’s stomach, looking for it, and saw it just hitting the floor a little past the guard’s feet. He lunged for it, got it in both hands, rolled over onto his back, stared down past his feet at the doorway and the corridor, and saw the guard down there just spinning around to see what the racket was.

Grofield showed the machine gun but didn’t fire it, hoping to avoid unnecessary noise and bloodshed — he might want that mackinaw — but the guard didn’t feel the same way. He fired a quick burst, but he made the mistake most people make when firing at something below them, and the bullets zipped over Grofield’s head, skinned the concrete behind him, and bounced out into the snow.

Oh, all right. Grofield squeezed the trigger, the gun in his hands chattered, and the guard down there jolted backward over the two chairs and crumpled up on the floor.

Grofield rolled to his right, got to knees and elbows, and was stuck there for a while. He couldn’t go any farther until he let go of the machine gun. Then he could push his torso upward so that he was kneeling on the concrete beside the unconscious guard, facing the open doorway. The door was just snicking into place in the open position.

Grofield looked out at the cold darkness. He could see two of the other buildings, with fewer lights lit now. Both of them were a good distance away. Had the firing been heard? Two short bursts, both indoors, they probably hadn’t been. In any case it was a chance he would have to take.

And here came the door. It had opened all the way, stopped briefly, made clicking and grinding noises, and now it was closing again. That was nice.

Grofield leaned carefully forward and picked up the machine gun and used it as a crutch to get himself to his feet, getting all the way up at about the same time the door was getting all the way down. He stood there leaning against the machine gun and watched the door shut. It made clicking and grinding noises. It started to open again.

Oh, damn it to hell. Grofield looked around in exasperation, and an A ladder was leaning against the wall to the right. He went around a skimobile and a small dozer, wrapped his arms around the ladder, and staggered back with it. He had a great deal of trouble opening it, and a great deal of reluctance climbing it, and during that time the door just kept opening and closing, being on its fourth round trip when he finally started up the ladder.

Talk about signals. Anybody glancing casually out a window in any of those other buildings would see the yellow doorway constantly contracting and expanding, contracting and expanding, and sooner or later it would occur to somebody to send an army over here and find out how come.

He got up the ladder just as the door was coming up again, but then he didn’t want to touch the nail with his hand so he hurried back down again and found a crumpled cigarette pack in the unconscious guard’s mackinaw pocket. He carried them up the ladder as the door was starting down again and used the pack to push the nail off the screws. It rolled off the motor entirely and plinked onto the concrete.

Grofield stayed on the ladder, watching the door mistrustfully. It scooped out and down, it closed, it clicked, it stopped. Grofield smiled.

He climbed down the ladder and went over to check the guard he’d kicked and sat on, and he was completely out, though breathing. And he was wearing fine-looking leather boots, knee-high.

It was the first time in his criminal career that Grofield had stolen the shoes from an unconscious man. It made him feel like a Skid Row mugger, but this was no time for professional snobbery. He removed the boots and the socks underneath them, and then took off his own cold wet shoes and socks. Sitting on the concrete floor, he used the guy’s shirt to dry his feet, then put on the long woolen socks and slipped his feet into the boots, smiling in almost drunken delight at the discovery that they were fur-lined.

They fit. A little big, maybe, but that was better than the shoes he’d been wearing, which had been a little too small to begin with and hadn’t improved by being soaked. The guard’s mackinaw was more practical than Grofield’s overcoat, so he made that switch too, then picked up the machine gun and walked down the corridor to see what the other one looked like.