u answered. This is Dud Ardley. Me and Shac are
here. Listen, this is the lower cellar corridor, Lateral 3, under
Broadway. Me and Shac just have seen your girls down here."

News of Anita and Venza! I could see in the mirror-image, behind Dud's
head the outlines of the little public cubby from which he was
calling. He and his brother, on some illicit errand of their own in
East Side lower Manhattan, had seen figures alighting from a
fare-car. They had caught a glimpse of the faces of Anita and Venza.
The girls were hooded and cloaked; a hooded man was with them. The
fare-car quickly rolled away, and the hooded figures, suddenly
becoming invisible within their magnetic cloaks, had vanished.

"S'elp me, we couldn't do nothin'. You know we take no chances with
the police by carryin' cylinders. So I paged you in a hurry."

"Dud, that's damn nice of you. Where are you now? Tell me again."

The Ardleys, knowing nothing of the events of this night, supposed
that the girls were being abducted, and decided I should be informed.

"Damn right, Dud. We'll come at once. You two wait for us?"

"Sure. If you got instruments, maybe we can track 'em. It wasn't a
quarter of a mile from here, over toward the river. Plenty of rotten
dumps down there."

"Wait for us, Dud. We'll come in a rush."

I slammed shut the audiphone. Snap, beside me, had heard it all. He
shoved the astonished orderly out of the way.

"What's the nearest exit-route out of here?"

"To the city roof, sir. Up this incline."

We dashed up the spiral incline, through a low exit-port, and were in
the starlight of the city roof.

* * * * *

"Connect it, Gregg! You can't tell; her message might come over any
minute."

I tuned my coils to the seldom used oscillation frequency which Halsey
had told us Anita's transmitter was sending.

"Anything, Gregg?"

"No. Dead channel."

The air, in Anita's channel, was bafflingly silent.

We had been challenged by a roof-guard when we appeared from the upper
port of the Conclave Hall; the city roof was not open to public
traffic. But with our identifications, he found us a single-seat
hand-tram, and started us southward on the deserted route.

It was a cloudless night, with stars like thickly-strewn diamonds on
purple velvet. The city roof lay glistening in the starlight. In my
great-grandfather's time there had been no roof here; the open city
was exposed to all the inclement weathe