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 mass.

Naturally, the kids winked out one by one--and reformed 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 vanish 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, hit and 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 mass, 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.

The vanishing trick Mike had worked out was being used by all of the
kids. Cops were hitting other cops, Lynch was hitting everybody, and the
kids were winking on and off all over the loft. It was a scene of
tremendous noise and carnage.

Malone suddenly sprang to his feet and charged into the melee, shouting
at the top of his lungs and swinging both fists. The first person he saw
was one of the teen-agers, and he charged him with abandon.

[Illustration]

He should, he reflected, have known better. The kid disappeared. Malone
caromed off the stomach of a policeman, received a blow on the shoulder
from his billy, and rebounded into the arms of a surprised police
officer at the edge of the battle.

"Who're you?" the officer gasped.

"Malone," Malone said.

"You on our side?"

"How about you?" Malone said.

"I'm a lieutenant here," the officer said. "In charge of warehouse
precinct. I--"

Malone and the lieutenant stepped nimbly aside as another cop careened
by them, waving his billy helplessly. They looked away as the crash
came. The cop had fallen over a table, and now lay with his legs in the
air, supported by the overturned table, blissfully unconscious.

"We seem