atter his enemy with his own pistol,
instead of pushing the muzzle against the man's body and pulling the
trigger. He struck a flailing blow, and his hand and the weapon struck a
metal brace. The blow cut his knuckles and paralyzed his fingers.
Despairingly he felt the pistol slipping from his grasp. Then his
assailant brought up his knee viciously, but it hit Joe's thigh instead
of his groin, and Joe flung his weight furiously forward and they
toppled to the ground together.

There was fighting all around him. The machine guns rasped again--there
was a burst of tracer-bullet fire. The panicked men by the exit tried to
surge out through the swinging doors. But the tracers marked a line they
must not cross. They checked. Once a gun flashed so close by Joe's eyes
that it blinded him. And once somebody fell over both himself and his
antagonist, who writhed like an eel possessed of desperate strength past
belief.

Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the
murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the
Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a
man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur's
pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its
way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to
crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary
off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which
surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.

There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in
the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the
Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he
got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his
forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man's
neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistol shots and
hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought
valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where
there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to
scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards' bodies and head
toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch
Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and
leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the oth