sliding down the spiral way, until he came up against a door four floors below. By the use of special keys and an intricate knowledge of the place, he soon was out in an empty corridor and hurrying along it. He dreaded the details of his capture, but it was a thing that had to be.
It was not long in coming. He rounded another corner and then heard the harsh order.
"Halt!"
He quickened his stride, only to be confronted by another of the fast-thinning guards. There was a spurt of light, and Winchester found himself writhing on the floor, paralyzed and in agony. He looked at the man who had brought him down. It was Severs, one of the men on his list for destruction. Apparently they had not gotten to him yet.
Other soldiers rushed up, and Winchester was seized and hurried along toward the exit. He saw only, as he left, that two of the newly arrived guards had pulled Severs to one side.
"Good work, buddy," he thought he heard one of them say. "Step this way, will you? The boss wants to see you."
At least the AFPA purge of its most effective agents was being carried out, with all the thoroughness and fidelity to orders for which that body was notorious.
It was, thought Winchester, a type of murderous efficiency which successfully destroyed itself.
His entry into the disciplinary barracks was inconspicuous enough. His two captors simply turned him over to the gate guard. They noted his serial number and the red star emblazoned on his back. Then they shot him on into the herd of prisoners.
Winchester lost no time in seeking out his old friend Heim. He was somewhere there, he knew, for he himself had committed him. He had ransacked the Heim file and examined the man's record from childhood on. The fellow was reliable. He was a true patriot and idealist, brave to the point of recklessness, and utterly dependable.
It took Winchester hours, among those cluttered thousands, but at last he came upon the man, seated in the midst of a group of other red star convicts.
"As I live and breathe!" ejaculated Heim. "My old sidekick — Rip Van Winkle! I thought they had done you in."
"Not me," grinned Winchester, and he squatted beside them. "Not yet."
"S-sh-h," he warned a moment later. "I've got to talk with you. Big things are coming up."
"You're telling me?" said Heim, with a hard laugh. "A round-up like this isn't done for nothing. Look! They've got every one of us — all the men that I know, and hundreds more I never heard about. But so far as I know, not a stool pigeon in the lot. Somehow, after you've been a con awhile, you learn to smell 'em out."
"Right," said Winchester. "Every stool pigeon died, not an hour ago. I know. I had the list, and I ordered their execution."
Heim never batted an eyelash.
"Poor kid," he said commiseratingly, looking sharply at his old friend. "So stir's got you at last, too? I thought you could take it."
"I could. I did," said Winchester grimly. "And I'm not nuts. Listen!"
For an hour he talked into the other man's ear. Now he need not fear lip-reading or eavesdropping stool pigeons about, nor did he care a hang about the concealed telemicrophones and scanners adroitly placed about the walls. Their leads were blind now. Their impressions would be carried only to burned and charred instruments, in the ruins of what had been the central files. The precautions he had taken had been thorough.
"You!" exclaimed Heim, drawing back in the traditional fear born of years of dealing with masked agents.
"Yes, I!" Winchester was vehement. "I was the AFPA chief. I ordered these things. Given another three days, we would have had the world in our hands, to take as we liked. I would have moved the remnants of the AFPA from here and substituted puppet guards.
"We could have had access to the vast stores of weapons in the prison arsenal. But I was not allowed to finish the job. Lohan beat me to the punch."
"Then we're sunk," said Heim desperately, and with a touch of reproach. "What if you did have thousands of guards and agents and spies killed? They will find others. You have imprisoned us all and disabled our brains. There is no one left outside to help, or care.
"They will kill us off by degrees — work, work, work, poor food, the lash, torture. It would have been better if you had never come."
"No," Winchester said resolutely. "All is not lost. We are stronger than ever. We are here — tens of thousands of us — with but one thought and one idea — freedom! There is not a man under this dome not in uniform that you cannot trust with your life. The spies have died miserably, the cruelest of the guards have gone the same way.
"For once we have a chance to organize. Let's get at it! We must strike before Lohan brings up his red-striped palace guards and his aristocratic cruiser force. We must — "
"Ha!" snorted Heim. "We would not last a day. They will hunt you down like a snake, and the other ringleaders as well. Your purge, as you call it, will appear as child's play beside what the Mongoloids will do. Their memories are long and they are vicious and vindictive."
"Their memories are no longer than their records," retorted Winchester. "The records have been destroyed, as well as the men who made them. The agents who knew me by sight are dead now, every last one of them. Only Lohan himself could pick me out from this mob — and he dare not try.
"The instant I destroyed the files, the numbers on our backs became meaningless. There is no way for them to know whether you or I or any other man is more dangerous than some poor fellow, let us say, who was sent here simply because he failed to perform the kow-tow quickly."
Heim remained gloomily unconvinced.
"I meant to put the weapons in your hands. I was forestalled," Winchester went on in eager earnestness. "There, and there only, I failed. There is only one thing to do. We must make our weapons. We can still prevail!"
Heim laughed outright, and held out his open hands.
"What weapons?" he asked hollowly. "They have paralyzers, ray and electron guns that kill instantly and at a distance. And we are expected to attack them with sticks! Behind these guards we see stands the army — the picked force kept on Earth to protect the Khan.
"If by some miracle we could overcome the guards, they would send in the army. No. Empty-handed we can do nothing, except offer the same sullen resistance we have always presented."
"No alert man has to go empty-handed long," asserted Winchester, trying to bolster the man with his own assurance. "Long before the invention of such weapons as the paralyzer and the electron gun, men fought wars and killed each other. The history books were burned before your time, but not before mine. What weapons we need, we can make or improvise."
"Like what?" Heim demanded.
"I will show you," said Winchester quietly, and he began to make marks upon the floor.
CHAPTER XX
Final Challenge
Winchester
