The word filtered out that the package was a special package, that its importance overshadowed that of other fusion packages. But no more agents tried for it.
By the end of October, opposition had apparently dwindled and faded. Avis had vanished from sight. There were reports that she had been seen in Stockholm and once that she had been glimpsed in a Moscow suburb. Then the reports ceased entirely.
Stan was not deceived. Avis would try once more, he thought. She would try for the package in Chicago. So he prepared for her, for the final ambush.
The 31st of October, agents were reported filtering down to the intersection and Stan decided to step in personally.
He stepped out of the circle of shimmering light in an alley near 63rd street. Nobody noticed him at all. People were streaming past him, racing through the alley to get away from the intersection. Stan grabbed a man running past him.
"What's going on?"
The man was sweating with fear, his eyes rolling wildly.
"Christ, Mister, don't go out there! They got guns that shoot flames and there's fifty people lying dead in the intersection! All in a minute, I'm walking past on my way to Sears and all of a sudden the streets are loaded with corpses!"
Stan let him go and raced up the alleyway. He could hear the quiet, singing noises of the heat guns and the rapid, spanging gunfire of Avis' men. She had come out in the open, trying desperately to convince the apes that they were threatened by alien groups. She had turned off the time projector halfway through the battle and it must have seemed like carnage had sprung up instantaneously.
There were at least two dozen crumpled figures lying on the pavement near the intersection. Some were crisped to near ash and others had been blasted with the spanging pellets. Two cars were blazing furiously and the windows in Sears and Wieboldt's had been shattered.