"All right; do that. And put out an emergency call, by inter-department telephone, not by public address, to floorwalkers from the fifth floor down, to gather up all male clerks and other store personnel in their departments, arm them with anything they can find, and rush them to Chinaware. Tell them to shout 'Pelton!' when they hit the mob, to avoid breaking each others' heads in the confusion, and tell them they're expected to hold the Chinaware and Glassware departments themselves, without any help from the store police."
"Why not?" Claire wanted to know.
"That's how battles come to happen at the wrong time and place," Prestonby told her. "Two small detachments collide, and each sends back for re-enforcements, and the next thing anybody knows, there's a full-size battle going on where nobody wants to fight one. We're going to fight our main battle at the head of the escalators from the twelfth floor."
"You've done this sort of work before, Literate," Coccozello grinned. "You talk like a storm-troop captain. What else?"
"Well, so far, we've just been talking defense. We need to take the offensive, ourselves." He glanced around. "Is there a freight elevator from this block to the basement?"
"Yeah. Wait till I see." Coccozello went to the TV-screen and dialed. "Yeah, and the elevator's up here, too," he said.
"Well, you take what men you can spare—a couple of your cops, and a couple of the office crew—arm them with pistols, carbines, clubs, whatever you please, and take them down to the basement. Gather up all the warehouse gang, down there, and arm them. And as soon as you get to the basement, send the elevator back up here. That's our life line; we can't risk having it captured. You'll organize flying squads to go up into the store from the basement. Bust up any trouble that seems to be getting started, if you can, but your main mission will be to rescue store police, Literates, Literates' guards, and store help, and get them back to the basement. They'll be picked up from there and brought up here on the elevator." He picked up a pad from a desk and wrote a few lines on it. "Show this to any Literate you meet; get Literate Hopkinson to countersign it for you, when you find him. Tell him we want his whole gang up here as soon as possible."
"How about getting help from outside?" Claire asked. "The city police, or—"
"City police won't lift a finger," Prestonby told her. "They never help anybody who has a private police force; they have too much to do protecting John Q. Citizen. Hutschnecker; suppose you call Radical-Socialist campaign headquarters; tell them to rush some of their Lone Rangers around here—"