Revanche had planned to slip down his private stairway to the little balcony that would overlook the other end of the tube. There he would have watched the doomed spilling out in a white and frenzied flood. There he would have lapped up revenge as a placated Greek ghost would have lapped blood at a Trojan hecatomb.
Instead, trembling, and bursting with terror, he turned and faced the X's. "You haven't got me yet!" he screamed at them.
He kicked the little wheel, that closed the vault from the inside. Once the two-hundred-ton door clanged shut, it could not be opened as long as the inside wheel remained locked in place. It was an anti-robbery device that he was well aware of, having in his youth once planned to plunder the bank in order to get a start in business.
The huge door swung shut swiftly.
Revanche shook his fist at the onrushing horde, then jerked around, and leaped into the tube. The thunder of brass shoes filled the vault walls. Just before he slid out of view Revanche twisted his head for one last look.
A Bioid was leaping through the air in a desperate endeavor to sacrifice itself by stopping the door with its hard and almost indestructible eternalloy body.
The financier did not see whether or not the Bioid made it, for he dropped abruptly into blackness.
V
Normally, he would have shot down the smooth funnel, inclined at thirty-five degrees, at a terrific speed. But he had not become the most resourceful financier of the solar system for nothing. No wizard in an emergency, he yet liked to be prepared.