“No nervous breakdown this year, Willkie,” Norvell said chattily to the M.C.
“What? Bligh? Bligh, they won’t listen to me,” Willkie sobbed.
Twelve feet, almost there, and then the brick, unseen, that tapped Don Lavin between the shoulder blades and made him flail the pole, too hard; and the hecklers were out of control. Hubble and Mundin shouted and screamed and pleaded, but the “gravel” was in their hands, and they weren’t listening; it was not only the piranha that were maddened at the first taste of blood.
Norvell took one last agonized look around the arena. But there was nothing. No chair, no table, no cushion, nothing to throw to the fish, but——
“NO!” bellowed Shep from behind him, and Norvell, startled, half-turned. Just for a moment. But the moment meant that it was Shep, not Norvell, who wrapped the sobbing Willkie in his arms; Shep, not Norvell, who lunged into the tank for an eternal instant; Shep—who had an “inpounding debt worry.” And who paid his debts.
First the water was cool. And then boiling.
At the far end, the quiet end, of the tank, Mundin and Hubble yanked Don out in one heave.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I wanted to do it,” Norvell Bligh was saying in a cracked voice. “I was willing to do it.”
Norma had her arms around him, in the cab going back to Belly Rave. “Of course you were,” she soothed him.
Mundin, riding dazedly beside them, tried to rest his brain. That was a pretty good little man, he thought. Good thing
Shep took the play away from him. Well need him. But of course he can’t Lee it that way, not yet.
Hubble was chattering vivaciously away. “Really an adventure. But the big adventure’s coming up, eh, Mundin? After the piranha, Green, Charlesworth. They’ll make us wish we were back with the piranha, wouldn’t you say?”
Don Lavin advised him, “Shut up.” Something had happened to Don Lavin. He might have learned something on the wire, Mundin thought. Funny, how you grow up after a while—after a very long while, for some people.
Reminded, he picked up the phone and asked information for a number.
Hubble, eavesdropping and irrepressible, said, “Oh, of course. The Stadium infirmary. We plain forgot about old Ryan, didn’t we? And we’ll need him for the big doings— when are you going to let us in on the plan, by the way? Now that we’ve got Don back we’ve got the stock. But we’ll never votelt. You know that; they’ll tie us up hi injunctions from here to hell. I suppose——” He broke off, warned by Mun-din’s expression as he slowly hung up the phone. “Ryan?” Hubble demanded in a completely different tone.
Mundin nodded. “Hemorrhage,” he said. “He died on the operating table.” He sighed.
War was never cheap, he thought. Shep—almost Bligh— and now Ryan. Give me one more victory such as this, and I am undone, he quoted to himself, as he began to plot the final struggle that Ryan had helped to shape, and would not see.
“You’d think,” grumbled Don Lavin, “that ten hours’ sleep would fix a person up.”
Mundin said worriedly, “It’s almost time for the bell. Do you see Norvie?” They were in the Stock Exchange, waiting for the start of business. The enormous hall was packed with its customary seething, excitable throng—but not quite the customary feeling of tension, Mundin thought, putting out psychic feelers into the crowd. It was a more somber mass of speculators than the last tune he had been here, a worried bunch, fretful and disturbed. Their own publicity campaign, Mundin thought with a touch of satisfaction. There had been trading in G.M.L.; it was off a few points, over the last weeks.
Not much, but enough to shake, ever so slightly, the ironclad conviction of its stability. And if G.M.L. wasn’t totally sound, the investors were wondering, almost aloud, what was?
They saw Norvie at last, inconspicuous against the far wall. He looked at them without visible recognition, then deliberately looked away. They followed his look; and there was Hubble, at a hundred-dollar window, chatting gaily with the investor at the window next to him. And then the bell rang for the first movement of the day.