Gangway!

    Finally the group turned and left the anteroom. When the tourists turned left, Gabe, Roscoe and Ittzy turned right and waited just around the corner until the group was gone.

    Vangie stepped to the barred door. She had the flask in one hand and the knuckle-duster in the other.

    "Stick 'em up."

    The guards whipped around in amazement and stared at her. "Huh?"

    "Stick 'em up. These are guns."

    They gri

    "I mean it. They really are guns."

    "Sure they are." The guard lifted his key ring. "I don't know how you got in there, honey, but you're about to come out." He began to unlock the door.

    "Don't make me shoot. Don't make me prove it!" Her voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch.

    The two guards yanked the barred door open.

    That was when Gabe and Roscoe arrived. Gabe said mildly, "Okay, hold it right there." Ittzy came in behind them. All three were holding guns that actually looked like guns.

    Vangie, her voice still shaky, said, "I thought you said you'd be right down."

    "We got here as fast as we could," Gabe said.

    The guards were getting over their surprise. One of them said, "You'll never get away with this."

    Vangie said, "That's what I keep telling them."

    "Let's move it along," Gabe said. "We're in kind of a hurry."

    Roscoe relieved the guards of their weapons and tied them up in a corner of the anteroom while Gabe locked the outer entrance-the steel-plated door that fitted right over the incoming handcart rails. Now they were sealed off from the rest of the Mint.

    Ittzy and Gabe climbed into the hole in the ceiling; Roscoe stood guard with his huge pistols. Presently the canisters and the box of dynamite made their way down to the floor, whereupon Roscoe carried the gas canisters out into the anteroom and placed one on each side of the door. Ittzy opened the box of dynamite, removed several sticks, got out his book again, and went thumbing through the pages.

    Roscoe returned from the anteroom, wheeling the handcart in. "Okay to turn those valves now?"

    Gabe said, "Not yet. Come on."

    As Ittzy approached the vault, lip-reading slowly in his dynamite book, Gabe led Vangie out to the anteroom, followed by Roscoe. "We'll wait out here," Gabe said. "Ittzy will set the charges in there and then come out here before they go off."

    "I don't know," Vangie said, "how I ever got invol…"

    There was a sudden explosion.

    The three of them turned, open-mouthed, and stared at the doorway to the vault room. A cloud of smoke puffed out through the doorway, and Ittzy came walking out through it, leafing through the book. He seemed mildly bewildered but otherwise unhurt. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "It shouldn't have done that."

    Awed, Vangie said, "Ittzy, are you okay?"

    He looked up from the book, blushed when he met Vangie's eye, and said, "Fine. Uh, I'm fine. Why not?"

    Roscoe said, "What about the vault?"

    "Right," said Gabe. He and Roscoe hurried into the next room through the settling smoke, with Ittzy and Vangie right behind them. Inside they found the steel door of the vault sagging wide open like a tin can that had been pried apart with a chisel.

    And just inside it were piles and piles of dull yellow metal.

    "That's the stuff," Gabe said. "I'd know it anywhere."

    Roscoe said, "That's pretty."

    "The handcart," Gabe told him.

    "Right."

    Roscoe wheeled the handcart as close as possible to the ruined door and he, Gabe and Ittzy went to work filling it with the ingots, stacking them with loving care.

    Gabe said, "Vangie? Get the valves, will you?"

    "Right."

    Vangie went back to the anteroom and across to the outer door, took a deep breath, held it, opened wide the valves of both canisters of laughing gas, left them hissing, hurried back to the i

    Ittzy said, "This stuff's heavy."

    "Keep loading," Gabe told him.

    Throughout the building armed men were begi

    Down on the waterfront, Francis was ambling along, easy and casual, taking the air. Pausing at an intersection, he glanced uphill toward the Mint, indistinct in the fog. He looked at his watch and moved on along the street until he came to a fire-alarm box. He posted himself near it and waited, the snap-lid watch in his hand.

    Vangie tried to lift an ingot, but it was too heavy for her. She stepped back and let the men do it. Her face was filled with anxiety.

    Guards ran from all directions through the mazed corridors toward the vault.

    The first arrivals found the anteroom door locked. Seven men dashed off in seven directions to find a key.

    Vangie was hopping up and down with nervousness. "That's enough," she cried. "That's enough. You've got enough!"

    "All of it," Gabe said grimly, and dropped another ingot onto the pile in the handcart.

    Three guards with three keys crashed into each other at a corridor junction. One was dazed, but the other two rushed into the railway-tracked corridor. After a minor skirmish they got the anteroom door unlocked.

    Two men clawed the edge of the door and swung it ponderously open. Twenty-two guards poured into the room and all but trampled one another in their flying rush for the vault.

    They didn't have time to notice the two canisters hissing quietly to themselves in a room already filled with laughing gas. Their attention was fixed on that closed steel door to the vault room across the way; midway to it, the guards began to sag. Gri

    Two of them, realizing too late what was going on, tried to get to the canisters to turn them off but failed. Chuckling stupidly, they embraced the cool smooth canisters in flaccid grips, sliding slowly down to the floor.

    Three others, at the rear of the group, turned around and made it back to the hallway before collapsing like their mates with idiotic smiles and glazed eyes.

    The canisters hissed on, above the supine smiling guards.

    Francis took out the watch, glanced at it, and looked upward at the Mint. The fog was thi

    The handcart was full.

    Too full.

    "Oh, no," Gabe said.

    Five thousand pounds of gold was a lot of gold. It was in fact too much gold to push.

    The four of them leaned as hard as they could, but the handcart wouldn't even rock. It might have been a stone wall.

    "Damn!" Gabe said. "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"

    Vangie cried, "I knew it wouldn't work! I knew it couldn't be done!"

    Ittzy said, "I guess we'll have to take a lot of the gold out."

    "Over my dead…" And then Gabe whipped around and grabbed Ittzy's arm. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Gimme that book!"

    Ittzy gave him the book and Gabe thumbed feverishly through it. "I know I saw it in here someplace, someplace… Something about shaped charges…"