Free If I Were You by L. Ron Hubbard Page A

under these grasshoppery conditions.
     
    Around they went. O’Brien, despite his chill, did not feel at all tired, though a corresponding amount of exercise would have laid him up if he had been his normal size. The laughter of the men thundered through the room. O’Brien thought unhappily that as soon as they became bored with this spectacle they would tie a weight to him to make him easier game for their man.
    Then a reflection caught his eye. It was a silvery spike lying in a crack of the floor. He snatched it up. It was an ordinary pin, not at all sharp, to his vision, but it would do for a dagger.
    Guanella approached, balancing his ax. The minute he raised it, O’Brien leaped at him, stabbing. The point bounced back from Guanella’s hide, which seemed much tougher than ordinary human skin had a right to be. Down they went. Their mutual efforts buffeted O’Brien about so that he hardly knew what he was doing. But he got a glimpse of Guanella’s arm flat on the floor, the handle—the eraser end—of the ax gripped in his fist. With both hands O’Brien drove the point of his pin into the arm. It went in and through and into the wood. Guanella shouted. O’Brien caught up the ax and raced for the door.
    He moved so quickly, compared to his normal ponderousness, that the gangsters were caught flat-footed. O’Brien slashed with the rear edge at the ankle of the man at the door. He saw the sock peel down, and the oozing skin after it. Vic roared and jumped, almost stepping on O’Brien, who dashed through and out.
    He raced to the bar; a mighty jump took him to the top of a stool, and thence he jumped to the bar-top. He gathered the thermos bottle under his arm. It was a small thermos bottle, but it was still almost as big as he was. But he had no time to ponder on the wonders of size. There was a thunderous explosion behind him, and a bullet ripped along the bar, throwing splinters large enough to bowl him over. He hopped off onto a stool, and thence to the floor, and raced out. He zigzagged, and the shots that followed him went wide.
    Outside, he yelled, “Orson!”
    Orson Crow, O’Brien’s favorite hackman , looked up from his tabloid. Seeing O’Brien bearing down on him, he muttered something about seeing things, and trod on the starter.
    “Wait!” shouted O’Brien. “It’s me, Obie! Let me in, quick! Quick, I say!”
    He pounded on the door of the cab. Crow still did not recognize him, but at that minute a gangster with a pistol appeared at the door of the Hole in the Wall. Crow at least understood that this animated billiken was being pursued with felonious intent. So he threw open the door, almost knocking O’Brien over. O’Brien leaped in.
    “McGraw-Hill building, quick!” he gasped. Crow automatically started to obey the order. As the cab roared down Eighth Avenue, O’Brien explained what he could to the bewildered driver.
    “Well, now,” he said, “have you got a handkerchief?” When Crow produced one, not exactly clean, O’Brien tied it diaperwise around his middle.
    When they reached the McGraw-Hill building, they did not have to ask where McLeod was. There was a huge crowd, and many firemen and policemen in evidence. Some men were trying to rig up a derrick. A searchlight on a firetruck played on the unfortunate McLeod, whose fingers clutched the twenty-first story of the building, and whose feet rested on the pavement. He had had difficulty in the matter of clothes similar to that experienced by O’Brien and Guanella, except that he had, of course, grown out of his clothes instead of shrinking out from under them. Around his waist was wound several turns of rope, and through this in front was thrust an uprooted tree, roots up.
    A cop stopped the cab. “You can’t go no closer.”
    “But—” said Crow.
    “Gawan, I says you can’t go no closer.”
    O’Brien said, “Meet me on the south side of the building, Orson. And open this damn door first.”
    Crow opened the door.