It didn't take long to get Murell's luggage assembled. There was
surprisingly little of it, and nothing that looked like photographic
or recording equipment. When he returned from a final gathering-up in
his stateroom, I noticed that he was bulging under his jacket, too, on
the left side at the waist. About enough for an 8.5-mm pocket
automatic. Evidently he had been briefed on the law-and-order
situation in Port Sandor.
Normally, we'd have gone off onto the Main City Level, but Tom's jeep
was down on the Bottom Level, and he made no suggestion that we go off
and wait for him to bring it up. I didn't suggest it, either. After
all, it was his jeep, and he wasn't our hired pilot. Besides, I was
beginning to get curious. An abnormally large bump of curiosity is
part of every newsman's basic equipment.
We borrowed a small handling-lifter and one of the spaceport
roustabouts to tow it for us, loaded Murell's luggage and my things
onto it, and started down to the bottomside cargo hatches, from which
the ship was discharging. There was no cargo at all to go aboard,
except mail and things like Adolf Lautier's old film and music tapes.
Our only export is tallow-wax, and it all goes to Terra. It would be
picked up by the Cape _Canaveral_ when she got in from Odin five
hundred hours from now. But except for a few luxury items from Odin,
everything we import comes from Terra, and the _Peenemünde_ had
started discharging that already. We rode down on a contragravity skid
loaded with ammunition. I saw Murell looking curiously at the square
cases, marked TERRAN FEDERATION ARMED FORCES, and 50-MM, MK. 608,
ANTIVEHICLE AND ANTIPERSONNEL, 25 ROUNDS, and OVERAGE. PRACTICE ONLY.
NOT TO BE ISSUED FOR SERVICE, and INSPECTED AND CONDEMNED. The hunters
bought that stuff through the Co-op. It cost half as much as new ammo,
but that didn't help them any. The difference stopped with Steve
Ravick. Murell didn't comment, and neither did Tom or I.
We got off at the bottom of the pit, a thousand feet below the
promenade from which I had come aboard, and stopped for a moment.
Murell was looking about the great amphitheater in amazement.
"I knew this spaceport would be big when I found out that the ship
landed directly on the planet," he said, "but I never expected
anything like this. And this serves a population of twenty thousand?"
"Twenty-four thousand, seven hundred and eight, if the man who got
pounded in a barroom fight around 1330 hasn't died yet," I said. "But
you have to remember that this place was built close to a hundred
years ago, when the population was ten times that much." I'd gotten my
story from him; now it was his turn to interview me. "You know
something about the history of Fenris, I suppose?"
"Yes. There are ample sources for it on Terra, up to the collapse of
the Fenris Company," he said. "Too much isn't known about what's been
happening here since, which is why I decided to do this book."
"Well, there were several cities built, over on the mainland," I told
him. "They're all abandoned now. The first one was a conventional
city, the buildings all on the surface. After one day-and-night cycle,
they found that it was uninhabitable. It was left unfinished. Then
they started digging in. The Chartered Fenris Company shipped in huge
quantities of mining and earth-moving equipment--that put the company
in the red more than anything else--and they began making
burrow-cities, like the ones built in the Northern Hemisphere of Terra
during the Third and Fourth World Wars, or like the cities on Luna and
Mercury Twilight Zone and Titan. There are a lot of valuable mineral
deposits over on the mainland; maybe in another century our
grandchildren will start working them again.
"But about six years before the Fenris Company went to pieces, they
decided to concentrate in one city, here in the archipelago. The sea
water stays cooler in the daytime and doesn't lose heat so rapidly in
the nighttime. So they built Port Sandor, here on Oakleaf Island."
"And for convenience in monster-hunting?"
I shook my head. "No. The Jarvis's sea-monster wasn't discovered until
after the city was built, and it was years after the company had gone
bankrupt before anybody found out about what tallow-wax was good
for."
I started telling him about the native life-forms of Fenris. Because
of the surface temperature extremes, the marine life is the most
highly developed. The land animals are active during the periods after
sunset and after sunrise; when it begins getting colder or hotter,
they burrow, or crawl into caves and crevices among the rocks, and go
into suspended animation. I found that he'd read up on that, and not
too much of his information was incorrect.
He seemed to think, though, that Port Sandor had also been mined out
below the surface. I set him right on that.
"You saw what it looked like when you were coming down," I said. "Just
a flat plateau, with a few shaft-head domes here and there, and the
landing pit of the spaceport. Well, originally it was a valley,
between two low hills. The city was built in the valley, level by
level, and then the tops of the hills were dug off and bulldozed down
on top of it. We have a lot of film at the public library of the
construction of the city, step by step. As far as I know, there are no
copies anywhere off-planet."
He should have gotten excited about that, and wanted to see them.
Instead, he was watching the cargo come off--food-stuffs, now--and
wanted to know if we had to import everything we needed.
"Oh, no. We're going in on the Bottom Level, which is mainly storage,
but we have hydroponic farms for our vegetables and carniculture
plants for meat on the Second and Third Levels. That's counting down
from the Main City Level. We make our own lumber, out of reeds
harvested in the swamps after sunrise and converted to pulpwood, and
we get some good hardwood from the native trees which only grow in
four periods of two hundred hours a year. We only use that for
furniture, gunstocks, that sort of thing. And there are a couple of
mining camps and smelters on the mainland; they employ about a
thousand of our people. But every millisol that's spent on this planet
is gotten from the sale of tallow-wax, at second or third hand if not
directly."
That seemed to interest him more. Maybe his book, if he was really
writing one, was going to be an economic study of Fenris. Or maybe his
racket, whatever it was, would be based on something connected with
our local production. I went on telling him about our hydroponic
farms, and the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we
wanted was grown--Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan _zhoumy_
meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest.... He knew, already, that none of the
native life-forms, animal or vegetable, were edible by Terrans.
"You can get all the _paté de foie gras_ you want here," I said. "We
have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in
one of our vats."
By this time, we'd gotten across the bottom of the pit, Murell's
luggage and my equipment being towed after us, and had entered the
Bottom Level. It was cool and pleasant here, lighted from the ceiling
fifty feet overhead, among the great column bases, two hundred feet
square and two hundred yards apart, that supported the upper city and
the thick roof of rock and earth that insulated it. The area we were
entering was stacked with tallow-wax waiting to be loaded onto the
_Cape Canaveral_ when she came in; it was vacuum-packed in plastic
skins, like big half-ton Bologna sausages, each one painted with the
blue and white emblem of the Hunters' Co-operative. He was quite
interested in that, and was figuring, mentally, how much wax there was
here and how much it was worth.
"Who does this belong to?" he wanted to know. "The Hunters'
Co-operative?"
Tom had been letting me do the talking up to now, but he answered that
question, very emphatically.
"No, it doesn't. It belongs to the hunters," he said. "Each ship crew
owns the wax they bring in in common, and it's sold for them by the
Co-op. When the captain gets paid for the wax he's turned over to the
Co-op, he divides the money among the crew. But every scrap of this
belongs to the ships that took it, up till it's bought and paid for by
Kapstaad Chemical."
"Well, if a captain wants his wax back, after it's been turned over
for sale to the Co-op, can he get it?" Murell asked.
"Absolutely!"
Murell nodded, and we went on. The roustabout who had been following
us with the lifter had stopped to chat with a couple of his fellows.
We went on slowly, and now and then a vehicle, usually a lorry, would
pass above us. Then I saw Bish Ware, ahead, sitting on a sausage of
wax, talking to one of the Spaceport Police. They were both smoking,
but that was all right. Tallow-wax will burn, and a wax fire is
something to get really excited about, but the ignition point is 750° C.,
and that's a lot hotter than the end of anybody's cigar. He must
have come out the same way we did, and I added that to the
"wonder-why" file. Pretty soon, I'd have so many questions to wonder
about that they'd start answering each other. He saw us and waved to
us, and then suddenly the spaceport cop's face got as white as my
shirt and he grabbed Bish by the arm. Bish didn't change color; he
just shook off the cop's hand, got to his feet, dropped his cigar, and
took a side skip out into the aisle.
"Murell!" he yelled. "Freeze! On your life; don't move a muscle!"
Then there was a gun going off in his hand. I didn't see him reach for
it, or where he drew it from. It was just in his hand, firing, and the
empty brass flew up and came down on the concrete with a jingle on the
heels of the report. We had all stopped short, and the roustabout who
was towing the lifter came hurrying up. Murell simply stood gaping at
Bish.
"All right," Bish said, slipping his gun back into a shoulder holster
under his coat. "Step carefully to your left. Don't move right at
all."
Murell, still in a sort of trance, obeyed. As he did I looked past his
right shin and saw what Bish had been shooting at. It was an irregular
gray oval, about sixteen inches by four at its widest and tapering up
in front to a cone about six inches high, into which a rodlike member,
darker gray, was slowly collapsing and dribbling oily yellow stuff.
The bullet had gone clear through and made a mess of dirty gray and
black and green body fluids on the concrete.
It was what we call a tread-snail, because it moves on a double row of
pads like stumpy feet and leaves a trail like a tractor. The
fishpole-aerial thing it had erected out of its head was its stinger,
and the yellow stuff was venom. A tenth of a milligram of it in your
blood and it's "Get the Gate open, St. Peter; here I come."
Tom saw it as soon as I did. His face got the same color as the cop's.
I don't suppose mine looked any better. When Murell saw what had been
buddying up to him, I will swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles,
Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels and
Thoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally stood on end.
I've heard that expression all my life; well, this time I really saw
it happen. I mentioned that he seemed to have been reading up on the
local fauna.
I looked down at his right leg. He hadn't been stung--if he had, he
wouldn't be breathing now--but he had been squirted, and there were a
couple of yellow stains on the cloth of his trouser leg. I told him to
hold still, used my left hand to pull the cloth away from his leg, and
got out my knife and flipped it open with the other hand, cutting away
the poisoned cloth and dropping it on the dead snail.
Murell started making an outcry about cutting up his trousers, and
said he could have had them cleaned. Bish Ware, coming up, told him to
stop talking like an imbecile.
"No cleaner would touch them, and even if they were cleaned, some of
the poison would remain in the fabric. Then, the next time you were
caught in the rain with a scratch on your leg, Walt, here, would
write you one of his very nicest obituaries."
Then he turned to the cop, who was gabbling into his belt radio, and
said: "Get an ambulance, quick. Possible case of tread-snail skin
poisoning." A moment later, looking at Murell's leg, he added, "Omit
'possible.'"
There were a couple of little spots on Murell's skin that were
beginning to turn raw-liver color. The raw poison hadn't gotten into
his blood, but some of it, with impurities, had filtered through the
cloth, and he'd absorbed enough of it through his skin to make him
seriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and the
laborer with the lifter brought it and let it down, and Murell sat
down on his luggage. Tom lit a cigarette and gave it to him, and told
him to remain perfectly still. In a couple of minutes, an ambulance
was coming, its siren howling.
The pilot and his helper were both jackleg medics, at least as far as
first aid. They gave him a drink out of a flask, smeared a lot of gunk
on the spots and slapped plasters over them, and helped him into the
ambulance, after I told him we'd take his things to the _Times_
building.
By this time, between the shot and the siren, quite a crowd had
gathered, and everybody was having a nice little recrimination party.
The labor foreman was chewing the cop out. The warehouse
superintendent was chewing him out. And somebody from the general
superintendent's office was chewing out everybody indiscriminately,
and at the same time mentioning to me that Mr. Fieschi, the
superintendent, would be very much pleased if the _Times_ didn't
mention the incident at all. I told him that was editorial policy,
and to talk to Dad about it. Nobody had any idea how the thing had
gotten in, but that wasn't much of a mystery. The Bottom Level is full
of things like that; they can stay active all the time because the
temperature is constant. I supposed that eventually they'd pick the
dumbest day laborer in the place and make him the patsy.
Tom stood watching the ambulance whisk Murell off, dithering in
indecision. The poisoning of Murell seemed like an unexpected blow to
him. That fitted what I'd begun to think. Finally, he motioned the
laborer to pick up the lifter, and we started off toward where he had
parked his jeep, outside the spaceport area.
Bish walked along with us, drawing his pistol and replacing the fired
round in the magazine. I noticed that it was a 10-mm Colt-Argentine
Federation Service, commercial type. There aren't many of those on
Fenris. A lot of 10-mm's, but mostly South African Sterbergs or
Vickers-Bothas, or Mars-Consolidated Police Specials. Mine, which I
wasn't carrying at the moment, was a Sterberg 7.7-mm Olympic Match.
"You know," he said, sliding the gun back under his coat, "I would be
just as well pleased as Mr. Fieschi if this didn't get any publicity.
If you do publish anything about it, I wish you'd minimize my own part
in it. As you have noticed, I have some slight proficiency with lethal
hardware. This I would prefer not to advertise. I can usually avoid
trouble, but when I can't, I would like to retain the advantage of
surprise."
We all got into the jeep. Tom, not too graciously, offered to drop
Bish wherever he was going. Bish said he was going to the _Times_, so
Tom lifted the jeep and cut in the horizontal drive. We got into a
busy one-way aisle, crowded with lorries hauling food-stuffs to the
refrigeration area. He followed that for a short distance, and then
turned off into a dimly lighted, disused area.
Before long, I began noticing stacks of tallow-wax, put up in the
regular outside sausage skins but without the Co-op markings. They
just had the names of hunter-ships--_Javelin_, _Bulldog_, _Helldiver_,
_Slasher_, and so on.
"What's that stuff doing in here?" I asked. "It's a long way from the
docks, and a long way from the spaceport."
"Oh, just temporary storage," Tom said. "It hasn't been checked in
with the Co-op yet."
That wasn't any answer--or maybe it was. I let it go at that. Then we
came to an open space about fifty feet square. There was a jeep, with
a 7-mm machine gun mounted on it, and half a dozen men in boat-clothes
were playing cards at a table made out of empty ammunition boxes. I
noticed they were all wearing pistols, and when a couple of them saw
us, they got up and grabbed rifles. Tom let down and got out of the
jeep, going over and talking with them for a few minutes. What he had
to tell them didn't seem to bring any noticeable amount of sunlight
into their lives. After a while he came back, climbed in at the
controls, and lifted the jeep again.
4