We heard nothing more from Bish Ware that evening. Joe and Tom
Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa slept at the _Times_ Building, and after
breakfast Dad called the spaceport hospital about Murell. He had
passed a good night and seemed to have thrown off all the poison he
had absorbed through his skin. Dad talked to him, and advised him not
to leave until somebody came for him. Tom and I took a car--and a
pistol apiece and a submachine gun--and went to get him. Remembering,
at the last moment, what I had done to his trousers, I unpacked his
luggage and got another suit for him.
He was grateful for that, and he didn't lift an eyebrow when he saw
the artillery we had with us. He knew, already, what the score was,
and the rules, or absence thereof, of the game, and accepted us as
members of his team. We dropped to the Bottom Level and went, avoiding
traffic, to where the wax was stored. There were close to a dozen
guards there now, all heavily armed.
We got out of the car, I carrying the chopper, and one of the gang
there produced a probe rod and microscope and a testing kit and a
microray scanner. Murell took his time going over the wax, jabbing the
probe rod in and pulling samples out of the big plastic-skinned
sausages at random, making chemical tests, examining them under the
microscope, and scanning other cylinders to make sure there was no
foreign matter in them. He might not know what a literary agent was,
but he knew tallow-wax.
I found out from the guards that there hadn't been any really serious
trouble after we left Hunter's Hall. The city police had beaten a few
men up, natch, and run out all the anti-Ravick hunters, and then
Ravick had reconvened the meeting and acceptance of the thirty-five
centisol price had been voted unanimously. The police were still
looking for the Kivelsons. Ravick seemed to have gotten the idea that
Joe Kivelson was the mastermind of the hunters' cabal against him. I
know if I'd found that Joe Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa were in any
kind of a conspiracy together, I wouldn't pick Joe for the mastermind.
It was just possible, I thought, that Oscar had been fostering this
himself, in case anything went wrong. After all, self-preservation is
the first law, and Oscar is a self-preserving type.
After Murell had finished his inspection and we'd gotten back in the
car and were lifting, I asked him what he was going to offer, just as
though I were the skipper of the biggest ship out of Port Sandor.
Well, it meant as much to us as it did to the hunters. The more wax
sold for, the more advertising we'd sell to the merchants, and the
more people would rent teleprinters from us.
"Eighty centisols a pound," he said. Nice and definite; quite a
difference from the way he stumbled around over listing his previous
publications. "Seventy-five's the Kapstaad price, regardless of what
you people here have been getting from that crook of a Belsher. We'll
have to go far enough beyond that to make him have to run like blazes
to catch up. You can put it in the _Times_ that the day of
monopolistic marketing on Fenris is over."
* * * * *
When we got back to the _Times_, I asked Dad if he'd heard anything
more from Bish.
"Yes," he said unhappily. "He didn't call in, this morning, so I
called his apartment and didn't get an answer. Then I called Harry
Wong's. Harry said Bish had been in there till after midnight, with
some other people." He named three disreputables, two female and one
male. "They were drinking quite a lot. Harry said Bish was plastered
to the ears. They finally went out, around 0130. He said the police
were in and out checking the crowd, but they didn't make any trouble."
I nodded, feeling very badly. Four and a half hours had been his
limit. Well, sometimes a ninety per cent failure is really a triumph;
after all, it's a ten per cent success. Bish had gone four and a half
hours without taking a drink. Maybe the percentage would be a little
better the next time. I was surely old enough to stop expecting
miracles.
The mate of the _Pequod_ called in, around noon, and said it was safe
for Oscar to come back to the ship. The mate of the _Javelin_, Ramón
Llewellyn, called in with the same report, that along the waterfront, at
least, the heat was off. However, he had started an ambitious-looking
overhaul operation, which looked as though it was good for a hundred
hours but which could be dropped on a minute's notice, and under cover
of this he had been taking on supplies and ammunition.
We made a long audiovisual of Murell announcing his price of eighty
centisols a pound for wax on behalf of Argentine Exotic Organics, Ltd.
As soon as that was finished, we loaded the boat-clothes we'd picked
up for him and his travel kit and mine into a car, with Julio Kubanoff
to bring it back to the _Times_, and went to the waterfront. When we
arrived, Ramón Llewellyn had gotten things cleared up, and the
_Javelin_ was ready to move as soon as we came aboard.
On the Main City Level, the waterfront is a hundred feet above the
ship pools; the ships load from and discharge onto the First Level
Down. The city roof curves down all along the south side of the city
into the water and about fifty feet below it. That way, even in the
post-sunset and post-dawn storms, ships can come in submerged around
the outer breakwater and under the roof, and we don't get any wind or
heavy seas along the docks.
Murell was interested in everything he saw, in the brief time while we
were going down along the docks to where the _Javelin_ was berthed. I
knew he'd never actually seen it before, but he must have been
studying pictures of it, because from some of the remarks he made, I
could tell that he was familiar with it.
Most of the ships had lifted out of the water and were resting on the
wide concrete docks, but the _Javelin_ was afloat in the pool, her
contragravity on at specific-gravity weight reduction. She was a
typical hunter-ship, a hundred feet long by thirty abeam, with a squat
conning tower amidships, and turrets for 50-mm guns and launchers for
harpoon rockets fore and aft. The only thing open about her was the
air-and-water lock under the conning tower. Julio, who was piloting
the car, set it down on the top of the aft gun turret. A couple of the
crewmen who were on deck grabbed our bags and hurried them inside. We
followed, and as soon as Julio lifted away, the lock was sealed.
Immediately, as the contragravity field dropped below the specific
gravity of the ship, she began submerging. I got up into the conning
tower in time to see the water of the boat pool come up over the
armor-glass windows and the outside lights come on. For a few minutes,
the _Javelin_ swung slowly and moved forward, feeling her way with
fingers of radar out of the pool and down the channel behind the
breakwater and under the overhang of the city roof. Then the water
line went slowly down across the windows as she surfaced. A moment
later she was on full contragravity, and the ship which had been a
submarine was now an aircraft.
Murell, who was accustomed to the relatively drab sunsets of Terra,
simply couldn't take his eyes from the spectacle that covered the
whole western half of the sky--high clouds streaming away from the
daylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. There
were more clouds coming in at a lower level from the east. By the time
the _Javelin_ returned to Port Sandor, it would be full dark and rain,
which would soon turn to snow, would be falling. Then we'd be in for
it again for another thousand hours.
Ramón Llewellyn was saying to Joe Kivelson: "We're one man short;
Devis, Abdullah's helper. Hospital."
"Get hurt in the fight, last night? He was right with us till we got
out to the elevators, and then I missed him."
"No. He made it back to the ship about the same time we did, and he
was all right then. Didn't even have a scratch. Strained his back at
work, this morning, trying to lift a power-unit cartridge by hand."
I could believe that. Those things weighed a couple of hundred pounds.
Joe Kivelson swore.
"What's he think this is, the First Century Pre-Atomic? Aren't there
any lifters on the ship?"
Llewellyn shrugged. "Probably didn't want to bother taking a couple of
steps to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment and
observation for a day or so."
"That's Al Devis?" I asked. "What hospital?" Al Devis's strained back
would be good for a two-line item; he'd feel hurt if we didn't mention
it.
"Co-op hospital."
That was all right. They always sent in their patient lists to the
_Times_. Tom was griping because he'd have to do Devis's work and his
own.
"You know anything about engines, Walt?" he asked me.
"I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magnetic
current into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate the
daylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction,"
I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math got
a little complicated after that, and I started reading another book."
"You'd be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tom
asked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but a
cannon's different."
"I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case or
something, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhere
close to it."
"We'll do that," he said. "Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when we
sight a monster, but somebody'll have to help Abdullah with the
engines."
He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded.
"Walt's made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, I
know that," he said, "and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher,
once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full of
air for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we'll go
down to the surface and have some shooting."
I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple of
hours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and I
would share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big on
the outside, but there's very little room for the crew. The engines
are much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravity
craft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in the
air. Then, there's a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boat
berth aft for the scout boat, so they're not exactly built for
comfort. They don't really need to be; a ship's rarely out more than a
hundred and fifty hours on any cruise.
Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the wax
business, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actual
observation. He said that Argentine Exotic Organics was going to keep
him here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be to
deal with the hunters, either individually or through their
co-operative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set up
something he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talk
the hunters' language and understand their problems.
So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything and
conscripting any crew members I came across to explain what I
couldn't. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbed
into it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed the
wax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills that
extracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and the
ship's armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. He
whistled when he saw the engines.
"Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter,"
he said.
"They have to be," I said. "Running submerged isn't the same as
running in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?"
He shook his head. "I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water's a
little too cold to do much swimming there. And I've spent most of my
time since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. The
sports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that."
Well, whattaya know! Here was a man who had not only seen a horse, but
actually ridden one. That in itself was worth a story in the _Times_.
Tom and Abdullah, who were fussing around the engines, heard that.
They knocked off what they were doing and began asking him
questions--I suppose he thought they were awfully silly, but he
answered all of them patiently--about horses and riding. I was looking
at a couple of spare power-unit cartridges, like the one Al Devis had
strained his back on, clamped to the deck out of the way.
They were only as big as a one-liter jar, rounded at one end and flat
at the other where the power cable was connected, but they weighed
close to two hundred pounds apiece. Most of the weight was on the
outside; a dazzlingly bright plating of collapsium--collapsed matter,
the electron shell collapsed onto the nucleus and the atoms in actual
physical contact--and absolutely nothing but nothing could get through
it. Inside was about a kilogram of strontium-90; it would keep on
emitting electrons for twenty-five years, normally, but there was a
miniature plutonium reactor, itself shielded with collapsium, which,
among other things, speeded that process up considerably. A cartridge
was good for about five years; two of them kept the engines in
operation.
The engines themselves converted the electric current from the power
cartridges into magnetic current, and lifted the ship and propelled
it. Abdullah was explaining that to Murell and Murell seemed to be
getting it satisfactorily.
Finally, we left them; Murell wanted to see the sunset some more and
went up to the conning tower where Joe and Ramón were, and I decided
to take a nap while I had a chance.
8