It seemed as though I had barely fallen asleep before I was wakened by
the ship changing direction and losing altitude. I knew there were
clouds coming in from the east, now, on the lower air currents, and I
supposed that Joe was taking the _Javelin_ below them to have a look
at the surface of the sea. So I ran up to the conning tower, and when
I got there I found that the lower clouds were solid over us, it was
growing dark, and another hunter-ship was approaching with her lights
on.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"_Bulldog_, Nip Spazoni," Joe told me. "Nip's bringing my saloon
fighter aboard, and he wants to meet Mr. Murell."
I remembered that the man who had roughed up the Ravick goon in
Martian Joe's had made his getaway from town in the _Bulldog_. As I
watched, the other ship's boat dropped out from her stern, went
end-over-end for an instant, and then straightened out and came
circling around astern of us, matching our speed and ejecting a
magnetic grapple.
Nip Spazoni and another man climbed out with life lines fast to their
belts and crawled along our upper deck, catching life lines that were
thrown out to them and snapping onto them before casting loose the
ones from their boat. Somebody at the lock under the conning tower
hauled them in.
Nip Spazoni's name was Old Terran Italian, but he had slanted
Mongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for his
nickname. The amount of intermarriage that's gone on since the First
Century, any resemblance between people's names and their appearances
is purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, who looks as though his name
ought to be Lief Ericsson, for example.
"Here's your prodigal, Joe," he was saying, peeling out of his parka
as he came up the ladder. "I owe him a second gunner's share on a
monster, fifteen tons of wax."
"Hey, that was a good one. You heading home, now?" Then he turned to
the other man, who had followed Nip up the ladder. "You didn't do a
very good job, Bill," he said. "The so-and-so's out of the hospital by
now."
"Well, you know who takes care of his own," the crewman said. "Give me
something for effort; I tried hard enough."
"No, I'm not going home yet," Nip was answering. "I have hold-room for
the wax of another one, if he isn't bigger than ordinary. I'm going to
go down on the bottom when the winds start and sit it out, and then
try to get a second one." Then he saw me. "Well, hey, Walt; when did
you turn into a monster-hunter?"
Then he was introduced to Murell, and he and Joe and the man from
Argentine Exotic Organics sat down at the chart table and Joe yelled
for a pot of coffee, and they started talking prices and quantities of
wax. I sat in, listening. This was part of what was going to be the
big story of the year. Finally they got that talked out, and Joe asked
Nip how the monsters were running.
"Why, good; you oughtn't to have any trouble finding one," Nip said.
"There must have been a Nifflheim of a big storm off to the east,
beyond the Lava Islands. I got mine north of Cape Terror. There's huge
patches of sea-spaghetti drifting west, all along the coast of Hermann
Reuch's Land. Here." He pulled out a map. "You'll find it all along
here."
Murell asked me if sea-spaghetti was something the monsters ate. His
reading-up still had a few gaps, here and there.
"No, it's seaweed; the name describes it. Screwfish eat it; big
schools of them follow it. Gulpers and funnelmouths and bag-bellies
eat screwfish, and monsters eat them. So wherever you find spaghetti,
you can count on finding a monster or two."
"How's the weather?" Joe was asking.
"Good enough, now. It was almost full dark when we finished the
cutting-up. It was raining; in fifty or sixty hours it ought to be
getting pretty bad." Spazoni pointed on the map. "Here's about where I
think you ought to try, Joe."
* * * * *
I screened the Times, after Nip went back to his own ship. Dad said
that Bish Ware had called in, with nothing to report but a vague
suspicion that something nasty was cooking. Steve Ravick and Leo
Belsher were taking things, even the announcement of the Argentine
Exotic Organics price, too calmly.
"I think so, myself," he added. "That gang has some kind of a knife up
their sleeve. Bish is trying to find out just what it is."
"Is he drinking much?" I asked.
"Well, he isn't on the wagon, I can tell you that," Dad said. "I'm
beginning to think that he isn't really sober till he's half
plastered."
There might be something to that, I thought. There are all kinds of
weird individualities about human metabolism; for all I knew, alcohol
might actually be a food for Bish. Or he might have built up some kind
of immunity, with antibodies that were themselves harmful if he didn't
have alcohol to neutralize them.
The fugitive from what I couldn't bring myself to call justice proved
to know just a little, but not much, more about engines than I did.
That meant that Tom would still have to take Al Devis's place, and I'd
have to take his with the after 50-mm. So the ship went down to almost
sea surface, and Tom and I went to the stern turret.
The gun I was to handle was an old-model Terran Federation Army
infantry-platoon accompanying gun. The mount, however, was
power-driven, like the mount for a 90-mm contragravity tank gun.
Reconciling the firing mechanism of the former with the elevating and
traversing gear of the latter had produced one of the craziest pieces
of machinery that ever gave an ordnance engineer nightmares. It was a
local job, of course. An ordnance engineer in Port Sandor doesn't
really have to be a raving maniac, but it's a help.
Externally, the firing mechanism consisted of a pistol grip and
trigger, which looked all right to me. The sight was a standard
binocular light-gun sight, with a spongeplastic mask to save the
gunner from a pair of black eyes every time he fired it. The elevating
and traversing gear was combined in one lever on a ball-and-socket
joint. You could move the gun diagonally in any direction in one
motion, but you had to push or pull the opposite way. Something would
go plonk when the trigger was pulled on an empty chamber, so I did
some dry practice at the crests of waves.
"Now, mind," Tom was telling me, "this is a lot different from a
pistol."
"So I notice," I replied. I had also noticed that every time I got the
cross hairs on anything and squeezed the trigger, they were on
something else when the trigger went plonk. "All this gun needs is
another lever, to control the motion of the ship."
"Oh, that only makes it more fun," Tom told me.
Then he loaded in a clip of five rounds, big expensive-looking
cartridges a foot long, with bottle-neck cases and pointed shells.
The targets were regular tallow-wax skins, blown up and weighted at
one end so that they would float upright. He yelled into the intercom,
and one was chucked overboard ahead. A moment later, I saw it bobbing
away astern of us. I put my face into the sight-mask, caught it,
centered the cross hairs, and squeezed. The gun gave a thunderclap
and recoiled past me, and when I pulled my face out of the mask, I saw
a column of water and spray about fifty feet left and a hundred yards
over.
"You won't put any wax in the hold with that kind of shooting," Tom
told me.
I fired again. This time, there was no effect at all that I could see.
The shell must have gone away over and hit the water a couple of miles
astern. Before Tom could make any comment on that shot, I let off
another, and this time I hit the water directly in front of the
bobbing wax skin. Good line shot, but away short.
"Well, you scared him, anyhow," Tom said, in mock commendation.
I remembered some of the comments I'd made when I'd been trying to
teach him to hit something smaller than the target frame with a
pistol, and humbled myself. The next two shots were reasonably close,
but neither would have done any damage if the rapidly vanishing skin
had really been a monster. Tom clucked sadly and slapped in another
clip.
"Heave over another one," he called. "That monster got away."
The trouble was, there were a lot of tricky air currents along the
surface of the water. The engines were running on lift to match
exactly the weight of the ship, which meant that she had no weight at
all, and a lot of wind resistance. The drive was supposed to match the
wind speed, and the ship was supposed to be kept nosed into the wind.
A lot of that is automatic, but it can't be made fully so, which means
that the pilot has to do considerable manual correcting, and no human
alive can do that perfectly. Joe Kivelson or Ramón Llewellyn or
whoever was at the controls was doing a masterly job, but that fell
away short of giving me a stable gun platform.
I caught the second target as soon as it bobbed into sight and slammed
a shell at it. The explosion was half a mile away, but the shell
hadn't missed the target by more than a few yards. Heartened, I fired
again, and that shot was simply dreadful.
"I know what you're doing wrong," Tom said. "You're squeezing the
trigger."
"_Huh_?"
I pulled my face out of the sight-mask and looked at him to see if he
were exhibiting any other signs of idiocy. That was like criticizing
somebody for using a fork instead of eating with his fingers.
"You're not shooting a pistol," he continued. "You don't have to hold
the gun on the target with the hand you shoot with. The mount control,
in your other hand, does that. As soon as the cross hairs touch the
target, just grab the trigger as though it was a million sols getting
away from you. Well, sixteen thousand; that's what a monster's worth
now, Murell prices. Jerking won't have the least effect on your hold
whatever."
So that was why I'd had so much trouble making a pistol shot out of
Tom, and why it would take a special act of God to make one out of his
father. And that was why monster-hunters caused so few casualties in
barroom shootings around Port Sandor, outside of bystanders and
back-bar mirrors. I felt like Newton after he'd figured out why the
apple bopped him on the head.
"You mean like this?" I asked innocently, as soon as I had the hairs
on the target again, violating everything I held most sacredly true
about shooting.
The shell must have passed within inches of the target; it bobbed over
flat and the weight pulled it up again into the backwave from the
shell and it bobbed like crazy.
"That would have been a dead monster," Tom said. "Let's see you do it
again."
I didn't; the next shot was terrible. Overconfidence. I had one more
shot, and I didn't want to use up another clip of the _Javelin_'s
ammo. They cost like crazy, even if they were Army rejects. The sea
current was taking the target farther away every second, but I took my
time on the next one, bringing the horizontal hair level with the
bottom of the inflated target and traversing quickly, grabbing the
trigger as soon as the vertical hair touched it. There was a
water-spout, and the target shot straight up for fifty feet; the shell
must have exploded directly under it. There was a sound of cheering
from the intercom. Tom asked if I wanted to fire another clip. I told
him I thought I had the hang of it now, and screwed a swab onto the
ramrod and opened the breech to clean the gun.
Joe Kivelson grinned at me when I went up to the conning tower.
"That wasn't bad, Walt," he said. "You never manned a 50-mm before,
did you?"
"No, and it's all backward from anything I ever learned about
shooting," I said. "Now, suppose I get a shot at a monster; where do I
try to hit him?"
"Here, I'll show you." He got a block of lucite, a foot square on the
end by two and a half feet long, out of a closet under the chart
table. In it was a little figure of a Jarvis's sea-monster; long body
tapering to a three-fluked tail, wide horizontal flippers like the
wings of an old pre-contragravity aircraft, and a long neck with a
little head and a wide tusked mouth.
"Always get him from in front," he said. "Aim right here, where his
chest makes a kind of V at the base of the neck. A 50-mm will go six
or eight feet into him before it explodes, and it'll explode among his
heart and lungs and things. If it goes straight along his body, it'll
open him up and make the cutting-up easier, and it won't spoil much
wax. That's where I always shoot."
"Suppose I get a broadside shot?"
"Why, then put your shell right under the flukes at the end of the
tail. That'll turn him and position him for a second shot from in
front. But mostly, you'll get a shot from in front, if the ship's down
near the surface. Monsters will usually try to attack the ship. They
attack anything around their own size that they see," he told me. "But
don't ever make a body shot broadside-to. You'll kill the monster, but
you'll blow about five thousand sols' worth of wax to Nifflheim doing
it."
It had been getting dusky while I had been shooting; it was almost
full dark now, and the _Javelin's_ lights were on. We were making
close to Mach 3, headed east now, and running away from the remaining
daylight.
We began running into squalls of rain, and then rain mixed with wet
snow. The underside lights came on, and the lookout below began
reporting patches of sea-spaghetti. Finally, the boat was dropped out
and went circling away ahead, swinging its light back and forth over
the water, and radioing back reports. Spaghetti. Spaghetti with a big
school of screwfish working on it. Funnel-mouths working on the
screwfish. Finally the speaker gave a shrill whistle.
"_Monster ho!_" the voice yelled. "About ten points off your port bow.
We're circling over it now."
"Monster ho!" Kivelson yelled into the intercom, in case anybody
hadn't heard. "All hands to killing stations." Then he saw me standing
there, wondering what was going to happen next. "Well, mister, didn't
you hear me?" he bellowed. "Get to your gun!"
Gee! I thought. I'm one of the crew, now.
"Yes sir!" I grabbed the handrail of the ladder and slid down, then
raced aft to the gun turret.
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