The scout boat from the _Pequod_ came in about thirty minutes later,
from up the ravine where the forest fire was sending up flame and
smoke. It passed over the boat and the hut beside it and the crowd of
us outside, and I could see Oscar in the machine gunner's seat aiming
a portable audiovisual telecast camera. After he got a view of us,
cheering and waving our arms, the boat came back and let down. We ran
to it, all of us except the man with the broken leg and a couple who
didn't have enough clothes to leave the fire, and as the boat opened I
could hear Oscar saying:
"Now I am turning you over to Walter Boyd, the _Times_ correspondent
with the _Javelin_ castaways."
He gave me the camera when he got out, followed by his gunner, and I
got a view of them, and of the boat lifting and starting west to guide
the ships in. Then I shut it off and said to him:
"What's this about Bish Ware? You said he was the one who started the
search."
"That's right," Oscar said. "About thirty hours after you left port,
he picked up some things that made him think the _Javelin_ had been
sabotaged. He went to your father, and he contacted me--Mohandas
Feinberg and I still had our ships in port--and started calling the
_Javelin_ by screen. When he couldn't get response, your father put
out a general call to all hunter-ships. Nip Spazoni reported boarding
the _Javelin_, and then went searching the area where he thought you'd
been hunting, picked up your locator signal, and found the _Javelin_
on the bottom with her bow blown out and the boat berth open and the
boat gone. We all figured you'd head south with the boat, and that's
where we went to look."
"Well, Bish Ware; he was dead drunk, last I heard of him," Joe
Kivelson said.
"Aah, just an act," Oscar said. "That was to fool the city cops, and
anybody else who needed fooling. It worked so well that he was able to
crash a party Steve Ravick was throwing at Hunters' Hall, after the
meeting. That was where he picked up some hints that Ravick had a spy
in the _Javelin_ crew. He spent the next twenty or so hours following
that up, and heard about your man Devis straining his back. He found
out what Devis did on the _Javelin_, and that gave him the idea that
whatever the sabotage was, it would be something to the engines. What
did happen, by the way?"
A couple of us told him, interrupting one another. He nodded.
"That was what Nip Spazoni thought when he looked at the ship. Well,
after that he talked to your father and to me, and then your father
began calling and we heard from Nip."
You could see that it absolutely hurt Joe Kivelson to have to owe his
life to Bish Ware.
"Well, it's lucky anybody listened to him," he grudged. "I wouldn't
have."
"No, I guess maybe you wouldn't," Oscar told him, not very cordially.
"I think he did a mighty sharp piece of detective work, myself."
I nodded, and then, all of a sudden, another idea, under _Bish Ware,
Reformation of_, hit me. Detective work; that was it. We could use a
good private detective agency in Port Sandor. Maybe I could talk him
into opening one. He could make a go of it. He had all kinds of
contacts, he was handy with a gun, and if he recruited a couple of
tough but honest citizens who were also handy with guns and built up a
protective and investigative organization, it would fill a long-felt
need and at the same time give him something beside Baldur honey-rum
to take his mind off whatever he was drinking to keep from thinking
about. If he only stayed sober half the time, that would be a fifty
per cent success.
Ramón Llewellyn was wanting to know whether anybody'd done anything
about Al Devis.
"We didn't have time to bother with any Al Devises," Oscar said. "As
soon as Bish figured out what had happened aboard the _Javelin_, we
knew you'd need help and need it fast. He's keeping an eye on Al for
us till we get back."
"That's if he doesn't get any drunker and forget," Joe said.
Everybody, even Tom, looked at him in angry reproach.
"We better find out what he drinks and buy you a jug of it, Joe,"
Oscar's gunner told him.
The _Helldiver_, which had been closest to us when our signal had
been picked up, was the first ship in. She let down into the ravine,
after some maneuvering around, and Mohandas Feinberg and half a dozen
of his crew got off with an improvised stretcher on a lifter and a lot
of blankets. We got our broken-leg case aboard, and Abdullah Monnahan,
and the man with the broken wrist. There were more ships coming, so
the rest of us waited. Joe Kivelson should have gone on the
_Helldiver_, to have his broken arm looked at, but a captain's always
the last man off, so he stayed.
Oscar said he'd take Tom and Joe, and Glenn Murell and me, on the
_Pequod_. I was glad of that. Oscar and his mate and his navigator are
all bachelors, and they use the _Pequod_ to throw parties on when
they're not hunting, so it is more comfortably fitted than the usual
hunter-ship. Joe decided not to try to take anything away from the
boat. He was going to do something about raising the _Javelin_, and
the salvage ship could stop here and pick everything up.
"Well, one thing," Oscar told him. "Bring that machine gun, and what
small arms you have. I think things are going to get sort of rough in
Port Sandor, in the next twenty or so hours."
I was beginning to think so, myself. The men who had gotten off the
_Helldiver_, and the ones who got off Corkscrew Finnegan's _Dirty
Gertie_ and Nip Spazoni's _Bulldog_ were all talking about what was
going to have to be done about Steve Ravick. Bombing _Javelin_ would
have been a good move for Ravick, if it had worked. It hadn't, though,
and now it was likely to be the thing that would finish him for good.
It wasn't going to be any picnic, either. He had his gang of
hoodlums, and he could count on Morton Hallstock's twenty or thirty
city police; they'd put up a fight, and a hard one. And they were all
together, and the hunter fleet was coming in one ship at a time. I
wondered if the Ravick-Hallstock gang would try to stop them at the
water front, or concentrate at Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Building
to stand siege. I knew one thing, though. However things turned out,
there was going to be an awful lot of shooting in Port Sandor before
it was over.
Finally, everybody had been gotten onto one ship or another but Oscar
and his gunner and the Kivelsons and Murell and myself. Then the
_Pequod_, which had been circling around at five thousand feet, let
down and we went aboard. The conning tower was twice as long as usual
on a hunter-ship, and furnished with a lot of easy chairs and a couple
of couches. There was a big combination view and communication screen,
and I hurried to that and called the _Times_.
Dad came on, as soon as I finished punching the wave-length
combination. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he was wearing a gun. I
guess we made kind of a show of ourselves, but, after all, he'd come
within an ace of being all out of family, and I'd come within an ace
of being all out, period. After we got through with the happy reunion,
I asked him what was the situation in Port Sandor. He shook his head.
"Not good, Walt. The word's gotten around that there was a bomb
planted aboard the _Javelin_, and everybody's taking just one guess
who did it. We haven't expressed any opinions one way or another,
yet. We've been waiting for confirmation."
"Set for recording," I said. "I'll give you the story as far as we
know it."
He nodded, reached one hand forward out of the picture, and then
nodded again. I began with our killing the monster and going down to
the bottom after the cutting-up, and the explosion. I told him what we
had seen after leaving the ship and circling around it in the boat.
"The condition of the hull looked very much like the effect of a
charge of high explosive exploding in the engine room," I finished.
"We got some views of it, transmitted in by Captain Spazoni, of the
_Bulldog_," he said. "Captain Courtland, of the Spaceport Police, has
expressed the opinion that it could hardly be anything but a small
demolition bomb. Would you say accident can be ruled out?"
"I would. There was nobody in the engine room at the time; we were
resting on the bottom, and all hands were in the wardroom."
"That's good enough," Dad said. "We'll run it as 'very convincing and
almost conclusive' evidence of sabotage." He'd shut off the recorder
for that. "Can I get the story of how you abandoned ship and landed,
now?"
His hand moved forward, and the recorder went on again. I gave a brief
account of our experiences in the boat, the landing and wreck, and our
camp, and the firewood cutting, and how we had repaired the radio. Joe
Kivelson talked for a while, and so did Tom and Glenn Murell. I was
going to say something when they finished, and I sat down on one of
the couches. I distinctly remember leaning back and relaxing.
The next thing I knew, Oscar Fujisawa's mate was shaking me awake.
"We're in sight of Port Sandor," he was telling me.
I mumbled something, and then sat up and found that I had been lying
down and that somebody had thrown a blanket over me. Tom Kivelson was
still asleep under a blanket on the other couch, across from me. The
clock over the instrument panel had moved eight G.S. hours. Joe
Kivelson wasn't in sight, but Glenn Murell and Oscar were drinking
coffee. I went to the front window, and there was a scarlet glow on
the horizon ahead of me.
That's another sight Cesário Vieria will miss, if he takes his next
reincarnation off Fenris. Really, it's nothing but damp, warm air,
blown up from the exhaust of the city's main ventilation plant,
condensing and freezing as it hits the cold air outside, and
floodlighted from below. I looked at it for a while, and then got
myself a cup of coffee and when I had finished it I went to the
screen.
It was still tuned to the _Times_, and Mohandas Feinberg was sitting
in front of it, smoking one of his twisted black cigars. He had a big
10-mm Sterberg stuffed into the waistband of his trousers.
"You guys poked along," he said. "I always thought the _Pequod_ was
fast. We got in three hours ago."
"Who else is in?"
"Corkscrew and some of his gang are here at the _Times_, now.
_Bulldog_ and _Slasher_ just got in a while ago. Some of the ships
that were farthest west and didn't go to your camp have been in quite
a while. We're having a meeting here. We are organizing the Port
Sandor Vigilance Committee and Renegade Hunters' Co-operative."
15