"I am, but I'm no chemist. I don't know anything about how wax burns.
All I know is what it's used for, roughly, and who's in the market for
it."
"Well, you know about those jumbo molecules, don't you?" I asked.
"They have everything but the kitchen sink in them, including enough
oxygen to sustain combustion even under water or in a vacuum. Not
enough oxygen to make wax explode, like powder, but enough to keep it
burning. Chemical extinguishers are all smothering agents, and you
just can't smother a wax fire. And water's worse than useless."
He wanted to know why.
"Burning wax is a liquid. The melting point is around 250 degrees
Centigrade. Wax ignites at 750. It has no boiling point, unless that's
the burning point. Throw water on a wax fire and you get a steam
explosion, just as you would if you threw it on molten metal, and that
throws the fire around and spreads it."
"If it melts that far below the ignition point, wouldn't it run away
before it caught fire?"
"Normally, it would. That's why I'm sure this fire was a touch-off. I
think somebody planted a thermoconcentrate bomb. A thermoconcentrate
flame is around 850 Centigrade; the wax would start melting and
burning almost instantaneously. In any case, the fire will be at the
bottom of the stacks. If it started there, melted wax would run down
from above and keep the fire going, and if it started at the top,
burning wax would run down and ignite what's below."
"Well, how in blazes do you put a wax fire out?" he wanted to know.
"You don't. You just pull away all the wax that hasn't caught fire
yet, and then try to scatter the fire and let it burn itself out....
Here's our chance!"
All this conversation we had been screaming into each other's ears, in
the midst of a pandemonium of yelling, cursing, siren howling and bell
clanging; just then I saw a hole in the vertical traffic jam and edged
the jeep into it, at the same time remembering that the jeep carried,
and I was entitled to use, a fire siren. I added its howls to the
general uproar and dropped down one level. Here a string of big
manipulators were trying to get in from below, sprouting claw hooks
and grapples and pusher arms in all directions. I made my siren
imitate a tail-tramped tomcat a couple of times, and got in among
them.
Bottom Level Broadway was a frightful mess, and I realized that we had
come down right between two units of the city power plant, big
mass-energy converters. The street was narrower than above, and ran
for a thousand yards between ceiling-high walls, and everything was
bottlenecked together. I took the jeep up till we were almost scraping
the ceiling, and Murell, who had seen how the audiovisual was used,
took over with it while I concentrated on inching forward. The noise
was even worse down here than it had been above; we didn't attempt to
talk.
Finally, by impudence and plain foolhardiness, I got the jeep forward
a few hundred yards, and found myself looking down on a big derrick
with a fifty-foot steel boom tipped with a four-clawed grapple,
shielded in front with sheet steel like a gun shield. It was painted
with the emblem of the Hunters' Co-operative, but the three men on it
looked like shipyard workers. I didn't get that, at all. The thing had
been built to handle burning wax, and was one of three kept on the
Second Level Down under Hunters' Hall. I wondered if Bish Ware had
found a way for a gang to get in at the bottom of Hunters' Hall. I
simply couldn't see Steve Ravick releasing equipment to fight the fire
his goons had started for him in the first place.
I let down a few feet, gave a polite little scream with my siren, and
then yelled down to the men on it:
"Where'd that thing come from?"
"Hunters' Hall; Steve Ravick sent it. The other two are up at the fire
already, and if this mess ahead doesn't get straightened out...." From
there on, his remarks were not suitable for publication in a family
journal like the _Times_.
I looked up ahead, rising to the ceiling again, and saw what was the
matter. It was one of the dredgers from the waterfront, really a
submarine scoop shovel, that they used to keep the pools and the inner
channel from sanding up. I wasn't surprised it was jammed; I couldn't
see how they'd gotten this far uptown with it. I got a few shots of
that, and then unhooked the handphone of my radio. Julio Kubanoff
answered.
"You getting everything I'm sending in?" I asked.
"Yes. What's that two-em-dashed thing up ahead, one of the harbor
dredgers?"
"That's right. Hey, look at this, once." I turned the audiovisual down
on the claw derrick. "The men on it look like Rodriguez &
Oughourlian's people, but they say Steve Ravick sent it. What do you
know about it?"
"Hey, Ralph! What's this Walt's picked up about Ravick sending
equipment to fight the fire?" he yelled.
Dad came over, and nodded. "It wasn't Ravick, it was Mort Hallstock.
He commandeered the Co-op equipment and sent it up," he said. "He
called me and wanted to know whom to send for it that Ravick's gang
wouldn't start shooting at right away. Casmir Oughourlian sent some of
his men."
Up front, something seemed to have given way. The dredger went
lurching forward, and everything moved off after it.
"I get it," I said. "Hallstock's getting ready to dump Ravick out the
airlock. He sees, now, that Ravick's a dead turkey; he doesn't want to
go into the oven along with him."
"Walt, can't you ever give anybody credit with trying to do something
decent, once in a while?" Dad asked.
"Sure I can. Decent people. There are a lot of them around, but Mort
Hallstock isn't one of them. There was an Old Terran politician named
Al Smith, once. He had a little saying he used in that kind of case:
'Let's look at the record.'"
"Well, Mort's record isn't very impressive, I'll give you that," Dad
admitted. "I understand Mort's up at the fire now. Don't spit in his
eye if you run into him."
"I won't," I promised. "I'm kind of particular where I spit."
Things must be looking pretty rough around Municipal Building, I
thought. Maybe Mort's afraid the people will start running Fenris
again, after this. He might even be afraid there'd be an election.
By this time, I'd gotten the jeep around the dredger--we'd come to the
end of the nuclear-power plant buildings--and cut off into open
country. That is to say, nothing but pillar-buildings two hundred
yards apart and piles of bagged mineral nutrients for the hydroponic
farms. We could see a blaze of electric lights ahead where the fire
must be, and after a while we began to run into lorries and
lifter-skids hauling ammunition away from the area. Then I could see a
big mushroom of greasy black smoke spreading out close to the ceiling.
The electric lights were brighter ahead, and there was a confused roar
of voices and sirens and machines.
And there was a stink.
There are a lot of stinks around Port Sandor, though the ventilation
system carries most of them off before they can spread out of their
own areas. The plant that reprocesses sewage to get organic nutrients
for the hydroponic farms, and the plant that digests hydroponic
vegetation to make nutrients for the carniculture vats. The
carniculture vats themselves aren't any flower gardens. And the pulp
plant where our synthetic lumber is made. But the worst stink there is
on Fenris is a tallow-wax fire. Fortunately, they don't happen often.
17