Now that we were out of the traffic jam, I could poke along and use
the camera myself. The wax was stacked in piles twenty feet high,
which gave thirty feet of clear space above them, but the section
where they had been piled was badly cut up by walls and full of small
extra columns to support the weight of the pulp plant above and the
carniculture vats on the level over that. However, the piles
themselves weren't separated by any walls, and the fire could spread
to the whole stock of wax. There were more men and vehicles on the job
than room for them to work. I passed over the heads of the crowd
around the edges and got onto a comparatively unobstructed side where
I could watch and get views of the fire fighters pulling down the big
skins of wax and loading them onto contragravity skids to be hauled
away. It still wasn't too hot to work unshielded, and they weren't
anywhere near the burning stacks, but the fire seemed to be spreading
rapidly. The dredger and the three shielded derricks hadn't gotten
into action yet.
I circled around clockwise, dodging over, under and around the skids
and lorries hauling wax out of danger. They were taking them into the
section through which I had brought the jeep a few minutes before, and
just dumping them on top of the piles of mineral nutrients.
The operation seemed to be directed from an improvised headquarters in
the area that had been cleared of ammunition. There were a couple of
view screens and a radio, operated by women. I saw one of the teachers
I'd gone to school to a few years ago, and Joe Kivelson's wife, and
Oscar Fujisawa's current girl friend, and Sigurd Ngozori's secretary,
and farther off there was an equally improvised coffee-and-sandwich
stand. I grounded the jeep, and Murell and I got out and went over to
the headquarters. Joe Kivelson seemed to be in charge.
I have, I believe, indicated here and there that Joe isn't one of our
mightier intellects. There are a lot of better heads, but Joe can be
relied upon to keep his, no matter what is happening or how bad it
gets. He was sitting on an empty box, his arm in a now-filthy sling,
and one of Mohandas Feinberg's crooked black cigars in his mouth.
Usually, Joe smokes a pipe, but a cigar's less bother for a
temporarily one-armed man. Standing in front of him, like a schoolboy
in front of the teacher, was Mayor Morton Hallstock.
"But, Joe, they simply won't!" His Honor was wailing. "I did talk to
Mr. Fieschi; he says he knows this is an emergency, but there's a
strict company directive against using the spaceport area for storage
of anything but cargo that has either just come in or is being shipped
out on the next ship."
"What's this all about?" Murell asked.
"Fieschi, at the spaceport, won't let us store this wax in the
spaceport area," Joe said. "We got to get it stored somewhere; we need
a lot of floor space to spread this fire out on, once we get into it.
We have to knock the burning wax cylinders apart, and get them
separated enough so that burning wax won't run from one to another."
"Well, why can't we store it in the spaceport area?" Murell wanted to
know. "It is going out on the next ship. I'm consigning it to Exotic
Organics, in Buenos Aires." He turned to Joe. "Are those skins all
marked to indicate who owns them?"
"That's right. And any we gather up loose, from busted skins, we can
figure some way of settling how much anybody's entitled to from them."
"All right. Get me a car and run me to the spaceport. Call them and
tell them I'm on the way. I'll talk to Fieschi myself."
"Martha!" Joe yelled to his wife. "Car and driver, quick. And then
call the spaceport for me; get Mr. Fieschi or Mr. Mansour on screen."
Inside two minutes, a car came in and picked Murell up. By that time,
Joe was talking to somebody at the spaceport. I called the paper, and
told Dad that Murell was buying the wax for his company as fast as it
was being pulled off the fire, at eighty centisols a pound. He said
that would go out as a special bulletin right away. Then I talked to
Morton Hallstock, and this time he wasn't giving me any of the
run-along-sonny routine. I told him, rather hypocritically, what a
fine thing he'd done, getting that equipment from Hunters' Hall. I
suspect I sounded as though I were mayor of Port Sandor and Hallstock,
just seventeen years old, had done something the grownups thought was
real smart for a kid. If so, he didn't seem to notice. Somebody
connected with the press was being nice to him. I asked him where
Steve Ravick was.
"Mr. Ravick is at Hunters' Hall," he said. "He thought it would be
unwise to make a public appearance just now." Oh, brother, what an
understatement! "There seems to be a lot of public feeling against
him, due to some misconception that he was responsible for what
happened to Captain Kivelson's ship. Of course, that is absolutely
false. Mr. Ravick had absolutely nothing to do with that. He wasn't
anywhere near the _Javelin_."
"Where's Al Devis?" I asked.
"Who? I don't believe I know him."
After Hallstock got into his big black air-limousine and took off, Joe
Kivelson gave a short laugh.
"I could have told him where Al Devis is," he said. "No, I couldn't,
either," he corrected himself. "That's a religious question, and I
don't discuss religion."