Joe named a couple of men from one of the hunter-ships.
"Here's what happened. There were six men on guard here; they had a
jeep with a 7-mm machine gun. About an hour ago, a lorry pulled in,
with two men in boat-clothes on it. They said that Pierre Karolyi's
_Corinne_ had just come in with a hold full of wax, and they were
bringing it up from the docks, and where should they put it? Well, the
men on guard believed that; Pierre'd gone off into the twilight zone
after the _Helldiver_ contacted us, and he could have gotten a monster
in the meantime.
"Well, they told these fellows that there was more room over on the
other side of the stacks, and the lorry went up above the stacks and
started across, and when they were about the middle, one of the men in
it threw out a thermoconcentrate bomb. The lorry took off, right away.
The only thing was that there were two men in the jeep, and one of
them was at the machine gun. They'd lifted to follow the lorry over
and show them where to put this wax, and as soon as the bomb went off,
the man at the gun grabbed it and caught the lorry in his sights and
let go. This fellow hadn't been covering for cutting-up work for years
for nothing. He got one burst right in the control cabin, and the
lorry slammed into the next column foundation. After they called in an
alarm on the fire the bomb had started, a couple of them went to see
who'd been in the lorry. The two men in it were both dead, and one of
them was Al Devis."
"Pity," I said. "I'd been looking forward to putting a recording of
his confession on the air. Where is this lorry now?"
Joe pointed toward the burning wax piles. "Almost directly on the
other side. We have a couple of men guarding it. The bodies are still
in it. We don't want any tampering with it till it can be properly
examined; we want to have the facts straight, in case Hallstock tries
to make trouble for the men who did the shooting."
I didn't know how he could. Under any kind of Federation law at all, a
man killed committing a felony--and bombing and arson ought to
qualify for that--is simply bought and paid for; his blood is on
nobody's head but his own. Of course, a small matter like legality was
always the least of Mort Hallstock's worries.
"I'll go get some shots of it," I said, and then I snapped on my radio
and called the story in.
Dad had already gotten it, from fire-alarm center, but he hadn't heard
that Devis was one of the deceased arsonists. Like me, he was very
sorry to hear about it. Devis as Devis was no loss, but alive and
talking he'd have helped us pin both the wax fire and the bombing of
the _Javelin_ on Steve Ravick. Then I went back and got in the jeep.
They were beginning to get in closer to the middle of the stacks where
the fire had been started. There was no chance of getting over the top
of it, and on the right there were at least five hundred men and a
hundred vehicles, all working like crazy to pull out unburned wax. Big
manipulators were coming up and grabbing as many of the half-ton
sausages as they could, and lurching away to dump them onto skids or
into lorries or just drop them on top of the bags of nutrient stacked
beyond. Jeeps and cars would dart in, throw grapnels on the end of
lines, and then pull away all the wax they could and return to throw
their grapnels again. As fast as they pulled the big skins down, men
with hand-lifters like the ones we had used at our camp to handle
firewood would pick them up and float them away.
That seemed to be where the major effort was being made, at present,
and I could see lifter-skids coming in with big blower fans on them. I
knew what the strategy was, now; they were going to pull the wax away
to where it was burning on one side, and then set up the blowers and
blow the heat and smoke away on that side. That way, on the other side
more men could work closer to the fire, and in the long run they'd
save more wax.
I started around the wax piles to the left, clockwise, to avoid the
activity on the other side, and before long I realized that I'd have
done better not to have. There was a long wall, ceiling-high, that
stretched off uptown in the direction of the spaceport, part of the
support for the weight of the pulpwood plant on the level above, and
piled against it was a lot of junk machinery of different kinds that
had been hauled in here and dumped long ago and then forgotten. The
wax was piled almost against this, and the heat and smoke forced me
down.
I looked at the junk pile and decided that I could get through it on
foot. I had been keeping up a running narration into my radio, and I
commented on all this salvageable metal lying in here forgotten, with
our perennial metal shortages. Then I started picking my way through
it, my portable audiovisual camera slung over my shoulder and a
flashlight in my hand. My left hand, of course; it's never smart to
carry a light in your right, unless you're left-handed.
The going wasn't too bad. Most of the time, I could get between things
without climbing over them. I was going between a broken-down press
from the lumber plant and a leaky 500-gallon pressure cooker from the
carniculture nutrient plant when I heard something moving behind me,
and I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't let myself be talked into
leaving my pistol behind.
It was a thing the size of a ten-gallon keg, with a thick tail and
flippers on which it crawled, and six tentacles like small elephants'
trunks around a circular mouth filled with jagged teeth halfway down
the throat. There are a dozen or so names for it, but mostly it is
called a meat-grinder.
The things are always hungry and try to eat anything that moves. The
mere fact that I would be as poisonous to it as any of the local flora
or fauna would be to me made no difference; this meat-grinder was no
biochemist. It was coming straight for me, all its tentacles writhing.
I had had my Sterberg out as soon as I'd heard the noise. I also
remembered that my radio was on, and that I was supposed to comment on
anything of interest that took place around me.
"Here's a meat-grinder, coming right for me," I commented in a voice
not altogether steady, and slammed three shots down its tooth-studded
gullet. Then I scored my target, at the same time keeping out of the
way of the tentacles. He began twitching a little. I fired again. The
meat-grinder jerked slightly, and that was all.
"Now I'm going out and take a look at that lorry." I was certain now
that the voice was shaky.
The lorry--and Al Devis and his companion--had come to an end against
one of the two-hundred-foot masonry and concrete foundations the
columns rest on. It had hit about halfway up and folded almost like an
accordion, sliding down to the floor. With one thing and another,
there is a lot of violent death around Port Sandor. I don't like to
look at the results. It's part of the job, however, and this time it
wasn't a pleasant job at all.
The two men who were guarding the wreck and contents were sitting on
a couple of boxes, smoking and watching the fire-fighting operation.
I took the partly empty clip out of my pistol and put in a full one on
the way back, and kept my flashlight moving its circle of light ahead
and on both sides of me. That was foolish, or at least unnecessary. If
there'd been one meat-grinder in that junk pile, it was a safe bet
there wasn't anything else. Meat-grinders aren't popular neighbors,
even for tread-snails. As I approached the carcass of the grinder I
had shot I found a ten-foot length of steel rod and poked it a few
times. When it didn't even twitch, I felt safe in walking past it.
I got back in the jeep and returned to where Joe Kivelson was keeping
track of what was going on in five screens, including one from a
pickup on a lifter at the ceiling, and shouting orders that were being
reshouted out of loudspeakers all over the place. The Odin Dock &
Shipyard equipment had begun coming out; lorries picking up the wax
that had been dumped back from the fire and wax that was being pulled
off the piles, and material-handling equipment. They had a lot of
small fork-lifters that were helping close to the fire.
A lot of the wax was getting so soft that it was hard to handle, and
quite a few of the plastic skins had begun to split from the heat.
Here and there I saw that outside piles had begun to burn at the
bottom, from burning wax that had run out underneath. I had moved
around to the right and was getting views of the big claw-derricks at
work picking the big sausages off the tops of piles, and while I was
swinging the camera back and forth, I was trying to figure just how
much wax there had been to start with, and how much was being saved.
Each of those plastic-covered cylinders was a thousand pounds; one of
the claw-derricks was picking up two or three of them at a grab....
I was still figuring when shouts of alarm on my right drew my head
around. There was an uprush of flame, and somebody began screaming,
and I could see an ambulance moving toward the center of excitement
and firemen in asbestos suits converging on a run. One of the piles
must have collapsed and somebody must have been splashed. I gave an
involuntary shudder. Burning wax was hotter than melted lead, and it
stuck to anything it touched, worse than napalm. I saw a man being
dragged out of further danger, his clothes on fire, and
asbestos-suited firemen crowding around to tear the burning garments
from him. Before I could get to where it had happened, though, they
had him in the ambulance and were taking him away. I hoped they'd get
him to the hospital before he died.
Then more shouting started around at the right as a couple more piles
began collapsing. I was able to get all of that--the wax sausages
sliding forward, the men who had been working on foot running out of
danger, the flames shooting up, and the gush of liquid fire from
below. All three derricks moved in at once and began grabbing wax
cylinders away on either side of it.
Then I saw Guido Fieschi, the Odin Dock & Shipyard's superintendent,
and caught him in my camera, moving the jeep toward him.
"Mr. Fieschi!" I called. "Give me a few seconds and say something."
He saw me and grinned.
"I just came out to see how much more could be saved," he said. "We
have close to a thousand tons on the shipping floor or out of danger
here and on the way in, and it looks as though you'll be able to save
that much more. That'll be a million and a half sols we can be sure
of, and a possible three million, at the new price. And I want to take
this occasion, on behalf of my company and of Terra-Odin Spacelines,
to welcome a new freight shipper."
"Well, that's wonderful news for everybody on Fenris," I said, and
added mentally, "with a few exceptions." Then I asked if he'd heard
who had gotten splashed.
"No. I know it happened; I passed the ambulance on the way out. I
certainly hope they get to work on him in time."
Then more wax started sliding off the piles, and more fire came
running out at the bottom. Joe Kivelson's voice, out of the
loudspeakers all around, was yelling:
"Everybody away from the front! Get the blowers in; start in on the
other side!"
18