Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper
7
ABOARD THE _JAVELIN_
We heard nothing more from Bish Ware that evening. Joe and TomKivelson and Oscar Fujisawa slept at the _Times_ Building, and afterbreakfast Dad called the spaceport hospital about Murell. He hadpassed a good night and seemed to have thrown off all the poison hehad absorbed through his skin. Dad talked to him, and advised him notto leave until somebody came for him. Tom and I took a car--and apistol apiece and a submachine gun--and went to get him. Remembering,at the last moment, what I had done to his trousers, I unpacked hisluggage and got another suit for him.
He was grateful for that, and he didn't lift an eyebrow when he sawthe artillery we had with us. He knew, already, what the score was,and the rules, or absence thereof, of the game, and accepted us asmembers of his team. We dropped to the Bottom Level and went, avoidingtraffic, to where the wax was stored. There were close to a dozenguards there now, all heavily armed.
We got out of the car, I carrying the chopper, and one of the gangthere produced a probe rod and microscope and a testing kit and amicroray scanner. Murell took his time going over the wax, jabbing theprobe rod in and pulling samples out of the big plastic-skinnedsausages at random, making chemical tests, examining them under themicroscope, and scanning other cylinders to make sure there was noforeign matter in them. He might not know what a literary agent was,but he knew tallow-wax.
I found out from the guards that there hadn't been any really serioustrouble after we left Hunter's Hall. The city police had beaten a fewmen up, natch, and run out all the anti-Ravick hunters, and thenRavick had reconvened the meeting and acceptance of the thirty-fivecentisol price had been voted unanimously. The police were stilllooking for the Kivelsons. Ravick seemed to have gotten the idea thatJoe Kivelson was the mastermind of the hunters' cabal against him. Iknow if I'd found that Joe Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa were in anykind of a conspiracy together, I wouldn't pick Joe for the mastermind.It was just possible, I thought, that Oscar had been fostering thishimself, in case anything went wrong. After all, self-preservation isthe first law, and Oscar is a self-preserving type.
After Murell had finished his inspection and we'd gotten back in thecar and were lifting, I asked him what he was going to offer, just asthough I were the skipper of the biggest ship out of Port Sandor.Well, it meant as much to us as it did to the hunters. The more waxsold for, the more advertising we'd sell to the merchants, and themore people would rent teleprinters from us.
"Eighty centisols a pound," he said. Nice and definite; quite adifference from the way he stumbled around over listing his previouspublications. "Seventy-five's the Kapstaad price, regardless of whatyou people here have been getting from that crook of a Belsher. We'llhave to go far enough beyond that to make him have to run like blazesto catch up. You can put it in the _Times_ that the day ofmonopolistic marketing on Fenris is over."
* * * * *
When we got back to the _Times_, I asked Dad if he'd heard anythingmore from Bish.
"Yes," he said unhappily. "He didn't call in, this morning, so Icalled his apartment and didn't get an answer. Then I called HarryWong's. Harry said Bish had been in there till after midnight, withsome other people." He named three disreputables, two female and onemale. "They were drinking quite a lot. Harry said Bish was plasteredto the ears. They finally went out, around 0130. He said the policewere in and out checking the crowd, but they didn't make any trouble."
I nodded, feeling very badly. Four and a half hours had been hislimit. Well, sometimes a ninety per cent failure is really a triumph;after all, it's a ten per cent success. Bish had gone four and a halfhours without taking a drink. Maybe the percentage would be a littlebetter the next time. I was surely old enough to stop expectingmiracles.
The mate of the _Pequod_ called in, around noon, and said it was safefor Oscar to come back to the ship. The mate of the _Javelin_, RamonLlewellyn, called in with the same report, that along the waterfront, atleast, the heat was off. However, he had started an ambitious-lookingoverhaul operation, which looked as though it was good for a hundredhours but which could be dropped on a minute's notice, and under coverof this he had been taking on supplies and ammunition.
We made a long audiovisual of Murell announcing his price of eightycentisols a pound for wax on behalf of Argentine Exotic Organics, Ltd.As soon as that was finished, we loaded the boat-clothes we'd pickedup for him and his travel kit and mine into a car, with Julio Kubanoffto bring it back to the _Times_, and went to the waterfront. When wearrived, Ramon Llewellyn had gotten things cleared up, and the_Javelin_ was ready to move as soon as we came aboard.
On the Main City Level, the waterfront is a hundred feet above theship pools; the ships load from and discharge onto the First LevelDown. The city roof curves down all along the south side of the cityinto the water and about fifty feet below it. That way, even in thepost-sunset and post-dawn storms, ships can come in submerged aroundthe outer breakwater and under the roof, and we don't get any wind orheavy seas along the docks.
Murell was interested in everything he saw, in the brief time while wewere going down along the docks to where the _Javelin_ was berthed. Iknew he'd never actually seen it before, but he must have beenstudying pictures of it, because from some of the remarks he made, Icould tell that he was familiar with it.
Most of the ships had lifted out of the water and were resting on thewide concrete docks, but the _Javelin_ was afloat in the pool, hercontragravity on at specific-gravity weight reduction. She was atypical hunter-ship, a hundred feet long by thirty abeam, with a squatconning tower amidships, and turrets for 50-mm guns and launchers forharpoon rockets fore and aft. The only thing open about her was theair-and-water lock under the conning tower. Julio, who was pilotingthe car, set it down on the top of the aft gun turret. A couple of thecrewmen who were on deck grabbed our bags and hurried them inside. Wefollowed, and as soon as Julio lifted away, the lock was sealed.
Immediately, as the contragravity field dropped below the specificgravity of the ship, she began submerging. I got up into the conningtower in time to see the water of the boat pool come up over thearmor-glass windows and the outside lights come on. For a few minutes,the _Javelin_ swung slowly and moved forward, feeling her way withfingers of radar out of the pool and down the channel behind thebreakwater and under the overhang of the city roof. Then the waterline went slowly down across the windows as she surfaced. A momentlater she was on full contragravity, and the ship which had been asubmarine was now an aircraft.
Murell, who was accustomed to the relatively drab sunsets of Terra,simply couldn't take his eyes from the spectacle that covered thewhole western half of the sky--high clouds streaming away from thedaylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. Therewere more clouds coming in at a lower level from the east. By the timethe _Javelin_ returned to Port Sandor, it would be full dark and rain,which would soon turn to snow, would be falling. Then we'd be in forit again for another thousand hours.
Ramon Llewellyn was saying to Joe Kivelson: "We're one man short;Devis, Abdullah's helper. Hospital."
"Get hurt in the fight, last night? He was right with us till we gotout to the elevators, and then I missed him."
"No. He made it back to the ship about the same time we did, and hewas all right then. Didn't even have a scratch. Strained his back atwork, this morning, trying to lift a power-unit cartridge by hand."
I could believe that. Those things weighed a couple of hundred pounds.Joe Kivelson swore.
"What's he think this is, the First Century Pre-Atomic? Aren't thereany lifters on the ship?"
Llewellyn shrugged. "Probably didn't want to bother taking a couple ofsteps to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment andobservation for a day or so."
"That's Al Devis?" I asked. "What hospital?" Al Devis's strained backwould be good for a two-line item; he'd feel hurt if we didn't mentionit.
"Co-op hospital."
That was all right. They always sent in their patient li
"You know anything about engines, Walt?" he asked me.
"I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magneticcurrent into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate thedaylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction,"I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math gota little complicated after that, and I started reading another book."
"You'd be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tomasked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but acannon's different."
"I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case orsomething, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhereclose to it."
"We'll do that," he said. "Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when wesight a monster, but somebody'll have to help Abdullah with theengines."
He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded.
"Walt's made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, Iknow that," he said, "and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher,once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full ofair for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we'll godown to the surface and have some shooting."
I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple ofhours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and Iwould share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big onthe outside, but there's very little room for the crew. The enginesare much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravitycraft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in theair. Then, there's a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boatberth aft for the scout boat, so they're not exactly built forcomfort. They don't really need to be; a ship's rarely out more than ahundred and fifty hours on any cruise.
Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the waxbusiness, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actualobservation. He said that Argentine Exotic Organics was going to keephim here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be todeal with the hunters, either individually or through theirco-operative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set upsomething he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talkthe hunters' language and understand their problems.
So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything andconscripting any crew members I came across to explain what Icouldn't. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbedinto it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed thewax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills thatextracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and theship's armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. Hewhistled when he saw the engines.
"Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter,"he said.
"They have to be," I said. "Running submerged isn't the same asrunning in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?"
He shook his head. "I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water's alittle too cold to do much swimming there. And I've spent most of mytime since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. Thesports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that."
Well, whattaya know! Here was a man who had not only seen a horse, butactually ridden one. That in itself was worth a story in the _Times_.
Tom and Abdullah, who were fussing around the engines, heard that.They knocked off what they were doing and began asking himquestions--I suppose he thought they were awfully silly, but heanswered all of them patiently--about horses and riding. I was lookingat a couple of spare power-unit cartridges, like the one Al Devis hadstrained his back on, clamped to the deck out of the way.
They were only as big as a one-liter jar, rounded at one end and flatat the other where the power cable was connected, but they weighedclose to two hundred pounds apiece. Most of the weight was on theoutside; a dazzlingly bright plating of collapsium--collapsed matter,the electron shell collapsed onto the nucleus and the atoms in actualphysical contact--and absolutely nothing but nothing could get throughit. Inside was about a kilogram of strontium-90; it would keep onemitting electrons for twenty-five years, normally, but there was aminiature plutonium reactor, itself shielded with collapsium, which,among other things, speeded that process up considerably. A cartridgewas good for about five years; two of them kept the engines inoperation.
The engines themselves converted the electric current from the powercartridges into magnetic current, and lifted the ship and propelledit. Abdullah was explaining that to Murell and Murell seemed to begetting it satisfactorily.
Finally, we left them; Murell wanted to see the sunset some more andwent up to the conning tower where Joe and Ramon were, and I decidedto take a nap while I had a chance.