“Well, if a captain wants his wax back, after it’s been turned over for sale to the Coop, can he get it?” Murell asked.
“Absolutely!”
Murell nodded, and we went on. The roustabout who had been following us with the lifter had stopped to chat with a couple of his fellows. We went on slowly, and now and then a vehicle, usually a lorry, would pass above us. Then I saw Bish Ware, ahead, sitting on a sausage of wax, talking to one of the Spaceport Police. They were both smoking, but that was all right. Tallow-wax will burn, and a wax fire is something to get really excited about, but the ignition point is 750° C, and that’s a lot hotter than the end of anybody’s cigar. He must have come out the same way we did, and I added that to the “wonder-why” file. Pretty soon, I’d have so many questions to wonder about that they’d start answering each other. He saw us and waved to us, and then suddenly the spaceport cop’s face got as white as my shirt and he grabbed Bish by the arm. Bish didn’t change color; he just shook off the cop’s hand, got to his feet, dropped his cigar, and took a side skip out into the aisle.
“Murell!” he yelled. “Freeze! On your life; don’t move a muscle!”
Then there was a gun going off in his hand. I didn’t see him reach for it, or where he drew it from. It was just in his hand, firing, and the empty brass flew up and came down on the concrete with a jingle on the heels of the report. We had all stopped short, and the roustabout who was towing the lifter came hurrying up. Murell simply stood gaping at Bish.
“All right,” Bish said, slipping his gun back into a shoulder holster under his coat. “Step carefully to your left. Don’t move right at all.”
Murell, still in a sort of trance, obeyed. As he did I looked past his right shin and saw what Bish had been shooting at. It was an irregular gray oval, about sixteen inches by four at its widest and tapering up in front to a cone about six inches high, into which a rodlike member, darker gray, was slowly collapsing and dribbling oily yellow stuff. The bullet had gone clear through and made a mess of dirty gray and black and green body fluids on the concrete.
It was what we call a tread-snail, because it moves on a double row of pads like stumpy feet and leaves a trail like a tractor. The fishpole-aerial thing it had erected out of its head was its stinger, and the yellow stuff was venom. A tenth of a milligram of it in your blood and it’s “Get the Gate open, St. Peter; here I come.”
Tom saw it as soon as I did. His face got the same color as the cop’s. I don’t suppose mine looked any better. When Murell saw what had been buddying up to him, I will swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles, Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels and Thoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally stood on end. I’ve heard that expression all my life; well, this time I really saw it happen. I mentioned that he seemed to have been reading up on the local fauna.
I looked down at his right leg. He hadn’t been stung—if he had, he wouldn’t be breathing now—but he had been squirted, and there were a couple of yellow stains on the cloth of his trouser leg. I told him to hold still, used my left hand to pull the cloth away from his leg, and got out my knife and flipped it open with the other hand, cutting away the poisoned cloth and dropping it on the dead snail.
Murell started making an outcry about cutting up his trousers, and said he could have had them cleaned. Bish Ware, coming up, told him to stop talking like an imbecile.
“No cleaner would touch them, and even if they were cleaned, some of the poison would remain in the fabric. Then, the next time you were caught in the rain with a scratch on your leg, Walt, here, would write you one of his very nicest obituaries.”
Then he turned to the cop, who was gabbling into his belt radio, and said: “Get an ambulance, quick. Possible case of tread-snail skin poisoning.” A moment later, looking at Murell’s leg, he added, “Omit ‘possible.’ ”
There were a couple of little spots on Murell’s skin that were beginning to turn raw-liver color. The raw poison hadn’t gotten into his blood, but some of it, with impurities, had filtered through the cloth, and he’d absorbed enough of it through his skin to make him seriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and the laborer with the lifter brought it and let it down, and Murell sat down on his luggage. Tom lit a cigarette and gave it to him, and told him to remain perfectly still. In a couple of minutes, an ambulance was coming, its siren howling.
The pilot and his helper were both jackleg medics, at least as far as first aid. They gave him a drink out of a flask, smeared a lot of gunk on the spots and slapped plasters over them, and helped him into the ambulance, after I told him we’d take his things to the Times building.
By this time, between the shot and the siren, quite a crowd had gathered, and everybody was having a nice little recrimination party. The labor foreman was chewing the cop out. The warehouse superintendent was chewing him out. And somebody from the general superintendent’s office was
