I went down to the floor below with him and got him my lighter gas-projector and a couple of spare fills for it, and found the bottle of Baldur honey-rum that Dad had been sure was around somewhere. I was kind of doubtful about that, and he noticed my hesitation in giving it to him and laughed.
“Don’t worry, Walt,” he said. “This is strictly for protective coloration—and odoration. I shall be quite sparing with it, I assure you.”
I shook hands with him, trying not to be too solemn about it, and he went down in the elevator and I went up the stairs to the floor above. By this time, the Port Sandor Vigilance Committee had gotten itself sorted out. The rank-and-file Vigilantes were standing around yacking at one another, and a smaller group—Dad and Sigurd Ngozori and the Reverend Sugitsuma and Oscar and Joe and Corkscrew and Nip and the Mahatma—were in a huddle around Dad’s editorial table, discussing strategy and tactics.
“Well, we’d better get back to the docks before it starts,” Corkscrew was saying. “No hunter crew will follow anybody but their own ships’ officers.”
“We’ll have to have somebody the uptown people will follow,” Oscar said. “These people won’t take orders from a woolly-pants hunter captain. How about you, Sigurd?”
The banker shook his head. “Ralph Boyd’s the man for that,” he said.
“Ralph’s needed right here; this is G.H.Q.,” Oscar said. “This is a job that’s going to have to be run from one central command. We’ve got to make sure the demonstration against Hallstock and the operation against Hunters’ Hall are synchronized.”
“I have about a hundred and fifty workmen, and they all have or can get something to shoot with,” another man said. I looked around, and saw that it was Casmir Oughourlian, of Rodriguez & Oughourlian Shipyards. “They’ll follow me, but I’m not too well known uptown.”
“Hey, Professor Hartzenbosch,” Mohandas Feinberg said. “You’re a respectable-looking duck; you ever have any experience leading a lynch mob?”
Everybody laughed. So, to his credit, did the professor.
“I’ve had a lot of experience with children,” the professor said. “Children are all savages. So are lynch mobs. Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. Yes, I’d say so.”
“All right,” Dad said. “Say I’m Chief of Staff, or something. Oscar, you and Joe and Corkscrew and the rest of you decide who’s going to take overall command of the hunters. Casmir, you’ll command your workmen, and anybody else from the shipyards and engine works and repair shops and so on. Sigurd, you and the Reverend, here, and Professor Hartzenbosch gather up all the uptown people you can. Now, we’ll have to decide on how much force we need to scare Mort Hallstock, and how we’re going to place the main force that will attack Hunters’ Hall.”
“I think we ought to wait till we see what Bish Ware can do,” Oscar said. “Get our gangs together, and find out where we’re going to put who, but hold off the attack for a while. If he can get inside Hunters’ Hall, we may not even need this demonstration at the Municipal Building.”
Joe Kivelson started to say something. The rest of his fellow ship captains looked at him severely, and he shut up. Dad kept on jotting down figures of men and 50 mm guns and vehicles and auto weapons we had available.
He was still doing it when the fire alarm started.
Civil War Postponed
The moaner went on for thirty seconds, like a banshee mourning its nearest and dearest. It was everywhere, Main City Level and the four levels below. What we have in Port Sandor is a volunteer fire organization—or disorganization, rather—of six independent companies, each of which cherishes enmity for all the rest. It’s the best we can do, though; if we depended on the city government, we’d have no fire protection at all. They do have a central alarm system, though, and the Times is connected with that.
Then the moaner stopped, and there were four deep whistle blasts for Fourth Ward, and four more shrill ones for Bottom Level. There was an instant’s silence, and then a bedlam of shouts from the hunter-boat captains. That was where the tallow-wax that was being held out from the Cooperative was stored.
“Shut up!” Dad roared, the loudest I’d ever heard him speak. “Shut up and listen!”
“Fourth Ward, Bottom Level,” a voice from the fire-alarm speaker said. “This is a tallow-wax fire. It is not the Coop wax; it is wax stored in an otherwise disused area. It is dangerously close to stored 50 mm cannon ammunition, and it is directly under the pulpwood lumber plant, on the Third Level Down, and if the fire spreads up to that, it will endanger some of the growing vats at the carniculture plant on the Second Level Down. I repeat, this is a tallow-wax fire. Do not use water or chemical extinguishers.”
About half of the Vigilantes, businessmen who belonged to one or another of the volunteer companies had bugged out for their fire stations already. The Buddhist priest and a couple of doctors were also leaving. The rest, mostly hunter-ship men, were standing around looking at one another.
Oscar Fujisawa gave a sour laugh. “That diversion idea of mine was all right,” he said. “The only trouble was that Steve Ravick thought of it first.”
“You think he started the fire?” Dad began, and then gave a sourer laugh than Oscar’s. “Am I dumb enough to ask that?”
I had started assembling equipment as soon as the feint on the Municipal Building and the attack on Hunters’ Hall had gotten into the discussion stage. I would use a jeep that had a heavy-duty audiovisual recording and transmitting outfit on it, and for situations where I’d have to leave the jeep and go on foot, I had a lighter outfit like the one Oscar had brought with him in the Pequod’s boat. Then I had my radio for two-way conversation with the office.
