“Good day, gentlemen,” I greeted them. “I’m representing the Port Sandor Times.”
“Oh, run along, sonny; we haven’t time to bother with you,” Hallstock said.
“But I want to get a story from Mr. Belsher,” I began.
“Well, come back in five or six years, when you’re dry behind the ears, and you can get it,” Ravick told me.
“Our readers aren’t interested in the condition of my ears,” I said sweetly. “They want to read about the price of tallow-wax. What’s this about another price cut? To thirty-five centisols a pound, I understand.”
“Oh, Steve, the young man’s from the news service, and his father will publish whatever he brings home,” Belsher argued. “We’d better give him something.” He turned to me. “I don’t know how this got out, but it’s quite true,” he said. He had a long face, like a horse’s. At least, he looked like pictures of horses I’d seen. As he spoke, he pulled it even longer and became as doleful as an undertaker at a ten-thousand-sol funeral.
“The price has gone down, again. Somebody has developed a synthetic substitute. Of course, it isn’t anywhere near as good as real Fenris tallow-wax, but try and tell the public that. So Kapstaad Chemical is being undersold, and the only way they can stay in business is cut the price they have to pay for wax. …”
It went on like that, and this time I had real trouble keeping my anger down. In the first place, I was pretty sure there was no substitute for Fenris tallow-wax, good, bad or indifferent. In the second place, it isn’t sold to the gullible public, it’s sold to equipment manufacturers who have their own test engineers and who have to keep their products up to legal safety standards. He didn’t know this balderdash of his was going straight to the Times as fast as he spouted it; he thought I was taking it down in shorthand. I knew exactly what Dad would do with it. He’d put it on telecast in Belsher’s own voice.
Maybe the monster-hunters would start looking around for a rope, then.
When I got through listening to him, I went over and got a short audiovisual of Captain Marshak of the Peenemünde for the ’cast, and then I rejoined Tom and Murell.
“Mr. Murell says he’s staying with you at the Times,” Tom said. He seemed almost as disappointed as Professor Hartzenbosch. I wondered, for an incredulous moment, if Tom had been trying to kidnap Murell away from me. “He wants to go out on the Javelin with us for a monster-hunt.”
“Well, that’s swell!” I said. “You can pay off on that promise to take me monster-hunting, too. Right now, Mr. Murell is my big story.” I reached into the front pocket of my “camera” case for the handphone, to shift to two-way. “I’ll call the Times and have somebody come up with a car to get us and Mr. Murell’s luggage.”
“Oh, I have a car. Jeep, that is,” Tom said. “It’s down on the Bottom Level. We can use that.”
Funny place to leave a car. And I was sure that he and Murell had come to some kind of an understanding, while I was being lied to by Belsher. I didn’t get it. There was just too much going on around me that I didn’t get, and me, I’m supposed to be the razor-sharp newshawk who gets everything.
Bottom Level
It didn’t take long to get Murell’s luggage assembled. There was surprisingly little of it, and nothing that looked like photographic or recording equipment. When he returned from a final gathering-up in his stateroom, I noticed that he was bulging under his jacket, too, on the left side at the waist. About enough for an 8.5 mm pocket automatic. Evidently he had been briefed on the law-and-order situation in Port Sandor.
Normally, we’d have gone off onto the Main City Level, but Tom’s jeep was down on the Bottom Level, and he made no suggestion that we go off and wait for him to bring it up. I didn’t suggest it, either. After all, it was his jeep, and he wasn’t our hired pilot. Besides, I was beginning to get curious. An abnormally large bump of curiosity is part of every newsman’s basic equipment.
We borrowed a small handling-lifter and one of the spaceport roustabouts to tow it for us, loaded Murell’s luggage and my things onto it, and started down to the bottomside cargo hatches, from which the ship was discharging. There was no cargo at all to go aboard, except mail and things like Adolf Lautier’s old film and music tapes. Our only export is tallow-wax, and it all goes to Terra. It would be picked up by the Cape Canaveral when she got in from Odin five hundred hours from now. But except for a few luxury items from Odin, everything we import comes from Terra, and the Peenemünde had started discharging that already. We rode down on a contragravity skid loaded with ammunition. I saw Murell looking curiously at the square cases, marked terran federation armed forces, and 50 mm, mk. 608, antivehicle and antipersonnel, 25 rounds, and Overage. Practice only. Not to be issued for service, and inspected and condemned. The hunters bought that stuff through the Coop. It cost half as much as new ammo, but that didn’t help them any. The difference stopped with Steve Ravick. Murell didn’t comment, and neither did Tom or I.
We got off at the bottom of the pit, a thousand feet below the promenade from which I had come aboard, and stopped for a moment. Murell was looking about the great amphitheater in amazement.
“I knew this spaceport would be big when I found out that the ship landed directly on the planet,” he said, “but I never expected anything like this. And this serves
