Four-Day Planet Part 16

"Rocket's ready for vertical launching. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one; rocket off!"

There was a whoosh outside. Clifford, at the radio, repeated: "Rocket off!" Then it banged, high overhead. "Did you see it? he asked.

"Didn't see a thing," Feinberg told him.

"Hey, I know what they would see!" Tom Kivelson burst out. "Say we go up and set the woods on fire?"

"Hey, that's an idea. Listen, Mahatma; we have a big forest of flowerpot trees up on a plateau above us. Say we set that on fire.

Think you could see it?"

"I don't see why not, even in this moonlight. Wait a minute, till I call the other ships."

Tom was getting into warm outer garments. Cesario got out the arc torch, and he and Tom and I raced out through the hut and outdoors.

We hastened up the path that had been tramped and dragged to the waterfall, got the lifters off the logs, and used them to help ourselves up over the rocks beside the waterfall.

We hadn't bothered doing anything with the slashings, except to get them out of our way, while we were working. Now we gathered them into piles among the trees, placing them to take advantage of what little wind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soon we had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer wood of the trunks. It actually began to get uncomfortably hot, although the temperature was now down around minus 90 Fahrenheit.

Cesario was using the torch. After he got all the slashings on fire, he started setting fire to the trees themselves, going all around them and getting the soft outer wood burning. As soon as he had one tree lit, he would run on to another.

"This guy's a real pyromaniac," Tom said to me, wiping his face on the sleeve of his father's parka which he was wearing over his own.

"Sure I am," Cesario took time out to reply. "You know who I was about fifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome." Theosophists never hesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they see it, a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "And look at the job I did on Moscow, a little later."

"Sure; I remember that. I was Napoleon then. What I'd have done to you if I'd caught you, too."

"Yes, and I know what he was in another reincarnation," Tom added.

"Mrs. O'Leary's cow!"

Whether or not Cesario really had had any past astral experience, he made a good job of firebugging on this forest. We waited around for a while, far enough back for the heat to be just comfortable and pleasant, until we were sure that it was burning well on both sides of the frozen stream. It even made the double moonlight dim, and it was sending up huge clouds of fire-reddened smoke, and where the fire didn't light the smoke, it was black in the moonlight. There wouldn't be any excuse for anybody not seeing that. Finally, we started back to camp.

As soon as we got within earshot, we could hear the excitement.

Everybody was jumping and yelling. "They see it! They see it!"

The boat was full of voices, too, from the radio:

"_Pequod_ to _Dirty Gertie_, we see it, too, just off our port bow...

Yes, _Bulldog_, we see your running lights; we're right behind you...

_Slasher_ to _Pequod_: we can't see you at all. Fire a flare, please..."

I pushed in to the radio. "This is Walter Boyd, _Times_ representative with the _Javelin_ castaways," I said. "Has anybody a portable audiovisual pickup that I can use to get some pictures in to my paper with?"

That started general laughter among the operators on the ships that were coming in.

"We have one, Walt," Oscar Fujisawa's voice told me. "I'm coming in ahead in the _Pequod_ scout boat; I'll bring it with me."

"Thanks, Oscar," I said. Then I asked him: "Did you see Bish Ware before you left port?"

"I should say I did!" Oscar told me. "You can thank Bish Ware that we're out looking for you now. Tell you about it as soon as we get in."

14

THE RESCUE

The scout boat from the _Pequod_ came in about thirty minutes later, from up the ravine where the forest fire was sending up flame and smoke. It pa.s.sed over the boat and the hut beside it and the crowd of us outside, and I could see Oscar in the machine gunner's seat aiming a portable audiovisual telecast camera. After he got a view of us, cheering and waving our arms, the boat came back and let down. We ran to it, all of us except the man with the broken leg and a couple who didn't have enough clothes to leave the fire, and as the boat opened I could hear Oscar saying:

"Now I am turning you over to Walter Boyd, the _Times_ correspondent with the _Javelin_ castaways."

He gave me the camera when he got out, followed by his gunner, and I got a view of them, and of the boat lifting and starting west to guide the ships in. Then I shut it off and said to him:

"What's this about Bish Ware? You said he was the one who started the search."

"That's right," Oscar said. "About thirty hours after you left port, he picked up some things that made him think the _Javelin_ had been sabotaged. He went to your father, and he contacted me--Mohandas Feinberg and I still had our ships in port--and started calling the _Javelin_ by screen. When he couldn't get response, your father put out a general call to all hunter-ships. Nip Spazoni reported boarding the _Javelin_, and then went searching the area where he thought you'd been hunting, picked up your locator signal, and found the _Javelin_ on the bottom with her bow blown out and the boat berth open and the boat gone. We all figured you'd head south with the boat, and that's where we went to look."

"Well, Bish Ware; he was dead drunk, last I heard of him," Joe Kivelson said.

"Aah, just an act," Oscar said. "That was to fool the city cops, and anybody else who needed fooling. It worked so well that he was able to crash a party Steve Ravick was throwing at Hunters' Hall, after the meeting. That was where he picked up some hints that Ravick had a spy in the _Javelin_ crew. He spent the next twenty or so hours following that up, and heard about your man Devis straining his back. He found out what Devis did on the _Javelin_, and that gave him the idea that whatever the sabotage was, it would be something to the engines. What did happen, by the way?"

A couple of us told him, interrupting one another. He nodded.

"That was what Nip Spazoni thought when he looked at the ship. Well, after that he talked to your father and to me, and then your father began calling and we heard from Nip."

You could see that it absolutely hurt Joe Kivelson to have to owe his life to Bish Ware.

"Well, it's lucky anybody listened to him," he grudged. "I wouldn't have."

"No, I guess maybe you wouldn't," Oscar told him, not very cordially.

"I think he did a mighty sharp piece of detective work, myself."

I nodded, and then, all of a sudden, another idea, under _Bish Ware, Reformation of_, hit me. Detective work; that was it. We could use a good private detective agency in Port Sandor. Maybe I could talk him into opening one. He could make a go of it. He had all kinds of contacts, he was handy with a gun, and if he recruited a couple of tough but honest citizens who were also handy with guns and built up a protective and investigative organization, it would fill a long-felt need and at the same time give him something beside Baldur honey-rum to take his mind off whatever he was drinking to keep from thinking about. If he only stayed sober half the time, that would be a fifty per cent success.

Ramon Llewellyn was wanting to know whether anybody'd done anything about Al Devis.

"We didn't have time to bother with any Al Devises," Oscar said. "As soon as Bish figured out what had happened aboard the _Javelin_, we knew you'd need help and need it fast. He's keeping an eye on Al for us till we get back."

"That's if he doesn't get any drunker and forget," Joe said.

Everybody, even Tom, looked at him in angry reproach.

"We better find out what he drinks and buy you a jug of it, Joe,"

Oscar's gunner told him.

The _h.e.l.ldiver_, which had been closest to us when our signal had been picked up, was the first ship in. She let down into the ravine, after some maneuvering around, and Mohandas Feinberg and half a dozen of his crew got off with an improvised stretcher on a lifter and a lot of blankets. We got our broken-leg case aboard, and Abdullah Monnahan, and the man with the broken wrist. There were more ships coming, so the rest of us waited. Joe Kivelson should have gone on the _h.e.l.ldiver_, to have his broken arm looked at, but a captain's always the last man off, so he stayed.

Oscar said he'd take Tom and Joe, and Glenn Murell and me, on the _Pequod_. I was glad of that. Oscar and his mate and his navigator are all bachelors, and they use the _Pequod_ to throw parties on when they're not hunting, so it is more comfortably fitted than the usual hunter-ship. Joe decided not to try to take anything away from the boat. He was going to do something about raising the _Javelin_, and the salvage ship could stop here and pick everything up.