Four-Day Planet - H. Beam Piper (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📗

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.”

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 passed 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 percent success.

Ramón 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 Helldiver, 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 Helldiver, 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.