to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment and
observation for a day or so."

"That's Al Devis?" I asked. "What hospital?" Al Devis's strained back
would be good for a two-line item; he'd feel hurt if we didn't mention
it.

"Co-op hospital."

That was all right. They always sent in their patient lists to the
_Times_. Tom was griping because he'd have to do Devis's work and his
own.

"You know anything about engines, Walt?" he asked me.

"I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magnetic
current into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate the
daylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction,"
I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math got
a little complicated after that, and I started reading another book."

"You'd be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tom
asked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but a
cannon's different."

"I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case or
something, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhere
close to it."

"We'll do that," he said. "Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when we
sight a monster, but somebody'll have to help Abdullah with the
engines."

He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded.

"Walt's made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, I
know that," he said, "and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher,
once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full of
air for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we'll go
down to the surface and have some shooting."

I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple of
hours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and I
would share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big on
the outside, but there's very little room for the crew. The engines
are much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravity
craft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in the
air. Then, there's a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boat
berth aft for the scout boat, so they're not exactly built for
comfort. They don't really need to be; a ship's rarely out more than a
hundred and fifty hours on any cruise.

Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the wax
business, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actual
observation. He said that Argentine Ex