h of the boat,
below. I threw my double armload of clothing down through it and slid
down after, getting out of the way of the load of boots Tom dumped
ahead of him. Joe Kivelson came down last, carrying the ship's log and
some other stuff. A little water was trickling over the edge of the
hatch above.

"It's squirting up from below in a dozen places," he said, after he'd
sealed the boat. "The whole front of the ship must be blown out."

"Well, now we know what happened to Simon MacGregor's _Claymore_," I
said, more to myself than to anybody else.

Joe and Hans Cronje, the gunner, were getting a rocket out of the
locker, detaching the harpoon and fitting on an explosive warhead. He
stopped, while he and Cronje were loading it into the after launcher,
and nodded at me.

"That's what I think, too," he said. "Everybody grab onto something;
we're getting the door open."

I knew what was coming and started hugging a stanchion as though it
were a long-lost sweetheart, and Murell, who didn't but knew enough to
imitate those who did, hugged it from the other side. The rocket
whooshed out of the launcher and went off with a deafening bang
outside. For an instant, nothing happened, and I told Murell not to
let go. Then the lock burst in and the water, at seventy fathoms'
pressure, hit the boat. Abdullah had gotten the engines on and was
backing against it. After a little, the pressure equalized and we went
out the broken lock stern first.

We circled and passed over the _Javelin_, and then came back. She was
lying in the ooze, a quarter over on her side, and her whole bow was
blown out to port. Joe Kivelson got the square box he had brought down
from the ship along with the log, fussed a little with it, and then
launched it out the disposal port. It was a radio locator. Sometimes a
lucky ship will get more wax than the holds' capacity; they pack it in
skins and anchor it on the bottom, and drop one of those gadgets with
it. It would keep on sending a directional signal and the name of the
ship for a couple of years.

"Do you really think it was sabotage?" Murell was asking me. Blowing
up a ship with sixteen men aboard must have seemed sort of extreme to
him. Maybe that wasn't according to Terran business ethics. "Mightn't
it have been a power unit?"

"No. Power units don't blow, and if one did, it would vaporize the
whole ship and a quarter of a cubic mile of water around her. No, that
was old fashioned country-style c