evis was no loss, but alive and
talking he'd have helped us pin both the wax fire and the bombing of
the _Javelin_ on Steve Ravick. Then I went back and got in the jeep.

They were beginning to get in closer to the middle of the stacks where
the fire had been started. There was no chance of getting over the top
of it, and on the right there were at least five hundred men and a
hundred vehicles, all working like crazy to pull out unburned wax. Big
manipulators were coming up and grabbing as many of the half-ton
sausages as they could, and lurching away to dump them onto skids or
into lorries or just drop them on top of the bags of nutrient stacked
beyond. Jeeps and cars would dart in, throw grapnels on the end of
lines, and then pull away all the wax they could and return to throw
their grapnels again. As fast as they pulled the big skins down, men
with hand-lifters like the ones we had used at our camp to handle
firewood would pick them up and float them away.

That seemed to be where the major effort was being made, at present,
and I could see lifter-skids coming in with big blower fans on them. I
knew what the strategy was, now; they were going to pull the wax away
to where it was burning on one side, and then set up the blowers and
blow the heat and smoke away on that side. That way, on the other side
more men could work closer to the fire, and in the long run they'd
save more wax.

I started around the wax piles to the left, clockwise, to avoid the
activity on the other side, and before long I realized that I'd have
done better not to have. There was a long wall, ceiling-high, that
stretched off uptown in the direction of the spaceport, part of the
support for the weight of the pulpwood plant on the level above, and
piled against it was a lot of junk machinery of different kinds that
had been hauled in here and dumped long ago and then forgotten. The
wax was piled almost against this, and the heat and smoke forced me
down.

I looked at the junk pile and decided that I could get through it on
foot. I had been keeping up a running narration into my radio, and I
commented on all this salvageable metal lying in here forgotten, with
our perennial metal shortages. Then I started picking my way through
it, my portable audiovisual camera slung over my shoulder and a
flashlight in my hand. My left hand, of course; it's never smart to
carry a light in your right, unless you're left-handed.

The going wasn't too bad. Mos