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Tallow-wax will burn, and a wax fire is something to get really excited about, but the ignition point is 750° C., and that's a lot hotter than the end of anybody's cigar. He must have come out the same way we did, and I added that to the "wonder-why" file. Pretty soon, I'd have so many questions to wonder about that they'd start answering each other.

For that matter, I wondered why we didn't grow tallow-wax by carniculture. We could grow any other animal matter we wanted. I'd often thought of that. The monster wasn't showing any inclination to come to the surface again, and finally Joe Kivelson's voice came out of the intercom: "Run in the guns and seal ports. Secure for submersion. We're going down and chase him up."

The sea was getting heavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll. "That's pretty dangerous work," Murell said. "If a man using one of those cutters slipped...." "It's happened," I told him. "You met our peg-legged compositor, Julio. That was how he lost his leg." "I don't blame them for wanting all they can get for tallow-wax."

That had all happened before, a number of times. When Steve Ravick had gotten control of the Hunters' Co-operative, the price of tallow-wax, on the loading floor at Port Sandor spaceport, had been fifteen hundred sols a ton. As far as Dad and I could find out, it was still bringing the same price on Terra as it always had.

I'll take about a dozen men and go down to Second Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple of skins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out." That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing how much wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in on some of the smoke.

A hunter-boat captain, even a good one like Joe Kivelson, won't make much more in a year than Dad and I make out of the Times. Chemically, tallow-wax isn't like anything else in the known Galaxy. The molecules are huge; they can be seen with an ordinary optical microscope, and a microscopically visible molecule is a curious-looking object, to say the least.

Glenn Murell, who had his office open by now and was grumbling that there had been a man from Interstellar Import-Export out on the Cape Canaveral, and if the competition got any stiffer the price of tallow-wax would be forced up on him to a sol a pound.

As soon as we got within earshot, I found that they were all in a very ugly mood. "Don't fool around," one man was saying as we came up. "Don't even bother looking for a rope. Just shoot them as soon as you see them." Well, I thought, a couple of million sols' worth of tallow-wax, in which they all owned shares, was something to get mean about. I said something like that.

Murell took his time going over the wax, jabbing the probe rod in and pulling samples out of the big plastic-skinned sausages at random, making chemical tests, examining them under the microscope, and scanning other cylinders to make sure there was no foreign matter in them. He might not know what a literary agent was, but he knew tallow-wax.

"Too bad you didn't get an audiovisual of Belsher making that idiotic statement." "He didn't even know I was getting a voice-only. All the time he was talking, I was doodling in a pad with a pencil." "Synthetic substitutes!" Dad snorted. "Putting a synthetic tallow-wax molecule together would be like trying to build a spaceship with a jackknife and a tack hammer."