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We picked parties, trying to get men who had enough clothing and hadn't been too badly banged around in the landing. Tom wanted to go along, but Abdullah insisted that he stay and help with the inspection of the boat's engines. Finally six of us Llewellyn, myself, Glenn Murell, Abe Clifford, old Piet Dumont, and another man went out through the broken stern of the boat.
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.
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."
There are a lot of good poker players in Port Sandor, but Professor Jan Hartzenbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment would have been comical if it hadn't been so utterly pathetic. He'd been hoping to lasso Murell himself. "I wonder if Mr. Murell could spare time to come to the school and speak to the students," he said, after a moment. "I'm sure he could.
"We got to get it stored somewhere; we need a lot of floor space to spread this fire out on, once we get into it. We have to knock the burning wax cylinders apart, and get them separated enough so that burning wax won't run from one to another." "Well, why can't we store it in the spaceport area?" Murell wanted to know. "It is going out on the next ship.
His face got the same color as the cop's. I don't suppose mine looked any better. When Murell saw what had been buddying up to him, I will swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles, Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels and Thoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally stood on end. I've heard that expression all my life; well, this time I really saw it happen.
Then this friend of mine with whom I was talking aboard the Peenemünde mentioned that Murell seemed to know more about the tallow-wax business than about literary matters, and after what happened at the meeting and afterward, I began putting two and two together. When I crashed that party at Hunters' Hall, I heard a few things, and they all added up.
I saw one of the teachers I'd gone to school to a few years ago, and Joe Kivelson's wife, and Oscar Fujisawa's current girl friend, and Sigurd Ngozori's secretary, and farther off there was an equally improvised coffee-and-sandwich stand. I grounded the jeep, and Murell and I got out and went over to the headquarters. Joe Kivelson seemed to be in charge.
That way, while they're eating he can tell her all the news that's fit to print, and all the gossip that isn't. For the moment, the odd things I'd been noticing about our distinguished and temporarily incapacitated visitor came under the latter head. I told Dad and Bish about my observations, beginning with the deafening silence about Glenn Murell at the library. Dad began popping immediately.
Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de plume, and nobody here had ever heard of him. That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides the toughness of our citizens, is our public library.
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