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 chemical explosive. Cataclysmite,
probably."
"Ravick?" he asked, rather unnecessarily.
"You know how well he can get along without you and Joe Kivelson, and
here's a chance to get along without both of you together." Everybody
in the boat was listening, so I continued: "How much do you know about
this fellow Devis, who strained his back at the last moment?"
"Engine room's where he could have planted something," Joe Kivelson
said.
"He was in there by himself for a while, the morning after the
meeting," Abdullah Monnahan added.
"And he disappeared between the meeting room and the elevator, during
the fight," Tom mentioned. "And when he showed up, he hadn't been
marked up any. I'd have thought he'd have been pretty badly
beaten--unless they knew he was one of their own gang."
"We're going to look Devis up when we get back," somebody said
pleasantly.
"If we get back," Ramón Llewellyn told him. "That's going to take some
doing."
"We have the boat," Hans Cronje said. "It's a little crowded, but we
can make it back to Port Sandor."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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