ing
decent, once in a while?" Dad asked.

"Sure I can. Decent people. There are a lot of them around, but Mort
Hallstock isn't one of them. There was an Old Terran politician named
Al Smith, once. He had a little saying he used in that kind of case:
'Let's look at the record.'"

"Well, Mort's record isn't very impressive, I'll give you that," Dad
admitted. "I understand Mort's up at the fire now. Don't spit in his
eye if you run into him."

"I won't," I promised. "I'm kind of particular where I spit."

Things must be looking pretty rough around Municipal Building, I
thought. Maybe Mort's afraid the people will start running Fenris
again, after this. He might even be afraid there'd be an election.

By this time, I'd gotten the jeep around the dredger--we'd come to the
end of the nuclear-power plant buildings--and cut off into open
country. That is to say, nothing but pillar-buildings two hundred
yards apart and piles of bagged mineral nutrients for the hydroponic
farms. We could see a blaze of electric lights ahead where the fire
must be, and after a while we began to run into lorries and
lifter-skids hauling ammunition away from the area. Then I could see a
big mushroom of greasy black smoke spreading out close to the ceiling.
The electric lights were brighter ahead, and there was a confused roar
of voices and sirens and machines.

And there was a stink.

There are a lot of stinks around Port Sandor, though the ventilation
system carries most of them off before they can spread out of their
own areas. The plant that reprocesses sewage to get organic nutrients
for the hydroponic farms, and the plant that digests hydroponic
vegetation to make nutrients for the carniculture vats. The
carniculture vats themselves aren't any flower gardens. And the pulp
plant where our synthetic lumber is made. But the worst stink there is
on Fenris is a tallow-wax fire. Fortunately, they don't happen often.

17

TALLOW-WAX FIRE

Now that we were out of the traffic jam, I could poke along and use
the camera myself. The wax was stacked in piles twenty feet high,
which gave thirty feet of clear space above them, but the section
where they had been piled was badly cut up by walls and full of small
extra columns to support the weight of the pulp plant above and the
carniculture vats on the level over that. However, the piles
themselves weren't separated by any walls, and the fire could spread
to the whole stock of wax. There