"Here's what happened. There were six men on guard here; they had a
jeep with a 7-mm machine gun. About an hour ago, a lorry pulled in,
with two men in boat-clothes on it. They said that Pierre Karolyi's
_Corinne_ had just come in with a hold full of wax, and they were
bringing it up from the docks, and where should they put it? Well, the
men on guard believed that; Pierre'd gone off into the twilight zone
after the _Helldiver_ contacted us, and he could have gotten a monster
in the meantime.

"Well, they told these fellows that there was more room over on the
other side of the stacks, and the lorry went up above the stacks and
started across, and when they were about the middle, one of the men in
it threw out a thermoconcentrate bomb. The lorry took off, right away.
The only thing was that there were two men in the jeep, and one of
them was at the machine gun. They'd lifted to follow the lorry over
and show them where to put this wax, and as soon as the bomb went off,
the man at the gun grabbed it and caught the lorry in his sights and
let go. This fellow hadn't been covering for cutting-up work for years
for nothing. He got one burst right in the control cabin, and the
lorry slammed into the next column foundation. After they called in an
alarm on the fire the bomb had started, a couple of them went to see
who'd been in the lorry. The two men in it were both dead, and one of
them was Al Devis."

"Pity," I said. "I'd been looking forward to putting a recording of
his confession on the air. Where is this lorry now?"

Joe pointed toward the burning wax piles. "Almost directly on the
other side. We have a couple of men guarding it. The bodies are still
in it. We don't want any tampering with it till it can be properly
examined; we want to have the facts straight, in case Hallstock tries
to make trouble for the men who did the shooting."

I didn't know how he could. Under any kind of Federation law at all, a
man killed committing a felony--and bombing and arson ought to
qualify for that--is simply bought and paid for; his blood is on
nobody's head but his own. Of course, a small matter like legality was
always the least of Mort Hallstock's worries.

"I'll go get some shots of it," I said, and then I snapped on my radio
and called the story in.

Dad had already gotten it, from fire-alarm center, but he hadn't heard
that Devis was one of the deceased arsonists. Like me, he was very
sorry to hear about it. Devis as D