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 were more men and vehicles on the job
than room for them to work. I passed over the heads of the crowd
around the edges and got onto a comparatively unobstructed side where
I could watch and get views of the fire fighters pulling down the big
skins of wax and loading them onto contragravity skids to be hauled
away.
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