There was a long wall, ceiling-high, that
stretched off uptown in the direction of the spaceport, part of the
support for the weight of the pulpwood plant on the level above, and
piled against it was a lot of junk machinery of different kinds that
had been hauled in here and dumped long ago and then forgotten. The
wax was piled almost against this, and the heat and smoke forced me
down.
I looked at the junk pile and decided that I could get through it on
foot. I had been keeping up a running narration into my radio, and I
commented on all this salvageable metal lying in here forgotten, with
our perennial metal shortages. Then I started picking my way through
it, my portable audiovisual camera slung over my shoulder and a
flashlight in my hand. My left hand, of course; it's never smart to
carry a light in your right, unless you're left-handed.
The going wasn't too bad. Most of the time, I could get between things
without climbing over them. I was going between a broken-down press
from the lumber plant and a leaky 500-gallon pressure cooker from the
carniculture nutrient plant when I heard something moving behind me,
and I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't let myself be talked into
leaving my pistol behind.
It was a thing the size of a ten-gallon keg, with a thick tail and
flippers on which it crawled, and six tentacles like small elephants'
trunks around a circular mouth filled with jagged teeth halfway down
the throat.
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