The wreckers were working overtime. They hacked with hammers and crowbars and drills and acetylene torches and they had almost finished stripping this once magnificent room down to its aged bones. It had been gutted. The saloon and smoking room and cabin partitions had been torn away to make room for the millions of fish that would bring millions of dollars to the Husacks and the Caswells and the Kennedys and the Kleets and the men at the directors’ tables in Washington and New York and San Francisco. Already the white enamel, the teakwood, the mahogany, the satin and brocade hangings, the deep-pile carpets were unimaginable. The rooms that had known the luxurious beds, the perfumed bodies; the passageways and dining rooms that had held the aroma of exquisite foods and vintage wines, the scent of rich black cigars, the prick of frosted cocktails, now reeked of the fish that had piled up on that first wildly successful trial trip when tons of them, like living silver, had choked the caverns of mahogany and silk. The caverns were cribs now, and men in hip boots slid and slipped on the slime of the floor.

“Take your ma’s arm, Bay, you dope!” Dave said.

“Watch out there now, Christine.” Czar’s cautioning voice.

Now and then the ship seemed to quiver as with a chill. “It’s the blowtorches,” Bay explained as his mother looked around, nervously. “I don’t think they ought to use them until they’re in dry dock.”

Dave Husack corrected this with a hoot of derision and triumph mingled. “No it isn’t, dopey boy. This machinery in this little skiff was built like a watch, like one of these fine Swiss watches. That’s why it cost the old boy about a million a minute to run her. Well, our fish ain’t so delicate. We yanked out the delicate works first thing and we put in some good serviceable secondhand junk that will make the old tub go and that’s all we need. But she’s temperamental yet, she gives us a shiver now and then the way you would”—he laid a heavy hand on Dina Drake’s shoulder—“if somebody was to take that pretty little mink doodad off of you and wrap you in burlap instead, see?” He did not pinch her cheek, though. His hand rested just a moment still on her shoulder. Then he turned away. His heavy hand descended now on Czar’s hunched shoulder, he did not notice the little flame of dislike that flicked out at him from Czar’s deep-set eyes.

“Give in? You ready to concede, Czar, old crab?” He was at his most jovial. “I been telling you all along, and the other boys have too, there’s no damn sense in carrying a spoonful at a time in little tubs when an old pro like this can load ten times as much. She’ll pay for herself in two three trips, like I said. Any old grease-monkey can run her engine now. She’s good for another ten—fifteen—maybe twenty years. Man!”