Transcriber's Note:

 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. The attribution is not a part of the original book. 

 Four-Day Planet

 by H. Beam Piper

 SF ace books A Division of Charter Communications Inc. A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY 360 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010

 Copyright © 1961 by H. Beam Piper

 _Cover art by Michael Whelan_

 * * * * *

DEDICATION

For Betty and Vall, withloving remembrance

 * * * * *

CONTENTS

 1. The Ship from Terra

 2. Reporter Working

 3. Bottom Level

 4. Main City Level

 5. Meeting Out of Order

 6. Elementary, My Dear Kivelson

 7. Aboard the _Javelin_

 8. Practice, 50-MM Gun

 9. Monster Killing

10. Mayday, Mayday

11. Darkness and Cold

12. Castaways Working

13. The Beacon Light

14. The Rescue

15. Vigilantes

16. Civil War Postponed

17. Tallow-Wax Fire

18. The Treason of Bish Ware

19. Masks Off

20. Finale

 * * * * *

Four-Day Planet

1

THE SHIP FROM TERRA

I went through the gateway, towing my equipment in a contragravityhamper over my head. As usual, I was wondering what it would take, short of a revolution, to get the city of Port Sandor as clean andtidy and well lighted as the spaceport area. I knew Dad's editorialsand my sarcastic news stories wouldn't do it. We'd been trying longenough. 

The two girls in bikinis in front of me pushed on, still gabblingabout the fight one of them had had with her boy friend, and I closedup behind the half dozen monster-hunters in long trousers, ankle bootsand short boat-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must haveall been from the same crew, because they weren't arguing about whoseship was fastest, had the toughest skipper, and made the most money. They were talking about the price of tallow-wax, and they seemed tohave picked up a rumor that it was going to be cut another tencentisols a pound. I eavesdropped shamelessly, but it was the samerumor I'd picked up, myself, a little earlier. 

"Hi, Walt, " somebody behind me called out. "Looking for some newsthat's fit to print?"

I turned my head. It was a man of about thirty-five with curly brownhair and a wide grin. Adolf Lautier, the entertainment promoter. Heand Dad each owned a share in the Port Sandor telecast station, andsplit their time between his music and drama-films and Dad'snewscasts. 

"All the news is fit to print, and if it's news the _Times_ printsit, " I told him. "Think you're going to get some good thrillers thistime?"

He shrugged. I'd just asked that to make conversation; he never hadany way of knowing what sort of films would come in. The ones the_Peenemünde_ was bringing should be fairly new, because she wasoutbound from Terra. He'd go over what was aboard, and trade one forone for the old films he'd shown already. 

"They tell me there's a real Old-Terran-style Western been showing onVölund that ought to be coming our way this time, " he said. "It wasfilmed in South America, with real horses. "

That would go over big here. Almost everybody thought horses were asextinct as dinosaurs. I've seen so-called Westerns with the cowboysriding Freyan _oukry_. I mentioned that, and then added:

"They'll think the old cattle towns like Dodge and Abilene were awfulsissy places, though. "

"I suppose they were, compared to Port Sandor, " Lautier said. "Are yougoing aboard to interview the distinguished visitor?"

"Which one?" I asked. "Glenn Murell or Leo Belsher?"

Lautier called Leo Belsher something you won't find in the dictionarybut which nobody needs to look up. The hunters, ahead of us, heardhim and laughed. They couldn't possibly have agreed more. He was goingto continue with the fascinating subject of Mr. Leo Belsher's ancestryand personal characteristics, and then bit it off short. I followedhis eyes, and saw old Professor Hartzenbosch, the principal of theschool, approaching. 

"Ah, here you are, Mr. Lautier, " he greeted. "I trust that I did notkeep you waiting. " Then he saw me. "Why, it's Walter Boyd. How is yourfather, Walter?"

I assured him as to Dad's health and inquired about his own, and thenasked him how things were going at school. As well as could beexpected, he told me, and I gathered that he kept his point ofexpectation safely low. Then he wanted to know if I were going aboardto interview Mr. Murell. 

"Really, Walter, it is a wonderful thing that a famous author like Mr. Murell should come here to write a book about our planet, " he told me, very seriously, and added, as an afterthought: "Have you any ideawhere he intends staying while he is among us?"

"Why, yes, " I admitted. "After the _Peenemünde_ radioed us theirpassenger list, Dad talked to him by screen, and invited him to staywith us. Mr. Murell accepted, at least until he can find quarters ofhis own. "

There are a lot of good poker players in Port Sandor, but ProfessorJan Hartzenbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment wouldhave been comical if it hadn't been so utterly pathetic. He'd beenhoping to lasso Murell himself. 

"I wonder if Mr. Murell could spare time to come to the school andspeak to the students, " he said, after a moment. 

"I'm sure he could. I'll mention it to him, Professor, " I promised. 

Professor Hartzenbosch bridled at that. The great author ought to becoming to his school out of respect for him, not because aseventeen-year-old cub reporter sent him. But then, ProfessorHartzenbosch always took the attitude that he was conferring a favoron the _Times_ when he had anything he wanted publicity on. 

The elevator door opened, and Lautier and the professor joined in thepush to get into it. I hung back, deciding to wait for the next one sothat I could get in first and get back to the rear, where my hamperwouldn't be in people's way. After a while, it came back empty and Igot on, and when the crowd pushed off on the top level, I put myhamper back on contragravity and towed it out into the outdoor air, which by this time had gotten almost as cool as a bake-oven. 

I looked up at the sky, where everybody else was looking. The_Peenemünde_ wasn't visible; it was still a few thousand milesoff-planet. Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the sunset was even brighter and redder than when I hadseen it last, ten hours before. It was now about 1630. 

Now, before anybody starts asking just who's crazy, let me point outthat this is not on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor any other rational planet. This is Fenris, and on Fenris thesunsets, like many other things, are somewhat peculiar. 

Fenris is the second planet of a G_{4} star, six hundred and fiftylight-years to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everythingelse equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to acooler primary and getting about the same amount of radiation. Atleast, that's what the book says. I was born on Fenris, and have neverbeen off it in the seventeen years since. 

Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifleshorter than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eightthousand and a few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenrismakes almost exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one sidethe sun is continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring downunceasing heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eighthours, and when you get up and go outside--in an insulated vehicle, oran extreme-environment suit--you find that the shadows have moved onlyan inch or so, and it's that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls downto the horizon and hangs there for a few days--periods of twenty-fourG. S. Hours--and then slides slowly out of sight. Then, for about ahundred hours, there is a beautiful unfading sunset, and it's reallypleasant outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder until, just beforesunrise, it gets almost cold enough to freeze CO_{2}. Then the suncomes up, and we begin all over again. 

You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenrisis nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and spacemen haven'tmade a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name offluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram Zilker, theOrthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of those planetsthe Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with. 

The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the FourthCentury A. E. , went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have takenthat long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been amatter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, twohundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They losteverything they'd put into the company, which, for most of them, wasall they had. Not a few lost their lives before the Federation SpaceNavy could get ships here to evacuate them. 

But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh startelsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, tookover all the equipment and installations the Fenris Company hadabandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least, they stayed alive. There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and whilewe are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it. 

There were about two thousand people--ten per cent of the planetarypopulation--on the wide concrete promenade around the spaceportlanding pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with mytelecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could findsome ten or twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be areporter when he grew up, so that I could have an apprentice to helpme with my junk. 

As the star--and only--reporter of the greatest--and only--paper onthe planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on theTerra-Odin milk run, the _Peenemünde_ and the _Cape Canaveral_, landed. Of course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as theycome out of hyperspace and into radio range, and get the passengerlist, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from thelatest native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal onVenus. Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all, or the Federation Member Republic of Venus will have somenonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story toend man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at least six months old, some more than a year. A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-oddhours, but radio waves still crawl along at the same old 186, 000 mps. 

I still have to meet the ships. There's always something that has tobe picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP travelingthrough. This time, though, the big story coming in on the_Peenemünde_ was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no suchthing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you getrid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structuralcontradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go atthat. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who wasgoing to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with thefour-day year. Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom deplume, and nobody here had ever heard of him. 

That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besidesthe toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people haveto stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/orfrozen to death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is oneof the cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. Andtravel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybodyis hoping to read about a worse place than Fenris. I had checked onGlenn Murell at the library. None of the librarians had ever heard ofhim, and there wasn't a single mention of him in any of the bigcatalogues of publications. 

The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell wassome swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that was thatI couldn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or whathe'd expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could beon the lam from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all thecover story? Some of our better-known citizens came here dodgingwarrants on other planets. 

I was still wondering about Murell when somebody behind me greeted me, and I turned around. It was Tom Kivelson. 

Tom and I are buddies, when he's in port. He's just a shade older thanI am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday won'tcome till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is JoeKivelson, the skipper of the _Javelin_; Tom is sort of juniorengineer, second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to schooltogether, which is to say a couple of years at ProfessorHartzenbosch's, learning to read and write and put figures together. That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although JoeKivelson sent Tom's older sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybodywho stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I werestill digging for ours. 

Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously aboutit. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling andromantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hotstuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realizedthat neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot. Tom couldn't string three sentences--no, one sentence--together tosave his life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in somethingthat isn't pitching end-for-end every minute. 

Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty poundsheavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard, thoughat present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see himdressed as I was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a lightjacket. Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I lookedaround behind him, and saw the brass tip of a scabbard under thejacket. Any time a hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife on, he isn'twearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knewJoe Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the _Peenemünde_, with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms andthe cold. 

"I thought you were down in the South Ocean, " I said. 

"There's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op, " he said. "Weonly heard about it last evening, " by which he meant after 1800 ofthe previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-shipcaptain who had called the _Javelin_ by screen. "We screened everybodyelse we could. "

That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. SteveRavick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast ofHermann Reuch's Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack itwith his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted votedthrough. I had always wondered how long the real hunters were going tostand for that. They'd been standing for it ever since I couldremember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn'tbeen too long. 

I was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled, "There she is!" I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see whichway they were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught atiny twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmeticto figure how high she'd have to be to catch the sunlight, I relaxed. Even with the telephoto, I'd only get a picture the size of a pinhead, so I fixed the position in my mind and then looked around at thecrowd. 

Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and slender, with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with ascrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under hisleft arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. Theformer was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Co-operative, andhis companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of PortSandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris. 

They had held their respective positions for as long as I couldremember anything at all. I could never remember an election in PortSandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch ofgoons and triggermen--I could see a couple of them loitering in thebackground--who kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, onlyhis wore badges and called themselves police. 

Once in a while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one orthe other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun on, andso would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the thirdmember of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure nobodygot behind Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and that alwaysrather hurt me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they didn't needto care what the Times printed or 'cast about them. 

Hallstock glanced over in my direction and said something to Ravick. Ravick gave a sneering laugh, and then he crushed out the cigarette hewas smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick ofhis. Showing how tough he was. Dad says that when you see somebodyshowing off, ask yourself whether he's trying to impress other people, or himself. I wondered which was the case with Steve Ravick. 

Then I looked up again. The _Peenemünde_ was coming down as fast asshe could without over-heating from atmosphere friction. She wasalmost buckshot size to the naked eye, and a couple of tugs weregetting ready to go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera outof the hamper, checked it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock andhandgrips and a trigger like a submachine gun. I caught the ship inthe finder and squeezed the trigger for a couple of seconds. It wouldbe about five minutes till the tugs got to her and anything elsehappened, so I put down the camera and looked around. 

Coming through the crowd, walking as though the concrete under him waspitching and rolling like a ship's deck on contragravity in a storm, was Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself andrecovered, and then changed course to starboard and bore down on us. He was carrying about his usual cargo, and as usual the manifest wouldread, _Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar_. 

Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'dfirst landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamedhim the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable. He looked like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's neverseen a bishop outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like. He was a big man, not fat, but tall and portly; he had a ruddy facethat always wore an expression of benevolent wisdom, and the morecargo he took on the wiser and more benevolent he looked. 

He had iron-gray hair, but he wasn't old. You could tell that by thebacks of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veinsdidn't protrude. And drunk or sober--though I never remembered seeinghim in the latter condition--he had the fastest reflexes of anybody Iknew. I saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knockover an open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbedit by the neck and set it up, all in one motion, without spilling adrop, and he went on talking as though nothing had happened. He wasquoting Homer, I remembered, and you could tell that he was thinkingin the original ancient Greek and translating to Lingua Terra as hewent. 

He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, thejacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an Ullerorganic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly--onceevery planetary day--a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in forhim, and he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. Ifanybody was unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said hehad a rich uncle on Terra. 

When I was a kid--well, more of a kid than I am now--I used to believehe really was a bishop--unfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, orwhatever they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot ofpeople who weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him onevery denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missingthe Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what he'ddone to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that somewherethere was a cathedral standing unfinished because he'd hypered outwith the building fund. It was generally agreed that hisecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay out there in theboondocks where he wouldn't cause them further embarrassment. 

I was pretty sure, myself, that he was being paid by somebody, probably his family, to stay out of sight. The colonial planets arefull of that sort of remittance men. 

Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, ofboth sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was anexample, who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associatewith him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be areporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knewall the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having toassociate with all of them, and it is sad but true that you get veryfew news stories in Sunday school. Far from fearing that Bish would bea bad influence on me, he rather hoped I'd be a good one on Bish. 

I had that in mind, too, if I could think of any way of managing it. Bish had been a good man, once. He still was, except for one thing. You could tell that before he'd started drinking, he'd really beensomebody, somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened tohim, and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind abottle. Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feetagain. I hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turninghimself into the rumpot he was now was waste of the worst kind. 

It would take a lot of doing, though, and careful tactical planning. Preaching at him would be worse than useless, and so would simplytrying to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky, at the hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do wasmake him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going tomanage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work onthe Times, but we barely made enough money out of it for ourselves, and with his remittance he didn't need to work. I had a lot of otherideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, itgot sick and died. 

2

REPORTER WORKING

Bish came over and greeted us solemnly. 

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Captain Ahab, I believe, " he said, bowingto Tom, who seemed slightly puzzled; the education Tom had beendigging out for himself was technical rather than literary. "And Mr. Pulitzer. Or is it Horace Greeley?"

"Lord Beaverbrook, your Grace, " I replied. "Have you any little newsitems for us from your diocese?"

Bish teetered slightly, getting out a cigar and inspecting itcarefully before lighting it. 

"We-el, " he said carefully, "my diocese is full to the hatch coverswith sinners, but that's scarcely news. " He turned to Tom. "One ofyour hands on the _Javelin_ got into a fight in Martian Joe's, a whileago. Lumped the other man up pretty badly. " He named the Javelincrewman, and the man who had been pounded. The latter was one of SteveRavick's goons. "But not fatally, I regret to say, " Bish added. "Thelocal Gestapo are looking for your man, but he made it aboard NipSpazoni's _Bulldog_, and by this time he's halfway to Hermann Reuch'sLand. "

"Isn't Nip going to the meeting, tonight?" Tom asked. 

Bish shook his head. "Nip is a peace-loving man. He has a well-foundedsuspicion that peace is going to be in short supply around Hunters'Hall this evening. You know, of course, that Leo Belsher's coming inon the _Peenemünde_ and will be there to announce another price cut. The new price, I understand, will be thirty-five centisols a pound. "

Seven hundred sols a ton, I thought; why, that would barely pay shipexpenses. 

"Where did you get that?" Tom asked, a trifle sharply. 

"Oh, I have my spies and informers, " Bish said. "And even if I hadn't, it would figure. The only reason Leo Belsher ever comes to this Edenamong planets is to negotiate a new contract, and who ever heard of anew contract at a higher price?"

That had all happened before, a number of times. When Steve Ravick hadgotten control of the Hunters' Co-operative, the price of tallow-wax, on the loading floor at Port Sandor spaceport, had been fifteenhundred sols a ton. As far as Dad and I could find out, it was stillbringing the same price on Terra as it always had. It looked to us asif Ravick and Leo Belsher, who was the Co-op representative on Terra, and Mort Hallstock were simply pocketing the difference. I was just assore about what was happening as anybody who went out in thehunter-ships. Tallow-wax is our only export. All our imports are paidfor with credit from the sale of wax. 

It isn't really wax, and it isn't tallow. It's a growth on theJarvis's sea-monster; there's a layer of it under the skin, and aroundorgans that need padding. An average-sized monster, say a hundred andfifty feet long, will yield twelve to fifteen tons of it, and a goodhunter kills about ten monsters a year. Well, at the price Belsher andRavick were going to cut from, that would run a little short of ahundred and fifty thousand sols for a year. If you say it quick enoughand don't think, that sounds like big money, but the upkeep andsupplies for a hunter-ship are big money, too, and what's left afterthat's paid off is divided, on a graduated scale, among ten to fifteenmen, from the captain down. A hunter-boat captain, even a good onelike Joe Kivelson, won't make much more in a year than Dad and I makeout of the _Times_. 

Chemically, tallow-wax isn't like anything else in the known Galaxy. The molecules are huge; they can be seen with an ordinary opticalmicroscope, and a microscopically visible molecule is acurious-looking object, to say the least. They use the stuff to treatfabric for protective garments. It isn't anything like collapsium, ofcourse, but a suit of waxed coveralls weighing only a couple of poundswill stop as much radiation as half an inch of lead. 

Back when they were getting fifteen hundred a ton, the hunters hadbeen making good money, but that was before Steve Ravick's time. 

It was slightly before mine, too. Steve Ravick had showed up on Fenrisabout twelve years ago. He'd had some money, and he'd bought shares ina couple of hunter-ships and staked a few captains who'd had bad luckand got them in debt to him. He also got in with Morton Hallstock, whocontrolled what some people were credulous enough to take for agovernment here. Before long, he was secretary of the Hunters'Co-operative. Old Simon MacGregor, who had been president then, was agood hunter, but he was no businessman. He came to depend very heavilyon Ravick, up till his ship, the _Claymore_, was lost with all handsdown in Fitzwilliam Straits. I think that was a time bomb in themagazine, but I have a low and suspicious mind. Professor Hartzenboschhas told me so repeatedly. After that, Steve Ravick was president ofthe Co-op. He immediately began a drive to increase the membership. Most of the new members had never been out in a hunter-ship in theirlives, but they could all be depended on to vote the way he wantedthem to. 

First, he jacked the price of wax up, which made everybody but the waxbuyers happy. Everybody who wasn't already in the Co-op hurried up andjoined. Then he negotiated an exclusive contract with KapstaadChemical Products, Ltd. , in South Africa, by which they agreed to takethe entire output for the Co-op. That ended competitive wax buying, and when there was nobody to buy the wax but Kapstaad, you had to sellit through the Co-operative or you didn't sell it at all. After that, the price started going down. The Co-operative, for which read SteveRavick, had a sales representative on Terra, Leo Belsher. He wrote allthe contracts, collected all the money, and split with Ravick. Whatwas going on was pretty generally understood, even if it couldn't beproven, but what could anybody do about it?

Maybe somebody would try to do something about it at the meeting thisevening. I would be there to cover it. I was beginning to wish I owneda bullet-proof vest. 

Bish and Tom were exchanging views on the subject, some of them almostprintable. I had my eyes to my binoculars, watching the tugs go up tomeet the _Peenemünde_. 

"What we need for Ravick, Hallstock and Belsher, " Tom was saying, "isabout four fathoms of harpoon line apiece, and something to haul upto. "

That kind of talk would have shocked Dad. He is very strong for lawand order, even when there is no order and the law itself is illegal. I'd always thought there was a lot of merit in what Tom wassuggesting. Bish Ware seemed to have his doubts, though. 

"Mmm, no; there ought to be some better way of doing it than that. "

"Can you think of one?" Tom challenged. 

I didn't hear Bish's reply. By that time, the tugs were almost to theship. I grabbed up the telephoto camera and aimed it. It has its ownpower unit, and transmits directly. In theory, I could tune it to thetelecast station and put what I was getting right on the air, and whatI was doing was transmitting to the _Times_, to be recorded and 'castlater. Because it's not a hundred per cent reliable, though, it makesits own audiovisual record, so if any of what I was sending didn't getthrough, it could be spliced in after I got back. 

I got some footage of the tugs grappling the ship, which was nowcompletely weightless, and pulling her down. Through the finder, Icould see that she had her landing legs extended; she looked like abig overfed spider being hauled in by a couple of gnats. I kept thebutt of the camera to my shoulder, and whenever anything interestinghappened, I'd squeeze the trigger. The first time I ever used a realsubmachine gun had been to kill a blue slasher that had gotten intoone of the ship pools at the waterfront. I used three one-secondbursts, and threw bits of slasher all over the place, and everybodywondered how I'd gotten the practice. 

A couple more boats, pushers, went up to help hold the ship againstthe wind, and by that time she was down to a thousand feet, which washalf her diameter. I switched from the shoulder-stock telephoto to thebig tripod job, because this was the best part of it. The ship wasweightless, of course, but she had mass and an awful lot of it. Ifanybody goofed getting her down, she'd take the side of the landingpit out, and about ten per cent of the population of Fenris, includingthe ace reporter for the Times, along with it. 

At the same time, some workmen and a couple of spaceport cops hadappeared, taken out a section of railing and put in a gate. The_Peenemünde_ settled down, turned slowly to get her port in line withthe gate, and lurched off contragravity and began running out a bridgeto the promenade. I got some shots of that, and then began packing mystuff back in the hamper. 

"You going aboard?" Tom asked. "Can I come along? I can carry some ofyour stuff and let on I'm your helper. "

Glory be, I thought; I finally got that apprentice. 

"Why, sure, " I said. "You tow the hamper; I'll carry this. " I got outwhat looked like a big camera case and slung it over my shoulder. "Butyou'll have to take me out on the _Javelin_, sometime, and let meshoot a monster. "

He said it was a deal, and we shook on it. Then I had another idea. 

"Bish, suppose you come with us, too, " I said. "After all, Tom and Iare just a couple of kids. If you're with us, it'll look a lot morebig-paperish. "

That didn't seem to please Tom too much. Bish shook his head, though, and Tom brightened. 

"I'm dreadfully sorry, Walt, " Bish said. "But I'm going aboard, myself, to see a friend who is en route through to Odin. A Dr. Watson;I have not seen him for years. "

I'd caught that name, too, when we'd gotten the passenger list. Dr. John Watson. Now, I know that all sorts of people call themselvesDoctor, and Watson and John aren't too improbable a combination, butI'd read _Sherlock Holmes_ long ago, and the name had caught myattention. And this was the first, to my knowledge, that Bish Ware hadever admitted to any off-planet connections. 

We started over to the gate. Hallstock and Ravick were ahead of us. Sowas Sigurd Ngozori, the president of the Fidelity & Trust, carrying aheavy briefcase and accompanied by a character with a submachine gun, and Adolf Lautier and Professor Hartzenbosch. There were a couple ofspaceport cops at the gate, in olive-green uniforms that looked asthough they had been sprayed on, and steel helmets. I wished we had acity police force like that. They were Odin Dock & Shipyard Companymen, all former Federation Regular Army or Colonial Constabulary. Thespaceport wasn't part of Port Sandor, or even Fenris; the Odin Dock &Shipyard Company was the government there, and it was run honestly andefficiently. 

They knew me, and when they saw Tom towing my hamper they cracked afew jokes about the new _Times_ cub reporter and waved us through. Ithought they might give Bish an argument, but they just nodded and lethim pass, too. We all went out onto the bridge, and across the pit tothe equator of the two-thousand-foot globular ship. 

We went into the main lounge, and the captain introduced us to Mr. Glenn Murell. He was fairly tall, with light gray hair, prematurelyso, I thought, and a pleasant, noncommittal face. I'd have pegged himfor a businessman. Well, I suppose authoring is a business, if thatwas his business. He shook hands with us, and said:

"Aren't you rather young to be a newsman?"

I started to burn on that. I get it all the time, and it burns me all thetime, but worst of all on the job. Maybe I am only going-on-eighteen, butI'm doing a man's work, and I'm doing it competently. 

"Well, they grow up young on Fenris, Mr. Murell, " Captain Marshakearned my gratitude by putting in. "Either that or they don't live togrow up. "

Murell unhooked his memophone and repeated the captain's remark intoit. Opening line for one of his chapters. Then he wanted to know ifI'd been born on Fenris. I saw I was going to have to get firm withMr. Murell, right away. The time to stop that sort of thing is as soonas it starts. 

"Who, " I wanted to know, "is interviewing whom? You'll have at leastfive hundred hours till the next possible ship out of here; I onlyhave two and a half to my next deadline. You want coverage, don't you?The more publicity you get, the easier your own job's going to be. "

Then I introduced Tom, carefully giving the impression that while Ihandled all ordinary assignments, I needed help to give him the fullVIP treatment. We went over to a quiet corner and sat down, and theinterview started. 

The camera case I was carrying was a snare and a deceit. Everybodyknows that reporters use recorders in interviews, but it never pays tobe too obtrusive about them, or the subject gets recorder-consciousand stiffens up. What I had was better than a recorder; it was arecording radio. Like the audiovisuals, it not only transmitted in tothe _Times_, but made a recording as insurance against transmissionfailure. I reached into a slit on the side and snapped on the switchwhile I was fumbling with a pencil and notebook with the other hand, and started by asking him what had decided him to do a book aboutFenris. 

After that, I fed a question every now and then to keep him running, and only listened to every third word. The radio was doing a betterjob than I possibly could have. At the same time, I was watching SteveRavick, Morton Hallstock and Leo Belsher at one side of the room, andBish Ware at the other. Bish was within ear-straining range. Out ofthe corner of my eye, I saw another man, younger in appearance andlooking like an Army officer in civvies, approach him. 

"My dear Bishop!" this man said in greeting. 

As far as I knew, that nickname had originated on Fenris. I made amental note of that. 

"How are you?" Bish replied, grasping the other's hand. "You have beenin Afghanistan, I perceive. "

That did it. I told you I was an old _Sherlock Holmes_ reader; Irecognized that line. This meeting was prearranged, neither of themhad ever met before, and they needed a recognition code. Then Ireturned to Murell, and decided to wonder about Bish Ware and "Dr. Watson" later. 

It wasn't long before I was noticing a few odd things about Murell, too, which confirmed my original suspicions of him. He didn't have thefirm name of his alleged publishers right, he didn't know what aliterary agent was and, after claiming to have been a newsman, heconsistently used the expression "news service. " I know, everybodysays that--everybody but newsmen. They always call a news service a"paper, " especially when talking to other newsmen. 

Of course, there isn't any paper connected with it, except the pad theeditor doodles on. What gets to the public is photoprint, out of ateleprinter. As small as our circulation is, we have four or fivehundred of them in Port Sandor and around among the small settlementsin the archipelago, and even on the mainland. Most of them are in barsand cafes and cigar stores and places like that, operated by a coin ina slot and leased by the proprietor, and some of the big hunter-shipslike Joe Kivelson's _Javelin_ and Nip Spazoni's _Bulldog_ have them. 

But long ago, back in the First Centuries, Pre-Atomic and Atomic Era, they were actually printed on paper, and the copies distributed andsold. They used printing presses as heavy as a spaceship's engines. That's why we still call ourselves the Press. Some of the old paperson Terra, like _La Prensa_ in Buenos Aires, and the Melbourne _Times_, which used to be the London _Times_ when there was still a London, were printed that way originally. 

Finally I got through with my interview, and then shot about fifteenminutes of audiovisual, which would be cut to five for the 'cast. Bythis time Bish and "Dr. Watson" had disappeared, I supposed to theship's bar, and Ravick and his accomplices had gotten through withtheir conspiracy to defraud the hunters. I turned Murell over to Tom, and went over to where they were standing together. I'd put away mypencil and pad long ago with Murell; now I got them out ostentatiouslyas I approached. 

"Good day, gentlemen, " I greeted them. "I'm representing the PortSandor _Times_. "

"Oh, run along, sonny; we haven't time to bother with you, " Hallstocksaid. 

"But I want to get a story from Mr. Belsher, " I began. 

"Well, come back in five or six years, when you're dry behind theears, and you can get it, " Ravick told me. 

"Our readers aren't interested in the condition of my ears, " I saidsweetly. "They want to read about the price of tallow-wax. What's thisabout another price cut? To thirty-five centisols a pound, Iunderstand. "

"Oh, Steve, the young man's from the news service, and his father willpublish whatever he brings home, " Belsher argued. "We'd better givehim something. " He turned to me. "I don't know how this got out, butit's quite true, " he said. He had a long face, like a horse's. Atleast, he looked like pictures of horses I'd seen. As he spoke, hepulled it even longer and became as doleful as an undertaker at aten-thousand-sol funeral. 

"The price has gone down, again. Somebody has developed a syntheticsubstitute. Of course, it isn't anywhere near as good as real Fenristallow-wax, but try and tell the public that. So Kapstaad Chemical isbeing undersold, and the only way they can stay in business is cut theprice they have to pay for wax. .. . "

It went on like that, and this time I had real trouble keeping myanger down. In the first place, I was pretty sure there was nosubstitute for Fenris tallow-wax, good, bad or indifferent. In thesecond place, it isn't sold to the gullible public, it's sold toequipment manufacturers who have their own test engineers and who haveto keep their products up to legal safety standards. He didn't knowthis balderdash of his was going straight to the _Times_ as fast as hespouted it; he thought I was taking it down in shorthand. I knewexactly what Dad would do with it. He'd put it on telecast inBelsher's own voice. 

Maybe the monster-hunters would start looking around for a rope, then. 

When I got through listening to him, I went over and got a shortaudiovisual of Captain Marshak of the _Peenemünde_ for the 'cast, andthen I rejoined Tom and Murell. 

"Mr. Murell says he's staying with you at the _Times_, " Tom said. Heseemed almost as disappointed as Professor Hartzenbosch. I wondered, for an incredulous moment, if Tom had been trying to kidnap Murellaway from me. "He wants to go out on the _Javelin_ with us for amonster-hunt. "

"Well, that's swell!" I said. "You can pay off on that promise to takeme monster-hunting, too. Right now, Mr. Murell is my big story. " Ireached into the front pocket of my "camera" case for the handphone, to shift to two-way. "I'll call the _Times_ and have somebody come upwith a car to get us and Mr. Murell's luggage. "

"Oh, I have a car. Jeep, that is, " Tom said. "It's down on the BottomLevel. We can use that. "

Funny place to leave a car. And I was sure that he and Murell had cometo some kind of an understanding, while I was being lied to byBelsher. I didn't get it. There was just too much going on around methat I didn't get, and me, I'm supposed to be the razor-sharp newshawkwho gets everything. 

3

BOTTOM LEVEL

It didn't take long to get Murell's luggage assembled. There wassurprisingly little of it, and nothing that looked like photographicor recording equipment. When he returned from a final gathering-up inhis stateroom, I noticed that he was bulging under his jacket, too, onthe left side at the waist. About enough for an 8. 5-mm pocketautomatic. Evidently he had been briefed on the law-and-ordersituation in Port Sandor. 

Normally, we'd have gone off onto the Main City Level, but Tom's jeepwas down on the Bottom Level, and he made no suggestion that we go offand wait for him to bring it up. I didn't suggest it, either. Afterall, it was his jeep, and he wasn't our hired pilot. Besides, I wasbeginning to get curious. An abnormally large bump of curiosity ispart of every newsman's basic equipment. 

We borrowed a small handling-lifter and one of the spaceportroustabouts to tow it for us, loaded Murell's luggage and my thingsonto it, and started down to the bottomside cargo hatches, from whichthe ship was discharging. There was no cargo at all to go aboard, except mail and things like Adolf Lautier's old film and music tapes. Our only export is tallow-wax, and it all goes to Terra. It would bepicked up by the Cape _Canaveral_ when she got in from Odin fivehundred hours from now. But except for a few luxury items from Odin, everything we import comes from Terra, and the _Peenemünde_ hadstarted discharging that already. We rode down on a contragravity skidloaded with ammunition. I saw Murell looking curiously at the squarecases, marked TERRAN FEDERATION ARMED FORCES, and 50-MM, MK. 608, ANTIVEHICLE AND ANTIPERSONNEL, 25 ROUNDS, and OVERAGE. PRACTICE ONLY. NOT TO BE ISSUED FOR SERVICE, and INSPECTED AND CONDEMNED. The huntersbought that stuff through the Co-op. It cost half as much as new ammo, but that didn't help them any. The difference stopped with SteveRavick. Murell didn't comment, and neither did Tom or I. 

We got off at the bottom of the pit, a thousand feet below thepromenade from which I had come aboard, and stopped for a moment. Murell was looking about the great amphitheater in amazement. 

"I knew this spaceport would be big when I found out that the shiplanded directly on the planet, " he said, "but I never expectedanything like this. And this serves a population of twenty thousand?"

"Twenty-four thousand, seven hundred and eight, if the man who gotpounded in a barroom fight around 1330 hasn't died yet, " I said. "Butyou have to remember that this place was built close to a hundredyears ago, when the population was ten times that much. " I'd gotten mystory from him; now it was his turn to interview me. "You knowsomething about the history of Fenris, I suppose?"

"Yes. There are ample sources for it on Terra, up to the collapse ofthe Fenris Company, " he said. "Too much isn't known about what's beenhappening here since, which is why I decided to do this book. "

"Well, there were several cities built, over on the mainland, " I toldhim. "They're all abandoned now. The first one was a conventionalcity, the buildings all on the surface. After one day-and-night cycle, they found that it was uninhabitable. It was left unfinished. Thenthey started digging in. The Chartered Fenris Company shipped in hugequantities of mining and earth-moving equipment--that put the companyin the red more than anything else--and they began makingburrow-cities, like the ones built in the Northern Hemisphere of Terraduring the Third and Fourth World Wars, or like the cities on Luna andMercury Twilight Zone and Titan. There are a lot of valuable mineraldeposits over on the mainland; maybe in another century ourgrandchildren will start working them again. 

"But about six years before the Fenris Company went to pieces, theydecided to concentrate in one city, here in the archipelago. The seawater stays cooler in the daytime and doesn't lose heat so rapidly inthe nighttime. So they built Port Sandor, here on Oakleaf Island. "

"And for convenience in monster-hunting?"

I shook my head. "No. The Jarvis's sea-monster wasn't discovered untilafter the city was built, and it was years after the company had gonebankrupt before anybody found out about what tallow-wax was goodfor. "

I started telling him about the native life-forms of Fenris. Becauseof the surface temperature extremes, the marine life is the mosthighly developed. The land animals are active during the periods aftersunset and after sunrise; when it begins getting colder or hotter, they burrow, or crawl into caves and crevices among the rocks, and gointo suspended animation. I found that he'd read up on that, and nottoo much of his information was incorrect. 

He seemed to think, though, that Port Sandor had also been mined outbelow the surface. I set him right on that. 

"You saw what it looked like when you were coming down, " I said. "Justa flat plateau, with a few shaft-head domes here and there, and thelanding pit of the spaceport. Well, originally it was a valley, between two low hills. The city was built in the valley, level bylevel, and then the tops of the hills were dug off and bulldozed downon top of it. We have a lot of film at the public library of theconstruction of the city, step by step. As far as I know, there are nocopies anywhere off-planet. "

He should have gotten excited about that, and wanted to see them. Instead, he was watching the cargo come off--food-stuffs, now--andwanted to know if we had to import everything we needed. 

"Oh, no. We're going in on the Bottom Level, which is mainly storage, but we have hydroponic farms for our vegetables and carnicultureplants for meat on the Second and Third Levels. That's counting downfrom the Main City Level. We make our own lumber, out of reedsharvested in the swamps after sunrise and converted to pulpwood, andwe get some good hardwood from the native trees which only grow infour periods of two hundred hours a year. We only use that forfurniture, gunstocks, that sort of thing. And there are a couple ofmining camps and smelters on the mainland; they employ about athousand of our people. But every millisol that's spent on this planetis gotten from the sale of tallow-wax, at second or third hand if notdirectly. "

That seemed to interest him more. Maybe his book, if he was reallywriting one, was going to be an economic study of Fenris. Or maybe hisracket, whatever it was, would be based on something connected withour local production. I went on telling him about our hydroponicfarms, and the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue wewanted was grown--Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan _zhoumy_meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest. .. . He knew, already, that none of thenative life-forms, animal or vegetable, were edible by Terrans. 

"You can get all the _paté de foie gras_ you want here, " I said. "Wehave a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing inone of our vats. "

By this time, we'd gotten across the bottom of the pit, Murell'sluggage and my equipment being towed after us, and had entered theBottom Level. It was cool and pleasant here, lighted from the ceilingfifty feet overhead, among the great column bases, two hundred feetsquare and two hundred yards apart, that supported the upper city andthe thick roof of rock and earth that insulated it. The area we wereentering was stacked with tallow-wax waiting to be loaded onto the_Cape Canaveral_ when she came in; it was vacuum-packed in plasticskins, like big half-ton Bologna sausages, each one painted with theblue and white emblem of the Hunters' Co-operative. He was quiteinterested in that, and was figuring, mentally, how much wax there washere and how much it was worth. 

"Who does this belong to?" he wanted to know. "The Hunters'Co-operative?"

Tom had been letting me do the talking up to now, but he answered thatquestion, very emphatically. 

"No, it doesn't. It belongs to the hunters, " he said. "Each ship crewowns the wax they bring in in common, and it's sold for them by theCo-op. When the captain gets paid for the wax he's turned over to theCo-op, he divides the money among the crew. But every scrap of thisbelongs to the ships that took it, up till it's bought and paid for byKapstaad Chemical. "

"Well, if a captain wants his wax back, after it's been turned overfor sale to the Co-op, can he get it?" Murell asked. 

"Absolutely!"

Murell nodded, and we went on. The roustabout who had been followingus with the lifter had stopped to chat with a couple of his fellows. We went on slowly, and now and then a vehicle, usually a lorry, wouldpass above us. Then I saw Bish Ware, ahead, sitting on a sausage ofwax, talking to one of the Spaceport Police. They were both smoking, but that was all right. Tallow-wax will burn, and a wax fire issomething to get really excited about, but the ignition point is 750° C. , and that's a lot hotter than the end of anybody's cigar. He musthave come out the same way we did, and I added that to the"wonder-why" file. Pretty soon, I'd have so many questions to wonderabout that they'd start answering each other. He saw us and waved tous, and then suddenly the spaceport cop's face got as white as myshirt and he grabbed Bish by the arm. Bish didn't change color; hejust shook off the cop's hand, got to his feet, dropped his cigar, andtook a side skip out into the aisle. 

"Murell!" he yelled. "Freeze! On your life; don't move a muscle!"

Then there was a gun going off in his hand. I didn't see him reach forit, or where he drew it from. It was just in his hand, firing, and theempty brass flew up and came down on the concrete with a jingle on theheels of the report. We had all stopped short, and the roustabout whowas towing the lifter came hurrying up. Murell simply stood gaping atBish. 

"All right, " Bish said, slipping his gun back into a shoulder holsterunder his coat. "Step carefully to your left. Don't move right atall. "

Murell, still in a sort of trance, obeyed. As he did I looked past hisright shin and saw what Bish had been shooting at. It was an irregulargray oval, about sixteen inches by four at its widest and tapering upin front to a cone about six inches high, into which a rodlike member, darker gray, was slowly collapsing and dribbling oily yellow stuff. The bullet had gone clear through and made a mess of dirty gray andblack and green body fluids on the concrete. 

It was what we call a tread-snail, because it moves on a double row ofpads like stumpy feet and leaves a trail like a tractor. Thefishpole-aerial thing it had erected out of its head was its stinger, and the yellow stuff was venom. A tenth of a milligram of it in yourblood and it's "Get the Gate open, St. Peter; here I come. "

Tom saw it as soon as I did. His face got the same color as the cop's. I don't suppose mine looked any better. When Murell saw what had beenbuddying up to him, I will swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles, Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels andThoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally stood on end. I've heard that expression all my life; well, this time I really sawit happen. I mentioned that he seemed to have been reading up on thelocal fauna. 

I looked down at his right leg. He hadn't been stung--if he had, hewouldn't be breathing now--but he had been squirted, and there were acouple of yellow stains on the cloth of his trouser leg. I told him tohold still, used my left hand to pull the cloth away from his leg, andgot out my knife and flipped it open with the other hand, cutting awaythe poisoned cloth and dropping it on the dead snail. 

Murell started making an outcry about cutting up his trousers, andsaid he could have had them cleaned. Bish Ware, coming up, told him tostop talking like an imbecile. 

"No cleaner would touch them, and even if they were cleaned, some ofthe poison would remain in the fabric. Then, the next time you werecaught in the rain with a scratch on your leg, Walt, here, wouldwrite you one of his very nicest obituaries. "

Then he turned to the cop, who was gabbling into his belt radio, andsaid: "Get an ambulance, quick. Possible case of tread-snail skinpoisoning. " A moment later, looking at Murell's leg, he added, "Omit'possible. '"

There were a couple of little spots on Murell's skin that werebeginning to turn raw-liver color. The raw poison hadn't gotten intohis blood, but some of it, with impurities, had filtered through thecloth, and he'd absorbed enough of it through his skin to make himseriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and thelaborer with the lifter brought it and let it down, and Murell satdown on his luggage. Tom lit a cigarette and gave it to him, and toldhim to remain perfectly still. In a couple of minutes, an ambulancewas coming, its siren howling. 

The pilot and his helper were both jackleg medics, at least as far asfirst aid. They gave him a drink out of a flask, smeared a lot of gunkon the spots and slapped plasters over them, and helped him into theambulance, after I told him we'd take his things to the _Times_building. 

By this time, between the shot and the siren, quite a crowd hadgathered, and everybody was having a nice little recrimination party. The labor foreman was chewing the cop out. The warehousesuperintendent was chewing him out. And somebody from the generalsuperintendent's office was chewing out everybody indiscriminately, and at the same time mentioning to me that Mr. Fieschi, thesuperintendent, would be very much pleased if the _Times_ didn'tmention the incident at all. I told him that was editorial policy, and to talk to Dad about it. Nobody had any idea how the thing hadgotten in, but that wasn't much of a mystery. The Bottom Level is fullof things like that; they can stay active all the time because thetemperature is constant. I supposed that eventually they'd pick thedumbest day laborer in the place and make him the patsy. 

Tom stood watching the ambulance whisk Murell off, dithering inindecision. The poisoning of Murell seemed like an unexpected blow tohim. That fitted what I'd begun to think. Finally, he motioned thelaborer to pick up the lifter, and we started off toward where he hadparked his jeep, outside the spaceport area. 

Bish walked along with us, drawing his pistol and replacing the firedround in the magazine. I noticed that it was a 10-mm Colt-ArgentineFederation Service, commercial type. There aren't many of those onFenris. A lot of 10-mm's, but mostly South African Sterbergs orVickers-Bothas, or Mars-Consolidated Police Specials. Mine, which Iwasn't carrying at the moment, was a Sterberg 7. 7-mm Olympic Match. 

"You know, " he said, sliding the gun back under his coat, "I would bejust as well pleased as Mr. Fieschi if this didn't get any publicity. If you do publish anything about it, I wish you'd minimize my own partin it. As you have noticed, I have some slight proficiency with lethalhardware. This I would prefer not to advertise. I can usually avoidtrouble, but when I can't, I would like to retain the advantage ofsurprise. "

We all got into the jeep. Tom, not too graciously, offered to dropBish wherever he was going. Bish said he was going to the _Times_, soTom lifted the jeep and cut in the horizontal drive. We got into abusy one-way aisle, crowded with lorries hauling food-stuffs to therefrigeration area. He followed that for a short distance, and thenturned off into a dimly lighted, disused area. 

Before long, I began noticing stacks of tallow-wax, put up in theregular outside sausage skins but without the Co-op markings. Theyjust had the names of hunter-ships--_Javelin_, _Bulldog_, _Helldiver_, _Slasher_, and so on. 

"What's that stuff doing in here?" I asked. "It's a long way from thedocks, and a long way from the spaceport. "

"Oh, just temporary storage, " Tom said. "It hasn't been checked inwith the Co-op yet. "

That wasn't any answer--or maybe it was. I let it go at that. Then wecame to an open space about fifty feet square. There was a jeep, witha 7-mm machine gun mounted on it, and half a dozen men in boat-clotheswere playing cards at a table made out of empty ammunition boxes. Inoticed they were all wearing pistols, and when a couple of them sawus, they got up and grabbed rifles. Tom let down and got out of thejeep, going over and talking with them for a few minutes. What he hadto tell them didn't seem to bring any noticeable amount of sunlightinto their lives. After a while he came back, climbed in at thecontrols, and lifted the jeep again. 

4

MAIN CITY LEVEL

The ceiling on Main City Level is two hundred feet high; in order topermit free circulation of air and avoid traffic jams, nothing isbuilt higher than a hundred and fifty feet except the squarebuildings, two hundred yards apart, which rest on foundations on theBottom Level and extend up to support the roof. The _Times_ has one ofthese pillar-buildings, and we have the whole thing to ourselves. In acity built for a quarter of a million, twenty thousand people don'thave to crowd very closely on one another. Naturally, we don't have atop landing stage, but except for the buttresses at the corners andsolid central column, the whole street floor is open. 

Tom hadn't said anything after we left the stacks of wax and the menguarding them. We came up a vehicle shaft a few blocks up Broadway, and he brought the jeep down and floated it in through one of thearchways. As usual, the place was cluttered with equipment we hadn'tgotten around to repairing or installing, merchandise we'd taken inexchange for advertising, and vehicles, our own and everybody else's. A couple of mechanics were tinkering on one of them. I decided, forthe oomptieth time, to do something about cleaning it up. Say inanother two or three hundred hours, when the ships would all be inport and work would be slack, and I could hire a couple of good men tohelp. 

We got Murell's stuff off the jeep, and I hunted around till I found ahand-lifter. 

"Want to stay and have dinner with us, Tom?" I asked. 

"Uh?" It took him a second or so to realize what I'd said. "Why, no, thanks, Walt. I have to get back to the ship. Father wants to see mebefore the meeting. "

"How about you, Bish? Want to take potluck with us?"

"I shall be delighted, " he assured me. 

Tom told us good-by absent-mindedly, lifted the jeep, and floated itout into the street. Bish and I watched him go; Bish looked as thoughhe had wanted to say something and then thought better of it. Wefloated Murell's stuff and mine over to the elevator beside thecentral column, and I ran it up to the editorial offices on the topfloor. 

We came out in a big room, half the area of the floor, full ofworktables and radios and screens and photoprinting machines. Dad, asusual, was in a gray knee-length smock, with a pipe jutting out underhis ragged mustache, and, as usual, he was stopping every minute or soto relight it. He was putting together the stuff I'd transmitted infor the audiovisual newscast. Over across the room, the rest of the_Times_ staff, Julio Kubanoff, was sitting at the composing machine, his peg leg propped up and an earphone on, his fingers punchingrapidly at the keyboard as he burned letters onto the white plasticsheet with ultraviolet rays for photographing. Julio was an oldhunter-ship man who had lost a leg in an accident and taught himselfhis new trade. He still wore the beard, now white, that waspractically the monster-hunters' uniform. 

"The stuff come in all right?" I asked Dad, letting down the lifter. 

"Yes. What do you think of that fellow Belsher?" he asked. "Did youever hear such an impudent string of lies in your life?" Then, out ofthe corner of his eye, he saw the lifter full of luggage, and sawsomebody with me. "Mr. Murell? Please excuse me for a moment, till Iget this blasted thing together straight. " Then he got the filmspliced and the sound record matched, and looked up. "Why, Bish?Where's Mr. Murell, Walt?"

"Mr. Murell has had his initiation to Fenris, " I said. "He gotsquirted by a tread-snail almost as soon as he got off the ship. Theyhave him at the spaceport hospital; it'll be 2400 before they get allthe poison sweated out of him. "

I went on to tell him what had happened. Dad's eyes widened slightly, and he took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at Bish withsomething very reasonably like respect. 

"That was mighty sharp work, " he said. "If you'd been a second slower, we'd be all out of visiting authors. That would have been a nicebusiness; story would have gotten back to Terra, and been mostunfortunate publicity for Fenris. And, of course, " he afterthoughted, "most unfortunate for Mr. Murell, too. "

"Well, if you give this any publicity, I would rather you passed myown trifling exploit over in silence, " Bish said. "I gather thespaceport people wouldn't be too happy about giving the public theimpression that their area is teeming with tread-snails, either. Theyhave enough trouble hiring shipping-floor help as it is. "

"But don't you want people to know what you did?" Dad demanded, incredulously. Everybody wanted their names in print or on 'cast; thatwas one of his basic articles of faith. "If the public learned aboutthis--" he went on, and then saw where he was heading and pulled upshort. It wouldn't be tactful to say something like, "Maybe theywouldn't think you were just a worthless old soak. "

Bish saw where Dad was heading, too, but he just smiled, as though hewere about to confer his episcopal blessing. 

"Ah, but that would be a step out of character for me, " he said. "Imust not confuse my public. Just as a favor to me, Ralph, say nothingabout it. "

"Well, if you'd rather I didn't. .. . Are you going to cover thismeeting at Hunters' Hall, tonight, Walt?" he asked me. 

"Would I miss it?"

He frowned. "I could handle that myself, " he said. "I'm afraid thismeeting's going to get a little rough. "

I shook my head. "Let's face it, Dad, " I said. "I'm a little short ofeighteen, but you're sixty. I can see things coming better than youcan, and dodge them quicker. "

Dad gave a rueful little laugh and looked at Bish. 

"See how it goes?" he asked. "We spend our lives shielding our youngand then, all of a sudden, we find they're shielding us. " His pipe hadgone out again and he relit it. "Too bad you didn't get an audiovisualof Belsher making that idiotic statement. "

"He didn't even know I was getting a voice-only. All the time he wastalking, I was doodling in a pad with a pencil. "

"Synthetic substitutes!" Dad snorted. "Putting a synthetic tallow-waxmolecule together would be like trying to build a spaceship with ajackknife and a tack hammer. " He puffed hard on his pipe, and thenexcused himself and went back to his work. 

Editing an audiovisual telecast is pretty much a one-man job. Bishwanted to know if he could be of assistance, but there was nothingeither of us could do, except sit by and watch and listen. Dad handledthe Belsher thing by making a film of himself playing off therecording, and interjecting sarcastic comments from time to time. Whenit went on the air, I thought, Ravick wasn't going to like it. I wouldhave to start wearing my pistol again. Then he made a tape on thelanding of the _Peenemünde_ and the arrival of Murell, who he said hadmet with a slight accident after leaving the ship. I took that over toJulio when Dad was finished, along with a tape on the announcedtallow-wax price cut. Julio only grunted and pushed them aside. He wassetting up the story of the fight in Martian Joe's--a "local bar, " ofcourse; nobody ever gets shot or stabbed or slashed or slugged inanything else. All the news _is_ fit to print, sure, but you can'tgive your advertisers and teleprinter customers any worse name thanthey have already. A paper has to use some judgment. 

Then Dad and Bish and I went down to dinner. Julio would have his alittle later, not because we're too good to eat with the help butbecause, around 1830, the help is too busy setting up the next paperto eat with us. The dining room, which is also the library, livingroom, and general congregating and loafing place, is as big as theeditorial room above. Originally, it was an office, at a time when alot of Fenris Company office work was being done here. Some of thefurniture is original, and some was made for us by local cabinetmakersout of native hardwood. The dining table, big enough for two ships'crews to eat at, is an example of the latter. Then, of course, thereare screens and microbook cabinets and things like that, and arefrigerator to save going a couple of hundred feet to the pantry incase anybody wants a snack. 

I went to that and opened it, and got out a bulb of concentrated fruitjuice and a bottle of carbonated water. Dad, who seldom drinks, keepsa few bottles around for guests. Seems most of our "guests" part withinformation easier if they have something like the locally madehydroponic potato schnapps inside them for courage. 

"You drink Baldur honey-rum, don't you, Bish?" he said, pawing amongthe bottles in the liquor cabinet next to the refrigerator. "I'm sureI have a bottle of it. Now wait a minute; it's here somewhere. "

When Dad passes on and some medium claims to have produced a spiritcommunication from him, I will not accept it as genuine without theexpression: "Now wait a minute; it's here somewhere. "

Bish wanted to know what I was fixing for myself, and I told him. 

"Never mind the rum, Ralph. I believe, " he said, "that I shall joinWalt in a fruit fizz. "

Well, whattaya know! Maybe my stealthy temperance campaign was havingresults. Dad looked positively startled, and then replaced the bottlehe was holding. 

"I believe I'll make it unanimous, " he said. "Fix me up a fruit fizz, too, Walt. "

I mixed two more fruit fizzes, and we carried them over to the table. Bish sipped at his critically. 

"Palatable, " he pronounced it. "Just a trifle on the mild side, butdefinitely palatable. "

Dad looked at him as though he still couldn't believe the whole thing. Dinner was slow coming. We finished our fizzes, and Bish and I bothwanted repeats, and Dad felt that he had to go along. So I made threemore. We were finishing them when Mrs. Laden started bringing in thedinner. Mrs. Laden is a widow; she has been with us since my motherdied, the year after I was born. She is violently anti-liquor. Reluctantly, she condones Dad taking a snort now and then, but as soonas she saw Bish Ware, her face started to stiffen. 

She put the soup on the table and took off for the kitchen. She alwayshas her own dinner with Julio. That way, while they're eating he cantell her all the news that's fit to print, and all the gossip thatisn't. 

For the moment, the odd things I'd been noticing about ourdistinguished and temporarily incapacitated visitor came under thelatter head. I told Dad and Bish about my observations, beginning withthe deafening silence about Glenn Murell at the library. Dad beganpopping immediately. 

"Why, he must be an impostor!" he exclaimed. "What kind of a racket doyou think he's up to?"

"Mmm-mm; I wouldn't say that, not right away, " Bish said. "In thefirst place, Murell may be his true name and he may publish under anom de plume. I admit, some of the other items are a littlesuspicious, but even if he isn't an author, he may have somelegitimate business here and, having heard a few stories about thisplanetary Elysium, he may be exercising a little caution. Walt, tellyour father about that tallow-wax we saw, down in Bottom Level FourthWard. "

I did, and while I was talking Dad sat with his soup spoon poisedhalfway to his mouth for at least a minute before he remembered he washolding it. 

"Now, that is funny, " he said when I was through. "Why do yousuppose. .. ?"

"Somebody, " Bish said, "some group of ship captains, is holding waxout from the Co-operative. There's no other outlet for it, so my guessis that they're holding it for a rise in price. There's only one waythat could happen, and that, literally, would be over Steve Ravick'sdead body. It could be that they expect Steve's dead body to be aroundfor a price rise to come in over. "

I was expecting Dad to begin spouting law-and-order. Instead, he hitthe table with his fist; not, fortunately, the one that was holdingthe soup spoon. 

"Well, I hope so! And if they do it before the _Cape Canaveral_ getsin, they may fix Leo Belsher, too, and then, in the generalexcitement, somebody might clobber Mort Hallstock, and that'd be grandslam. After the triple funeral, we could go to work on setting up anhonest co-operative and an honest government. "

"Well, I never expected to hear you advocating lynch law, Dad, " Isaid. 

He looked at me for a few seconds. 

"Tell the truth, Walt, neither did I, " he admitted. "Lynch law is ahorrible thing; don't make any mistake about that. But there's onething more horrible, and that's no law at all. And that is the presentsituation in Port Sandor. 

"You know what the trouble is, here? We have no government. No legalgovernment, anyhow; no government under Federation law. We don't evenhave a Federation Resident-Agent. Before the Fenris Company wentbroke, it was the government here; when the Space Navy evacuated thecolonists, they evacuated the government along with them. The thousandwho remained were all too busy keeping alive to worry about that. Theydidn't even care when Fenris was reclassified from Class III, uninhabited but inhabitable, to Class II, inhabitable only inartificial environment, like Mercury or Titan. And when Mort Hallstockgot hold of the town-meeting pseudo government they put together fiftyyears ago and turned it into a dictatorship, nobody realized what hadhappened till it was too late. Lynch law's the only recourse we have. "

"Ralph, " Bish told him, "if anything like that starts, Belsher andHallstock and Ravick won't be the only casualties. Between Ravick'sgoons and Hallstock's police, they have close to a hundred men. Iwon't deny that they could be cleaned out, but it wouldn't be alynching. It would be a civil war. "

"Well, that's swell!" Dad said. "The Federation Government has neverpaid us any attention; the Federation planets are scattered over toomany million cubic light-years of space for the Government to runaround to all of them wiping everybody's noses. As long as things arequiet here, they'll continue to do nothing for us. But let a story hitthe big papers on Terra, _Revolution Breaks Out on Fenris_--andthat'll be the story I'll send to Interworld News--and watch whathappens. "

"I will tell you what will happen, " Bish Ware said. "A lot of peoplewill get killed. That isn't important, in itself. People are gettingkilled all the time, in a lot worse causes. But these people will allhave friends and relatives who will take it up for them. Start killingpeople here in a faction fight, and somebody will be shooting somebodyin the back out of a dark passage a hundred years from now over it. You want this planet poisoned with blood feuds for the next century?"

Dad and I looked at one another. That was something that hadn'toccurred to either of us, and it should have. There were feuds, evennow. Half the little settlements on the other islands and on themainland had started when some group or family moved out of PortSandor because of the enmity of some larger and more powerful group orfamily, and half our shootings and knife fights grew out of oldgrudges between families or hunting crews. 

"We don't want it poisoned for the next century with the sort of thingMort Hallstock and Steve Ravick started here, either, " Dad said. 

"Granted. " Bish nodded. "If a civil war's the only possible way to getrid of them, that's what you'll have to have, I suppose. Only makesure you don't leave a single one of them alive when it's over. But ifyou can get the Federation Government in here to clean the mess up, that would be better. Nobody starts a vendetta with the TerranFederation. "

"But how?" Dad asked. "I've sent story after story off about crime andcorruption on Fenris. They all get the file-and-forget treatment. "

Mrs. Laden had taken away the soup plates and brought us our maincourse. Bish sat toying with his fork for a moment. 

"I don't know what you can do, " he said slowly. "If you can stall offthe blowup till the _Cape Canaveral_ gets in, and you can sendsomebody to Terra. .. . "

All of a sudden, it hit me. Here was something that would give Bish apurpose; something to make him want to stay sober. 

"Well, don't say, 'If _you_ can, '" I said. "Say, 'If _we_ can. ' Youlive on Fenris, too, don't you?"

5

MEETING OUT OF ORDER

Dad called the spaceport hospital, after dinner, and talked to DocRojansky. Murell was asleep, and in no danger whatever. They'd givenhim a couple of injections and a sedative, and his system was throwingoff the poison satisfactorily. He'd be all right, but they thought heought to be allowed to rest at the hospital for a while. 

By then, it was time for me to leave for Hunters' Hall. Julio and Mrs. Laden were having their dinner, and Dad and Bish went up to theeditorial office. I didn't take a car. Hunters' Hall was only a halfdozen blocks south of the Times, toward the waterfront. I carried myradio-under-false-pretense slung from my shoulder, and starteddowntown on foot. 

The business district was pretty well lighted, both from the ceilingand by the stores and restaurants. Most of the latter were in theopen, with small kitchen and storage buildings. At a table at one ofthem I saw two petty officers from the _Peenemünde_ with a couple ofgirls, so I knew the ship wasn't leaving immediately. Going past theMunicipal Building, I saw some activity, and an unusually large numberof police gathered around the vehicle port. Ravick must have hisdoubts about how the price cut was going to be received, and MortHallstock was mobilizing his storm troopers to give him support incase he needed it. I called in about that, and Dad told me fretfullyto be sure to stay out of trouble. 

Hunters' Hall was a four-story building, fairly substantial asbuildings that don't have to support the roof go, with a landing stageon top and a vehicle park underneath. As I came up, I saw a lot ofcars and jeeps and ships' boats grounded in and around it, and a crowdof men, almost all of them in boat-clothes and wearing whiskers, including quite a few characters who had never been out in ahunter-ship in their lives but were members in the best of goodstanding of the Co-operative. I also saw a few of Hallstock'suniformed thugs standing around with their thumbs in their gun beltsor twirling their truncheons. 

I took an escalator up to the second floor, which was one big room, with the escalators and elevators in the rear. It was the social room, decorated with photos and models and solidigraphs of hunter-ships, photos of record-sized monsters lashed alongside ships beforecutting-up, group pictures of ships's crews, monster tusks, driedslashers and halberd fish, and a whole monster head, its tusked mouthopen. There was a big crowd there, too, at the bar, at the gamemachines, or just standing around in groups talking. 

I saw Tom Kivelson and his father and Oscar Fujisawa, and went over tojoin them. Joe Kivelson is just an outsize edition of his son, with ablond beard that's had thirty-five years' more growth. Oscar isskipper of the _Pequod_--he wouldn't have looked baffled if Bish Warecalled him Captain Ahab--and while his family name is Old TerranJapanese, he had blue eyes and red hair and beard. He was almost asbig as Joe Kivelson. 

"Hello, Walt, " Joe greeted me. "What's this Tom's been telling meabout Bish Ware shooting a tread-snail that was going to sting Mr. Murell?"

"Just about that, " I said. "That snail must have crawled out frombetween two stacks of wax as we came up. We never saw it till it wasall over. It was right beside Murell and had its stinger up when Bishshot it. "

"He took an awful chance, " Kivelson said. "He might of shot Mr. Murell. "

I suppose it would look that way to Joe. He is the planet's worstpistol shot, so according to him nobody can hit anything with apistol. 

"He wouldn't have taken any chance not shooting, " I said. "If hehadn't, we'd have been running the Murell story with black borders. "

Another man came up, skinny, red hair, sharp-pointed nose. His namewas Al Devis, and he was Joe Kivelson's engineer's helper. He wantedto know about the tread-snail shooting, so I had to go over it again. I hadn't anything to add to what Tom had told them already, but I wasthe _Times_, and if the _Times_ says so it's true. 

"Well, I wouldn't want any drunk like Bish Ware shooting around mewith a pistol, " Joe Kivelson said. 

That's relative, too. Joe doesn't drink. 

"Don't kid yourself, Joe, " Oscar told him. "I saw Bish shoot a knifeout of a man's hand, one time, in One Eye Swanson's. Didn't scratchthe guy; hit the blade. One Eye has the knife, with the bullet mark onit, over his back bar, now. "

"Well, was he drunk then?" Joe asked. 

"Well, he had to hang onto the bar with one hand while he fired withthe other. " Then he turned to me. "How is Murell, now?" he asked. 

I told him what the hospital had given us. Everybody seemed muchrelieved. I wouldn't have thought that a celebrated author of whomnobody had ever heard before would be the center of so much interestin monster-hunting circles. I kept looking at my watch while we weretalking. After a while, the Times newscast came on the big screenacross the room, and everybody moved over toward it. 

They watched the _Peenemünde_ being towed down and berthed, and theaudiovisual interview with Murell. Then Dad came on the screen with arecord player in front of them, and gave them a play-off of myinterview with Leo Belsher. 

Ordinary bad language I do not mind. I'm afraid I use a little myself, while struggling with some of the worn-out equipment we have at thepaper. But when Belsher began explaining about how the price of waxhad to be cut again, to thirty-five centisols a pound, the languagethose hunters used positively smelled. I noticed, though, that a lotof the crowd weren't saying anything at all. They would be Ravick'sboys, and they would have orders not to start anything before themeeting. 

"Wonder if he's going to try to give us that stuff about substitutes?"Oscar said. 

"Well, what are you going to do?" I asked. 

"I'll tell you what we're not going to do, " Joe Kivelson said. "We'renot going to take his price cut. If he won't pay our price, he can usehis [deleted by censor] substitutes. "

"You can't sell wax anywhere else, can you?"

"Is that so, we can't?" Joe started. 

Before he could say anything else, Oscar was interrupting:

"We can eat for a while, even if we don't sell wax. Sigurd Ngozori'llcarry us for a while and make loans on wax. But if the wax stopscoming in, Kapstaad Chemical's going to start wondering why. .. . "

By this time, other _Javelin_ men came drifting over--Ramón Llewellyn, the mate, and Abdullah Monnahan, the engineer, and Abe Clifford, thenavigator, and some others. I talked with some of them, and thendrifted off in the direction of the bar, where I found another huntercaptain, Mohandas Gandhi Feinberg, whom everybody simply called theMahatma. He didn't resemble his namesake. He had a curly black beardwith a twisted black cigar sticking out of it, and nobody, after onelook at him, would have mistaken him for any apostle of nonviolence. 

He had a proposition he was enlisting support for. He wanted ballotingat meetings to be limited to captains of active hunter-ships, thecaptains to vote according to expressed wishes of a majority of theircrews. It was a good scheme, though it would have sounded better ifthe man who was advocating it hadn't been a captain himself. At least, it would have disenfranchised all Ravick's permanently unemployed"unemployed hunters. " The only trouble was, there was no conceivableway of getting it passed. It was too much like trying to curtail thepowers of Parliament by act of Parliament. 

The gang from the street level started coming up, and scattered intwos and threes around the hall, ready for trouble. I'd put on myradio when I'd joined the Kivelsons and Oscar, and I kept it on, circulating around and letting it listen to the conversations. TheRavick people were either saying nothing or arguing that Belsher wasdoing the best he could, and if Kapstaad wouldn't pay more thanthirty-five centisols, it wasn't his fault. Finally, the call bell forthe meeting began clanging, and the crowd began sliding over towardthe elevators and escalators. 

The meeting room was on the floor above, at the front of the building, beyond a narrow hall and a door at which a couple of Ravick henchmenwearing guns and sergeant-at-arms brassards were making everybodycheck their knives and pistols. They passed me by without getting myarsenal, which consisted of a sleep-gas projector camouflaged as ajumbo-sized lighter and twenty sols in two rolls of forty quarter solseach. One of these inside a fist can make a big difference. 

Ravick and Belsher and the secretary of the Co-op, who was a littlescrawny henpecked-husband type who never had an opinion of his own inhis life, were all sitting back of a big desk on a dais in front. After as many of the crowd who could had found seats and the rest, including the Press, were standing in the rear, Ravick pounded withthe chunk of monster tusk he used for a gavel and called the meetingto order. 

"There's a bunch of old business, " he said, "but I'm going to rulethat aside for the moment. We have with us this evening ourrepresentative on Terra, Mr. Leo Belsher, whom I wish to present. Mr. Belsher. "

Belsher got up. Ravick started clapping his hands to indicate thatapplause was in order. A few of his zombies clapped their hands;everybody else was quiet. Belsher held up a hand. 

"Please don't applaud, " he begged. "What I have to tell you isn'tanything to applaud about. "

"You're tootin' well right it isn't!" somebody directly in front of mesaid, very distinctly. 

"I'm very sorry to have to bring this news to you, but the fact isthat Kapstaad Chemical Products, Ltd. , is no longer able to payforty-five centisols a pound. This price is being scaled down tothirty-five centisols. I want you to understand that Kapstaad Chemicalwants to give you every cent they can, but business conditions nolonger permit them to pay the old price. Thirty-five is the absolutemaximum they can pay and still meet competition--"

"Aaah, knock it off, Belsher!" somebody shouted. "We heard all thatrot on the screen. "

"How about our contract?" somebody else asked. "We do have a contractwith Kapstaad, don't we?"

"Well, the contract will have to be re-negotiated. They'll paythirty-five centisols or they'll pay nothing. "

"They can try getting along without wax. Or try buying it somewhereelse!"

"Yes; those wonderful synthetic substitutes!"

"Mr. Chairman, " Oscar Fujisawa called out. "I move that thisorganization reject the price of thirty-five centisols a pound fortallow-wax, as offered by, or through, Leo Belsher at this meeting. "

Ravick began clamoring that Oscar was out of order, that Leo Belsherhad the floor. 

"I second Captain Fujisawa's motion, " Mohandas Feinberg said. 

"And Leo Belsher doesn't have the floor; he's not a member of theCo-operative, " Tom Kivelson declared. "He's our hired employee, and assoon as this present motion is dealt with, I intend moving that wefire him and hire somebody else. "

"I move to amend Captain Fujisawa's motion, " Joe Kivelson said. "Imove that the motion, as amended, read, '--and stipulate a price ofseventy-five centisols a pound. '"

"You're crazy!" Belsher almost screamed. 

Seventy-five was the old price, from which he and Ravick had beenreducing until they'd gotten down to forty-five. 

Just at that moment, my radio began making a small fuss. I unhookedthe handphone and brought it to my face. 

"Yeah?"

It was Bish Ware's voice: "Walt, get hold of the Kivelsons and getthem out of Hunters' Hall as fast as you can, " he said. "I just got atip from one of my . .. My parishioners. Ravick's going to stage a riotto give Hallstock's cops an excuse to raid the meeting. They want theKivelsons. "

"Roger. " I hung up, and as I did I could hear Joe Kivelson shouting:

"You think we don't get any news on this planet? Tallow-wax has beenselling for the same price on Terra that it did eight years ago, whenyou two crooks started cutting the price. Why, the very ship Belshercame here on brought the quotations on the commodity market--"

I edged through the crowd till I was beside Oscar Fujisawa. I decidedthe truth would need a little editing; I didn't want to use Bish Wareas my source. 

"Oscar, Dad just called me, " I told him. "A tip came in to the Timesthat Ravick's boys are going to fake a riot and Hallstock's cops aregoing to raid the meeting. They want Joe and Tom. You know whatthey'll do if they get hold of them. "

"Shot while resisting arrest. You sure this is a good tip, though?"

Across the room, somebody jumped to his feet, kicking over a chair. 

"That's a double two-em-dashed lie, you etaoin shrdlu so-and-so!"somebody yelled. 

"Who are you calling a so-and-so, you thus-and-so-ing such-and-such?"somebody else yelled back, and a couple more chairs got smashed and aswirl of fighting started. 

"Yes, it is, " Oscar decided. "Let's go. "

We started plowing through the crowd toward where the Kivelsons and acouple more of the _Javelin_ crew were clumped. I got one of the rollsof quarter sols into my right fist and let Oscar go ahead. He has moremass than I have. 

It was a good thing I did, because before we had gone ten feet, somecharacter got between us, dragged a two-foot length of inch-and-a-halfhigh-pressure hose out of his pant leg, and started to swing at theback of Oscar's head. I promptly clipped him behind the ear with afist full of money, and down he went. Oscar, who must have eyes inthe back of his head, turned and grabbed the hose out of his handbefore he dropped it, using it to clout somebody in front of him. Somebody else came pushing toward us, and I was about to clip him, too, when he yelled, "Watch it, Walt; I'm with it!" It was CesárioVieira, another _Javelin_ man; he's engaged to Linda Kivelson, Joe'sdaughter and Tom's sister, the one going to school on Terra. 

Then we had reached Tom and Joe Kivelson. Oscar grabbed Joe by thearm. 

"Come on, Joe; let's get moving, " he said. "Hallstock's Gestapo are onthe way. They have orders to get you dead or alive. "

"Like blazes!" Joe told him. "I never chickened out on a fight yet, and--"

That's what I'd been afraid of. Joe is like a Zarathustra veldtbeest;the only tactics he knows is a headlong attack. 

"You want to get your crew and your son killed, and yourself alongwith them?" Oscar asked him. "That's what'll happen if the cops catchyou. Now are you coming, or will I have to knock you senseless anddrag you out?"

Fortunately, at that moment somebody took a swing at Joe and grazedhis cheek. It was a good thing that was all he did; he was wearingbrass knuckles. Joe went down a couple of feet, bending at the knees, and caught this fellow around the hips with both hands, straighteningand lifting him over his head. Then he threw him over the heads of thepeople in front of him. There were yells where the human missilelanded. 

"That's the stuff, Joe!" Oscar shouted. "Come on, we got them on therun!"

That, of course, converted a strategic retreat into an attack. We gotJoe aimed toward the doors and before he knew it, we were out in thehall by the elevators. There were a couple of Ravick's men, withsergeant-at-arms arm bands, and two city cops. One of the latter gotin Joe's way. Joe punched him in the face and knocked him back aboutten feet in a sliding stagger before he dropped. The other cop grabbedme by the left arm. 

I slugged him under the jaw with my ten-sol right and knocked him out, and I felt the wrapping on the coin roll break and the quarters comeloose in my hand. Before I could drop them into my jacket pocket andget out the other roll, one of the sergeants at arms drew a gun. Ijust hurled the handful of coins at him. He dropped the pistol and putboth hands to his face, howling in pain. 

I gave a small mental howl myself when I thought of all the nicethings I could have bought for ten sols. One of Joe Kivelson'sfollowers stooped and scooped up the fallen pistol, firing a couple oftimes with it. Then we all rushed Joe into one of the elevators andcrowded in behind him, and as I turned to start it down I could hearpolice sirens from the street and also from the landing stage above. In the hall outside the meeting room, four or five of Ravick'sfree-drink mercenaries were down on all fours scrabbling for coins, and the rest of the pursuers from the meeting room were stumbling andtripping over them. I wished I'd brought a camera along, too. Thepublic would have loved a shot of that. I lifted the radio and spokeinto it:

"This is Walter Boyd, returning you now to the regular entertainmentprogram. "

A second later, the thing whistled at me. As the car started down andthe doors closed I lifted the handphone. It was Bish Ware again. 

"We're going down in the elevator to Second Level Down, " I said. "Ihave Joe and Tom and Oscar Fujisawa and a few of the _Javelin_ crewwith me. The place is crawling with cops now. "

"Go to Third Level Down and get up on the catwalk on the right, " Bishsaid. "I'll be along to pick you up. "

"Roger. We'll be looking for you. "

The car stopped at Second Level Down. I punched a button and sent itdown another level. Joe Kivelson, who was dabbing at his cheek with apiece of handkerchief tissue, wanted to know what was up. 

"We're getting a pickup, " I told him. "Vehicle from the _Times_. "

I thought it would save arguments if I didn't mention who was bringingit. 

6

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR KIVELSON

Before we left the lighted elevator car, we took a quick nose count. Besides the Kivelsons, there were five _Javelin_ men--Ramón Llewellyn, Abdullah Monnahan, Abe Clifford, Cesário Vieira, and a whitebeardnamed Piet Dumont. Al Devis had been with us when we crashed the doorout of the meeting room, but he'd fallen by the way. We had a coupleof flashlights, so, after sending the car down to Bottom Level, wepicked our way up the zigzag iron stairs to the catwalk, under theseventy-foot ceiling, and sat down in the dark. 

Joe Kivelson was fretting about what would happen to the rest of hismen. 

"Fine captain I am, running out and leaving them!"

"If they couldn't keep up, that's their tough luck, " Oscar Fujisawatold him. "You brought out all you could. If you'd waited any longer, none of us would have gotten out. "

"They won't bother with them, " I added. "You and Tom and Oscar, here, are the ones they want. "

Joe was still letting himself be argued into thinking he had done theright thing when we saw the lights of a lorry coming from uptown atceiling level. A moment later, it backed to the catwalk, and Bish Warestuck his head out from the pilot's seat. 

"Where do you gentlemen wish to go?" he asked. 

"To the _Javelin_, " Joe said instantly. 

"Huh-uh, " Oscar disagreed. "That's the first place they'll look. That'll be all right for Ramón and the others, but if they catch youand Tom, they'll shoot you and call it self-defense, or take you inand beat both of you to a jelly. This'll blow over in fifteen ortwenty hours, but I'm not going anywhere near my ship, now. "

"Drop us off on Second Level Down, about Eighth Street and a couple ofblocks from the docks, " the mate, Llewellyn, said. "We'll borrow someweapons from Patel the Pawnbroker and then circulate around and seewhat's going on. But you and Joe and Oscar had better go undergroundfor a while. "

"The _Times_, " I said. "We have a whole pillar-building to ourselves;we could hide half the population. "

That was decided upon. We all piled into the lorry, and Bish took itto an inconspicuous place on the Second Level and let down. RamónLlewellyn and the others got out. Then we went up to Main City Level. We passed within a few blocks of Hunters' Hall. There was a lot ofnoise, but no shooting. 

Joe Kivelson didn't have anything to say, on the trip, but he keptlooking at the pilot's seat in perplexity and apprehension. I thinkhe expected Bish to try to ram the lorry through every building wepassed by or over. 

We found Dad in the editorial department on the top floor, feedingvoice-tape to Julio while the latter made master sheets forteleprinting. I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened that hehadn't gotten from my radio. Dad cluck-clucked in disapproval, eitherat my getting into a fight, assaulting an officer, or, literally, throwing money away. 

Bish Ware seemed a little troubled. "I think, " he said, "that I shallmake a circuit of my diocese, and see what can be learned from mydevoted flock. Should I turn up anything significant, I will call itin. "

With that, he went tottering over to the elevator, stumbling on theway and making an unepiscopal remark. I watched him, and then turnedto Dad. 

"Did he have anything to drink after I left?" I asked. 

"Nothing but about five cups of coffee. "

I mentally marked that: _Add oddities, Bish Ware. _ He'd been at leastfour hours without liquor, and he was walking as unsteadily as whenI'd first seen him at the spaceport. I didn't know any kind of liquorthat would persist like that. 

Julio had at least an hour's tape to transcribe, so Dad and Joe andTom and Oscar and I went to the living room on the floor below. Joewas still being bewildered about Bish Ware. 

"How'd he manage to come for us?" he wanted to know. 

"Why, he was here with me all evening, " Dad said. "He came from thespaceport with Walt and Tom, and had dinner with us. He called a fewpeople from here, and found out about the fake riot and police raidRavick had cooked up. You'd be surprised at how much information hecan pick up around town. "

Joe looked at his son, alarmed. 

"Hey! You let him see--" he began. 

"The wax on Bottom Level, in the Fourth Ward?" I asked. "He won't blababout that. He doesn't blab things where they oughtn't be blabbed. "

"That's right, " Dad backed me up. He was beginning to think of Bish asone of the _Times_ staff, now. "We got a lot of tips from him, butnothing we give him gets out. " He got his pipe lit again. "What aboutthat wax, Joe?" he asked. "Were you serious when you made that motionabout a price of seventy-five centisols?"

"I sure was!" Joe declared. "That's the real price, and always hasbeen, and that's what we get or Kapstaad doesn't get any more wax. "

"If Murell can top it, maybe Kapstaad won't get any more wax, period, "I said. "Who's he with--Interstellar Import-Export?"

Anybody would have thought a barbwire worm had crawled onto JoeKivelson's chair seat under him. 

"Where'd you hear that?" he demanded, which is the Galaxy's silliestquestion to ask any newsman. "Tom, if you've been talking--"

"He hasn't, " I said. "He didn't need to. It sticks out a parsec in alldirections. " I mentioned some of the things I'd noticed whileinterviewing Murell, and his behavior after leaving the ship. "Evenbefore I'd talked to him, I wondered why Tom was so anxious to getaboard with me. He didn't know we'd arranged to put Murell up here; hewas going to take him to see that wax, and then take him to the_Javelin_. You were going to produce him at the meeting and have himbid against Belsher, only that tread-snail fouled your lines for you. So then you thought you had to stall off a new contract till he gotout of the hospital. "

The two Kivelsons and Oscar Fujisawa were looking at one another; Joeand Tom in consternation, and Oscar in derision of both of them. I wasfeeling pretty good. Brother, I thought, Sherlock Holmes never didbetter, himself. 

That, all of a sudden, reminded me of Dr. John Watson, whom Bishperceived to have been in Afghanistan. That was one thing Sherlock H. Boyd hadn't deduced any answers for. Well, give me a little more time. And more data. 

"You got it all figured out, haven't you?" Joe was askingsarcastically. The sarcasm was as hollow as an empty oil drum. 

"The _Times_, " Dad was saying, trying not to sound too proud, "has avery sharp reportorial staff, Joe. "

"It isn't Interstellar, " Oscar told me, grinning. "It's ArgentineExotic Organics. You know, everybody thought Joe, here, was gettingpretty high-toned, sending his daughter to school on Terra. Schoolwasn't the only thing she went for. We got a letter from her, the lasttime the Cape Canaveral was in, saying that she'd contacted ArgentineOrganics and that a man was coming out on the _Peenemünde_, posing asa travel-book author. Well, he's here, now. "

"You'd better keep an eye on him, " I advised. "If Steve Ravick getsto him, he won't be much use to you. "

"You think Ravick would really harm Murell?" Dad asked. 

He thought so, too. He was just trying to comfort himself bypretending he didn't. 

"What do you think, Ralph?" Oscar asked him. "If we get competitivewax buying, again, seventy-five a pound will be the starting price. I'm not spending the money till I get it, but I wouldn't be surprisedto see wax go to a sol a pound on the loading floor here. And you knowwhat that would mean. "

"Thirty for Steve Ravick, " Dad said. That puzzled Oscar, till Iexplained that "thirty" is newsese for "the end. " "I guess Walt'sright. Ravick would do anything to prevent that. " He thought for amoment. "Joe, you were using the wrong strategy. You should have letRavick get that thirty-five centisol price established for theCo-operative, and then had Murell offer seventy-five or something likethat. "

"You crazy?" Joe demanded. "Why, then the Co-op would have been stuckwith it. "

"That's right. And as soon as Murell's price was announced, everybodywould drop out of the Co-operative and reclaim their wax, even thecaptains who owe Ravick money. He'd have nobody left but a handful ofthugs and barflies. "

"But that would smash the Co-operative, " Joe Kivelson objected. "Listen, Ralph; I've been in the Co-operative all my life, sincebefore Steve Ravick was heard of on this planet. I've worked hard forthe Co-operative, and--"

You didn't work hard enough, I thought. You let Steve Ravick take itaway from you. Dad told Joe pretty much the same thing:

"You don't have a Co-operative, Joe. Steve Ravick has a racket. Theonly thing you can do with this organization is smash it, and thenrebuild it with Ravick and his gang left out. "

Joe puzzled over that silently. He'd been thinking that it was thesame Co-operative his father and Simon MacGregor and the other oldhunters had organized, and that getting rid of Ravick was simply amatter of voting him out. He was beginning to see, now, thatparliamentary procedure wasn't any weapon against Ravick's force andfraud and intimidation. 

"I think Walt has something, " Oscar Fujisawa said. "As long asMurell's in the hospital at the spaceport, he's safe, but as soon ashe gets out of Odin Dock & Shipyard territory, he's going to be a claypigeon. "

Tom hadn't been saying anything. Now he cleared his throat. 

"On the _Peenemünde_, I was talking about taking Mr. Murell for a tripin the _Javelin_, " he said. "That was while we were still pretendinghe'd come here to write a book. Maybe that would be a good idea, anyhow. "

"It's a cinch we can't let him get killed on us, " his father said. "Idoubt if Exotic Organics would send anybody else out, if he was. "

"Here, " Dad said. "We'll run the story we have on him in the morningedition, and then correct it and apologize to the public formisleading them and explain in the evening edition. And before hegoes, we can have him make an audiovisual for the 'cast, tellingeverybody who he is and announcing the price he's offering. We'll putthat on the air. Get enough publicity, and Steve Ravick won't dare doanything to him. "

Publicity, I thought, is the only weapon Dad knows how to use. Hethinks it's invincible. Me, I wouldn't bet on what Steve Ravickwouldn't dare do if you gave me a hundred to one. Ravick had been inpower too long, and he was drunker on it than Bish Ware ever got onBaldur honey-rum. As an intoxicant, rum is practically a soft drinkbeside power. 

"Well, do you think Ravick's gotten onto Murell yet?" Oscar said. "Wekept that a pretty close secret. Joe and I knew about him, and so didthe Mahatma and Nip Spazoni and Corkscrew Finnegan, and that was all. "

"I didn't even tell Tom, here, till the _Peenemünde_ got into radiorange, " Joe Kivelson said. "Then I only told him and Ramón andAbdullah and Abe and Hans Cronje. "

"And Al Devis, " Tom added. "He came into the conning tower while youwere telling the rest of us. "

The communication screen began buzzing, and I went and put it on. Itwas Bish Ware, calling from a pay booth somewhere. 

"I have some early returns, " he said. "The cops cleared everybody outof Hunters' Hall except the Ravick gang. Then Ravick reconvened themeeting, with nobody but his gang. They were very careful to make surethey had enough for a legal quorum under the bylaws, and then theyvoted to accept the new price of thirty-five centisols a pound. "

"That's what I was afraid of, " Joe Kivelson said. "Did they arrest anyof my crew?"

"Not that I know of, " Bish said. "They made a few arrests, but turnedeverybody loose later. They're still looking for you and your son. Asfar as I know, they aren't interested in anybody else. " He glancedhastily over his shoulder, as though to make sure the door of thebooth was secure. "I'm with some people, now. I'll call you backlater. "

"Well, that's that, Joe, " Oscar said, after Bish blanked the screen. "The Ravick Co-op's stuck with the price cut. The only thing left todo is get everybody out of it we can, and organize a new one. "

"I guess that's so, " Joe agreed. "I wonder, though if Ravick hasreally got wise to Murell. "

"Walt figured it out since the ship got in, " Oscar said. "Belsher'sbeen on the ship with Murell for six months. Well, call it three;everything speeds up about double in hyperspace. But in three monthshe ought to see as much as Walt saw in a couple of hours. "

"Well, maybe Belsher doesn't know what's suspicious, the way Waltdoes, " Tom said. 

"I'm sure he doesn't, " I said. "But he and Murell are both in the waxbusiness. I'll bet he noticed dozens of things I never even saw. "

"Then we'd better take awfully good care of Mr. Murell, " Tom said. "Get him aboard as fast as we can, and get out of here with him. Walt, you're coming along, aren't you?"

That was what we'd agreed, while Glenn Murell was still the famoustravel-book author. I wanted to get out of it, now. There wouldn't beanything happening aboard the _Javelin_, and a lot happening here inPort Sandor. Dad had the same idea, only he was one hundred per centfor my going with Murell. I think he wanted me out of Port Sandor, where I wouldn't get in the way of any small high-velocity particlesof lead that might be whizzing around. 

7

ABOARD THE _JAVELIN_

We heard nothing more from Bish Ware that evening. Joe and TomKivelson and Oscar Fujisawa slept at the _Times_ Building, and afterbreakfast Dad called the spaceport hospital about Murell. He hadpassed a good night and seemed to have thrown off all the poison hehad absorbed through his skin. Dad talked to him, and advised him notto leave until somebody came for him. Tom and I took a car--and apistol apiece and a submachine gun--and went to get him. Remembering, at the last moment, what I had done to his trousers, I unpacked hisluggage and got another suit for him. 

He was grateful for that, and he didn't lift an eyebrow when he sawthe artillery we had with us. He knew, already, what the score was, and the rules, or absence thereof, of the game, and accepted us asmembers of his team. We dropped to the Bottom Level and went, avoidingtraffic, to where the wax was stored. There were close to a dozenguards there now, all heavily armed. 

We got out of the car, I carrying the chopper, and one of the gangthere produced a probe rod and microscope and a testing kit and amicroray scanner. Murell took his time going over the wax, jabbing theprobe rod in and pulling samples out of the big plastic-skinnedsausages at random, making chemical tests, examining them under themicroscope, and scanning other cylinders to make sure there was noforeign matter in them. He might not know what a literary agent was, but he knew tallow-wax. 

I found out from the guards that there hadn't been any really serioustrouble after we left Hunter's Hall. The city police had beaten a fewmen up, natch, and run out all the anti-Ravick hunters, and thenRavick had reconvened the meeting and acceptance of the thirty-fivecentisol price had been voted unanimously. The police were stilllooking for the Kivelsons. Ravick seemed to have gotten the idea thatJoe Kivelson was the mastermind of the hunters' cabal against him. Iknow if I'd found that Joe Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa were in anykind of a conspiracy together, I wouldn't pick Joe for the mastermind. It was just possible, I thought, that Oscar had been fostering thishimself, in case anything went wrong. After all, self-preservation isthe first law, and Oscar is a self-preserving type. 

After Murell had finished his inspection and we'd gotten back in thecar and were lifting, I asked him what he was going to offer, just asthough I were the skipper of the biggest ship out of Port Sandor. Well, it meant as much to us as it did to the hunters. The more waxsold for, the more advertising we'd sell to the merchants, and themore people would rent teleprinters from us. 

"Eighty centisols a pound, " he said. Nice and definite; quite adifference from the way he stumbled around over listing his previouspublications. "Seventy-five's the Kapstaad price, regardless of whatyou people here have been getting from that crook of a Belsher. We'llhave to go far enough beyond that to make him have to run like blazesto catch up. You can put it in the _Times_ that the day ofmonopolistic marketing on Fenris is over. "

 * * * * *

When we got back to the _Times_, I asked Dad if he'd heard anythingmore from Bish. 

"Yes, " he said unhappily. "He didn't call in, this morning, so Icalled his apartment and didn't get an answer. Then I called HarryWong's. Harry said Bish had been in there till after midnight, withsome other people. " He named three disreputables, two female and onemale. "They were drinking quite a lot. Harry said Bish was plasteredto the ears. They finally went out, around 0130. He said the policewere in and out checking the crowd, but they didn't make any trouble. "

I nodded, feeling very badly. Four and a half hours had been hislimit. Well, sometimes a ninety per cent failure is really a triumph;after all, it's a ten per cent success. Bish had gone four and a halfhours without taking a drink. Maybe the percentage would be a littlebetter the next time. I was surely old enough to stop expectingmiracles. 

The mate of the _Pequod_ called in, around noon, and said it was safefor Oscar to come back to the ship. The mate of the _Javelin_, RamónLlewellyn, called in with the same report, that along the waterfront, atleast, the heat was off. However, he had started an ambitious-lookingoverhaul operation, which looked as though it was good for a hundredhours but which could be dropped on a minute's notice, and under coverof this he had been taking on supplies and ammunition. 

We made a long audiovisual of Murell announcing his price of eightycentisols a pound for wax on behalf of Argentine Exotic Organics, Ltd. As soon as that was finished, we loaded the boat-clothes we'd pickedup for him and his travel kit and mine into a car, with Julio Kubanoffto bring it back to the _Times_, and went to the waterfront. When wearrived, Ramón Llewellyn had gotten things cleared up, and the_Javelin_ was ready to move as soon as we came aboard. 

On the Main City Level, the waterfront is a hundred feet above theship pools; the ships load from and discharge onto the First LevelDown. The city roof curves down all along the south side of the cityinto the water and about fifty feet below it. That way, even in thepost-sunset and post-dawn storms, ships can come in submerged aroundthe outer breakwater and under the roof, and we don't get any wind orheavy seas along the docks. 

Murell was interested in everything he saw, in the brief time while wewere going down along the docks to where the _Javelin_ was berthed. Iknew he'd never actually seen it before, but he must have beenstudying pictures of it, because from some of the remarks he made, Icould tell that he was familiar with it. 

Most of the ships had lifted out of the water and were resting on thewide concrete docks, but the _Javelin_ was afloat in the pool, hercontragravity on at specific-gravity weight reduction. She was atypical hunter-ship, a hundred feet long by thirty abeam, with a squatconning tower amidships, and turrets for 50-mm guns and launchers forharpoon rockets fore and aft. The only thing open about her was theair-and-water lock under the conning tower. Julio, who was pilotingthe car, set it down on the top of the aft gun turret. A couple of thecrewmen who were on deck grabbed our bags and hurried them inside. Wefollowed, and as soon as Julio lifted away, the lock was sealed. 

Immediately, as the contragravity field dropped below the specificgravity of the ship, she began submerging. I got up into the conningtower in time to see the water of the boat pool come up over thearmor-glass windows and the outside lights come on. For a few minutes, the _Javelin_ swung slowly and moved forward, feeling her way withfingers of radar out of the pool and down the channel behind thebreakwater and under the overhang of the city roof. Then the waterline went slowly down across the windows as she surfaced. A momentlater she was on full contragravity, and the ship which had been asubmarine was now an aircraft. 

Murell, who was accustomed to the relatively drab sunsets of Terra, simply couldn't take his eyes from the spectacle that covered thewhole western half of the sky--high clouds streaming away from thedaylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. Therewere more clouds coming in at a lower level from the east. By the timethe _Javelin_ returned to Port Sandor, it would be full dark and rain, which would soon turn to snow, would be falling. Then we'd be in forit again for another thousand hours. 

Ramón Llewellyn was saying to Joe Kivelson: "We're one man short;Devis, Abdullah's helper. Hospital. "

"Get hurt in the fight, last night? He was right with us till we gotout to the elevators, and then I missed him. "

"No. He made it back to the ship about the same time we did, and hewas all right then. Didn't even have a scratch. Strained his back atwork, this morning, trying to lift a power-unit cartridge by hand. "

I could believe that. Those things weighed a couple of hundred pounds. Joe Kivelson swore. 

"What's he think this is, the First Century Pre-Atomic? Aren't thereany lifters on the ship?"

Llewellyn shrugged. "Probably didn't want to bother taking a couple ofsteps to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment andobservation for a day or so. "

"That's Al Devis?" I asked. "What hospital?" Al Devis's strained backwould be good for a two-line item; he'd feel hurt if we didn't mentionit. 

"Co-op hospital. "

That was all right. They always sent in their patient lists to the_Times_. Tom was griping because he'd have to do Devis's work and hisown. 

"You know anything about engines, Walt?" he asked me. 

"I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magneticcurrent into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate thedaylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction, "I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math gota little complicated after that, and I started reading another book. "

"You'd be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50-mm?" Tomasked. "I know you're pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but acannon's different. "

"I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case orsomething, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhereclose to it. "

"We'll do that, " he said. "Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when wesight a monster, but somebody'll have to help Abdullah with theengines. "

He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded. 

"Walt's made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, Iknow that, " he said, "and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher, once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full ofair for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we'll godown to the surface and have some shooting. "

I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple ofhours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and Iwould share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big onthe outside, but there's very little room for the crew. The enginesare much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravitycraft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in theair. Then, there's a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boatberth aft for the scout boat, so they're not exactly built forcomfort. They don't really need to be; a ship's rarely out more than ahundred and fifty hours on any cruise. 

Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the waxbusiness, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actualobservation. He said that Argentine Exotic Organics was going to keephim here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be todeal with the hunters, either individually or through theirco-operative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set upsomething he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talkthe hunters' language and understand their problems. 

So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything andconscripting any crew members I came across to explain what Icouldn't. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbedinto it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed thewax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills thatextracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and theship's armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. Hewhistled when he saw the engines. 

"Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter, "he said. 

"They have to be, " I said. "Running submerged isn't the same asrunning in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?"

He shook his head. "I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water's alittle too cold to do much swimming there. And I've spent most of mytime since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. Thesports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that. "

Well, whattaya know! Here was a man who had not only seen a horse, butactually ridden one. That in itself was worth a story in the _Times_. 

Tom and Abdullah, who were fussing around the engines, heard that. They knocked off what they were doing and began asking himquestions--I suppose he thought they were awfully silly, but heanswered all of them patiently--about horses and riding. I was lookingat a couple of spare power-unit cartridges, like the one Al Devis hadstrained his back on, clamped to the deck out of the way. 

They were only as big as a one-liter jar, rounded at one end and flatat the other where the power cable was connected, but they weighedclose to two hundred pounds apiece. Most of the weight was on theoutside; a dazzlingly bright plating of collapsium--collapsed matter, the electron shell collapsed onto the nucleus and the atoms in actualphysical contact--and absolutely nothing but nothing could get throughit. Inside was about a kilogram of strontium-90; it would keep onemitting electrons for twenty-five years, normally, but there was aminiature plutonium reactor, itself shielded with collapsium, which, among other things, speeded that process up considerably. A cartridgewas good for about five years; two of them kept the engines inoperation. 

The engines themselves converted the electric current from the powercartridges into magnetic current, and lifted the ship and propelledit. Abdullah was explaining that to Murell and Murell seemed to begetting it satisfactorily. 

Finally, we left them; Murell wanted to see the sunset some more andwent up to the conning tower where Joe and Ramón were, and I decidedto take a nap while I had a chance. 

8

PRACTICE, 50-MM GUN

It seemed as though I had barely fallen asleep before I was wakened bythe ship changing direction and losing altitude. I knew there wereclouds coming in from the east, now, on the lower air currents, and Isupposed that Joe was taking the _Javelin_ below them to have a lookat the surface of the sea. So I ran up to the conning tower, and whenI got there I found that the lower clouds were solid over us, it wasgrowing dark, and another hunter-ship was approaching with her lightson. 

"Who is she?" I asked. 

"_Bulldog_, Nip Spazoni, " Joe told me. "Nip's bringing my saloonfighter aboard, and he wants to meet Mr. Murell. "

I remembered that the man who had roughed up the Ravick goon inMartian Joe's had made his getaway from town in the _Bulldog_. As Iwatched, the other ship's boat dropped out from her stern, wentend-over-end for an instant, and then straightened out and camecircling around astern of us, matching our speed and ejecting amagnetic grapple. 

Nip Spazoni and another man climbed out with life lines fast to theirbelts and crawled along our upper deck, catching life lines that werethrown out to them and snapping onto them before casting loose theones from their boat. Somebody at the lock under the conning towerhauled them in. 

Nip Spazoni's name was Old Terran Italian, but he had slantedMongoloid eyes and a sparse little chin-beard, which accounted for hisnickname. The amount of intermarriage that's gone on since the FirstCentury, any resemblance between people's names and their appearancesis purely coincidental. Oscar Fujisawa, who looks as though his nameought to be Lief Ericsson, for example. 

"Here's your prodigal, Joe, " he was saying, peeling out of his parkaas he came up the ladder. "I owe him a second gunner's share on amonster, fifteen tons of wax. "

"Hey, that was a good one. You heading home, now?" Then he turned tothe other man, who had followed Nip up the ladder. "You didn't do avery good job, Bill, " he said. "The so-and-so's out of the hospital bynow. "

"Well, you know who takes care of his own, " the crewman said. "Give mesomething for effort; I tried hard enough. "

"No, I'm not going home yet, " Nip was answering. "I have hold-room forthe wax of another one, if he isn't bigger than ordinary. I'm going togo down on the bottom when the winds start and sit it out, and thentry to get a second one. " Then he saw me. "Well, hey, Walt; when didyou turn into a monster-hunter?"

Then he was introduced to Murell, and he and Joe and the man fromArgentine Exotic Organics sat down at the chart table and Joe yelledfor a pot of coffee, and they started talking prices and quantities ofwax. I sat in, listening. This was part of what was going to be thebig story of the year. Finally they got that talked out, and Joe askedNip how the monsters were running. 

"Why, good; you oughtn't to have any trouble finding one, " Nip said. "There must have been a Nifflheim of a big storm off to the east, beyond the Lava Islands. I got mine north of Cape Terror. There's hugepatches of sea-spaghetti drifting west, all along the coast of HermannReuch's Land. Here. " He pulled out a map. "You'll find it all alonghere. "

Murell asked me if sea-spaghetti was something the monsters ate. Hisreading-up still had a few gaps, here and there. 

"No, it's seaweed; the name describes it. Screwfish eat it; bigschools of them follow it. Gulpers and funnelmouths and bag-bellieseat screwfish, and monsters eat them. So wherever you find spaghetti, you can count on finding a monster or two. "

"How's the weather?" Joe was asking. 

"Good enough, now. It was almost full dark when we finished thecutting-up. It was raining; in fifty or sixty hours it ought to begetting pretty bad. " Spazoni pointed on the map. "Here's about where Ithink you ought to try, Joe. "

 * * * * *

I screened the Times, after Nip went back to his own ship. Dad saidthat Bish Ware had called in, with nothing to report but a vaguesuspicion that something nasty was cooking. Steve Ravick and LeoBelsher were taking things, even the announcement of the ArgentineExotic Organics price, too calmly. 

"I think so, myself, " he added. "That gang has some kind of a knife uptheir sleeve. Bish is trying to find out just what it is. "

"Is he drinking much?" I asked. 

"Well, he isn't on the wagon, I can tell you that, " Dad said. "I'mbeginning to think that he isn't really sober till he's halfplastered. "

There might be something to that, I thought. There are all kinds ofweird individualities about human metabolism; for all I knew, alcoholmight actually be a food for Bish. Or he might have built up some kindof immunity, with antibodies that were themselves harmful if he didn'thave alcohol to neutralize them. 

The fugitive from what I couldn't bring myself to call justice provedto know just a little, but not much, more about engines than I did. That meant that Tom would still have to take Al Devis's place, and I'dhave to take his with the after 50-mm. So the ship went down to almostsea surface, and Tom and I went to the stern turret. 

The gun I was to handle was an old-model Terran Federation Armyinfantry-platoon accompanying gun. The mount, however, waspower-driven, like the mount for a 90-mm contragravity tank gun. Reconciling the firing mechanism of the former with the elevating andtraversing gear of the latter had produced one of the craziest piecesof machinery that ever gave an ordnance engineer nightmares. It was alocal job, of course. An ordnance engineer in Port Sandor doesn'treally have to be a raving maniac, but it's a help. 

Externally, the firing mechanism consisted of a pistol grip andtrigger, which looked all right to me. The sight was a standardbinocular light-gun sight, with a spongeplastic mask to save thegunner from a pair of black eyes every time he fired it. The elevatingand traversing gear was combined in one lever on a ball-and-socketjoint. You could move the gun diagonally in any direction in onemotion, but you had to push or pull the opposite way. Something wouldgo plonk when the trigger was pulled on an empty chamber, so I didsome dry practice at the crests of waves. 

"Now, mind, " Tom was telling me, "this is a lot different from apistol. "

"So I notice, " I replied. I had also noticed that every time I got thecross hairs on anything and squeezed the trigger, they were onsomething else when the trigger went plonk. "All this gun needs isanother lever, to control the motion of the ship. "

"Oh, that only makes it more fun, " Tom told me. 

Then he loaded in a clip of five rounds, big expensive-lookingcartridges a foot long, with bottle-neck cases and pointed shells. 

The targets were regular tallow-wax skins, blown up and weighted atone end so that they would float upright. He yelled into the intercom, and one was chucked overboard ahead. A moment later, I saw it bobbingaway astern of us. I put my face into the sight-mask, caught it, centered the cross hairs, and squeezed. The gun gave a thunderclapand recoiled past me, and when I pulled my face out of the mask, I sawa column of water and spray about fifty feet left and a hundred yardsover. 

"You won't put any wax in the hold with that kind of shooting, " Tomtold me. 

I fired again. This time, there was no effect at all that I could see. The shell must have gone away over and hit the water a couple of milesastern. Before Tom could make any comment on that shot, I let offanother, and this time I hit the water directly in front of thebobbing wax skin. Good line shot, but away short. 

"Well, you scared him, anyhow, " Tom said, in mock commendation. 

I remembered some of the comments I'd made when I'd been trying toteach him to hit something smaller than the target frame with apistol, and humbled myself. The next two shots were reasonably close, but neither would have done any damage if the rapidly vanishing skinhad really been a monster. Tom clucked sadly and slapped in anotherclip. 

"Heave over another one, " he called. "That monster got away. "

The trouble was, there were a lot of tricky air currents along thesurface of the water. The engines were running on lift to matchexactly the weight of the ship, which meant that she had no weight atall, and a lot of wind resistance. The drive was supposed to match thewind speed, and the ship was supposed to be kept nosed into the wind. A lot of that is automatic, but it can't be made fully so, which meansthat the pilot has to do considerable manual correcting, and no humanalive can do that perfectly. Joe Kivelson or Ramón Llewellyn orwhoever was at the controls was doing a masterly job, but that fellaway short of giving me a stable gun platform. 

I caught the second target as soon as it bobbed into sight and slammeda shell at it. The explosion was half a mile away, but the shellhadn't missed the target by more than a few yards. Heartened, I firedagain, and that shot was simply dreadful. 

"I know what you're doing wrong, " Tom said. "You're squeezing thetrigger. "

"_Huh_?"

I pulled my face out of the sight-mask and looked at him to see if hewere exhibiting any other signs of idiocy. That was like criticizingsomebody for using a fork instead of eating with his fingers. 

"You're not shooting a pistol, " he continued. "You don't have to holdthe gun on the target with the hand you shoot with. The mount control, in your other hand, does that. As soon as the cross hairs touch thetarget, just grab the trigger as though it was a million sols gettingaway from you. Well, sixteen thousand; that's what a monster's worthnow, Murell prices. Jerking won't have the least effect on your holdwhatever. "

So that was why I'd had so much trouble making a pistol shot out ofTom, and why it would take a special act of God to make one out of hisfather. And that was why monster-hunters caused so few casualties inbarroom shootings around Port Sandor, outside of bystanders andback-bar mirrors. I felt like Newton after he'd figured out why theapple bopped him on the head. 

"You mean like this?" I asked innocently, as soon as I had the hairson the target again, violating everything I held most sacredly trueabout shooting. 

The shell must have passed within inches of the target; it bobbed overflat and the weight pulled it up again into the backwave from theshell and it bobbed like crazy. 

"That would have been a dead monster, " Tom said. "Let's see you do itagain. "

I didn't; the next shot was terrible. Overconfidence. I had one moreshot, and I didn't want to use up another clip of the _Javelin_'sammo. They cost like crazy, even if they were Army rejects. The seacurrent was taking the target farther away every second, but I took mytime on the next one, bringing the horizontal hair level with thebottom of the inflated target and traversing quickly, grabbing thetrigger as soon as the vertical hair touched it. There was awater-spout, and the target shot straight up for fifty feet; the shellmust have exploded directly under it. There was a sound of cheeringfrom the intercom. Tom asked if I wanted to fire another clip. I toldhim I thought I had the hang of it now, and screwed a swab onto theramrod and opened the breech to clean the gun. 

Joe Kivelson grinned at me when I went up to the conning tower. 

"That wasn't bad, Walt, " he said. "You never manned a 50-mm before, did you?"

"No, and it's all backward from anything I ever learned aboutshooting, " I said. "Now, suppose I get a shot at a monster; where do Itry to hit him?"

"Here, I'll show you. " He got a block of lucite, a foot square on theend by two and a half feet long, out of a closet under the charttable. In it was a little figure of a Jarvis's sea-monster; long bodytapering to a three-fluked tail, wide horizontal flippers like thewings of an old pre-contragravity aircraft, and a long neck with alittle head and a wide tusked mouth. 

"Always get him from in front, " he said. "Aim right here, where hischest makes a kind of V at the base of the neck. A 50-mm will go sixor eight feet into him before it explodes, and it'll explode among hisheart and lungs and things. If it goes straight along his body, it'llopen him up and make the cutting-up easier, and it won't spoil muchwax. That's where I always shoot. "

"Suppose I get a broadside shot?"

"Why, then put your shell right under the flukes at the end of thetail. That'll turn him and position him for a second shot from infront. But mostly, you'll get a shot from in front, if the ship's downnear the surface. Monsters will usually try to attack the ship. Theyattack anything around their own size that they see, " he told me. "Butdon't ever make a body shot broadside-to. You'll kill the monster, butyou'll blow about five thousand sols' worth of wax to Nifflheim doingit. "

It had been getting dusky while I had been shooting; it was almostfull dark now, and the _Javelin's_ lights were on. We were makingclose to Mach 3, headed east now, and running away from the remainingdaylight. 

We began running into squalls of rain, and then rain mixed with wetsnow. The underside lights came on, and the lookout below beganreporting patches of sea-spaghetti. Finally, the boat was dropped outand went circling away ahead, swinging its light back and forth overthe water, and radioing back reports. Spaghetti. Spaghetti with a bigschool of screwfish working on it. Funnel-mouths working on thescrewfish. Finally the speaker gave a shrill whistle. 

"_Monster ho!_" the voice yelled. "About ten points off your port bow. We're circling over it now. "

"Monster ho!" Kivelson yelled into the intercom, in case anybodyhadn't heard. "All hands to killing stations. " Then he saw me standingthere, wondering what was going to happen next. "Well, mister, didn'tyou hear me?" he bellowed. "Get to your gun!"

Gee! I thought. I'm one of the crew, now. 

"Yes sir!" I grabbed the handrail of the ladder and slid down, thenraced aft to the gun turret. 

9

MONSTER KILLING

There was a man in the turret, waiting to help me. He had a clip offive rounds in the gun, the searchlight on, and the viewscreen tunedto the forward pickup. After checking the gun and loading the chamber, I looked in that, and in the distance, lighted by the boat above andthe searchlight of the _Javelin_, I saw a long neck with a little headon the end of it weaving about. We were making straight for it, losingaltitude and speed as we went. 

Then the neck dipped under the water and a little later reappeared, coming straight for the advancing light. The forward gun went off, shaking the ship with its recoil, and the head ducked under again. There was a spout from the shell behind it. 

I took my eyes from the forward screen and looked out the rear window, ready to shove my face into the sight-mask. An instant later, the headand neck reappeared astern of us. I fired, without too much hope ofhitting anything, and then the ship was rising and circling. 

As soon as I'd fired, the monster had sounded, headfirst. I fired asecond shot at his tail, in hope of crippling his steering gear, butthat was a clean miss, too, and then the ship was up to about fivethousand feet. My helper pulled out the partly empty clip and replacedit with a full one, giving me five and one in the chamber. 

If I'd been that monster, I thought, I'd have kept on going till I wasa couple of hundred miles away from this place; but evidently thatwasn't the way monsters thought, if thinking is what goes on inside abrain cavity the size of a quart bottle in a head the size of two oildrums on a body as big as the ship that was hunting him. He'd found alot of gulpers and funnelmouths, and he wasn't going to be chased awayfrom his dinner by somebody shooting at him. 

I wondered why they didn't eat screwfish, instead of the things thatpreyed on them. Maybe they did and we didn't know it. Or maybe theyjust didn't like screwfish. There were a lot of things we didn't knowabout sea-monsters. 

For that matter, I wondered why we didn't grow tallow-wax bycarniculture. We could grow any other animal matter we wanted. I'doften thought of that. 

The monster wasn't showing any inclination to come to the surfaceagain, and finally Joe Kivelson's voice came out of the intercom:

"Run in the guns and seal ports. Secure for submersion. We're goingdown and chase him up. "

My helper threw the switch that retracted the gun and sealed the gunport. I checked that and reported, "After gun secure. " Hans Cronje'svoice, a moment later, said, "Forward gun secure, " and then RamónLlewellyn said, "Ship secure; ready to submerge. "

Then the _Javelin_ began to settle, and the water came up over thewindow. I didn't know what the radar was picking up. All I could seewas the screen and the window; water lighted for about fifty feet infront and behind. I saw a cloud of screwfish pass over and around us, spinning rapidly as they swam as though on lengthwise axis--theyalways spin counterclockwise, never clockwise. A couple offunnelmouths were swimming after them, overtaking and engulfing them. 

Then the captain yelled, "Get set for torpedo, " and my helper and Ieach grabbed a stanchion. A couple of seconds later it seemed asthough King Neptune himself had given the ship a poke in the nose; myhands were almost jerked loose from their hold. Then she swung slowly, nosing up and down, and finally Joe Kivelson spoke again:

"We're going to surface. Get set to run the guns out and startshooting as soon as we're out of the water. "

"What happened?" I asked my helper. 

"Must have put the torp right under him and lifted him, " he said. "Hecould be dead or stunned. Or he could be live and active and spoilingfor a fight. "

That last could be trouble. The _Times_ had run quite a few stories, some with black borders, about ships that had gotten into trouble withmonsters. A hunter-ship is heavy and it is well-armored--installhyperdrive engines in one, and you could take her from here toTerra--but a monster is a tough brute, and he has armor of his own, scales an inch or so thick and tougher than sole leather. A lot ofchair seats around Port Sandor are made of single monster scales. Amonster strikes with its head, like a snake. They can smash a ship'sboat, and they've been known to punch armor-glass windows out of theirframes. I didn't want the window in front of me coming in at me with amonster head the size of a couple of oil drums and full of big tusksfollowing it. 

The _Javelin_ came up fast, but not as fast as the monster, whichseemed to have been injured only in his disposition. He was on thesurface already, about fifty yards astern of us, threshing with hisforty-foot wing-fins, his neck arched back to strike. I started toswing my gun for the chest shot Joe Kivelson had recommended as soonas it was run out, and then the ship was swung around and tilted upforward by a sudden gust of wind. While I was struggling to get thesights back on the monster, the ship gave another lurch and the crosshairs were right on its neck, about six feet below the head. I grabbedthe trigger, and as soon as the shot was off, took my eyes from thesights. I was just a second too late to see the burst, but not toolate to see the monster's neck jerk one way out of the smoke puff andits head fly another. A second later, the window in front of me wassplashed with blood as the headless neck came down on our fantail. 

Immediately, two rockets jumped from the launcher over the gun turret, planting a couple of harpoons, and the boat, which had been circlingaround since we had submerged, dived into the water and passed underthe monster, coming up on the other side dragging another harpoonline. The monster was still threshing its wings and flogging with itsheadless neck. It takes a monster quite a few minutes to tumble to thefact that it's been killed. My helper was pounding my back black andblue with one hand and trying to pump mine off with the other, and Iwas getting an ovation from all over the ship. At the same time, acouple more harpoons went into the thing from the ship, and the boatput another one in from behind. 

I gathered that shooting monsters' heads off wasn't at all usual, andhastened to pass it off as pure luck, so that everybody would hurry upand deny it before they got the same idea themselves. 

We hadn't much time for ovations, though. We had a very slowly dyingmonster, and before he finally discovered that he was dead, a coupleof harpoons got pulled out and had to be replaced. Finally, however, he quieted down, and the boat swung him around, bringing the tail pastour bow, and the ship cut contragravity to specific-gravity level andsettled to float on top of the water. The boat dived again, and payedout a line that it brought up and around and up again, lashing themonster fast alongside. 

"All right, " Kivelson was saying, out of the intercom. "Shooting'sover. All hands for cutting-up. "

I pulled on a parka and zipped it up and went out onto the deck. Everybody who wasn't needed at engines or controls was there, andequipment was coming up from below--power saws and sonocutters andeven a solenoid jackhammer. There were half a dozen floodlights, onsmall contragravity lifters; they were run up on lines fifty feetabove the ship's deck. By this time it was completely dark and finesnow was blowing. I could see that Joe Kivelson was anxious to get thecutting-up finished before the wind got any worse. 

"Walt, can you use a machine gun?" he asked me. 

I told him I could. I was sure of it; a machine gun is fired in arational and decent manner. 

"Well, all right. Suppose you cover for us from the boat, " he said. "Mr. Murell can pilot for you. You never worked at cutting-up before, and neither did he. You'd be more of a hindrance than a help and sowould he. But we do need a good machine gunner. As soon as we startthrowing out waste, we'll have all the slashers and halberd fish formiles around. You just shoot them as fast as you see them. "

He was courteous enough not to add: "And don't shoot any of the crew. "

The boat came in and passed out the lines of its harpoons, and Murelland I took the places of Cesário Vieira and the other man. We went upto the nose, and Murell took his place at the controls, and I got backof the 7-mm machine gun and made sure that there were plenty of extrabelts of ammo. Then, as we rose, I pulled the goggles down from myhood, swung the gun away from the ship, and hammered off a one-secondburst to make sure it was working, after which I settled down, glad Ihad a comfortable seat and wasn't climbing around on that monster. 

They began knocking scales loose with the jackhammer and cutting intothe leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was gettingheavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll. 

"That's pretty dangerous work, " Murell said. "If a man using one ofthose cutters slipped. .. . "

"It's happened, " I told him. "You met our peg-legged compositor, Julio. That was how he lost his leg. "

"I don't blame them for wanting all they can get for tallow-wax. "

They had the monster opened down the belly, and were beginning to cutloose big chunks of the yellow tallow-wax and throw them into cargonets and swing them aboard with lifters, to be chucked down the cargohatches. I was only able to watch that for a minute or so and tellMurell what was going on, and then the first halberd fish, with aspearlike nose and sharp ridges of the nearest thing to bone you findon Fenris, came swimming up. I swung the gun on the leader and gavehim a second of fire, and then a two-second burst on the ones behind. Then I waited for a few seconds until the survivors converged on theirdead and injured companions and gave them another burst, which wipedout the lot of them. 

It was only a couple of seconds after that that the first slasher camein, shiny as heat-blued steel and waving four clawed tentacles thatgrew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights onhim. He stopped slashing immediately. Slashers are smart; you killthem and they find it out right away. 

Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was pollutedwith things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, nowworking up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoidmassacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keepthe boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and everytime I had to change belts, there'd be a new rush of things that hadto be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-upoperation is one of the things that runs up expenses for ahunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted withmachine-gun brass. 

Finally, they got the job done, and everybody went below and sealedship. We sealed the boat and went down after her. The last I saw, theremains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, andthe water around it was rioting with slashers and clawbeaks andhalberd fish and similar marine unpleasantnesses. 

10

MAYDAY, MAYDAY

Getting a ship's boat berthed inside the ship in the air is trickywork under the best of conditions; the way the wind was blowing bynow, it would have been like trying to thread a needle inside aconcrete mixer. We submerged after the ship and went in underwater. Then we had to wait in the boat until the ship rose above the surfaceand emptied the water out of the boat berth. When that was done andthe boat berth was sealed again, the ship went down seventy fathomsand came to rest on the bottom, and we unsealed the boat and got out. 

There was still the job of packing the wax into skins, but that couldwait. Everybody was tired and dirty and hungry. We took turns washingup, three at a time, in the little ship's latrine which, for somereason going back to sailing-ship days on Terra, was called the"head. " Finally the whole sixteen of us gathered in the relativelycomfortable wardroom under the after gun turret. 

Comfortable, that is, to the extent that everybody could find a placeto sit down, or could move about without tripping over somebody else. There was a big pot of coffee, and everybody had a plate or bowl ofhot food. There's always plenty of hot food to hand on a hunter-ship;no regular meal-times, and everybody eats, as he sleeps, when he hastime. This is the only time when a whole hunter crew gets together, after a monster has been killed and cut up and the ship is resting onthe bottom and nobody has to stand watch. 

Everybody was talking about the killing, of course, and the wax we hadin the hold, and counting the money they were going to get for it, atthe new eighty-centisol price. 

"Well, I make it about fourteen tons, " Ramón Llewellyn, who had beenchecking the wax as it went into the hold, said. He figured mentallyfor a moment, and added, "Call it twenty-two thousand sols. " Then hehad to fall back on a pencil and paper to figure shares. 

I was surprised to find that he was reckoning shares for both Murelland myself. 

"Hey, do we want to let them do that?" I whispered to Murell. "We justcame along for the ride. "

"I don't want the money, " he said. "These people need every cent theycan get. "

So did I, for that matter, and I didn't have salary and expenseaccount from a big company on Terra. However, I hadn't come along inthe expectation of making anything out of it, and a newsman has to becareful about the outside money he picks up. It wouldn't do any harmin the present instance, but as a practice it can lead to all kinds ofthings, like playing favorites, coloring news, killing stories thatshouldn't be killed. We do enough of that as it is, like playing downthe tread-snail business for Bish Ware and the spaceport people, andnever killing anybody except in a "local bar. " It's hard to draw aline on that sort of thing. 

"We're just guests, " I said. "We don't work here. "

"The dickens you are, " Joe Kivelson contradicted. "Maybe you cameaboard as guests, but you're both part of the crew now. I never saw aprettier shot on a monster than Walt made--took that thing's head offlike a chicken on a chopping block--and he did a swell job of coveringfor the cutting-up. And he couldn't have done that if Murell hadn'thandled the boat the way he did, and that was no easy job. "

"Well, let's talk about that when we get to port, " I said. "Are wegoing right back, or are we going to try for another monster?"

"I don't know, " Joe said. "We could stow the wax, if we didn't get toomuch, but if we stay out, we'll have to wait out the wind and by thenit'll be pretty cold. "

"The longer we stay out, the more the cruise'll cost, " AbdullahMonnahan, the engineer, said, "and the expenses'll cut into theshares. "

"Tell the truth, I'm sort of antsy to get back, " Joe Kivelson said. "Iwant to see what's going on in Port Sandor. "

"So am I, " Murell said. "I want to get some kind of office opened, andget into business. What time will the _Cape Canaveral_ be getting in?I want a big cargo, for the first time. "

"Oh, not for four hundred hours, at the least, " I said. "Thespaceships always try to miss the early-dark and early-daylightstorms. It's hard to get a big ship down in a high wind. "

"That'll be plenty of time, I suppose, " Murell said. "There's all thatwax you have stored, and what I can get out of the Co-operative storesfrom crews that reclaim it. But I'm going to have a lot to do. "

"Yes, " I agreed. "Dodging bullets, for one. "

"Oh, I don't expect any trouble, " Murell said. "This fellow Ravick'sshot his round. "

He was going to say something else, but before he could say it therewas a terrific roar forward. The whole ship bucked like a recoilinggun, throwing everybody into a heap, and heeled over to starboard. There were a lot of yells, particularly from those who had beensplashed with hot coffee, and somebody was shouting something aboutthe magazines. 

"The magazines are aft, you dunderhead, " Joe Kivelson told him, shoving himself to his feet. "Stay put, everybody; I'll see what itis. "

He pulled open the door forward. An instant later, he had slammed itshut and was dogging it fast. 

"Hull must be ruptured forward; we're making water. It's spouting upthe hatch from the engine room like a geyser, " he said. "Ramón, go seewhat it's like in the boat berth. The rest of you, follow him, andgrab all the food and warm clothing you can. We're going to have toabandon. "

He stood by the doorway aft, shoving people through and keeping themfrom jamming up, saying: "Take it easy, now; don't crowd. We'll allget out. " There wasn't any panic. A couple of men were in the doorwayof the little galley when I came past, handing out cases of food. Asnothing was coming out at the instant, I kept on, and on the way backto the boat-berth hatch, I pulled down as many parkas and pairs ofoverpants as I could carry, squeezing past Tom, who was collectingfleece-lined hip boots. Each pair was buckled together at the tops; ahunter always does that, even at home ashore. 

Ramón had the hatch open, and had opened the top hatch of the boat, below. I threw my double armload of clothing down through it and sliddown after, getting out of the way of the load of boots Tom dumpedahead of him. Joe Kivelson came down last, carrying the ship's log andsome other stuff. A little water was trickling over the edge of thehatch above. 

"It's squirting up from below in a dozen places, " he said, after he'dsealed the boat. "The whole front of the ship must be blown out. "

"Well, now we know what happened to Simon MacGregor's _Claymore_, " Isaid, more to myself than to anybody else. 

Joe and Hans Cronje, the gunner, were getting a rocket out of thelocker, detaching the harpoon and fitting on an explosive warhead. Hestopped, while he and Cronje were loading it into the after launcher, and nodded at me. 

"That's what I think, too, " he said. "Everybody grab onto something;we're getting the door open. "

I knew what was coming and started hugging a stanchion as though itwere a long-lost sweetheart, and Murell, who didn't but knew enough toimitate those who did, hugged it from the other side. The rocketwhooshed out of the launcher and went off with a deafening bangoutside. For an instant, nothing happened, and I told Murell not tolet go. Then the lock burst in and the water, at seventy fathoms'pressure, hit the boat. Abdullah had gotten the engines on and wasbacking against it. After a little, the pressure equalized and we wentout the broken lock stern first. 

We circled and passed over the _Javelin_, and then came back. She waslying in the ooze, a quarter over on her side, and her whole bow wasblown out to port. Joe Kivelson got the square box he had brought downfrom the ship along with the log, fussed a little with it, and thenlaunched it out the disposal port. It was a radio locator. Sometimes alucky ship will get more wax than the holds' capacity; they pack it inskins and anchor it on the bottom, and drop one of those gadgets withit. It would keep on sending a directional signal and the name of theship for a couple of years. 

"Do you really think it was sabotage?" Murell was asking me. Blowingup a ship with sixteen men aboard must have seemed sort of extreme tohim. Maybe that wasn't according to Terran business ethics. "Mightn'tit have been a power unit?"

"No. Power units don't blow, and if one did, it would vaporize thewhole ship and a quarter of a cubic mile of water around her. No, thatwas old fashioned country-style chemical explosive. Cataclysmite, probably. "

"Ravick?" he asked, rather unnecessarily. 

"You know how well he can get along without you and Joe Kivelson, andhere's a chance to get along without both of you together. " Everybodyin the boat was listening, so I continued: "How much do you know aboutthis fellow Devis, who strained his back at the last moment?"

"Engine room's where he could have planted something, " Joe Kivelsonsaid. 

"He was in there by himself for a while, the morning after themeeting, " Abdullah Monnahan added. 

"And he disappeared between the meeting room and the elevator, duringthe fight, " Tom mentioned. "And when he showed up, he hadn't beenmarked up any. I'd have thought he'd have been pretty badlybeaten--unless they knew he was one of their own gang. "

"We're going to look Devis up when we get back, " somebody saidpleasantly. 

"If we get back, " Ramón Llewellyn told him. "That's going to take somedoing. "

"We have the boat, " Hans Cronje said. "It's a little crowded, but wecan make it back to Port Sandor. "

"I hope we can, " Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Shall we take herup, Joe?"

"Yes, see what it's like on top, " the skipper replied. 

Going up, we passed a monster at about thirty fathoms. It stuck itsneck out and started for us. Monnahan tilted the boat almost verticaland put on everything the engines had, lift and drive parallel. Aninstant later, we broke the surface and shot into the air. 

The wind hit the boat as though it had been a ping-pong ball, and itwas several seconds, and bad seconds at that, before Monnahan regainedeven a semblance of control. There was considerable bad language, andseveral of the crew had bloody noses. Monnahan tried to get the boatturned into the wind. A circuit breaker popped, and red lights blazedall over the instrument panel. He eased off and let the wind takeover, and for a while we were flying in front of it like a riflebullet. Gradually, he nosed down and submerged. 

"Well, that's that. " Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in theunderwater calm again. "We'll have to stay under till the wind's over. Don't anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We'll have to conserve oxygen. "

"Isn't the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?" Murell asked. 

"Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen inhere. "

"How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?" I asked. 

"About eight hours. "

It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. Thewind wouldn't even begin to fall in less than twenty. 

"We can go south, to the coast of Hermann Reuch's Land, " Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Let me figure something out. "

He dug out a slide rule and a pencil and pad and sat down with hisback to the back of the pilot's seat, under the light. Everybodywatched him in a silence which Joe Kivelson broke suddenly bybellowing:

"Dumont! You light that pipe and I'll feed it to you!"

Old Piet Dumont grabbed the pipe out of his mouth with one hand andpocketed his lighter with the other. 

"Gosh, Joe; I guess I just wasn't thinking. .. " he began. 

"Well, give me that pipe. " Joe put it in the drawer under the charts. "Now you won't have it handy the next time you don't think. "

After a while, Abe Clifford looked up. "Ship's position I don't haveexactly; somewhere around East 25 Longitude, South 20 Latitude. Ican't work out our present position at all, except that we'resomewhere around South 30 Latitude. The locator signal is almostexactly north-by-northeast of us. If we keep it dead astern, we'llcome out in Sancerre Bay, on Hermann Reuch's Land. If we make that, we're all right. We'll be in the lee of the Hacksaw Mountains, and wecan surface from time to time to change air, and as soon as the windfalls we can start for home. "

Then he and Abdullah and Joe went into a huddle, arguing aboutcruising speed submerged. The results weren't so heartening. 

"It looks like a ten-hour trip, submerged, " Joe said. "That's twohours too long, and there's no way of getting more oxygen out of thegills than we're getting now. We'll just have to use less. Everybodylie down and breathe as shallowly as possible, and don't do anythingto use energy. I'm going to get on the radio and see what I canraise. "

Big chance, I thought. These boat radios were only used forcommunicating with the ship while scouting; they had a strain-everythingrange of about three hundred miles. Hunter-ships don't crowd that closetogether when they're working. Still, there was a chance that somebodyelse might be sitting it out on the bottom within hearing. So Abe tookthe controls and kept the signal from the wreck of the _Javelin_ deadastern, and Joe Kivelson began speaking into the radio:

"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Captain Kivelson, _Javelin_, calling. My ship was wrecked by an explosion; all hands now in scout boat, proceeding toward Sancerre Bay, on course south-by-southwest from thewreck. Locator signal is being broadcast from the _Javelin_. Otherthan that, we do not know our position. Calling all craft, callingMayday. "

He stopped talking. The radio was silent except for an occasionalfrying-fat crackle of static. Then he began over again. 

I curled up, trying to keep my feet out of anybody's face and my faceclear of anybody else's feet. Somebody began praying, and somebodyelse told him to belay it, he was wasting oxygen. I tried to go tosleep, which was the only practical thing to do. I must havesucceeded. When I woke again, Joe Kivelson was saying, exasperatedly:

"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. .. "

11

DARKNESS AND COLD

The next time I woke, Tom Kivelson was reciting the Mayday, Maydayincantation into the radio, and his father was asleep. The man who hadbeen praying had started again, and nobody seemed to care whether hewasted oxygen or not. It was a Theosophist prayer to the SpiritGuides, and I remembered that Cesário Vieira was a Theosophist. Well, maybe there really were Spirit Guides. If there were, we'd all befinding out before long. I found that I didn't care one hoot whichway, and I set that down to oxygen deficiency. 

Then Glenn Murell broke in on the monotone call for help and theprayer. 

"We're done for if we stay down here another hour, " he said. "Anyargument on that?"

There wasn't any. Joe Kivelson opened his eyes and looked around. 

"We haven't raised anything at all on the radio, " Murell went on. "That means nobody's within an hour of reaching us. Am I right?"

"I guess that's about the size of it, " Joe Kivelson conceded. 

"How close to land are we?"

"The radar isn't getting anything but open water and schools offish, " Abe Clifford said. "For all I know, we could be inside SancerreBay now. "

"Well, then, why don't we surface?" Murell continued. "It's a thousandto one against us, but if we stay here our chances are precisely onehundred per cent negative. "

"What do you think?" Joe asked generally. "I think Mr. Murell's statedit correctly. "

"There is no death, " Cesário said. "Death is only a change, and thenmore of life. I don't care what you do. "

"What have we got to lose?" somebody else asked. "We're broke andgambling on credit now. "

"All right; we surface, " the skipper said. "Everybody grab ontosomething. We'll take the Nifflheim of a slamming around as soon aswe're out of the water. "

We woke up everybody who was sleeping, except the three men who hadcompletely lost consciousness. Those we wrapped up in blankets andtarpaulins, like mummies, and lashed them down. We gathered everythingthat was loose and made it fast, and checked the fastenings ofeverything else. Then Abdullah Monnahan pointed the nose of the boatstraight up and gave her everything the engines could put out. Just aswe were starting upward, I heard Cesário saying:

"If anybody wants to see me in the next reincarnation, I can tell youone thing; I won't reincarnate again on Fenris!"

The headlights only penetrated fifty or sixty feet ahead of us. Icould see slashers and clawbeaks and funnelmouths and gulpers andthings like that getting out of our way in a hurry. Then we were outof the water and shooting straight up in the air. 

It was the other time all over again, doubled in spades, only thistime Abdullah didn't try to fight it; he just kept the boat rising. Then it went end-over-end, again and again. I think most of us blackedout; I'm sure I did, for a while. Finally, more by good luck than goodmanagement, he got us turned around with the wind behind us. Thatlasted for a while, and then we started keyholing again. I could seethe instrument panel from where I'd lashed myself fast; it was goingcompletely bughouse. Once, out the window in front, I could see jaggedmountains ahead. I just shut my eyes and waited for the Spirit Guidesto come and pick up the pieces. 

When they weren't along, after a few seconds that seemed like half anhour, I opened my eyes again. There were more mountains ahead, andmountains to the right. This'll do it, I thought, and I wondered howlong it would take Dad to find out what had happened to us. Cesáriohad started praying again, and so had Abdullah Monnahan, who had justremembered that he had been brought up a Moslem. I hoped he wasn'ttrying to pray in the direction of Mecca, even allowing that he knewwhich way Mecca was from Fenris generally. That made me laugh, andthen I thought, This is a fine time to be laughing at anything. Then Irealized that things were so bad that anything more that happened wasfunny. 

I was still laughing when I discovered that the boat had slowed to acrawl and we were backing in between two high cliffs. EvidentlyAbdullah, who had now stopped praying, had gotten enough control ofthe boat to keep her into the wind and was keeping enough speedforward to yield to it gradually. That would be all right, I thought, if the force of the wind stayed constant, and as soon as I thought ofthat, it happened. We got into a relative calm, the boat went forwardagain, and then was tossed up and spun around. Then I saw a mountainslope directly behind us, out the rear window. 

A moment later, I saw rocks and boulders sticking out of it inapparent defiance of gravitation, and then I realized that it waslevel ground and we were coming down at it backward. That lasted a fewseconds, and then we hit stern-on, bounced and hit again. I wasconscious up to the third time we hit. 

The next thing I knew, I was hanging from my lashings from the side ofthe boat, which had become the top, and the headlights and the lightson the control panel were out, and Joe Kivelson was holding aflashlight while Abe Clifford and Glenn Murell were trying to get meuntied and lower me. I also noticed that the air was fresh, and verycold. 

"Hey, we're down!" I said, as though I were telling anybody anythingthey didn't know. "How many are still alive?"

"As far as I know, all of us, " Joe said. "I think I have a brokenarm. " I noticed, then, that he was holding his left arm stiffly at hisside. Murell had a big gash on top of his head, and he was moppingblood from his face with his sleeve while he worked. 

When they got me down, I looked around. Somebody else was playing aflashlight around at the stern, which was completely smashed. It wasa miracle the rocket locker hadn't blown up, but the main miracle wasthat all, or even any, of us were still alive. 

We found a couple of lights that could be put on, and we got all of uspicked up and the unconscious revived. One man, Dominic Silverstein, had a broken leg. Joe Kivelson's arm was, as he suspected, broken, another man had a fractured wrist, and Abdullah Monnahan thought acouple of ribs were broken. The rest of us were in one piece, but allof us were cut and bruised. I felt sore all over. We also found anuclear-electric heater that would work, and got it on. Tom and Irigged some tarpaulins to screen off the ruptured stern and keep outthe worst of the cold wind. After they got through setting andsplinting the broken bones and taping up Abdullah's ribs, Cesário andMurell got some water out of one of the butts and started boiling itfor coffee. I noticed that Piet Dumont had recovered his pipe and wassmoking it, and Joe Kivelson had his lit. 

"Well, where are we?" somebody was asking Abe Clifford. 

The navigator shook his head. "The radio's smashed, so's the receiverfor the locator, and so's the radio navigational equipment. I canstate positively, however, that we are on the north coast of HermannReuch's Land. "

Everybody laughed at that except Murell. I had to explain to him thatHermann Reuch's Land was the antarctic continent of Fenris, and hasn'tany other coast. 

"I'd say we're a good deal west of Sancerre Bay, " Cesário Vieirahazarded. "We can't be east of it, the way we got blown west. I thinkwe must be at least five hundred miles east of it. "

"Don't fool yourself, Cesário, " Joe Kivelson told him. "We could havegotten into a turbulent updraft and been carried to the upper, eastward winds. The altimeter was trying to keep up with the boat andjust couldn't, half the time. We don't know where we went. I'll takeAbe's estimate and let it go at that. "

"Well, we're up some kind of a fjord, " Tom said. "I think it brancheslike a Y, and we're up the left branch, but I won't make a point ofthat. "

"I can't find anything like that on this map, " Abe Clifford said, after a while. 

Joe Kivelson swore. "You ought to know better than that, Abe; you knowhow thoroughly this coast hasn't been mapped. "

"How much good will it do us to know where we are, right now?" Iasked. "If the radio's smashed, we can't give anybody our position. "

"We might be able to fix up the engines and get the boat in the airagain, after the wind drops. " Monnahan said. "I'll take a look at themand see how badly they've been banged up. "

"With the whole stern open?" Hans Cronje asked. "We'd freeze stifferthan a gun barrel before we went a hundred miles. "

"Then we can pack the stern full of wet snow and let it freeze, instead of us, " I suggested. "There'll be plenty of snow before thewind goes down. "

Joe Kivelson looked at me for a moment. "That would work, " he said. "How soon can you get started on the engines, Abdullah?"

"Right away. I'll need somebody to help me, though. I can't do muchthe way you have me bandaged up. "

"I think we'd better send a couple of parties out, " Ramón Llewellynsaid. "We'll have to find a better place to stay than this boat. Wedon't all have parkas or lined boots, and we have a couple of injuredmen. This heater won't be enough; in about seventy hours we'd allfreeze to death sitting around it. "

Somebody mentioned the possibility of finding a cave. 

"I doubt it, " Llewellyn said. "I was on an exploring expedition downhere, once. This is all igneous rock, mostly granite. There aren'tmany caves. But there may be some sort of natural shelter, orsomething we can make into a shelter, not too far away. We have twohalf-ton lifters; we could use them to pile up rocks and buildsomething. Let's make up two parties. I'll take one; Abe, you take theother. One of us can go up and the other can go down. "

We picked parties, trying to get men who had enough clothing andhadn't been too badly banged around in the landing. Tom wanted to goalong, but Abdullah insisted that he stay and help with the inspectionof the boat's engines. Finally six of us--Llewellyn, myself, GlennMurell, Abe Clifford, old Piet Dumont, and another man--went outthrough the broken stern of the boat. We had two portablefloodlights--a scout boat carries a lot of equipment--and Llewellyntook the one and Clifford the other. It had begun to snow already, andthe wind was coming straight up the narrow ravine into which we hadlanded, driving it at us. There was a stream between the two walls ofrock, swollen by the rains that had come just before the darkness, andthe rocks in and beside it were coated with ice. We took one look atit and shook our heads. Any exploring we did would be done withouttrying to cross that. We stood for a few minutes trying to see throughthe driving snow, and then we separated, Abe Clifford, Dumont and theother man going up the stream and Ramón Llewellyn, Glenn Murell and Igoing down. 

A few hundred yards below the boat, the stream went over a fifty-footwaterfall. We climbed down beside it, and found the ravine widening. It was a level beach, now, or what had been a beach thousands of yearsago. The whole coast of Hermann Reuch's land is sinking in the EasternHemisphere and rising in the Western. We turned away from the streamand found that the wind was increasing in strength and coming at usfrom the left instead of in front. The next thing we knew, we were atthe point of the mountain on our right and we could hear the searoaring ahead and on both sides of us. Tom had been right about thatV-shaped fjord, I thought. 

We began running into scattered trees now, and when we got around thepoint of the mountain we entered another valley. 

Trees, like everything else on Fenris, are considerably different fromanything analogous on normal planets. They aren't tall, the biggestnot more than fifteen feet high, but they are from six to eight feetthick, with all the branches at the top, sprouting out in alldirections and reminding me of pictures of Medusa. The outside bark isa hard shell, which grows during the beginning of our four hotseasons a year. Under that will be more bark, soft and spongy, andthis gets more and more dense toward the middle; and then comes thehardwood core, which may be as much as two feet thick. 

"One thing, we have firewood, " Murell said, looking at them. 

"What'll we cut it with; our knives?" I wanted to know. 

"Oh, we have a sonocutter on the boat, " Ramón Llewellyn said. "We canchop these things into thousand-pound chunks and float them to campwith the lifters. We could soak the spongy stuff on the outside withwater and let it freeze, and build a hut out of it, too. " He lookedaround, as far as the light penetrated the driving snow. "Thiswouldn't be a bad place to camp. "

Not if we're going to try to work on the boat, I thought. And packingDominic, with his broken leg, down over that waterfall was something Ididn't want to try, either. I didn't say anything. Wait till we gotback to the boat. It was too cold and windy here to argue, andbesides, we didn't know what Abe and his party might have foundupstream. 

12

CASTAWAYS WORKING

We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back, I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off theengine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at theruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, notjust relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was evenmore crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsiumshielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piledin the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at theconverters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in ahopeless mess. 

There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesário Vieira hadfound a small portable radio that wasn't in too bad condition, and hadit apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work ofanybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he wasdoing. It wasn't much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolutelimit of its range, at least for sending. 

"Is this all we have?" I asked, looking at it. It was the same type asthe one I carried on the job, camouflaged in a camera case, exceptthat it wouldn't record. 

"There's the regular boat radio, but it's smashed up pretty badly. Iwas thinking we could do something about cannibalizing one radio outof parts from both of them. "

We use a lot of radio equipment on the _Times_, and I do a good bit ofwork on it. I started taking the big set apart and then remembered thereceiver for the locator and got at that, too. The trouble was thatmost of the stuff in all the sets had been miniaturized to a pointwhere watchmaker's tools would have been pretty large for working onthem, and all we had was a general-repair kit that was just about fineenough for gunsmithing. 

While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramón Llewellyn wastelling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. JoeKivelson shook his head over it. 

"That's too far from the boat. We can't trudge back and forth to workon the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up withthe lifters, and I think that's a good idea about using slabs of thesoft wood to build a hut. But let's build the hut right here. "

"Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?" the mateasked. 

"Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream. There may be something better up there. "

Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:

"I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job. We need parts, and we haven't anything to make them out of or with. "

That was about what I'd thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-driveengines than I'd ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion asconfirmation of my own. 

"Tom, take a look at this mess, " I said. "See if you can help us withit. "

He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, "You need amagnifier for this. Wait till I see something. " Then he went over toone of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. Hecame over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soonas he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly goodmagnifying glasses. 

That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was onething, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kitand a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers outof needles. 

After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returnedand made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe waswarmed a little, he said:

"There's a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn't too hard toget up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a bigbowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom, once. The wind isn't so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom orwhatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place tomake a camp, if it wasn't so far from the boat. "

"How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?" Joeasked, going on to explain what he had in mind. 

"Why, easy. I don't think it would be nearly as hard as the placeRamón found. "

"Neither do I, " the mate agreed. "Climbing up that waterfall down thestream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping oneover beside the one above. " He began zipping up his parka. "Let's getthe cutter and the lifters and go up now. "

"Wait till I warm up a little, and I'll go with you, " Abe said. 

Then he came over to where Cesário and Tom and I were working, to seewhat we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midgetscrewdrivers and things Tom was making. 

"I'll take that back, Ramón, " he said. "I can do a lot more good righthere. Have you taken any of the radio navigational equipment apart, yet?" he asked us. 

We hadn't. We didn't know anything about it. 

"Well, I think we can get some stuff out of the astrocompass that canbe used. Let me in here, will you?"

I got up. "You take over for me, " I said. "I'll go on thewood-chopping detail. "

Tom wanted to go, too; Abe told him to keep on with his toolmaking. Piet Dumont said he'd guide us, and Glenn Murell said he'd go along. There was some swapping around of clothes and we gathered up the twolifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream. 

The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but notquite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to helpus. The worst difficulty, and the worst danger, was from the wind. 

Once we were at the top, though, it wasn't so bad. We went a couple ofhundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto theold lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights wouldshine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branchesgrowing out of the tops. 

We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hangingbranches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. Wetook turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around tokeep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, evenafter the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of itwith both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to woodas it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off inslabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we couldget it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that intoburnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn't bother with theslashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuffhere that the branches weren't worth taking in. 

We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before wedecided to knock off. We didn't realize until then how tired and coldwe were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heavedit over at the side as fast as the others got the trees down and cutup. If we only had another cutter and a couple more lifters, Ithought. If we only had an airworthy boat. .. . 

When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn't crippled and had enoughclothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we gota fire started--there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to getthe dense hardwood burning--and then we began building a hut againstthe boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abeand Cesário knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and theman with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By thistime, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. Wemade snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke inuse pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track ofhow long we worked, but finally we had a place we could all get into, with a fireplace, and it was as warm and comfortable as the inside ofthe boat. 

We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too coldto work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woodsand the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began toclear and we could see stars. That didn't make us happy at all. Aslong as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heatthat had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now itwas all radiating away into space. 

The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In a way, that was ahelp; we could slide wood down over it, and some of the billets wouldslide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was gettingto us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting--Cesário, and oldPiet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest andcould wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as longas any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut, we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff inno time at all. 

Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job asever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundredmiles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think itwas Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn't have anything to do withthe day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, _m'aidez_, meaning "help me. " I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn'ttoo optimistic about him. 

Cesário and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads offirewood--we weren't bothering, now, with anything but the hard andslow-burning cores--and had just gotten two of them hooked onto thelifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn't acloud in the sky, and two of Fenris's three moons were makingeverything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozenwaterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful. 

I turned to Cesário. "See what all you'll miss, if you take your nextreincarnation off Fenris, " I said. "This, and the long sunsets andsunrises, and--"

Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7-mmmachine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, andthen another, and another and another. 

13

THE BEACON LIGHT

We all said, "Shooting!" and, "The machine gun!" as though we had totell each other what it was. 

"Something's attacking them, " Cesário guessed. 

"Oh, there isn't anything to attack them now, " Abe said. "All thecritters are dug in for the winter. I'll bet they're just using it tochop wood with. "

That could be; a few short bursts would knock off all the soft woodfrom one of those big billets and expose the hard core. Only whydidn't they use the cutter? It was at the boat now. 

"We better go see what it is, " Cesário insisted. "It might betrouble. "

None of us was armed; we'd never thought we'd need weapons. There arequite a few Fenrisian land animals, all creepers or crawlers, that aredangerous, but they spend the extreme hot and cold periods in burrows, in almost cataleptic sleep. It occurred to me that something mighthave burrowed among the rocks near the camp and been roused by theheat of the fire. 

We hadn't carried a floodlight with us--there was no need for one inthe moonlight. Of the two at camp, one was pointed up the ravinetoward us, and the other into the air. We began yelling as soon as wecaught sight of them, not wanting to be dusted over lightly with7-mm's before anybody recognized us. As soon as the men at the campheard us, the shooting stopped and they started shouting to us. Thenwe could distinguish words. 

"Come on in! We made contact!"

We pushed into the hut, where everybody was crowded around theunderhatch of the boat, which was now the side door. Abe shovedthrough, and I shoved in after him. Newsman's conditioned reflex; getto where the story is. I even caught myself saying, "Press, " as Ishoved past Abdullah Monnahan. 

"What happened?" I asked, as soon as I was inside. I saw Joe Kivelsongetting up from the radio and making place for Abe. "Who did youcontact?"

"The Mahatma; _Helldiver_, " he said. "Signal's faint, but plain;they're trying to make a directional fix on us. There are about adozen ships out looking for us: _Helldiver_, _Pequod_, _Bulldog_, _Dirty Gertie_. .. " He went on naming them. 

"How did they find out?" I wanted to know. "Somebody pick up ourMayday while we were cruising submerged?"

Abe Clifford was swearing into the radio. "No, of course not. We don'tknow where in Nifflheim we are. All the instruments in the boat weresmashed. "

"Well, can't you shoot the stars, Abe?" The voice--I thought it wasFeinberg's--was almost as inaudible as a cat's sneeze. 

"Sure we can. If you're in range of this makeshift set, the positionwe'd get would be practically the same as yours, " Abe told him. "Look, there's a floodlight pointed straight up. Can you see that?"

"In all this moonlight? We could be half a mile away and not see it. "

"We've been firing with a 7-mm, " the navigator said. 

"I know; I heard it. On the radio. Have you got any rockets? Maybe ifyou shot one of them up we could see it. "

"Hey, that's an idea! Hans, have we another rocket with an explosivehead?"

Cronje said we had, and he and another man got it out and carried itfrom the boat. I repeated my question to Joe Kivelson. 

"No. Your Dad tried to call the _Javelin_ by screen; that must havebeen after we abandoned ship. He didn't get an answer, and put out ageneral call. Nip Spazoni was nearest, and he cruised around andpicked up the locator signal and found the wreck, with the boat berthblown open and the boat gone. Then everybody started looking for us. "

Feinberg was saying that he'd call the other ships and alert them. Ifthe _Helldiver_ was the only ship we could contact by radio, the oddswere that if they couldn't see the rocket from Feinberg's ship, nobodyelse could. The same idea must have occurred to Abe Clifford. 

"You say you're all along the coast. Are the other ships west or eastof you?"

"West, as far as I know. "

"Then we must be way east of you. Where are you now?"

"About five hundred miles east of Sancerre Bay. "

That meant we must be at least a thousand miles east of the bay. Icould see how that happened. Both times the boat had surfaced, it hadgone straight up, lift and drive operating together. There is aconstant wind away from the sunlight zone at high level, heated airthat has been lifted, and there is a wind at a lower level out of thedark zone, coming in to replace it. We'd gotten completely above thelatter and into the former. 

There was some yelling outside, and then I could hear Hans Cronje:

"Rocket's ready for vertical launching. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one; rocket off!"

There was a whoosh outside. Clifford, at the radio, repeated: "Rocketoff!" Then it banged, high overhead. "Did you see it? he asked. 

"Didn't see a thing, " Feinberg told him. 

"Hey, I know what they would see!" Tom Kivelson burst out. "Say we goup and set the woods on fire?"

"Hey, that's an idea. Listen, Mahatma; we have a big forest offlowerpot trees up on a plateau above us. Say we set that on fire. Think you could see it?"

"I don't see why not, even in this moonlight. Wait a minute, till Icall the other ships. "

Tom was getting into warm outer garments. Cesário got out the arctorch, and he and Tom and I raced out through the hut and outdoors. We hastened up the path that had been tramped and dragged to thewaterfall, got the lifters off the logs, and used them to helpourselves up over the rocks beside the waterfall. 

We hadn't bothered doing anything with the slashings, except to getthem out of our way, while we were working. Now we gathered them intopiles among the trees, placing them to take advantage of what littlewind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soonwe had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer woodof the trunks. It actually began to get uncomfortably hot, althoughthe temperature was now down around minus 90° Fahrenheit. 

Cesário was using the torch. After he got all the slashings on fire, he started setting fire to the trees themselves, going all around themand getting the soft outer wood burning. As soon as he had one treelit, he would run on to another. 

"This guy's a real pyromaniac, " Tom said to me, wiping his face on thesleeve of his father's parka which he was wearing over his own. 

"Sure I am, " Cesário took time out to reply. "You know who I was aboutfifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome. " Theosophists neverhesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they seeit, a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "Andlook at the job I did on Moscow, a little later. "

"Sure; I remember that. I was Napoleon then. What I'd have done to youif I'd caught you, too. "

"Yes, and I know what he was in another reincarnation, " Tom added. "Mrs. O'Leary's cow!"

Whether or not Cesário really had had any past astral experience, hemade a good job of firebugging on this forest. We waited around for awhile, far enough back for the heat to be just comfortable andpleasant, until we were sure that it was burning well on both sides ofthe frozen stream. It even made the double moonlight dim, and it wassending up huge clouds of fire-reddened smoke, and where the firedidn't light the smoke, it was black in the moonlight. There wouldn'tbe any excuse for anybody not seeing that. Finally, we started back tocamp. 

As soon as we got within earshot, we could hear the excitement. Everybody was jumping and yelling. "They see it! They see it!"

The boat was full of voices, too, from the radio:

"_Pequod_ to _Dirty Gertie_, we see it, too, just off our port bow. .. Yes, _Bulldog_, we see your running lights; we're right behind you. .. _Slasher_ to _Pequod_: we can't see you at all. Fire a flare, please. .. "

I pushed in to the radio. "This is Walter Boyd, _Times_ representativewith the _Javelin_ castaways, " I said. "Has anybody a portableaudiovisual pickup that I can use to get some pictures in to my paperwith?"

That started general laughter among the operators on the ships thatwere coming in. 

"We have one, Walt, " Oscar Fujisawa's voice told me. "I'm coming inahead in the _Pequod_ scout boat; I'll bring it with me. "

"Thanks, Oscar, " I said. Then I asked him: "Did you see Bish Warebefore you left port?"

"I should say I did!" Oscar told me. "You can thank Bish Ware thatwe're out looking for you now. Tell you about it as soon as we getin. "

14

THE RESCUE

The scout boat from the _Pequod_ came in about thirty minutes later, from up the ravine where the forest fire was sending up flame andsmoke. It passed over the boat and the hut beside it and the crowd ofus outside, and I could see Oscar in the machine gunner's seat aiminga portable audiovisual telecast camera. After he got a view of us, cheering and waving our arms, the boat came back and let down. We ranto it, all of us except the man with the broken leg and a couple whodidn't have enough clothes to leave the fire, and as the boat opened Icould hear Oscar saying:

"Now I am turning you over to Walter Boyd, the _Times_ correspondentwith the _Javelin_ castaways. "

He gave me the camera when he got out, followed by his gunner, and Igot a view of them, and of the boat lifting and starting west to guidethe ships in. Then I shut it off and said to him:

"What's this about Bish Ware? You said he was the one who started thesearch. "

"That's right, " Oscar said. "About thirty hours after you left port, he picked up some things that made him think the _Javelin_ had beensabotaged. He went to your father, and he contacted me--MohandasFeinberg and I still had our ships in port--and started calling the_Javelin_ by screen. When he couldn't get response, your father putout a general call to all hunter-ships. Nip Spazoni reported boardingthe _Javelin_, and then went searching the area where he thought you'dbeen hunting, picked up your locator signal, and found the _Javelin_on the bottom with her bow blown out and the boat berth open and theboat gone. We all figured you'd head south with the boat, and that'swhere we went to look. "

"Well, Bish Ware; he was dead drunk, last I heard of him, " JoeKivelson said. 

"Aah, just an act, " Oscar said. "That was to fool the city cops, andanybody else who needed fooling. It worked so well that he was able tocrash a party Steve Ravick was throwing at Hunters' Hall, after themeeting. That was where he picked up some hints that Ravick had a spyin the _Javelin_ crew. He spent the next twenty or so hours followingthat up, and heard about your man Devis straining his back. He foundout what Devis did on the _Javelin_, and that gave him the idea thatwhatever the sabotage was, it would be something to the engines. Whatdid happen, by the way?"

A couple of us told him, interrupting one another. He nodded. 

"That was what Nip Spazoni thought when he looked at the ship. Well, after that he talked to your father and to me, and then your fatherbegan calling and we heard from Nip. "

You could see that it absolutely hurt Joe Kivelson to have to owe hislife to Bish Ware. 

"Well, it's lucky anybody listened to him, " he grudged. "I wouldn'thave. "

"No, I guess maybe you wouldn't, " Oscar told him, not very cordially. "I think he did a mighty sharp piece of detective work, myself. "

I nodded, and then, all of a sudden, another idea, under _Bish Ware, Reformation of_, hit me. Detective work; that was it. We could use agood private detective agency in Port Sandor. Maybe I could talk himinto opening one. He could make a go of it. He had all kinds ofcontacts, he was handy with a gun, and if he recruited a couple oftough but honest citizens who were also handy with guns and built up aprotective and investigative organization, it would fill a long-feltneed and at the same time give him something beside Baldur honey-rumto take his mind off whatever he was drinking to keep from thinkingabout. If he only stayed sober half the time, that would be a fiftyper cent success. 

Ramón Llewellyn was wanting to know whether anybody'd done anythingabout Al Devis. 

"We didn't have time to bother with any Al Devises, " Oscar said. "Assoon as Bish figured out what had happened aboard the _Javelin_, weknew you'd need help and need it fast. He's keeping an eye on Al forus till we get back. "

"That's if he doesn't get any drunker and forget, " Joe said. 

Everybody, even Tom, looked at him in angry reproach. 

"We better find out what he drinks and buy you a jug of it, Joe, "Oscar's gunner told him. 

The _Helldiver_, which had been closest to us when our signal hadbeen picked up, was the first ship in. She let down into the ravine, after some maneuvering around, and Mohandas Feinberg and half a dozenof his crew got off with an improvised stretcher on a lifter and a lotof blankets. We got our broken-leg case aboard, and Abdullah Monnahan, and the man with the broken wrist. There were more ships coming, sothe rest of us waited. Joe Kivelson should have gone on the_Helldiver_, to have his broken arm looked at, but a captain's alwaysthe last man off, so he stayed. 

Oscar said he'd take Tom and Joe, and Glenn Murell and me, on the_Pequod_. I was glad of that. Oscar and his mate and his navigator areall bachelors, and they use the _Pequod_ to throw parties on whenthey're not hunting, so it is more comfortably fitted than the usualhunter-ship. Joe decided not to try to take anything away from theboat. He was going to do something about raising the _Javelin_, andthe salvage ship could stop here and pick everything up. 

"Well, one thing, " Oscar told him. "Bring that machine gun, and whatsmall arms you have. I think things are going to get sort of rough inPort Sandor, in the next twenty or so hours. "

I was beginning to think so, myself. The men who had gotten off the_Helldiver_, and the ones who got off Corkscrew Finnegan's _DirtyGertie_ and Nip Spazoni's _Bulldog_ were all talking about what wasgoing to have to be done about Steve Ravick. Bombing _Javelin_ wouldhave been a good move for Ravick, if it had worked. It hadn't, though, and now it was likely to be the thing that would finish him for good. 

It wasn't going to be any picnic, either. He had his gang ofhoodlums, and he could count on Morton Hallstock's twenty or thirtycity police; they'd put up a fight, and a hard one. And they were alltogether, and the hunter fleet was coming in one ship at a time. Iwondered if the Ravick-Hallstock gang would try to stop them at thewater front, or concentrate at Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Buildingto stand siege. I knew one thing, though. However things turned out, there was going to be an awful lot of shooting in Port Sandor beforeit was over. 

Finally, everybody had been gotten onto one ship or another but Oscarand his gunner and the Kivelsons and Murell and myself. Then the_Pequod_, which had been circling around at five thousand feet, letdown and we went aboard. The conning tower was twice as long as usualon a hunter-ship, and furnished with a lot of easy chairs and a coupleof couches. There was a big combination view and communication screen, and I hurried to that and called the _Times_. 

Dad came on, as soon as I finished punching the wave-lengthcombination. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he was wearing a gun. Iguess we made kind of a show of ourselves, but, after all, he'd comewithin an ace of being all out of family, and I'd come within an aceof being all out, period. After we got through with the happy reunion, I asked him what was the situation in Port Sandor. He shook his head. 

"Not good, Walt. The word's gotten around that there was a bombplanted aboard the _Javelin_, and everybody's taking just one guesswho did it. We haven't expressed any opinions one way or another, yet. We've been waiting for confirmation. "

"Set for recording, " I said. "I'll give you the story as far as weknow it. "

He nodded, reached one hand forward out of the picture, and thennodded again. I began with our killing the monster and going down tothe bottom after the cutting-up, and the explosion. I told him what wehad seen after leaving the ship and circling around it in the boat. 

"The condition of the hull looked very much like the effect of acharge of high explosive exploding in the engine room, " I finished. 

"We got some views of it, transmitted in by Captain Spazoni, of the_Bulldog_, " he said. "Captain Courtland, of the Spaceport Police, hasexpressed the opinion that it could hardly be anything but a smalldemolition bomb. Would you say accident can be ruled out?"

"I would. There was nobody in the engine room at the time; we wereresting on the bottom, and all hands were in the wardroom. "

"That's good enough, " Dad said. "We'll run it as 'very convincing andalmost conclusive' evidence of sabotage. " He'd shut off the recorderfor that. "Can I get the story of how you abandoned ship and landed, now?"

His hand moved forward, and the recorder went on again. I gave a briefaccount of our experiences in the boat, the landing and wreck, and ourcamp, and the firewood cutting, and how we had repaired the radio. JoeKivelson talked for a while, and so did Tom and Glenn Murell. I wasgoing to say something when they finished, and I sat down on one ofthe couches. I distinctly remember leaning back and relaxing. 

The next thing I knew, Oscar Fujisawa's mate was shaking me awake. 

"We're in sight of Port Sandor, " he was telling me. 

I mumbled something, and then sat up and found that I had been lyingdown and that somebody had thrown a blanket over me. Tom Kivelson wasstill asleep under a blanket on the other couch, across from me. Theclock over the instrument panel had moved eight G. S. Hours. JoeKivelson wasn't in sight, but Glenn Murell and Oscar were drinkingcoffee. I went to the front window, and there was a scarlet glow onthe horizon ahead of me. 

That's another sight Cesário Vieria will miss, if he takes his nextreincarnation off Fenris. Really, it's nothing but damp, warm air, blown up from the exhaust of the city's main ventilation plant, condensing and freezing as it hits the cold air outside, andfloodlighted from below. I looked at it for a while, and then gotmyself a cup of coffee and when I had finished it I went to thescreen. 

It was still tuned to the _Times_, and Mohandas Feinberg was sittingin front of it, smoking one of his twisted black cigars. He had a big10-mm Sterberg stuffed into the waistband of his trousers. 

"You guys poked along, " he said. "I always thought the _Pequod_ wasfast. We got in three hours ago. "

"Who else is in?"

"Corkscrew and some of his gang are here at the _Times_, now. _Bulldog_ and _Slasher_ just got in a while ago. Some of the shipsthat were farthest west and didn't go to your camp have been in quitea while. We're having a meeting here. We are organizing the PortSandor Vigilance Committee and Renegade Hunters' Co-operative. "

15

VIGILANTES

When the _Pequod_ surfaced under the city roof, I saw what wascooking. There were twenty or more ships, either on the concrete docksor afloat in the pools. The waterfront was crowded with men in boatclothes, forming little knots and breaking up to join other groups, all milling about talking excitedly. Most of them were armed; not justknives and pistols, which is normal costume, but heavy rifles orsubmachine guns. Down to the left, there was a commotion and peoplewere getting out of the way as a dozen men come pushing through, towing a contragravity skid with a 50-mm ship's gun on it. I began notliking the looks of things, and Glenn Murell, who had come up from hisnap below, was liking it even less. He'd come to Fenris to buytallow-wax, not to fight a civil war. I didn't want any of that stuff, either. Getting rid of Ravick, Hallstock and Belsher would come underthe head of civic improvements, but towns are rarely improved byhaving battles fought in them. 

Maybe I should have played dumb and waited till I'd talked to Dad faceto face, before making any statements about what had happened on the_Javelin_, I thought. Then I shrugged that off. From the minute the_Javelin_ had failed to respond to Dad's screen-call and the generalcall had gone out to the hunter-fleet, everybody had been positive ofwhat had happened. It was too much like the loss of the _Claymore_, which had made Ravick president of the Co-op. 

Port Sandor had just gotten all of Steve Ravick that anybody couldtake. They weren't going to have any more of him, and that was allthere was to it. 

Joe Kivelson was grumbling about his broken arm; that meant that whena fight started, he could only go in swinging with one fist, and thatwould cut the fun in half. Another reason why Joe is a wretched shotis that he doesn't like pistols. They're a little too impersonal tosuit him. They weren't for Oscar Fujisawa; he had gotten aMars-Consolidated Police Special out of the chart-table drawer and putit on, and he was loading cartridges into a couple of spare clips. Down on the main deck, the gunner was serving out small arms, andthere was an acrimonious argument because everybody wanted a chopperand there weren't enough choppers to go around. Oscar went over to theladder head and shouted down at them. 

"Knock off the argument, down there; you people are all going to stayon the ship. I'm going up to the _Times_; as soon as I'm off, floather out into the inner channel and keep her afloat, and don't letanybody aboard you're not sure of. "

"That where we're going?" Joe Kivelson asked. 

"Sure. That's the safest place in town for Mr. Murell and I want tofind out exactly what's going on here. "

"Well, here; you don't need to put me in storage, " Murell protested. "I can take care of myself. "

Add, Famous Last Words, I thought. 

"I'm sure of it, but we can't take any chances, " Oscar told him. "Right now, you are Fenris's Indispensable Man. If you're not aroundto buy tallow-wax, Ravick's won the war. "

Oscar and Murell and Joe and Tom Kivelson and I went down into theboat; somebody opened the port and we floated out and lifted onto theSecond Level Down. There was a fringe of bars and cafes and dancehalls and outfitters and ship chandlers for a couple of blocks back, and then we ran into the warehouse district. Oscar ran up town to avehicle shaft above the Times Building, careful to avoid theneighborhood of Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Building. 

There was a big crowd around the _Times_, mostly business districtpeople and quite a few women. They were mostly out on the street andinside the street-floor vehicle port. Not a disorderly crowd, but Inoticed quite a few rifles and submachine guns. As we slipped into thevehicle port, they recognized the _Pequod's_ boat, and there was arush after it. We had trouble getting down without setting it onanybody, and more trouble getting out of it. They were allfriendly--too friendly for comfort. They began cheering us as soon asthey saw us. 

Oscar got Joe Kivelson, with his arm in a sling, out in front where hecould be seen, and began shouting: "Please make way; this man's beeninjured. Please don't crowd; we have an injured man here. " The crowdbegan shoving back, and in the rear I could hear them taking it up:"Joe Kivelson; he's been hurt. They're carrying Joe Kivelson off. "That made Joe curse a blue streak, and somebody said, "Oh, he's beenhurt real bad; just listen to him!"

When we got up to the editorial floor, Dad and Bish Ware and a fewothers were waiting at the elevator for us. Bish was dressed as healways was, in his conservative black suit, with the organic opalglowing in his neckcloth. Dad had put a coat on over his gun. Julio waswearing two pistols and a knife a foot long. There was a big crowd inthe editorial office--ships' officers, merchants, professional people. Inoticed Sigurd Ngozori, the banker, and Professor Hartzenbosch--he waswearing a pistol, too, rather self-consciously--and the Zen Buddhistpriest, who evidently had something under his kimono. They all greetedus enthusiastically and shook hands with us. I noticed that Joe Kivelsonwas something less than comfortable about shaking hands with Bish Ware. The fact that Bish had started the search for the _Javelin_ that hadsaved our lives didn't alter the opinion Joe had formed long ago thatBish was just a worthless old souse. Joe's opinions are allcollapsium-plated and impervious to outside influence. 

I got Bish off to one side as we were going into the editorial room. 

"How did you get onto it?" I asked. 

He chuckled deprecatingly. "No trick at all, " he said. "I justcirculated and bought drinks for people. The trouble with Ravick'sgang, it's an army of mercenaries. They'll do anything for the priceof a drink, and as long as my rich uncle stays solvent, I always havethe price of a drink. In the five years I've spent in this Garden Spotof the Galaxy, I've learned some pretty surprising things about SteveRavick's operations. "

"Well, surely, nobody was going around places like Martian Joe's orOne Eye Swanson's boasting that they'd put a time bomb aboard the_Javelin_, " I said. 

"It came to pretty nearly that, " Bish said. "You'd be amazed at howcareless people who've had their own way for a long time can get. Forinstance, I've known for some time that Ravick has spies among thecrews of a lot of hunter-ships. I tried, a few times, to warn some ofthese captains, but except for Oscar Fujisawa and Corkscrew Finnegan, none of them would listen to me. It wasn't that they had any doubtthat Ravick would do that; they just wouldn't believe that any oftheir crew were traitors. 

"I've suspected this Devis for a long time, and I've spoken to RamónLlewellyn about him, but he just let it go in one ear and out theother. For one thing, Devis always has more money to spend than hisshare of the _Javelin_ take would justify. He's the showoff type;always buying drinks for everybody and playing the big shot. Claims towin it gambling, but all the times I've ever seen him gambling, he'sbeen losing. 

"I knew about this hoard of wax we saw the day Murell came in for sometime. I always thought it was being held out to squeeze a better priceout of Belsher and Ravick. Then this friend of mine with whom I wastalking aboard the _Peenemünde_ mentioned that Murell seemed to knowmore about the tallow-wax business than about literary matters, andafter what happened at the meeting and afterward, I began putting twoand two together. When I crashed that party at Hunters' Hall, I hearda few things, and they all added up. 

"And then, about thirty hours after the Javelin left port, I was inthe Happy Haven, and who should I see, buying drinks for the house, but Al Devis. I let him buy me one, and he told me he'd strained hisback hand-lifting a power-unit cartridge. A square dance got started alittle later, and he got into it. His back didn't look very strainedto me. And then I heard a couple of characters in One Eye Swanson'sbetting that the _Javelin_ would never make port again. "

I knew what had happened from then on. If it hadn't been for BishWare, we'd still be squatting around a fire down on the coast ofHermann Reuch's Land till it got too cold to cut wood, and then we'dfreeze. I mentioned that, but Bish just shrugged it off and suggestedwe go on in and see what was happening inside. 

"Where is Al Devis?" I asked. "A lot of people want to talk to him. "

"I know they do. I want to get to him first, while he's still incondition to do some talking of his own. But he just dropped out ofsight, about the time your father started calling the _Javelin_. "

"Ah!" I drew a finger across under my chin, and mentioned the class ofpeople who tell no tales. Bish shook his head slowly. 

"I doubt it, " he said. "Not unless it was absolutely necessary. Thatsort of thing would have a discouraging effect the next time Ravickwanted a special job done. I'm pretty sure he isn't at Hunters' Hall, but he's hiding somewhere. "

Joe Kivelson had finished telling what had happened aboard the_Javelin_ when we joined the main crowd, and everybody was talkingabout what ought to be done with Steve Ravick. Oddly enough, the mostbloodthirsty were the banker and the professor. Well, maybe it wasn'tso odd. They were smart enough to know what Steve Ravick was reallydoing to Port Sandor, and it hurt them as much as it did the hunters. Dad and Bish seemed to be the only ones present who weren't in favorof going down to Hunters' Hall right away and massacring everybody init, and then doing the same at the Municipal Building. 

"That's what I say!" Joe Kivelson was shouting. "Let's go clean outboth rats' nests. Why, there must be a thousand hunter-ship men at thewaterfront, and look how many people in town who want to help. We gotenough men to eat Hunters' Hall whole. "

"You'll find it slightly inedible, Joe, " Bish told him. "Ravick hasabout thirty men of his own and fifteen to twenty city police. He hasat least four 50-mm's on the landing stage above, and he has half adozen heavy machine guns and twice that many light 7-mm's. "

"Bish is right, " somebody else said. "They have the vehicle port onthe street level barricaded, and they have the two floors on the levelbelow sealed off. We got men all around it and nobody can get out, butif we try to blast our way in, it's going to cost us like Nifflheim. "

"You mean you're just going to sit here and talk about it and not doanything?" Joe demanded. 

"We're going to do something, Joe, " Dad told him. "But we've got totalk about what we're going to do, and how we're going to do it, orit'll be us who'll get wiped out. "

"Well, we'll have to decide on what it'll be, pretty quick, " MohandasGandhi Feinberg said. 

"What are things like at the Municipal Building?" Oscar Fujisawaasked. "You say Ravick has fifteen to twenty city cops at Hunters'Hall. Where are the rest of them? That would only be five to ten. "

"At the Municipal Building, " Bish said. "Hallstock's holed up there, trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is happening. "

"Good. Let's go to the Municipal Building, first, " Oscar said. "Take acouple of hundred men, make a lot of noise, shoot out a few windowsand all yell, 'Hang Mort Hallstock!' loud enough, and he'll recall thecops he has at Hunters' Hall to save his own neck. Then the rest of uscan make a quick rush and take Hunters' Hall. "

"We'll have to keep our main force around Hunters' Hall while we'redemonstrating at the Municipal Building, " Corkscrew Finnegan said. "Wecan't take a chance on Ravick's getting away. "

"I couldn't care less whether he gets away or not, " Oscar said. "Idon't want Steve Ravick's blood. I just want him out of theCo-operative, and if he runs out from it now, he'll never get backin. "

"You want him, and you want him alive, " Bish Ware said. "Ravick hasclose to four million sols banked on Terra. Every millisol of that'smoney he's stolen from the monster-hunters of this planet, through theCo-operative. If you just take him out and string him up, you'll havethe Nifflheim of a time getting hold of any of it. "

That made sense to all the ship captains, even Joe Kivelson, after Dadreminded him of how much the salvage job on the _Javelin_ was going tocost. It took Sigurd Ngozori a couple of minutes to see the point, butthen, hanging Steve Ravick wasn't going to cost the Fidelity & TrustCompany anything. 

"Well, this isn't my party, " Glenn Murell said, "but I'm too much of abusinessman to see how watching somebody kick on the end of a rope isworth four million sols. "

"Four million sols, " Bish said, "and wondering, the rest of yourlives, whether it was justice or just murder. "

The Buddhist priest looked at him, a trifle startled. After all, hewas the only clergyman in the crowd; he ought to have thought of that, instead of this outrageous mock-bishop. 

"I think it's a good scheme, " Dad said. "Don't mass any more menaround Hunters' Hall than necessary. You don't want the police to beafraid to leave when Hallstock calls them in to help him at MunicipalBuilding. "

Bish Ware rose. "I think I'll see what I can do at Hunters' Hall, inthe meantime, " he said. "I'm going to see if there's some way in fromthe First or Second Level Down. Walt, do you still have that sleep-gasgadget of yours?"

I nodded. It was, ostensibly, nothing but an oversized pocket lighter, just the sort of a thing a gadget-happy kid would carry around. Itworked perfectly as a lighter, too, till you pushed in on a littlegismo on the side. Then, instead of producing a flame, it squirtedout a small jet of sleep gas. It would knock out a man; it wouldalmost knock out a Zarathustra veldtbeest. I'd bought it from aspaceman on the _Cape Canaveral_. I'd always suspected that he'dstolen it on Terra, because it was an expensive little piece of work, but was I going to ride a bicycle six hundred and fifty light-years tofind out who it belonged to? One of the chemists' shops at Port Sandormade me up some fills for it, and while I had never had to use it, itwas a handy thing to have in some of the places I had to followstories into, and it wouldn't do anybody any permanent damage, the waya gun would. 

"Yes; it's down in my room. I'll get it for you, " I said. 

"Be careful, Bish, " Dad said. "That gang would kill you sooner thanlook at you. "

"Who, me?" Bish staggered into a table and caught hold of it. "Who'dwanna hurt me? I'm just good ol' Bish Ware. _Good_ ol' Bish! nobodyhurt him; he'sh everybody's friend. " He let go of the table andstaggered into a chair, upsetting it. Then he began to sing:

 "_Come all ye hardy spacemen, and harken while I tell Of fluorine-tainted Nifflheim, the Planetary Hell. _"

Involuntarily, I began clapping my hands. It was a superb piece ofacting--Bish Ware sober playing Bish Ware drunk, and that's not aneasy role for anybody to play. Then he picked up the chair and satdown on it. 

"Who do you have around Hunters' Hall, and how do I get past them?"he asked. "I don't want a clipful from somebody on my own side. "

Nip Spazoni got a pencil and a pad of paper and began drawing a plan. 

"This is Second Level Down, " he said. "We have a car here, with acouple of men in it. It's watching this approach here. And we have aship's boat, over here, with three men in it, and a 7-mm machine gun. And another car--no, a jeep, here. Now, up on the First Level Down, wehave two ships' boats, one here, and one here. The password is'Exotic, ' and the countersign is 'Organics. '" He grinned at Murell. "Compliment to your company. "

"Good enough. I'll want a bottle of liquor. My breath needs a littletouching up, and I may want to offer somebody a drink. If I could getinside that place, there's no telling what I might be able to do. Ifone man can get in and put a couple of guards to sleep, an army canget in after him. "

Brother, I thought, if he pulls this one off, he's in. Nobody aroundPort Sandor will ever look down on Bish Ware again, not even JoeKivelson. I began thinking about the detective agency idea again, andwondered if he'd want a junior partner. Ware & Boyd, PlanetwideDetective Agency. 

I went down to the floor below with him and got him my lightergas-projector and a couple of spare fills for it, and found the bottleof Baldur honey-rum that Dad had been sure was around somewhere. I waskind of doubtful about that, and he noticed my hesitation in giving itto him and laughed. 

"Don't worry, Walt, " he said. "This is strictly for protectivecoloration--and odoration. I shall be quite sparing with it, I assureyou. "

I shook hands with him, trying not to be too solemn about it, and hewent down in the elevator and I went up the stairs to the floor above. By this time, the Port Sandor Vigilance Committee had gotten itselfsorted out. The rank-and-file Vigilantes were standing around yackingat one another, and a smaller group--Dad and Sigurd Ngozori and theReverend Sugitsuma and Oscar and Joe and Corkscrew and Nip and theMahatma--were in a huddle around Dad's editorial table, discussingstrategy and tactics. 

"Well, we'd better get back to the docks before it starts, " Corkscrewwas saying. "No hunter crew will follow anybody but their own ships'officers. "

"We'll have to have somebody the uptown people will follow, " Oscarsaid. "These people won't take orders from a woolly-pants huntercaptain. How about you, Sigurd?"

The banker shook his head. "Ralph Boyd's the man for that, " he said. 

"Ralph's needed right here; this is G. H. Q. , " Oscar said. "This is ajob that's going to have to be run from one central command. We've gotto make sure the demonstration against Hallstock and the operationagainst Hunters' Hall are synchronized. "

"I have about a hundred and fifty workmen, and they all have or canget something to shoot with, " another man said. I looked around, andsaw that it was Casmir Oughourlian, of Rodriguez & OughourlianShipyards. "They'll follow me, but I'm not too well known uptown. "

"Hey, Professor Hartzenbosch, " Mohandas Feinberg said. "You're arespectable-looking duck; you ever have any experience leading alynch mob?"

Everybody laughed. So, to his credit, did the professor. 

"I've had a lot of experience with children, " the professor said. "Children are all savages. So are lynch mobs. Things that are equal tothe same thing are equal to one another. Yes, I'd say so. "

"All right, " Dad said. "Say I'm Chief of Staff, or something. Oscar, you and Joe and Corkscrew and the rest of you decide who's going totake over-all command of the hunters. Casmir, you'll command yourworkmen, and anybody else from the shipyards and engine works andrepair shops and so on. Sigurd, you and the Reverend, here, andProfessor Hartzenbosch gather up all the uptown people you can. Now, we'll have to decide on how much force we need to scare MortHallstock, and how we're going to place the main force that willattack Hunters' Hall. "

"I think we ought to wait till we see what Bish Ware can do, " Oscarsaid. "Get our gangs together, and find out where we're going to putwho, but hold off the attack for a while. If he can get insideHunters' Hall, we may not even need this demonstration at theMunicipal Building. "

Joe Kivelson started to say something. The rest of his fellow shipcaptains looked at him severely, and he shut up. Dad kept on jottingdown figures of men and 50-mm guns and vehicles and auto weapons wehad available. 

He was still doing it when the fire alarm started. 

16

CIVIL WAR POSTPONED

The moaner went on for thirty seconds, like a banshee mourning itsnearest and dearest. It was everywhere, Main City Level and the fourlevels below. What we have in Port Sandor is a volunteer fireorganization--or disorganization, rather--of six independentcompanies, each of which cherishes enmity for all the rest. It's thebest we can do, though; if we depended on the city government, we'dhave no fire protection at all. They do have a central alarm system, though, and the _Times_ is connected with that. 

Then the moaner stopped, and there were four deep whistle blasts forFourth Ward, and four more shrill ones for Bottom Level. There was aninstant's silence, and then a bedlam of shouts from the hunter-boatcaptains. That was where the tallow-wax that was being held out fromthe Co-operative was stored. 

"Shut up!" Dad roared, the loudest I'd ever heard him speak. "Shut upand listen!"

"Fourth Ward, Bottom Level, " a voice from the fire-alarm speaker said. "This is a tallow-wax fire. It is not the Co-op wax; it is wax storedin an otherwise disused area. It is dangerously close to stored 50-mmcannon ammunition, and it is directly under the pulpwood lumber plant, on the Third Level Down, and if the fire spreads up to that, it willendanger some of the growing vats at the carniculture plant on theSecond Level Down. I repeat, this is a tallow-wax fire. Do not usewater or chemical extinguishers. "

About half of the Vigilantes, businessmen who belonged to one oranother of the volunteer companies had bugged out for their firestations already. The Buddhist priest and a couple of doctors werealso leaving. The rest, mostly hunter-ship men, were standing aroundlooking at one another. 

Oscar Fujisawa gave a sour laugh. "That diversion idea of mine was allright, " he said. "The only trouble was that Steve Ravick thought of itfirst. "

"You think he started the fire?" Dad began, and then gave a sourerlaugh than Oscar's. "Am I dumb enough to ask that?"

I had started assembling equipment as soon as the feint on theMunicipal Building and the attack on Hunters' Hall had gotten into thediscussion stage. I would use a jeep that had a heavy-duty audiovisualrecording and transmitting outfit on it, and for situations where I'dhave to leave the jeep and go on foot, I had a lighter outfit like theone Oscar had brought with him in the Pequod's boat. Then I had myradio for two-way conversation with the office. And, because thiswasn't likely to be the sort of war in which the rights ofnoncombatants like war correspondents would be taken very seriously, I had gotten out my Sterberg 7. 7-mm. 

Dad saw me buckling it on, and seemed rather distressed. 

"Better leave that, Walt, " he said. "You don't want to get into anyshooting. "

Logical, I thought. If you aren't prepared for something, it justwon't happen. There's an awful lot of that sort of thinking going on. As I remember my Old Terran history, it was even indulged in bygovernments, at one time. None of them exists now. 

"You know what all crawls into the Bottom Level, " I reminded him. "Ifyou don't, ask Mr. Murell, here. One sent him to the hospital. "

Dad nodded; I had a point there. The abandoned sections of BottomLevel are full of tread-snails and other assorted little nasties, andthe heat of the fire would stir them all up and start them movingaround. Even aside from the possibility that, having started the fire, Steve Ravick's gang would try to take steps to keep it from being putout too soon, a gun was going to be a comforting companion, downthere. 

"Well, stay out of any fighting. Your job's to get the news, not playhero in gun fights. I'm no hero; that's why I'm sixty years old. Inever knew many heroes that got that old. "

It was my turn to nod. On that, Dad had a point. I said somethingabout getting the news, not making it, and checked the chamber andmagazine of the Sterberg, and then slung my radio and picked up theaudiovisual outfit. 

Tom and Joe Kivelson had left already, to round up the scatteredJavelin crew for fire fighting. The attack on the Municipal Buildingand on Hunters' Hall had been postponed, but it wasn't going to beabandoned. Oscar and Professor Hartzenbosch and Dad and a couple ofothers were planning some sort of an observation force of a few menfor each place, until the fire had been gotten out or under control. Glenn Murell decided he'd go out with me, at least as far as the fire, so we went down to the vehicle port and got the jeep out. Main CityLevel Broadway was almost deserted; everybody had gone down belowwhere the excitement was. We started down the nearest vehicle shaftand immediately got into a jam, above a lot of stuff that was goinginto the shaft from the First Level Down, mostly manipulators and thatsort of thing. There were no police around, natch, and a lot ofvolunteers were trying to direct traffic and getting in each other'sway. I got some views with the jeep camera, just to remind any of thepublic who needed reminding what our city administration wasn't doingin an emergency. A couple of pieces of apparatus, a chemical tank anda pumper marked SALAMANDER VOLUNTEER FIRE COMPANY NO. 3 came along, veered out of the jam, and continued uptown. 

"If they know another way down, maybe we'd better follow them, " Murellsuggested. 

"They're not going down. They're going to the lumber plant, in casethe fire spreads upward, " I said. "They wouldn't be taking that sortof equipment to a wax fire. "

"Why not?"

I looked at him. "I thought you were in the wax business, " I said. 

"I am, but I'm no chemist. I don't know anything about how wax burns. All I know is what it's used for, roughly, and who's in the market forit. "

"Well, you know about those jumbo molecules, don't you?" I asked. "They have everything but the kitchen sink in them, including enoughoxygen to sustain combustion even under water or in a vacuum. Notenough oxygen to make wax explode, like powder, but enough to keep itburning. Chemical extinguishers are all smothering agents, and youjust can't smother a wax fire. And water's worse than useless. "

He wanted to know why. 

"Burning wax is a liquid. The melting point is around 250 degreesCentigrade. Wax ignites at 750. It has no boiling point, unless that'sthe burning point. Throw water on a wax fire and you get a steamexplosion, just as you would if you threw it on molten metal, and thatthrows the fire around and spreads it. "

"If it melts that far below the ignition point, wouldn't it run awaybefore it caught fire?"

"Normally, it would. That's why I'm sure this fire was a touch-off. Ithink somebody planted a thermoconcentrate bomb. A thermoconcentrateflame is around 850 Centigrade; the wax would start melting andburning almost instantaneously. In any case, the fire will be at thebottom of the stacks. If it started there, melted wax would run downfrom above and keep the fire going, and if it started at the top, burning wax would run down and ignite what's below. "

"Well, how in blazes do you put a wax fire out?" he wanted to know. 

"You don't. You just pull away all the wax that hasn't caught fireyet, and then try to scatter the fire and let it burn itself out. .. . Here's our chance!"

All this conversation we had been screaming into each other's ears, inthe midst of a pandemonium of yelling, cursing, siren howling and bellclanging; just then I saw a hole in the vertical traffic jam and edgedthe jeep into it, at the same time remembering that the jeep carried, and I was entitled to use, a fire siren. I added its howls to thegeneral uproar and dropped down one level. Here a string of bigmanipulators were trying to get in from below, sprouting claw hooksand grapples and pusher arms in all directions. I made my sirenimitate a tail-tramped tomcat a couple of times, and got in amongthem. 

Bottom Level Broadway was a frightful mess, and I realized that we hadcome down right between two units of the city power plant, bigmass-energy converters. The street was narrower than above, and ranfor a thousand yards between ceiling-high walls, and everything wasbottlenecked together. I took the jeep up till we were almost scrapingthe ceiling, and Murell, who had seen how the audiovisual was used, took over with it while I concentrated on inching forward. The noisewas even worse down here than it had been above; we didn't attempt totalk. 

Finally, by impudence and plain foolhardiness, I got the jeep forwarda few hundred yards, and found myself looking down on a big derrickwith a fifty-foot steel boom tipped with a four-clawed grapple, shielded in front with sheet steel like a gun shield. It was paintedwith the emblem of the Hunters' Co-operative, but the three men on itlooked like shipyard workers. I didn't get that, at all. The thing hadbeen built to handle burning wax, and was one of three kept on theSecond Level Down under Hunters' Hall. I wondered if Bish Ware hadfound a way for a gang to get in at the bottom of Hunters' Hall. Isimply couldn't see Steve Ravick releasing equipment to fight the firehis goons had started for him in the first place. 

I let down a few feet, gave a polite little scream with my siren, andthen yelled down to the men on it:

"Where'd that thing come from?"

"Hunters' Hall; Steve Ravick sent it. The other two are up at the firealready, and if this mess ahead doesn't get straightened out. .. . " Fromthere on, his remarks were not suitable for publication in a familyjournal like the _Times_. 

I looked up ahead, rising to the ceiling again, and saw what was thematter. It was one of the dredgers from the waterfront, really asubmarine scoop shovel, that they used to keep the pools and the innerchannel from sanding up. I wasn't surprised it was jammed; I couldn'tsee how they'd gotten this far uptown with it. I got a few shots ofthat, and then unhooked the handphone of my radio. Julio Kubanoffanswered. 

"You getting everything I'm sending in?" I asked. 

"Yes. What's that two-em-dashed thing up ahead, one of the harbordredgers?"

"That's right. Hey, look at this, once. " I turned the audiovisual downon the claw derrick. "The men on it look like Rodriguez &Oughourlian's people, but they say Steve Ravick sent it. What do youknow about it?"

"Hey, Ralph! What's this Walt's picked up about Ravick sendingequipment to fight the fire?" he yelled. 

Dad came over, and nodded. "It wasn't Ravick, it was Mort Hallstock. He commandeered the Co-op equipment and sent it up, " he said. "Hecalled me and wanted to know whom to send for it that Ravick's gangwouldn't start shooting at right away. Casmir Oughourlian sent some ofhis men. "

Up front, something seemed to have given way. The dredger wentlurching forward, and everything moved off after it. 

"I get it, " I said. "Hallstock's getting ready to dump Ravick out theairlock. He sees, now, that Ravick's a dead turkey; he doesn't want togo into the oven along with him. "

"Walt, can't you ever give anybody credit with trying to do somethingdecent, once in a while?" Dad asked. 

"Sure I can. Decent people. There are a lot of them around, but MortHallstock isn't one of them. There was an Old Terran politician namedAl 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, " Dadadmitted. "I understand Mort's up at the fire now. Don't spit in hiseye 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, Ithought. Maybe Mort's afraid the people will start running Fenrisagain, 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 theend of the nuclear-power plant buildings--and cut off into opencountry. That is to say, nothing but pillar-buildings two hundredyards apart and piles of bagged mineral nutrients for the hydroponicfarms. We could see a blaze of electric lights ahead where the firemust be, and after a while we began to run into lorries andlifter-skids hauling ammunition away from the area. Then I could see abig mushroom of greasy black smoke spreading out close to the ceiling. The electric lights were brighter ahead, and there was a confused roarof voices and sirens and machines. 

And there was a stink. 

There are a lot of stinks around Port Sandor, though the ventilationsystem carries most of them off before they can spread out of theirown areas. The plant that reprocesses sewage to get organic nutrientsfor the hydroponic farms, and the plant that digests hydroponicvegetation to make nutrients for the carniculture vats. Thecarniculture vats themselves aren't any flower gardens. And the pulpplant where our synthetic lumber is made. But the worst stink there ison 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 usethe camera myself. The wax was stacked in piles twenty feet high, which gave thirty feet of clear space above them, but the sectionwhere they had been piled was badly cut up by walls and full of smallextra columns to support the weight of the pulp plant above and thecarniculture vats on the level over that. However, the pilesthemselves weren't separated by any walls, and the fire could spreadto the whole stock of wax. There were more men and vehicles on the jobthan room for them to work. I passed over the heads of the crowdaround the edges and got onto a comparatively unobstructed side whereI could watch and get views of the fire fighters pulling down the bigskins of wax and loading them onto contragravity skids to be hauledaway. It still wasn't too hot to work unshielded, and they weren'tanywhere near the burning stacks, but the fire seemed to be spreadingrapidly. The dredger and the three shielded derricks hadn't gotteninto action yet. 

I circled around clockwise, dodging over, under and around the skidsand lorries hauling wax out of danger. They were taking them into thesection through which I had brought the jeep a few minutes before, andjust dumping them on top of the piles of mineral nutrients. 

The operation seemed to be directed from an improvised headquarters inthe area that had been cleared of ammunition. There were a couple ofview screens and a radio, operated by women. I saw one of the teachersI'd gone to school to a few years ago, and Joe Kivelson's wife, andOscar Fujisawa's current girl friend, and Sigurd Ngozori's secretary, and farther off there was an equally improvised coffee-and-sandwichstand. I grounded the jeep, and Murell and I got out and went over tothe headquarters. Joe Kivelson seemed to be in charge. 

I have, I believe, indicated here and there that Joe isn't one of ourmightier intellects. There are a lot of better heads, but Joe can berelied upon to keep his, no matter what is happening or how bad itgets. He was sitting on an empty box, his arm in a now-filthy sling, and one of Mohandas Feinberg's crooked black cigars in his mouth. Usually, Joe smokes a pipe, but a cigar's less bother for atemporarily one-armed man. Standing in front of him, like a schoolboyin front of the teacher, was Mayor Morton Hallstock. 

"But, Joe, they simply won't!" His Honor was wailing. "I did talk toMr. Fieschi; he says he knows this is an emergency, but there's astrict company directive against using the spaceport area for storageof anything but cargo that has either just come in or is being shippedout on the next ship. "

"What's this all about?" Murell asked. 

"Fieschi, at the spaceport, won't let us store this wax in thespaceport area, " Joe said. "We got to get it stored somewhere; we needa lot of floor space to spread this fire out on, once we get into it. We have to knock the burning wax cylinders apart, and get themseparated enough so that burning wax won't run from one to another. "

"Well, why can't we store it in the spaceport area?" Murell wanted toknow. "It is going out on the next ship. I'm consigning it to ExoticOrganics, in Buenos Aires. " He turned to Joe. "Are those skins allmarked to indicate who owns them?"

"That's right. And any we gather up loose, from busted skins, we canfigure some way of settling how much anybody's entitled to from them. "

"All right. Get me a car and run me to the spaceport. Call them andtell them I'm on the way. I'll talk to Fieschi myself. "

"Martha!" Joe yelled to his wife. "Car and driver, quick. And thencall the spaceport for me; get Mr. Fieschi or Mr. Mansour on screen. "

Inside two minutes, a car came in and picked Murell up. By that time, Joe was talking to somebody at the spaceport. I called the paper, andtold Dad that Murell was buying the wax for his company as fast as itwas being pulled off the fire, at eighty centisols a pound. He saidthat would go out as a special bulletin right away. Then I talked toMorton Hallstock, and this time he wasn't giving me any of therun-along-sonny routine. I told him, rather hypocritically, what afine thing he'd done, getting that equipment from Hunters' Hall. Isuspect I sounded as though I were mayor of Port Sandor and Hallstock, just seventeen years old, had done something the grownups thought wasreal smart for a kid. If so, he didn't seem to notice. Somebodyconnected with the press was being nice to him. I asked him whereSteve Ravick was. 

"Mr. Ravick is at Hunters' Hall, " he said. "He thought it would beunwise to make a public appearance just now. " Oh, brother, what anunderstatement! "There seems to be a lot of public feeling againsthim, due to some misconception that he was responsible for whathappened to Captain Kivelson's ship. Of course, that is absolutelyfalse. Mr. Ravick had absolutely nothing to do with that. He wasn'tanywhere near the _Javelin_. "

"Where's Al Devis?" I asked. 

"Who? I don't believe I know him. "

After Hallstock got into his big black air-limousine and took off, JoeKivelson gave a short laugh. 

"I could have told him where Al Devis is, " he said. "No, I couldn't, either, " he corrected himself. "That's a religious question, and Idon't discuss religion. "

I shut off my radio in a hurry. "Who got him?" I asked. 

Joe named a couple of men from one of the hunter-ships. 

"Here's what happened. There were six men on guard here; they had ajeep 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 werebringing it up from the docks, and where should they put it? Well, themen on guard believed that; Pierre'd gone off into the twilight zoneafter the _Helldiver_ contacted us, and he could have gotten a monsterin the meantime. 

"Well, they told these fellows that there was more room over on theother side of the stacks, and the lorry went up above the stacks andstarted across, and when they were about the middle, one of the men init 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 ofthem was at the machine gun. They'd lifted to follow the lorry overand 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 andlet go. This fellow hadn't been covering for cutting-up work for yearsfor nothing. He got one burst right in the control cabin, and thelorry slammed into the next column foundation. After they called in analarm on the fire the bomb had started, a couple of them went to seewho'd been in the lorry. The two men in it were both dead, and one ofthem was Al Devis. "

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

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

I didn't know how he could. Under any kind of Federation law at all, aman killed committing a felony--and bombing and arson ought toqualify for that--is simply bought and paid for; his blood is onnobody's head but his own. Of course, a small matter like legality wasalways the least of Mort Hallstock's worries. 

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

Dad had already gotten it, from fire-alarm center, but he hadn't heardthat Devis was one of the deceased arsonists. Like me, he was verysorry to hear about it. Devis as Devis was no loss, but alive andtalking he'd have helped us pin both the wax fire and the bombing ofthe _Javelin_ on Steve Ravick. Then I went back and got in the jeep. 

They were beginning to get in closer to the middle of the stacks wherethe fire had been started. There was no chance of getting over the topof it, and on the right there were at least five hundred men and ahundred vehicles, all working like crazy to pull out unburned wax. Bigmanipulators were coming up and grabbing as many of the half-tonsausages as they could, and lurching away to dump them onto skids orinto lorries or just drop them on top of the bags of nutrient stackedbeyond. Jeeps and cars would dart in, throw grapnels on the end oflines, and then pull away all the wax they could and return to throwtheir grapnels again. As fast as they pulled the big skins down, menwith hand-lifters like the ones we had used at our camp to handlefirewood would pick them up and float them away. 

That seemed to be where the major effort was being made, at present, and I could see lifter-skids coming in with big blower fans on them. Iknew what the strategy was, now; they were going to pull the wax awayto where it was burning on one side, and then set up the blowers andblow the heat and smoke away on that side. That way, on the other sidemore men could work closer to the fire, and in the long run they'dsave more wax. 

I started around the wax piles to the left, clockwise, to avoid theactivity on the other side, and before long I realized that I'd havedone better not to have. There was a long wall, ceiling-high, thatstretched off uptown in the direction of the spaceport, part of thesupport for the weight of the pulpwood plant on the level above, andpiled against it was a lot of junk machinery of different kinds thathad been hauled in here and dumped long ago and then forgotten. Thewax was piled almost against this, and the heat and smoke forced medown. 

I looked at the junk pile and decided that I could get through it onfoot. I had been keeping up a running narration into my radio, and Icommented on all this salvageable metal lying in here forgotten, withour perennial metal shortages. Then I started picking my way throughit, my portable audiovisual camera slung over my shoulder and aflashlight in my hand. My left hand, of course; it's never smart tocarry a light in your right, unless you're left-handed. 

The going wasn't too bad. Most of the time, I could get between thingswithout climbing over them. I was going between a broken-down pressfrom the lumber plant and a leaky 500-gallon pressure cooker from thecarniculture nutrient plant when I heard something moving behind me, and I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't let myself be talked intoleaving my pistol behind. 

It was a thing the size of a ten-gallon keg, with a thick tail andflippers on which it crawled, and six tentacles like small elephants'trunks around a circular mouth filled with jagged teeth halfway downthe throat. There are a dozen or so names for it, but mostly it iscalled a meat-grinder. 

The things are always hungry and try to eat anything that moves. Themere fact that I would be as poisonous to it as any of the local floraor fauna would be to me made no difference; this meat-grinder was nobiochemist. It was coming straight for me, all its tentacles writhing. 

I had had my Sterberg out as soon as I'd heard the noise. I alsoremembered that my radio was on, and that I was supposed to comment onanything of interest that took place around me. 

"Here's a meat-grinder, coming right for me, " I commented in a voicenot altogether steady, and slammed three shots down its tooth-studdedgullet. Then I scored my target, at the same time keeping out of theway of the tentacles. He began twitching a little. I fired again. Themeat-grinder jerked slightly, and that was all. 

"Now I'm going out and take a look at that lorry. " I was certain nowthat the voice was shaky. 

The lorry--and Al Devis and his companion--had come to an end againstone of the two-hundred-foot masonry and concrete foundations thecolumns rest on. It had hit about halfway up and folded almost like anaccordion, sliding down to the floor. With one thing and another, there is a lot of violent death around Port Sandor. I don't like tolook at the results. It's part of the job, however, and this time itwasn't a pleasant job at all. 

The two men who were guarding the wreck and contents were sitting ona couple of boxes, smoking and watching the fire-fighting operation. 

I took the partly empty clip out of my pistol and put in a full one onthe way back, and kept my flashlight moving its circle of light aheadand on both sides of me. That was foolish, or at least unnecessary. Ifthere'd been one meat-grinder in that junk pile, it was a safe betthere wasn't anything else. Meat-grinders aren't popular neighbors, even for tread-snails. As I approached the carcass of the grinder Ihad shot I found a ten-foot length of steel rod and poked it a fewtimes. When it didn't even twitch, I felt safe in walking past it. 

I got back in the jeep and returned to where Joe Kivelson was keepingtrack of what was going on in five screens, including one from apickup on a lifter at the ceiling, and shouting orders that were beingreshouted out of loudspeakers all over the place. The Odin Dock &Shipyard equipment had begun coming out; lorries picking up the waxthat had been dumped back from the fire and wax that was being pulledoff the piles, and material-handling equipment. They had a lot ofsmall fork-lifters that were helping close to the fire. 

A lot of the wax was getting so soft that it was hard to handle, andquite a few of the plastic skins had begun to split from the heat. Here and there I saw that outside piles had begun to burn at thebottom, from burning wax that had run out underneath. I had movedaround to the right and was getting views of the big claw-derricks atwork picking the big sausages off the tops of piles, and while I wasswinging the camera back and forth, I was trying to figure just howmuch wax there had been to start with, and how much was being saved. Each of those plastic-covered cylinders was a thousand pounds; one ofthe claw-derricks was picking up two or three of them at a grab. .. . 

I was still figuring when shouts of alarm on my right drew my headaround. There was an uprush of flame, and somebody began screaming, and I could see an ambulance moving toward the center of excitementand firemen in asbestos suits converging on a run. One of the pilesmust have collapsed and somebody must have been splashed. I gave aninvoluntary shudder. Burning wax was hotter than melted lead, and itstuck to anything it touched, worse than napalm. I saw a man beingdragged out of further danger, his clothes on fire, andasbestos-suited firemen crowding around to tear the burning garmentsfrom him. Before I could get to where it had happened, though, theyhad him in the ambulance and were taking him away. I hoped they'd gethim to the hospital before he died. 

Then more shouting started around at the right as a couple more pilesbegan collapsing. I was able to get all of that--the wax sausagessliding forward, the men who had been working on foot running out ofdanger, the flames shooting up, and the gush of liquid fire frombelow. All three derricks moved in at once and began grabbing waxcylinders away on either side of it. 

Then I saw Guido Fieschi, the Odin Dock & Shipyard's superintendent, and caught him in my camera, moving the jeep toward him. 

"Mr. Fieschi!" I called. "Give me a few seconds and say something. "

He saw me and grinned. 

"I just came out to see how much more could be saved, " he said. "Wehave close to a thousand tons on the shipping floor or out of dangerhere and on the way in, and it looks as though you'll be able to savethat much more. That'll be a million and a half sols we can be sureof, and a possible three million, at the new price. And I want to takethis occasion, on behalf of my company and of Terra-Odin Spacelines, to welcome a new freight shipper. "

"Well, that's wonderful news for everybody on Fenris, " I said, andadded mentally, "with a few exceptions. " Then I asked if he'd heardwho had gotten splashed. 

"No. I know it happened; I passed the ambulance on the way out. Icertainly hope they get to work on him in time. "

Then more wax started sliding off the piles, and more fire camerunning out at the bottom. Joe Kivelson's voice, out of theloudspeakers all around, was yelling:

"Everybody away from the front! Get the blowers in; start in on theother side!"

18

THE TREASON OF BISH WARE

I wanted to find out who had been splashed, but Joe Kivelson was toobusy directing the new phase of the fight to hand out casualty reportsto the press, and besides, there were too many things happening all atonce that I had to get. I went around to the other side where theincendiaries had met their end, moving slowly as close to the face ofthe fire as I could get and shooting the burning wax flowing out fromit. A lot of equipment, including two of the three claw-derricks and adredger--they'd brought a second one up from the waterfront--weremoving to that side. By the time I had gotten around, the blowers hadbeen maneuvered into place and were ready to start. There was a lot ofback-and-forth yelling to make sure that everybody was out from infront, and then the blowers started. 

It looked like a horizontal volcanic eruption; burning wax blowingaway from the fire for close to a hundred feet into the clear spacebeyond. The derricks and manipulators and the cars and jeeps withgrapnels went in on both sides, snatching and dragging wax away. Because they had the wind from the blowers behind them, the men couldwork a lot closer, and the fire wasn't spreading as rapidly. They weresaving a lot of wax; each one of those big sausages that the lifterspicked up and floated away weighed a thousand pounds, and was worth, at the new price, eight hundred sols. 

Finally, they got everything away that they could, and then theblowers were shut down and the two dredge shovels moved in, scoopingup the burning sludge and carrying it away, scattering it on theconcrete. I would have judged that there had been six or seven millionsols' worth of wax in the piles to start with, and that a little morethan half of it had been saved before they pulled the last cylinderaway. 

The work slacked off; finally, there was nothing but the two dredgesdoing anything, and then they backed away and let down, and it was allover but standing around and watching the scattered fire burn itselfout. I looked at my watch. It was two hours since the first alarm hadcome in. I took a last swing around, got the spaceport peoplegathering up wax and hauling it away, and the broken lake of fire thatextended downtown from where the stacks had been, and then I floatedmy jeep over to the sandwich-and-coffee stand and let down, gettingout. Maybe, I thought, I could make some kind of deal with somebodylike Interworld News on this. It would make a nice thrillingfeature-program item. Just a little slice of life from Fenris, theGarden Spot of the Galaxy. 

I got myself a big zhoumy-loin sandwich with hot sauce and a cup ofcoffee, made sure that my portable radio was on, and circulated amongthe fire fighters, getting comments. Everybody had been a hero, natch, and they were all very unbashful about admitting it. There wasa great deal of wisecracking about Al Devis buying himself a ringsideseat for the fire he'd started. Then I saw Cesário Vieira and joinedhim. 

"Have all the fire you want, for a while?" I asked him. 

"Brother, and how! We could have used a little of this over on HermannReuch's Land, though. Have you seen Tom around anywhere?"

"No. Have you?"

"I saw him over there, about an hour ago. I guess he stayed on thisside. After they started blowing it, I was over on Al Devis's side. "He whistled softly. "Was that a mess!"

There was still a crowd at the fire, but they seemed all to betownspeople. The hunters had gathered where Joe Kivelson had beendirecting operations. We finished our sandwiches and went over to jointhem. As soon as we got within earshot, I found that they were all ina very ugly mood. 

"Don't fool around, " one man was saying as we came up. "Don't evenbother looking for a rope. Just shoot them as soon as you see them. "

Well, I thought, a couple of million sols' worth of tallow-wax, inwhich they all owned shares, was something to get mean about. I saidsomething like that. 

"It's not that, " another man said. "It's Tom Kivelson. "

"What about him?" I asked, alarmed. 

"Didn't you hear? He got splashed with burning wax, " the hunter said. "His whole back was on fire; I don't know whether he's alive now ornot. "

So that was who I'd seen screaming in agony while the firemen tore hisburning clothes away. I pushed through, with Cesário behind me, andfound Joe Kivelson and Mohandas Feinberg and Corkscrew Finnegan andOscar Fujisawa and a dozen other captains and ships' officers in ahuddle. 

"Joe, " I said, "I just heard about Tom. Do you know anything yet?"

Joe turned. "Oh, Walt. Why, as far as we know, he's alive. He wasalive when they got him to the hospital. "

"That's at the spaceport?" I unhooked my handphone and got Dad. He'dheard about a man being splashed, but didn't know who it was. He saidhe'd call the hospital at once. A few minutes later, he was calling meback. 

"He's been badly burned, all over the back. They're preparing to do adeep graft on him. They said his condition was serious, but he wasalive five minutes ago. "

I thanked him and hung up, relaying the information to the others. They all looked worried. When the screen girl at a hospital tells yousomebody's serious, instead of giving you the well-as-can-be-expectedroutine, you know it is serious. Anybody who makes it alive to ahospital, these days, has an excellent chance, but injury cases dodie, now and then, after they've been brought in. They are the"serious" cases. 

"Well, I don't suppose there's anything we can do, " Joe said heavily. 

"We can clean up on the gang that started this fire, " Oscar Fujisawasaid. "Do it now; then if Tom doesn't make it, he's paid for inadvance. "

Oscar, I recalled, was the one who had been the most impressed withBish Ware's argument that lynching Steve Ravick would cost the huntersthe four million sols they might otherwise be able to recover, after afew years' interstellar litigation, from his bank account on Terra. That reminded me that I hadn't even thought of Bish since I'd left the_Times_. I called back. Dad hadn't heard a word from him. 

"What's the situation at Hunters' Hall?" I asked. 

"Everything's quiet there. The police left when Hallstock commandeeredthat fire-fighting equipment. They helped the shipyard men get it out, and then they all went to the Municipal Building. As far as I know, both Ravick and Belsher are still in Hunters' Hall. I'm in contactwith the vehicles on guard at the approaches; I'll call them now. "

I relayed that. The others nodded. 

"Nip Spazoni and a few others are bringing men and guns up from thedocks and putting a cordon around the place on the Main City Level, "Oscar said. "Your father will probably be hearing that they're movinginto position now. "

He had. He also said that he had called all the vehicles on the Firstand Second Levels Down; they all reported no activity in Hunters' Hallexcept one jeep on Second Level Down, which did not report at all. 

Everybody was puzzled about that. 

"That's the jeep that reported Bish Ware going in on the bottom, "Mohandas Feinberg said. "I wonder if somebody inside mightn't havegotten both the man on the jeep and Bish. "

"He could have left the jeep, " Joe said. "Maybe he went inside afterBish. "

"Funny he didn't call in and say so, " somebody said. 

"No, it isn't, " I contradicted. "Manufacturers' claims to thecontrary, there is no such thing as a tap-proof radio. Maybe he wasn'tsupposed to leave his post, but if he did, he used his head notadvertising it. "

"That makes sense, " Oscar agreed. "Well, whatever happened, we're notdoing anything standing around up here. Let's get it started. "

He walked away, raising his voice and calling, "_Pequod_! _Pequod_!All hands on deck!"

The others broke away from the group, shouting the names of theirships to rally their crews. I hurried over to the jeep and checked myequipment. There wasn't too much film left in the big audiovisual, soI replaced it with a fresh sound-and-vision reel, good for anothercouple of hours, and then lifted to the ceiling. Worrying about Tomwouldn't help Tom, and worrying about Bish wouldn't help Bish, and Ihad a job to do. 

What I was getting now, and I was glad I was starting a fresh reel forit, was the beginning of the First Fenris Civil War. A long time fromnow, when Fenris was an important planet in the Federation, maybethey'd make today a holiday, like Bastille Day or the Fourth of Julyor Federation Day. Maybe historians, a couple of centuries from now, would call me an important primary source, and if Cesário's religionwas right, maybe I'd be one of them, saying, "Well, after all, isBoyd such a reliable source? He was only seventeen years old at thetime. "

Finally, after a lot of yelling and confusion, the Rebel Army gotmoving. We all went up to Main City Level and went down Broadway, spreading out side streets when we began running into the cordon thathad been thrown around Hunters' Hall. They were mostly men from thewaterfront who hadn't gotten to the wax fire, and they must havestripped the guns off half the ships in the harbor and mounted them onlorries or cargo skids. 

Nobody, not even Joe Kivelson, wanted to begin with any massed frontalattack on Hunters' Hall. 

"We'll have to bombard the place, " he was saying. "We try to rush itand we'll lose half our gang before we get in. One man with good coverand a machine gun's good for a couple of hundred in the open. "

"Bish may be inside, " I mentioned. 

"Yes, " Oscar said, "and even aside from that, that building was builtwith our money. Let's don't burn the house down to get rid of thecockroaches. "

"Well, how are you going to do it, then?" Joe wanted to know. Rule outfrontal attack and Joe's at the end of his tactics. 

"You stay up here. Keep them amused with a little smallarms fire atthe windows and so on. I'll take about a dozen men and go down toSecond Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple ofskins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out. "

That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing howmuch wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in onsome of the smoke. I mentioned that if we got into the building and upto Main City Level, we'd need some way of signaling to avoid beingshot by our own gang, and got the wave-length combination of thePequod scout boat, which Joe and Oscar were using for a command car. Oscar picked ten or twelve men, and they got into a lorry and wentuptown and down a vehicle shaft to Second Level. I followed in myjeep, even after Oscar and his crowd let down and got out, and hoveredbehind them as they advanced on foot to Hunters' Hall. 

The Second Level Down was the vehicle storage, where the derricks andother equipment had been kept. It was empty now except for aworkbench, a hand forge and some other things like that, a few drumsof lubricant, and several piles of sheet metal. Oscar and his men gotinside and I followed, going up to the ceiling. I was the one who sawthe man lying back of a pile of sheet metal, and called theirattention. 

He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and apistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple ofOscar's followers, dragging him out, said:

"He's been sleep-gassed. "

Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been onguard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight. 

I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been whathad gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weaponson Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it lookedto me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used itto knock out our guard. Taken if off his body, I guessed. That crowdwasn't any more interested in taking prisoners alive than we were. 

We laid the man on a workbench and put a rolled-up sack under his headfor a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't thinkwe were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close tomy gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and noneof them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to. 

The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any ofthem. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hearfiring outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked myhandphone. 

"We're in, " I said when Joe Kivelson answered. "Stop the shooting;we're coming up to the vehicle port. "

"Might as well. Nobody's paying any attention to it, " he said. 

The firing slacked off as the word was passed around the perimeter, and finally it stopped entirely. We went up into the open archedvehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half adozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing. 

"We're going up, " I said. "They've all lammed out. The place isempty. "

"You don't know that, " Oscar chided. "It might be bulging withRavick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down. "

Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren'trunning, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush bystarting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that Iwasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of uswent over and looked behind the bar, which was the only hiding placein it. Then we went back to the rear and tiptoed to the third floor. 

The meeting room was empty. So were the offices behind it. I looked inall of them, expecting to find Bish Ware's body. Maybe a couple ofother bodies, too. I'd seen him shoot the tread-snail, and I didn'tthink he'd die unpaid for. In Steve Ravick's office, the safe was openand a lot of papers had been thrown out. I pointed that out to Oscar, and he nodded. After seeing that, he seemed to relax, as though hewasn't expecting to find anybody any more. We went to the third floor. Ravick's living quarters were there, and they were magnificentlyluxurious. The hunters, whose money had paid for all that magnificenceand luxury, cursed. 

There were no bodies there, either, or on the landing stage above. Iunhooked the radio again. 

"You can come in, now, " I said. "The place is empty. Nobody here butus Vigilantes. "

"Huh?" Joe couldn't believe that. "How'd they get out?"

"They got out on the Second Level Down. " I told him about thesleep-gassed guard. 

"Did you bring him to? What did he say?"

"Nothing; we didn't. We can't. You get sleep-gassed, you sleep tillyou wake up. That ought to be two to four hours for this fellow. "

"Well, hold everything; we're coming in. "

We were all in the social room; a couple of the men had poured drinksor drawn themselves beers at the bar and rung up no sale on the cashregister. Somebody else had a box of cigars he'd picked up in Ravick'squarters on the fourth floor and was passing them around. Joe andabout two or three hundred other hunters came crowding up theescalator, which they had turned on below. 

"You didn't find Bish Ware, either, I'll bet, " Joe was saying. 

"I'm afraid they took him along for a hostage, " Oscar said. "The guardwas knocked out with Walt's gas gadget, that Bish was carrying. "

"Ha!" Joe cried. "Bet you it was the other way round; Bish took themout. "

That started an argument. While it was going on, I went to thecommunication screen and got the _Times_, and told Dad what hadhappened. 

"Yes, " he said. "That was what I was afraid you'd find. Glenn Murellcalled in from the spaceport a few minutes ago. He says Mort Hallstockcame in with his car, and he heard from some of the workmen that BishWare, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher came in on the Main City Level in ajeep. They claimed protection from a mob, and Captain Courtland'spolice are protecting them. "

19

MASKS OFF

There was dead silence for two or three seconds. If a kitten hadsneezed, everybody would have heard it. Then it started, first aninarticulate roar, and then a babel of unprintabilities. I thought I'dheard some bad language from these same men in this room when LeoBelsher's announcement of the price cut had been telecast, but thatwas prayer meeting to this. Dad was still talking. At least, I saw hislips move in the screen. 

"Say that again, Ralph, " Oscar Fujisawa shouted. 

Dad must have heard him. At least, his lips moved again, but I wasn'ta lip reader and neither was Oscar. Oscar turned to the mob--by now, it was that, pure and simple--and roared, in a voice like a foghorn, "_Shut up and listen!_" A few of those closest to him heard him. Therest kept on shouting curses. Oscar waited a second, and then pointedhis submachine gun at the ceiling and hammered off the whole clip. 

"Shut up, a couple of hundred of you, and listen!" he commanded, onthe heels of the blast. Then he turned to the screen again. "Now, Ralph; what was it you were saying?"

"Hallstock got to the spaceport about half an hour ago, " Dad said. "Hebought a ticket to Terra. Sigurd Ngozori's here; he called the bankand one of the clerks there told him that Hallstock had checked outhis whole account, around three hundred thousand sols. Took some of itin cash and the rest in Banking Cartel drafts. Murell says that hisinformation is that Bish Ware, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher arrivedearlier, about an hour ago. He didn't see them himself, but he talkedwith spaceport workmen who did. "

The men who had crowded up to the screen seemed to have run out ofoaths and obscenities now. Oscar was fitting another clip into hissubmachine gun. 

"Well, we'll have to go to the spaceport and get them, " he said. "Andtake four ropes instead of three. "

"You'll have to fight your way in, " Dad told him. "Odin Dock &Shipyard won't let you take people out of their spaceport without afight. They've all bought tickets by now, and Fieschi will have toprotect them. "

"Then we'll kick the blankety-blank spaceport apart, " somebodyshouted. 

That started it up again. Oscar wondered if getting silence was worthanother clip of cartridges, and decided it wasn't. He managed to makehimself heard without it. 

"We'll do nothing of the kind. We need that spaceport to stay alive. But we will take Ravick and Belsher and Hallstock--"

"And that etaoin shrdlu traitor of a Ware!" Joe Kivelson added. 

"And Bish Ware, " Oscar agreed. "They only have fifty police; we havethree or four thousand men. "

Three or four thousand undisciplined hunters, against fifty trained, disciplined and organized soldiers, because that was what thespaceport police were. I knew their captain, and the lieutenants. Theywere old Regular Army, and they ran the police force like a militaryunit. 

"I'll bet Ware was working for Ravick all along, " Joe was saying. 

That wasn't good thinking even for Joe Kivelson. I said:

"If he was working for Ravick all along, why did he tip Dad and Oscarand the Mahatma on the bomb aboard the _Javelin_? That wasn't any helpto Ravick. "

"I get it, " Oscar said. "He never was working for anybody but BishWare. When Ravick got into a jam, he saw a way to make something forhimself by getting Ravick out of it. I'll bet, ever since he camehere, he was planning to cut in on Ravick somehow. You notice, he knewjust how much money Ravick had stashed away on Terra? When he saw thespot Ravick was in, Bish just thought he had a chance to develophimself another rich uncle. "

I'd been worse stunned than anybody by Dad's news. The worst of it wasthat Oscar could be right. I hadn't thought of that before. I'd justthought that Ravick and Belsher had gotten Bish drunk and found outabout the way the men were posted around Hunters' Hall and the loneman in the jeep on Second Level Down. 

Then it occurred to me that Bish might have seen a way of gettingFenris rid of Ravick and at the same time save everybody the guilt oflynching him. Maybe he'd turned traitor to save the rest of us fromourselves. 

I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have whatyou wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whetherRavick got away or not, as long as you got him out of the Co-op. Well, he's out for good now. "

"That was before the fire, " Oscar said. "We didn't have a couple ofmillion sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in thehospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin tosswhether he lives or not. "

"Yes. I thought you were Tom's friend, " Joe Kivelson reproached me. 

I wondered how much skin hanging Steve Ravick would grow on Tom'sback. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turnto Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby Dick_, thebook he'd named his ship from. 

"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettestit, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in ourNantucket market. _"

He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then heshrugged. 

"I know, Walt, " he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrelsof whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax. "

Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are alsoperfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not tomake it. I wondered if that meant anything, either. 

They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted inpillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, thetroops stopped to loot the enemy's camp. _ I'd come across that linefifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had beenexpensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, atleast, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannonand machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity inthe street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now, and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and thewhole mass, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started upBroadway. 

Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gottenoutside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera backto get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustrationfor somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so. 

Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area. There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfwayto the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcherpointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in anolive-green uniform stood. 

I knew him; Lieutenant Ranjit Singh, Captain Courtland'ssecond-in-command. He was a Sikh. Instead of a steel helmet, he wore astriped turban, and he had a black beard that made Joe Kivelson'sblond one look like Tom Kivelson's chin-fuzz. On his belt, along withhis pistol, he wore the little kirpan, the dagger all Sikhs carry. Healso carried a belt radio, and as we approached he lifted the phone tohis mouth and a loudspeaker on the combat car threw his voice at us:

"All right, that's far enough, now. The first vehicle that comeswithin a hundred yards of this gate will be shot down. "

One man, and one combat car, against five thousand, with twenty-oddguns and close to a hundred machine guns. He'd last about as long as apint of trade gin at a Sheshan funeral. The only thing was, before heand the crew of the combat car were killed, they'd wipe out about tenor fifteen of our vehicles and a couple of hundred men, and they wouldbe the men and vehicles in the lead. 

Mobs are a little different from soldiers, and our Rebel Army wasstill a mob. Mobs don't like to advance into certain death, and theydon't like to advance over the bodies and wreckage of their ownforward elements. Neither do soldiers, but soldiers will do it. Soldiers realize, when they put on the uniform, that some day they mayface death in battle, and if this is it, this is it. 

I got the combat car and the lone soldier in the turban--that wouldlook good in anybody's history book--and moved forward, taking carethat he saw the _Times_ lettering on the jeep and taking care to staywell short of the deadline. I let down to the street and got out, taking off my gun belt and hanging it on the control handle of thejeep. Then I walked forward. 

"Lieutenant Ranjit, " I said, "I'm representing the _Times_. I havebusiness inside the spaceport. I want to get the facts about this. Itmay be that when I get this story, these people will be satisfied. "

"We will, like Nifflheim!" I heard Joe Kivelson bawling, above andbehind me. "We want the men who started the fire my son got burnedin. "

"Is that the Kivelson boy's father?" the Sikh asked me, and when Inodded, he lifted the phone to his lips again. "Captain Kivelson, " theloudspeaker said, "your son is alive and under skin-grafting treatmenthere at the spaceport hospital. His life is not, repeat not, indanger. The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of themare guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authoritythan an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turnedover for trial. But they will not be taken from this spaceport byforce, as long as I or one of my men remains alive. "

"That's easy. We'll get them afterward, " Joe Kivelson shouted. 

"Somebody may. You won't, " Ranjit Singh told him. "Van Steen, hit thatship's boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody inthis mob makes. "

"Yes, sir. With pleasure, " another voice replied. 

Nobody in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had anycomment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me. 

"Mr. Boyd, " he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was aman of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. "If I admityou to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly asyou learn them?"

"That's what the _Times_ always does, Lieutenant. " Well, almost allthe facts almost always. 

"Will you people accept what this _Times_ reporter tells you he haslearned?"

"Yes, of course. " That was Oscar Fujisawa. 

"I won't!" That was Joe Kivelson. "He's always taking the part of thatold rumpot of a Bish Ware. "

"Lieutenant, that remark was a slur on my paper, as well as myself, " Isaid. "Will you permit Captain Kivelson to come in along with me? Andsomebody else, " I couldn't resist adding, "so that people will believehim?"

Ranjit Singh considered that briefly. He wasn't afraid to die--Ibelieve he was honestly puzzled when he heard people talking aboutfear--but his job was to protect some fugitives from a mob, not to diea useless hero's death. If letting in a small delegation would preventan attack on the spaceport without loss of life and ammunition--ormaybe he reversed the order of importance--he was obliged to try it. 

"Yes. You may choose five men to accompany Mr. Boyd, " he said. "Theymay not bring weapons in with them. Sidearms, " he added, "will notcount as weapons. "

After all, a kirpan was a sidearm, and his religion required him tocarry that. The decision didn't make me particularly happy. Respectfor the dignity of others is a fine thing in an officer, but likejournalistic respect for facts, it can be carried past the point ofbeing a virtue. I thought he was over-estimating Joe Kivelson'sself-control. 

Vehicles in front began grounding, and men got out and bunchedtogether on the street. Finally, they picked their delegation: JoeKivelson, Oscar Fujisawa, Casmir Oughourlian the shipyard man, one ofthe engineers at the nutrient plant, and the Reverend Hiram Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher. They all had pistols, even theReverend Zilker, so I went back to the jeep and put mine on. RanjitSingh had switched his radio off the speaker and was talking tosomebody else. After a while, an olive-green limousine piloted by apoliceman in uniform and helmet floated in and grounded. The six of usgot into it, and it lifted again. 

The car let down in a vehicle hall in the administrative area, and thepolice second lieutenant, Chris Xantos, was waiting alone, armed onlywith the pistol that was part of his uniform and wearing a beretinstead of a helmet. He spoke to us, and ushered us down a hallwaytoward Guido Fieschi's office. 

I get into the spaceport administrative area about once in twenty orso hours. Oughourlian is a somewhat less frequent visitor. The othershad never been there, and they were visibly awed by all the gleamingglass and brightwork, and the soft lights and the thick carpets. AllPort Sandor ought to look like this, I thought. It could, and maybenow it might, after a while. 

There were six chairs in a semicircle facing Guido Fieschi's desk, andthree men sitting behind it. Fieschi, who had changed clothes andwashed since the last time I saw him, sat on the extreme right. Captain Courtland, with his tight mouth under a gray mustache and thequadruple row of medal ribbons on his breast, was on the left. In themiddle, the seat of honor, was Bish Ware, looking as though he werepresiding over a church council to try some rural curate for heresy. 

As soon as Joe Kivelson saw him, he roared angrily:

"There's the dirty traitor who sold us out! He's the worst of the lot;I wouldn't be surprised if--"

Bish looked at him like a bishop who has just been contradicted on apoint of doctrine by a choirboy. 

"Be quiet!" he ordered. "I did not follow this man you call Ravickhere to this . .. This running-hot-and-cold Paradise planet, and I didnot spend five years fraternizing with its unwashed citizenry andcreating for myself the role of town drunkard of Port Sandor, to havehim taken from me and lynched after I have arrested him. People do notlynch my prisoners. "

"And who in blazes are you?" Joe demanded. 

Bish took cognizance of the question, if not the questioner. 

"Tell them, if you please, Mr. Fieschi, " he said. 

"Well, Mr. Ware is a Terran Federation Executive Special Agent, "Fieschi said. "Captain Courtland and I have known that for the pastfive years. As far as I know, nobody else was informed of Mr. Ware'sposition. "

After that, you could have heard a gnat sneeze. 

Everybody knows about Executive Special Agents. There are all kinds ofsecret agents operating in the Federation--Army and Navy Intelligence, police of different sorts, Colonial Office agents, private detectives, Chartered Company agents. But there are fewer Executive Specials thanthere are inhabited planets in the Federation. They rank, ex officio, as Army generals and Space Navy admirals; they have the privilege ofthe floor in Parliament, they take orders from nobody but thePresident of the Federation. But very few people have ever seen one, or talked to anybody who has. 

And Bish Ware--_good ol' Bish; he'sh everybodysh frien'_--was one ofthem. And I had been trying to make a man of him and reform him. I'deven thought, if he stopped drinking, he might make a success as aprivate detective--at Port Sandor, on Fenris! I wondered what colormy face had gotten now, and I started looking around for a crack inthe floor, to trickle gently and unobtrusively into. 

And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was anExecutive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly. Theway he'd gone four hours without a drink, and seemed to be just asdrunk as ever. That was right--just as drunk as he'd ever been; whichwas to say, cold sober. There was the time I'd seen him catch thatfalling bottle and set it up. No drunken man could have done that; aman's reflexes are the first thing to be affected by alcohol. And theway he shot that tread-snail. I've seen men who could shoot well onliquor, but not quick-draw stuff. That calls for perfectco-ordination. And the way he went into his tipsy act at the_Times_--veteran actor slipping into a well-learned role. 

He drank, sure. He did a lot of drinking. But there are men whosesystems resist the effects of alcohol better than others, and he musthave been an exceptional example of the type, or he'd never haveadopted the sort of cover personality he did. It would have beenfairly easy for him. Space his drinks widely, and never take a drinkunless he _had_ to, to maintain the act. When he was at the Times withjust Dad and me, what did he have? A fruit fizz. 

Well, at least I could see it after I had my nose rubbed in it. JoeKivelson was simply gaping at him. The Reverend Zilker seemed to behaving trouble adjusting, too. The shipyard man and the chemicalengineer weren't saying anything, but it had kicked them for a loss, too. Oscar Fujisawa was making a noble effort to be completelyunsurprised. Oscar is one of our better poker players. 

"I thought it might be something like that, " he lied brazenly. "But, Bish . .. Excuse me, I mean, Mr. Ware. .. "

"Bish, if you please, Oscar. "

"Bish, what I'd like to know is what you wanted with Ravick, " he said. "They didn't send any Executive Special Agent here for five years toinvestigate this tallow-wax racket of his. "

"No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, andI've been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a careerof him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit. "

Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, "Aha!The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!" We didn't. Wejust looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to thename. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam. 

"I know that name, " he said. "Something on Loki, wasn't it?"

Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it. 

"The Loki enslavements. Was that it?" I asked. "I read about it, but Inever seem to have heard of Gerrit. "

"He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago, were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He wasresponsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousandLokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom wereworked to death in the mines. "

No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking forhim. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down anorphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something triviallike that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonablysafe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers?Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and theFederation depends on every planet to do its own policing. 

But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is agovernment of and for--if occasionally not by--all sapient peoples ofall races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow ateverything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept huntingfifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements. 

"Gerrit got away, with a month's start. By the time we had traced himto Baldur, he had a year's start on us. He was five years ahead of uswhen we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago, nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from thebest information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of thelocal-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There aresix planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man toeach of them. I drew this prize out of the hat. 

"When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a mananswering to Gerrit's description had come in on the _Peenemünde_ fromOdin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The manwho called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anythinglike the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'dtaken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get hisfingerprints. "

Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunkenoversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and litit. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I wentto the desk and took back my lighter-weapon. 

"Thank you, Walt. I wouldn't have been able to do this if I hadn't hadthat. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick's fingerprints, which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent themin. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. Accordingto his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named ErnestineCoyón, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of ahospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago. "

"Why, that's incredible!" the Reverend Zilker burst out, and JoeKivelson was saying: "Steve Ravick isn't any woman. .. . "

"Least of all one who died fourteen years ago, " Bish agreed. "But thefingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a bighospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small, woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get thepicture now?"

"They're doing the same thing on Tom's back, right here, " I told Joe. "Only you can't grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you canhuman tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfacesfrom a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatmentward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter. " Then I thoughtof something else. "That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettesin his palm, " I said. 

Bish nodded commendingly. "Exactly. He'd have about as much sensationin his palms as I'd have wearing thick leather gloves. I'd noticedthat. 

"Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reportsfrom other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn't untilthe _Peenemünde_ got in from Terra, the last time, that I got finalconfirmation. Dr. Watson, you'll recall. "

"Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan, " I mentioned, trying tosalvage something. Showing off. The one I was trying to impress wasWalt Boyd. 

"You caught that? Careless of me, " Bish chided himself. "What he gaveme was a report that they had finally located a man who had been astaff surgeon at this hospital on Baldur at the time. He's now doing astretch for another piece of malpractice he was unlucky enough to getcaught at later. We will not admit making deals with any criminals, injail or out, but he is willing to testify, and is on his way to Terranow. He can identify pictures of Anton Gerrit as those of the man heoperated on fourteen years ago, and his testimony and ErnestineCoyón's fingerprints will identify Ravick as that man. With all theColonial Constabulary and Army Intelligence people got on Gerrit onLoki, simple identification will be enough. Gerrit was proven guiltylong ago, and it won't be any trouble, now, to prove that Ravick isGerrit. "

"Why didn't you arrest him as soon as you got the word from yourfriend from Afghanistan?" I wanted to know. 

"Good question; I've been asking myself that, " Bish said, a triflewryly. "If I had, the _Javelin_ wouldn't have been bombed, that waxwouldn't have been burned, and Tom Kivelson wouldn't have beeninjured. What I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabularydetective, to Gimli, the next planet out. There's a Navy base there, and always at least a couple of destroyers available. He's coming backwith one of them to pick Gerrit up and take him to Terra. They oughtto be in in about two hundred and fifty hours. I thought it would besafer all around to let Gerrit run loose till then. There's no placehe could go. 

"What I didn't realize, at the time, was what a human H-bomb this manMurell would turn into. Then everything blew up at once. Finally, Iwas left with the choice of helping Gerrit escape from Hunters' Hallor having him lynched before I could arrest him. " He turned toKivelson. "In the light of what you knew, I don't blame you forcalling me a dirty traitor. "

"But how did I know. .. " Kivelson began. 

"That's right. You weren't supposed to. That was before you found out. You ought to have heard what Gerrit and Belsher--as far as I know, that is his real name--called me after they found out, when they gotout of that jeep and Captain Courtland's men snapped the handcuffs onthem. It even shocked a hardened sinner like me. "

There was a lot more of it. Bish had managed to get into Hunters' Halljust about the time Al Devis and his companion were starting the fireRavick--Gerrit--had ordered for a diversion. The whole gang was goingto crash out as soon as the fire had attracted everybody away. Bishled them out onto the Second Level Down, sleep-gassed the lone man inthe jeep, and took them to the spaceport, where the police werewaiting for them. 

As soon as I'd gotten everything, I called the _Times_. I'd had myradio on all the time, and it had been coming in perfectly. Dad, I washappy to observe, was every bit as flabbergasted as I had been at whoand what Bish Ware was. He might throw my campaign to reform Bish upat me later on, but at the moment he wasn't disposed to, and I waspraising Allah silently that I hadn't had a chance to mention thedetective agency idea to him. That would have been a little too much. 

"What are they doing about Belsher and Hallstock?" he asked. 

"Belsher goes back to Terra with Ravick. Gerrit, I mean. That's wherehe collected his cut on the tallow-wax, so that is where he'd have tobe tried. Bish is convinced that somebody in Kapstaad Chemical musthave been involved, too. Hallstock is strictly a local matter. "

"That's about what I thought. With all this interstellarback-and-forth, it'll be a long time before we'll be able to writethirty under the story. "

"Well, we can put thirty under the Steve Ravick story, " I said. 

Then it hit me. The Steve Ravick story was finished; that is, thelocal story of racketeer rule in the Hunters' Co-operative. But theAnton Gerrit story was something else. That was Federation-wide news;the end of a fifteen-year manhunt for the most wanted criminal in theknown Galaxy. And who had that story, right in his hot little hand?Walter Boyd, the ace--and only--reporter for the mighty Port Sandor_Times_. 

"Yes, " I continued. "The Ravick story's finished. But we still havethe Anton Gerrit story, and I'm going to work on it right now. "

20

FINALE

They had Tom Kivelson in a private room at the hospital; he wassitting up in a chair, with a lot of pneumatic cushions around him, and a lunch tray on his lap. He looked white and thin. He could moveone arm completely, but the bandages they had loaded him with seemedto have left the other free only at the elbow. He was concentrating onhis lunch, and must have thought I was one of the nurses, or a doctor, or something of the sort. 

"Are you going to let me have a cigarette and a cup of coffee, whenI'm through with this?" he asked. 

"Well, I don't have any coffee, but you can have one of mycigarettes, " I said. 

Then he looked up and gave a whoop. "Walt! How'd you get in here? Ithought they weren't going to let anybody in to see me till thisafternoon. "

"Power of the press, " I told him. "Bluff, blarney, and blackmail. Howare they treating you?"

"Awful. Look what they gave me for lunch. I thought we were on shortrations down on Hermann Reuch's Land. How's Father?"

"He's all right. They took the splint off, but he still has to carryhis arm in a sling. "

"Lucky guy; he can get around on his feet, and I'll bet he isn'tstarving, either. You know, speaking about food, I'm going to feellike a cannibal eating carniculture meat, now. My whole back'scarniculture. " He filled his mouth with whatever it was they werefeeding him and asked, through it: "Did I miss Steve Ravick'shanging?"

I was horrified. "Haven't these people told you anything?" I demanded. 

"Nah; they wouldn't even tell me the right time. Afraid it wouldexcite me. "

So I told him; first who Bish Ware really was, and then who Ravickreally was. He gaped for a moment, and then shoveled in more food. 

"Go on; what happened?"

I told him how Bish had smuggled Gerrit and Leo Belsher out on SecondLevel Down and gotten them to the spaceport, where Courtland's men hadbeen waiting for them. 

"Gerrit's going to Terra, and from there to Loki. They want thenatives to see what happens to a Terran who breaks Terran law; teachthem that our law isn't just to protect us. Belsher's going to Terra, too. There was a big ship captains' meeting; they voted to reclaimtheir wax and sell it individually to Murell, but to retain membershipin the Co-op. They think they'll have to stay in the Co-op to getanything that's gettable out of Gerrit's and Belsher's money. OscarFujisawa and Cesário Vieira are going to Terra on the _Cape Canaveral_to start suit to recover anything they can, and also to petition forreclassification of Fenris. Oscar's coming back on the next ship, butCesário's going to stay on as the Co-op representative. I suppose heand Linda will be getting married. "

"Natch. They'll both stay on Terra, I suppose. Hey, whattaya know!Cesário's getting off Fenris without having to die and reincarnate. "

He finished his lunch, such as it was and what there was of it, and Irelieved him of the tray and set it on the floor beyond his chair. Ifound an ashtray and lit a cigarette for him and one for myself, usingthe big lighter. Tom looked at it dubiously, predicting that sometimeI'd push the wrong thing and send myself bye-byes for a couple ofhours. I told him how Bish had used it. 

"Bet a lot of people wanted to hang him, too, before they found outwho he was and what he'd really done. What's my father think of Bish, now?"

"Bish Ware is a great and good man, and the savior of Fenris, " I said. "And he was real smart, to keep an act like that up for five years. Your father modestly admits that it even fooled him. "

"Bet Oscar Fujisawa knew it all along. "

"Well, Oscar modestly admits that he suspected something of the sort, but he didn't feel it was his place to say anything. "

Tom laughed, and then wanted to know if they were going to hang MortHallstock. "I hope they wait till I can get out of here. "

"No, Odin Dock & Shipyard claim he's a political refugee and theywon't give him up. They did loan us a couple of accountants to go overthe city books, to see if we could find any real evidence ofmisappropriation, and whattaya know, there were no city books. Thecity of Port Sandor didn't keep books. We can't even take that threehundred thousand sols away from him; for all we can prove, he savedthem out of his five-thousand-sol-a-year salary. He's shipping out onthe _Cape Canaveral_, too. "

"Then we don't have any government at all!"

"Are you fooling yourself we ever had one?"

"No, but--"

"Well, we have one now. A temporary dictatorship; Bish Ware isdictator. Fieschi loaned him Ranjit Singh and some of his men. Thefirst thing he did was gather up the city treasurer and the chief ofpolice and march them to the spaceport; Fieschi made Hallstock buythem tickets, too. But there aren't going to be any unofficialhangings. This is a law-abiding planet, now. "

A nurse came in, and disapproved of Tom smoking and of me being in theroom at all. 

"Haven't you had your lunch yet?" she asked Tom. 

He looked at her guilelessly and said, "No; I was waiting for it. "

"Well, I'll get it, " she said. "I thought the other nurse had broughtit. " She started out, and then she came back and had to fuss with hiscushions, and then she saw the tray on the floor. 

"You did so have your lunch!" she accused. 

Tom looked at her as innocently as ever. "Oh, you mean these samples?Why, they were good; I'll take all of them. And a big slab of roastbeef, and brown gravy, and mashed potatoes. And how about some icecream?"

It was a good try; too bad it didn't work. 

"Don't worry, Tom, " I told him. "I'll get my lawyer to spring you outof this jug, and then we'll take you to my place and fill you up onMrs. Laden's cooking. "

The nurse sniffed. She suspected, quite correctly, that whoever Mrs. Laden was, she didn't know anything about scientific dietetics. 

 * * * * *

When I got back to the _Times_, Dad and Julio had had their lunch andwere going over the teleprint edition. Julio was printing correctionson blank sheets of plastic and Dad was cutting them out and cementingthem over things that needed correcting on the master sheets. I gaveJulio a short item to the effect that Tom Kivelson, son of Captain andMrs. Joe Kivelson, one of the _Javelin_ survivors who had been burnedin the tallow-wax fire, was now out of all danger, and recovering. Dadwas able to scrounge that onto the first page. 

There was a lot of other news. The T. F. N. Destroyer _Simón Bolivar_, en route from Gimli to pick up the notorious Anton Gerrit, alias SteveRavick, had come out of hyperspace and into radio range. Dad hadtalked to the skipper by screen and gotten interviews, which would betelecast, both with him and Detective-Major MacBride of the ColonialConstabulary. The _Simón Bolivar_ would not make landing, but go intoorbit and send down a boat. Detective-Major MacBride (alias Dr. JohnWatson) would remain on Fenris to take over local police activities. 

More evidence had been unearthed at Hunters' Hall on the fraudspracticed by Leo Belsher and Gerrit-alias-Ravick; it looked as thougha substantial sum of money might be recovered, eventually, from thebank accounts and other holdings of both men on Terra. ActingResident-Agent Gonzalo Ware--Ware, it seemed, really was his rightname, but look what he had in front of it--had promulgated moreregulations and edicts, and a crackdown on the worst waterfront diveswas in progress. I'll bet the devoted flock was horrified at whattheir beloved bishop had turned into. Bish would leave his diocese ina lot healthier condition than he'd found it, that was one thing forsure. And most of the gang of thugs and plug-uglies who had been usedto intimidate and control the Hunters' Co-operative had been gatheredup and jailed on vagrancy charges; prisoners were being put to workcleaning up the city. 

And there was a lot about plans for a registration of voters, andorganization of election boards, and a local electronics-engineeringfirm had been awarded a contract for voting machines. I didn't thinkthere had ever been a voting machine on Fenris before. 

"The commander of the _Bolivar_ says he'll take your story to Terrawith him, and see that it gets to Interworld News, " Dad told me as wewere sorting the corrected master sheets and loading them into thephotoprint machine, to be sent out on the air. "The _Bolivar_'ll makeTerra at least two hundred hours ahead of the _Cape Canaveral_. Interworld will be glad to have it. It isn't often they get a storylike that with the first news of anything, and this'll be a bigstory. "

"You shouldn't have given me the exclusive by-line, " I said. "You didas much work on it as I did. "

"No, I didn't, either, " he contradicted, "and I knew what I wasdoing. "

With the work done, I remembered that I hadn't had anything to eatsince breakfast, and I went down to take inventory of therefrigerator. Dad went along with me, and after I had assembled alunch and sat down to it, he decided that his pipe needed refilling, lit it, poured a cup of coffee and sat down with me. 

"You know, Walt, I've been thinking, lately, " he began. 

Oh-oh, I thought. When Dad makes that remark, in just that tone, it'sall hands to secure ship for diving. 

"We've all had to do a lot of thinking, lately, " I agreed. 

"Yes. You know, they want me to be mayor of Port Sandor. "

I nodded and waited till I got my mouth empty. I could see a lot ofsense in that. Dad is honest and scrupulous and public-spirited; toomuch so, sometimes, for his own good. There wasn't any question of hisability, and while there had always been antagonism between thehunter-ship crews and waterfront people and the uptown business crowd, Dad was well liked and trusted by both parties. 

"Are you going to take it?" I asked. 

"I suppose I'll have to, if they really want me. Be a sort ofobligation. "

That would throw a lot more work on me. Dad could give some attentionto the paper as mayor, but not as much as now. 

"What do you want me to try to handle for you?" I asked. 

"Well, Walt, that's what I've been thinking about, " he said. "I'vebeen thinking about it for a long time, and particularly since thingsgot changed around here. I think you ought to go to school some more. "

That made me laugh. "What, back to Hartzenbosch?" I asked. "I couldteach him more than he could teach me, now. "

"I doubt that, Walt. Professor Hartzenbosch may be an old maid introusers, but he's really a very sound scholar. But I wasn't thinkingabout that. I was thinking about your going to Terra to school. "

"Huh?" I forgot to eat, for a moment. "Let's stop kidding. "

"I didn't start kidding; I meant it. "

"Well, think again, Dad. It costs money to go to school on Terra. Iteven costs money to go to Terra. "

"We have a little money, Walt. Maybe more than you think we do. Andwith things getting better, we'll lease more teleprinters and get moreadvertising. You're likely to get better than the price of yourpassage out of that story we're sending off on the _Bolivar_, and thatwon't be the end of it, either. Fenris is going to be in the news fora while. You may make some more money writing. That's why I wascareful to give you the by-line on that Gerrit story. " His pipe hadgone out again; he took time out to relight it, and then added:"Anything I spend on this is an investment. The _Times_ will get itback. "

"Yes, that's another thing; the paper, " I said. "If you're going to bemayor, you won't be able to do everything you're doing on the papernow, and then do all my work too. "

"Well, shocking as the idea may be, I think we can find somebody toreplace you. "

"Name one, " I challenged. 

"Well, Lillian Arnaz, at the Library, has always been interested innewspaper work, " he began. 

"A girl!" I hooted. "You have any idea of some of the places I have togo to get stories?"

"Yes. I have always deplored the necessity. But a great many of themhave been closed lately, and the rest are being run in a much moreseemly manner. And she wouldn't be the only reporter. I hesitate togive you any better opinion of yourself than you have already, but itwould take at least three people to do the work you've been doing. When you get back from Terra, you'll find the _Times_ will have a veryrespectable reportorial staff. "

"What'll I be, then?" I wondered. 

"Editor, " Dad told me. "I'll retire and go into politics full time. And if Fenris is going to develop the way I believe it will, theeditor of the _Times_ will need a much better education than I have. "

I kept on eating, to give myself an excuse for silence. He was right, I knew that. But college on Terra; why, that would be at least fouryears, maybe five, and then a year for the round trip. .. . 

"Walt, this doesn't have to be settled right away, " Dad said. "Youwon't be going on the _Simón Bolivar_, along with Ravick and Belsher. And that reminds me. Have you talked to Bish lately? He'd be hurt ifyou didn't see him before he left. "

 * * * * *

The truth was, I'd been avoiding Bish, and not just because I knew howbusy he was. My face felt like a tallow-wax fire every time I thoughtof how I'd been trying to reform him, and I didn't quite know what I'dbe able to say to him if I met him again. And he seemed to me to be anentirely different person, as though the old Bish Ware, whom I hadliked in spite of what I'd thought he was, had died, and some totalstranger had taken his place. 

But I went down to the Municipal Building. It didn't look like thesame place. The walls had been scrubbed; the floors were free fromlitter. All the drove of loafers and hangers-on had been run out, ormaybe jailed and put to work. I looked into a couple of offices;everybody in them was busy. A few of the old police force were stillthere, but their uniforms had been cleaned and pressed, they had allshaved recently, and one or two looked as though they liked being ableto respect themselves, for a change. 

The girl at the desk in the mayor's outside office told me Bish had adelegation of uptown merchants, who seemed to think that reform wasall right in its place but it oughtn't to be carried more than a fewblocks above the waterfront. They were protesting the new sanitaryregulations. Then she buzzed Bish on the handphone, and told me he'dsee me in a few minutes. After a while, I heard the delegation goingdown the hall from the private office door. One of them was saying:

"Well, this is what we've always been screaming our heads off for. Nowwe've got it good and hard; we'll just have to get used to it. "

When I went in, Bish rose from his desk and came to meet me, shakingmy hand. He looked and was dressed like the old Bish Ware I'd alwaysknown. 

"Glad you dropped in, Walt. Find a seat. How are things on the_Times_?"

"You ought to know. You're making things busy for us. "

"Yes. There's so much to do, and so little time to do it. Seems asthough I've heard somebody say that before. "

"Are you going back to Terra on the _Simón Bolivar_?"

"Oh, Allah forbid! I made a trip on a destroyer, once, and once isenough for a lifetime. I won't even be able to go on the _CapeCanaveral_; I'll take the _Peenemünde_ when she gets in. I'm gladMacBride--Dr. Watson--is going to stop off. He'll be a big help. Don'tknow what I'd have done without Ranjit Singh. "

"That won't be till after the _Cape Canaveral_ gets back from Terra. "

"No. That's why I'm waiting. Don't publish this, Walt, I don't want tostart any premature rumors that might end in disappointments, but I'verecommended immediate reclassification to Class III, and there may bea Colonial Office man on the _Cape Canaveral_ when she gets in. Resident-Agent, permanent. I hope so; he'll need a little breakingin. "

"I saw Tom Kivelson this morning, " I said. "He seems to be gettingalong pretty well. "

"Didn't anybody at the hospital tell you about him?" Bish asked. 

I shook my head. He cursed all hospital staffs. 

"I wish military security was half as good. Why, Tom's permanentlyinjured. He won't be crippled, or anything like that, but there wasconsiderable unrepairable damage to his back muscles. He'll be able toget around, but I doubt it he'll ever be able to work on a hunter-shipagain. "

I was really horrified. Monster-hunting was Tom's whole life. I saidsomething like that. 

"He'll just have to make a new life for himself. Joe says he's goingto send him to school on Terra. He thinks that was his own idea, but Isuggested it to him. "

"Dad wants me to go to school on Terra. "

"Well, that's a fine idea. Tom's going on the _Peenemünde_, along withme. Why don't you come with us?"

"That would be great, Bish. I'd like it. But I just can't. "

"Why not?"

"Well, they want Dad to be mayor, and if he runs, they'll all vote forhim. He can't handle this and the paper both alone. "

"He can get help on both jobs. "

"Yes, but . .. Why, it would be years till I got back. I can'tsacrifice the time. Not now. "

"I'd say six years. You can spend your voyage time from here crammingfor entrance qualifications. Schools don't bother about academiccredits any more; they're only interested in how much you know. Youtake four years' regular college, and a year postgrading, and you'llhave all the formal education you'll need. "

"But, Bish, I can get that here, at the Library, " I said. "We haveevery book on film that's been published since the Year Zero. "

"Yes. And you'd die of old age before you got a quarter through thefirst film bank, and you still wouldn't have an education. Do you knowwhich books to study, and which ones not to bother with? Or which onesto read first, so that what you read in the others will becomprehensible to you? That's what they'll give you on Terra. Thetools, which you don't have now, for educating yourself. "

I thought that over. It made sense. I'd had a lot of the very sort oftrouble he'd spoken of, trying to get information for myself in properorder, and I'd read a lot of books that duplicated other books I'dread, and books I had trouble understanding because I hadn't read someother book first. Bish had something there. I was sure he had. But sixyears!

I said that aloud, and added: "I can't take the time. I have to bedoing things. "

"You'll do things. You'll do them a lot better for waiting those sixyears. You aren't eighteen yet. Six years is a whole third of yourpast life. No wonder it seems long to you. But you're thinking thewrong way; you're relating those six years to what has passed. Relatethem to what's ahead of you, and see how little time they are. Youtake ordinary care of yourself and keep out of any more civil wars, and you have sixty more years, at least. Your six years at school areonly one-tenth of that. I was fifty when I came here to this Creator'sblunder of a planet. Say I had only twenty more years; I spent aquarter of them playing town drunk here. I'm the one who ought to bein a rush and howling about lost time, not you. I ought to be in sucha hurry I'd take the _Simón Bolivar_ to Terra and let this place goto--to anywhere you might imagine to be worse. "

"You know, I don't think you like Fenris. "

"I don't. If I were a drinking man, this planet would have made adrunkard of me. Now, you forget about these six years chopped out ofyour busy life. When you get back here, with an education, you'll be akid of twenty-four, with a big long life ahead of you and your mindstocked with things you don't have now that will help you makesomething--and more important, something enjoyable--out of it. "

 * * * * *

There was a huge crowd at the spaceport to see us off, Tom and BishWare and me. Mostly, it was for Bish. If I don't find a monument tohim when I get back, I'll know there is no such thing as gratitude. There had been a big banquet for us the evening before, and I thinkBish actually got a little tipsy. Nobody can be sure, though; it mighthave been just the old actor back in his role. Now they were allcrowding around us, as many as could jam in, in the main lounge of the_Peenemünde_. Joe Kivelson and his wife. Dad and Julio and Mrs. Laden, who was actually being cordial to Bish, and who had a bundle for usthat we weren't to open till we were in hyperspace. Lillian Arnaz, thegirl who was to take my place as star reporter. We were going to sendeach other audiovisuals; advice from me on the job, and news from the_Times_ from her. Glenn Murell, who had his office open by now and wasgrumbling that there had been a man from Interstellar Import-Exportout on the _Cape Canaveral_, and if the competition got any stifferthe price of tallow-wax would be forced up on him to a sol a pound. And all the _Javelin_ hands who had been wrecked with us on HermannReuch's Land, and the veterans of the Civil War, all but Oscar andCesário, who will be at the dock to meet us when we get to Terra. 

I wonder what it'll be like, on a world where you go to bed every timeit gets dark and get up when it gets light, and can go outdoors allthe time. I wonder how I'll like college, and meeting people from allover the Federation, and swapping tall stories about our home planets. 

And I wonder what I'll learn. The long years ahead, I can't imaginethem now, will be spent on the _Times_, and I ought to learn things tofit me for that. But I can't get rid of the idea about carniculturegrowth of tallow-wax. We'll have to do something like that. The demandfor the stuff is growing, and we don't know how long it'll be beforethe monsters are hunted out. We know how fast we're killing them, butwe don't know how many there are or how fast they breed. I'll talk toTom about that; maybe between us we can hit on something, or at leastlay a foundation for somebody else who will. 

The crowd pushed out and off the ship, and the three of us were alone, here in the lounge of the _Peenemünde_, where the story started andwhere it ends. Bish says no story ends, ever. He's wrong. Stories die, and nothing in the world is deader than a dead news story. But beforethey do, they hatch a flock of little ones, and some of them grow intobigger stories still. What happens after the ship lifts into thedarkness, with the pre-dawn glow in the east, will be another, a new, story. 

But to the story of how the hunters got an honest co-operative andFenris got an honest government, and Bish Ware got Anton Gerrit theslaver, I can write

"The End. "

 * * * * *

_THE WORLDS OF H. BEAM PIPER_

FOUR-DAY PLANET . .. Where the killing heat of a thousand-hour "day"drives men underground, and the glorious hundred-hour sunset isfollowed by a thousand-hour night so cold that only an ExtremeEnvironment Suit can preserve the life of anyone caught outside. 

and

LONE STAR PLANET . .. A planet-full of Texans--they firmly believe theylive on the biggest, strongest, best planet in the galaxy. They herdcattle the size of boxcars for a living, and they defy the SolarLeague to prove that New Texas has even the slightest need of the"protection" that a bunch of diplomatic sissies can offer. 

BRAVE NEW WORLDS FROM THECREATOR OF "LITTLE FUZZY"

--TOGETHER IN ONE VOLUME--

Also by H. Beam Piper

LITTLE FUZZYFUZZY SAPIENSSPACE VIKINGTHE COSMIC COMPUTER

all from Ace Science Fiction

ACESCIENCEFICTION

 * * * * *

Four-Day Planet

Fenris isn't a hell planet, but it's nobody's bargain. With 2, 000-hourdays and an 8, 000-hour year, it alternates blazing heat with killingcold. A planet like that tends to breed a special kind of person:tough enough to stay alive and smart enough to make the best of it. When that kind of person discovers he's being cheated of wealth he'srisked his life for, that kind of planet is ripe for revolution. 

Lone Star Planet

New Texas: its citizens figure that name about says it all. The SolarLeague ambassador to the Lone Star Planet has the unenviable task ofconvincing New Texans that a s'Srauff attack is imminent, anddangerous. Unfortunately it's common knowledge that the s'Srauff areevolved from canine ancestors--and not a Texan alive is about to bescared of a talking dog! But unless he can get them to act, and fast, there won't be a Texan alive, scared or otherwise!

 * * * * *