I went through the gateway, towing my equipment in a contragravity
hamper 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 and
tidy and well lighted as the spaceport area. I knew Dad's editorials
and my sarcastic news stories wouldn't do it. We'd been trying long
enough.
The two girls in bikinis in front of me pushed on, still gabbling
about the fight one of them had had with her boy friend, and I closed
up behind the half dozen monster-hunters in long trousers, ankle boots
and short boat-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must have
all been from the same crew, because they weren't arguing about whose
ship was fastest, had the toughest skipper, and made the most money.
They were talking about the price of tallow-wax, and they seemed to
have picked up a rumor that it was going to be cut another ten
centisols a pound. I eavesdropped shamelessly, but it was the same
rumor I'd picked up, myself, a little earlier.
"Hi, Walt," somebody behind me called out. "Looking for some news
that's fit to print?"
I turned my head. It was a man of about thirty-five with curly brown
hair and a wide grin. Adolf Lautier, the entertainment promoter. He
and Dad each owned a share in the Port Sandor telecast station, and
split their time between his music and drama-films and Dad's
newscasts.
"All the news is fit to print, and if it's news the _Times_ prints
it," I told him. "Think you're going to get some good thrillers this
time?"
He shrugged. I'd just asked that to make conversation; he never had
any way of knowing what sort of films would come in. The ones the
_Peenemünde_ was bringing should be fairly new, because she was
outbound from Terra. He'd go over what was aboard, and trade one for
one for the old films he'd shown already.
"They tell me there's a real Old-Terran-style Western been showing on
Völund that ought to be coming our way this time," he said. "It was
filmed in South America, with real horses."
That would go over big here. Almost everybody thought horses were as
extinct as dinosaurs. I've seen so-called Westerns with the cowboys
riding Freyan _oukry_. I mentioned that, and then added:
"They'll think the old cattle towns like Dodge and Abilene were awful
sissy places, though."
"I suppose they were, compared to Port Sandor," Lautier said. "Are you
going 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 dictionary
but which nobody needs to look up. The hunters, ahead of us, heard
him and laughed. They couldn't possibly have agreed more. He was going
to continue with the fascinating subject of Mr. Leo Belsher's ancestry
and personal characteristics, and then bit it off short. I followed
his eyes, and saw old Professor Hartzenbosch, the principal of the
school, approaching.
"Ah, here you are, Mr. Lautier," he greeted. "I trust that I did not
keep you waiting." Then he saw me. "Why, it's Walter Boyd. How is your
father, Walter?"
I assured him as to Dad's health and inquired about his own, and then
asked him how things were going at school. As well as could be
expected, he told me, and I gathered that he kept his point of
expectation safely low. Then he wanted to know if I were going aboard
to 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 idea
where he intends staying while he is among us?"
"Why, yes," I admitted. "After the _Peenemünde_ radioed us their
passenger list, Dad talked to him by screen, and invited him to stay
with us. Mr. Murell accepted, at least until he can find quarters of
his own."
There are a lot of good poker players in Port Sandor, but Professor
Jan Hartzenbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment would
have been comical if it hadn't been so utterly pathetic. He'd been
hoping to lasso Murell himself.
"I wonder if Mr. Murell could spare time to come to the school and
speak 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 be
coming to his school out of respect for him, not because a
seventeen-year-old cub reporter sent him. But then, Professor
Hartzenbosch always took the attitude that he was conferring a favor
on the _Times_ when he had anything he wanted publicity on.
The elevator door opened, and Lautier and the professor joined in the
push to get into it. I hung back, deciding to wait for the next one so
that I could get in first and get back to the rear, where my hamper
wouldn't be in people's way. After a while, it came back empty and I
got on, and when the crowd pushed off on the top level, I put my
hamper 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 miles
off-planet. Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west,
very high, and the sunset was even brighter and redder than when I had
seen it last, ten hours before. It was now about 1630.
Now, before anybody starts asking just who's crazy, let me point out
that 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 the
sunsets, like many other things, are somewhat peculiar.
Fenris is the second planet of a G_{4} star, six hundred and fifty
light-years to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everything
else equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a
cooler primary and getting about the same amount of radiation. At
least, that's what the book says. I was born on Fenris, and have never
been off it in the seventeen years since.
Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle
shorter than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight
thousand and a few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris
makes almost exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one side
the sun is continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down
unceasing heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight
hours, and when you get up and go outside--in an insulated vehicle, or
an extreme-environment suit--you find that the shadows have moved only
an inch or so, and it's that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls down
to the horizon and hangs there for a few days--periods of twenty-four
G.S. hours--and then slides slowly out of sight. Then, for about a
hundred hours, there is a beautiful unfading sunset, and it's really
pleasant outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder until, just before
sunrise, it gets almost cold enough to freeze CO_{2}. Then the sun
comes up, and we begin all over again.
You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenris
is nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and spacemen haven't
made a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of
fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram Zilker, the
Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of those planets
the Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with.
The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth
Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have taken
that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a
matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two
hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost
everything they'd put into the company, which, for most of them, was
all they had. Not a few lost their lives before the Federation Space
Navy could get ships here to evacuate them.
But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh start
elsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, took
over all the equipment and installations the Fenris Company had
abandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least,
they stayed alive. There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while
we are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it.
There were about two thousand people--ten per cent of the planetary
population--on the wide concrete promenade around the spaceport
landing pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my
telecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could find
some ten or twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be a
reporter when he grew up, so that I could have an apprentice to help
me with my junk.
As the star--and only--reporter of the greatest--and only--paper on
the planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on the
Terra-Odin milk run, the _Peenemünde_ and the _Cape Canaveral_,
landed. Of course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as they
come out of hyperspace and into radio range, and get the passenger
list, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the
latest native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on
Venus. Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all,
or the Federation Member Republic of Venus will have some
nonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story to
end 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-odd
hours, 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 to
be picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP traveling
through. This time, though, the big story coming in on the
_Peenemünde_ was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such
thing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get
rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structural
contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at
that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was
going to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with the
four-day year. Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de
plume, and nobody here had ever heard of him.
That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides
the toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people have
to stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/or
frozen to death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one
of the cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And
travel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybody
is hoping to read about a worse place than Fenris. I had checked on
Glenn Murell at the library. None of the librarians had ever heard of
him, and there wasn't a single mention of him in any of the big
catalogues of publications.
The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell was
some swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that was that
I couldn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what
he'd expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could be
on the lam from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all the
cover story? Some of our better-known citizens came here dodging
warrants 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 than
I am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday won't
come till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is Joe
Kivelson, the skipper of the _Javelin_; Tom is sort of junior
engineer, second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to school
together, which is to say a couple of years at Professor
Hartzenbosch's, learning to read and write and put figures together.
That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although Joe
Kivelson sent Tom's older sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody
who stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I were
still digging for ours.
Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about
it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and
romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot
stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized
that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot.
Tom couldn't string three sentences--no, one sentence--together to
save his life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in something
that isn't pitching end-for-end every minute.
Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds
heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard, though
at present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him
dressed as I was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a light
jacket. Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked
around behind him, and saw the brass tip of a scabbard under the
jacket. Any time a hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife on, he isn't
wearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew
Joe Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the _Peenemünde_,
with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms and
the 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. "We
only heard about it last evening," by which he meant after 1800 of
the previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship
captain who had called the _Javelin_ by screen. "We screened everybody
else we could."
That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. Steve
Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast of
Hermann Reuch's Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack it
with his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted voted
through. I had always wondered how long the real hunters were going to
stand for that. They'd been standing for it ever since I could
remember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn't
been 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 which
way they were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught a
tiny twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmetic
to 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 the
crowd.
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 a
scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his
left arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The
former was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Co-operative, and
his companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port
Sandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris.
They had held their respective positions for as long as I could
remember anything at all. I could never remember an election in Port
Sandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of
goons and triggermen--I could see a couple of them loitering in the
background--who kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, only
his wore badges and called themselves police.
Once in a while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one or
the other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun on, and
so would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third
member of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure nobody
got behind Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and that always
rather hurt me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they didn't need
to 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 he
was smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of
his. Showing how tough he was. Dad says that when you see somebody
showing 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 as
she could without over-heating from atmosphere friction. She was
almost buckshot size to the naked eye, and a couple of tugs were
getting ready to go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera out
of the hamper, checked it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock and
handgrips and a trigger like a submachine gun. I caught the ship in
the finder and squeezed the trigger for a couple of seconds. It would
be about five minutes till the tugs got to her and anything else
happened, so I put down the camera and looked around.
Coming through the crowd, walking as though the concrete under him was
pitching and rolling like a ship's deck on contragravity in a storm,
was Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself and
recovered, and then changed course to starboard and bore down on us.
He was carrying about his usual cargo, and as usual the manifest would
read, _Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar_.
Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd
first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamed
him 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 never
seen 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 face
that always wore an expression of benevolent wisdom, and the more
cargo 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 the
backs of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veins
didn't protrude. And drunk or sober--though I never remembered seeing
him in the latter condition--he had the fastest reflexes of anybody I
knew. I saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock
over an open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed
it by the neck and set it up, all in one motion, without spilling a
drop, and he went on talking as though nothing had happened. He was
quoting Homer, I remembered, and you could tell that he was thinking
in the original ancient Greek and translating to Lingua Terra as he
went.
He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, the
jacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an Uller
organic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly--once
every planetary day--a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in for
him, and he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. If
anybody was unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said he
had a rich uncle on Terra.
When I was a kid--well, more of a kid than I am now--I used to believe
he really was a bishop--unfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, or
whatever they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot of
people who weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him on
every denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missing
the Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what he'd
done to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that somewhere
there was a cathedral standing unfinished because he'd hypered out
with the building fund. It was generally agreed that his
ecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay out there in the
boondocks 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 are
full of that sort of remittance men.
Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, of
both sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was an
example, who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associate
with him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a
reporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knew
all the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having to
associate with all of them, and it is sad but true that you get very
few news stories in Sunday school. Far from fearing that Bish would be
a 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 been
somebody, somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to
him, and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a
bottle. Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feet
again. I hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turning
himself 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 simply
trying to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky,
at the hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was
make him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to
manage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on
the 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 other
ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it
got sick and died.
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