"How did you get onto it?" I asked.
He chuckled deprecatingly. "No trick at all," he said. "I just
circulated and bought drinks for people. The trouble with Ravick's
gang, it's an army of mercenaries. They'll do anything for the price
of a drink, and as long as my rich uncle stays solvent, I always have
the price of a drink. In the five years I've spent in this Garden Spot
of the Galaxy, I've learned some pretty surprising things about Steve
Ravick's operations."
"Well, surely, nobody was going around places like Martian Joe's or
One 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 how
careless people who've had their own way for a long time can get. For
instance, I've known for some time that Ravick has spies among the
crews of a lot of hunter-ships. I tried, a few times, to warn some of
these captains, but except for Oscar Fujisawa and Corkscrew Finnegan,
none of them would listen to me. It wasn't that they had any doubt
that Ravick would do that; they just wouldn't believe that any of
their crew were traitors.
"I've suspected this Devis for a long time, and I've spoken to Ramón
Llewellyn about him, but he just let it go in one ear and out the
other. For one thing, Devis always has more money to spend than his
share of the _Javelin_ take would justify. He's the showoff type;
always buying drinks for everybody and playing the big shot. Claims to
win it gambling, but all the times I've ever seen him gambling, he's
been losing.
"I knew about this hoard of wax we saw the day Murell came in for some
time. I always thought it was being held out to squeeze a better price
out of Belsher and Ravick. Then this friend of mine with whom I was
talking aboard the _Peenemünde_ mentioned that Murell seemed to know
more about the tallow-wax business than about literary matters, and
after what happened at the meeting and afterward, I began putting two
and two together. When I crashed that party at Hunters' Hall, I heard
a few things, and they all added up.
"And then, about thirty hours after the Javelin left port, I was in
the 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 his
back hand-lifting a power-unit cartridge. A square dance got started a
little later, and he got into it. His back didn't look very strained
to me. And then I heard a couple of characters in One Eye Swanson's
betting that the _Javelin_ would never make port again."
I knew what had happened from then on. If it hadn't been for Bish
Ware, we'd still be squatting around a fire down on the coast of
Hermann Reuch's Land till it got too cold to cut wood, and then we'd
freeze. I mentioned that, but Bish just shrugged it off and suggested
we 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 in
condition to do some talking of his own. But he just dropped out of
sight, about the time your father started calling the _Javelin_."
"Ah!" I drew a finger across under my chin, and mentioned the class of
people who tell no tales. Bish shook his head slowly.
"I doubt it," he said. "Not unless it was absolutely necessary. That
sort of thing would have a discouraging effect the next time Ravick
wanted 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 talking
about what ought to be done with Steve Ravick. Oddly enough, the most
bloodthirsty were the banker and the professor. Well, maybe it wasn't
so odd. They were smart enough to know what Steve Ravick was really
doing 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 favor
of going down to Hunters' Hall right away and massacring everybody in
it, and then doing the same at the Municipal Building.
"That's what I say!" Joe Kivelson was shouting. "Let's go clean out
both rats' nests. Why, there must be a thousand hunter-ship men at the
waterfront, and look how many people in town who want to help. We got
enough men to eat Hunters' Hall whole."
"You'll find it slightly inedible, Joe," Bish told him. "Ravick has
about thirty men of his own and fifteen to twenty city police. He has
at least four 50-mm's on the landing stage above, and he has half a
dozen heavy machine guns and twice that many light 7-mm's."
"Bish is right," somebody else said. "They have the vehicle port on
the street level barricaded, and they have the two floors on the level
below sealed off. We got men all around it and nobody can get out, but
if 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 do
anything?" Joe demanded.
"We're going to do something, Joe," Dad told him. "But we've got to
talk about what we're going to do, and how we're going to do it, or
it'll be us who'll get wiped out."
"Well, we'll have to decide on what it'll be, pretty quick," Mohandas
Gandhi Feinberg said.
"What are things like at the Municipal Building?" Oscar Fujisawa
asked. "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 a
couple of hundred men, make a lot of noise, shoot out a few windows
and all yell, 'Hang Mort Hallstock!' loud enough, and he'll recall the
cops he has at Hunters' Hall to save his own neck. Then the rest of us
can make a quick rush and take Hunters' Hall."
"We'll have to keep our main force around Hunters' Hall while we're
demonstrating at the Municipal Building," Corkscrew Finnegan said. "We
can't take a chance on Ravick's getting away."
"I couldn't care less whether he gets away or not," Oscar said. "I
don't want Steve Ravick's blood. I just want him out of the
Co-operative, and if he runs out from it now, he'll never get back
in."
"You want him, and you want him alive," Bish Ware said. "Ravick has
close to four million sols banked on Terra. Every millisol of that's
money he's stolen from the monster-hunters of this planet, through the
Co-operative. If you just take him out and string him up, you'll have
the Nifflheim of a time getting hold of any of it."
That made sense to all the ship captains, even Joe Kivelson, after Dad
reminded him of how much the salvage job on the _Javelin_ was going to
cost. It took Sigurd Ngozori a couple of minutes to see the point, but
then, hanging Steve Ravick wasn't going to cost the Fidelity & Trust
Company anything.
"Well, this isn't my party," Glenn Murell said, "but I'm too much of a
businessman to see how watching somebody kick on the end of a rope is
worth four million sols."
"Four million sols," Bish said, "and wondering, the rest of your
lives, whether it was justice or just murder."
The Buddhist priest looked at him, a trifle startled. After all, he
was 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 men
around Hunters' Hall than necessary. You don't want the police to be
afraid to leave when Hallstock calls them in to help him at Municipal
Building."
Bish Ware rose. "I think I'll see what I can do at Hunters' Hall, in
the meantime," he said. "I'm going to see if there's some way in from
the First or Second Level Down. Walt, do you still have that sleep-gas
gadget 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. It
worked perfectly as a lighter, too, till you pushed in on a little
gismo on the side. Then, instead of producing a flame, it squirted
out a small jet of sleep gas. It would knock out a man; it would
almost knock out a Zarathustra veldtbeest. I'd bought it from a
spaceman on the _Cape Canaveral_. I'd always suspected that he'd
stolen 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 to
find out who it belonged to? One of the chemists' shops at Port Sandor
made me up some fills for it, and while I had never had to use it, it
was a handy thing to have in some of the places I had to follow
stories into, and it wouldn't do anybody any permanent damage, the way
a 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 than
look at you."
"Who, me?" Bish staggered into a table and caught hold of it. "Who'd
wanna hurt me? I'm just good ol' Bish Ware. _Good_ ol' Bish! nobody
hurt him; he'sh everybody's friend." He let go of the table and
staggered 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 of
acting--Bish Ware sober playing Bish Ware drunk, and that's not an
easy role for anybody to play. Then he picked up the chair and sat
down 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 a
couple of men in it. It's watching this approach here. And we have a
ship'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, we
have 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 little
touching up, and I may want to offer somebody a drink. If I could get
inside that place, there's no telling what I might be able to do. If
one man can get in and put a couple of guards to sleep, an army can
get in after him."
Brother, I thought, if he pulls this one off, he's in. Nobody around
Port Sandor will ever look down on Bish Ware again, not even Joe
Kivelson. I began thinking about the detective agency idea again, and
wondered if he'd want a junior partner. Ware & Boyd, Planetwide
Detective Agency.
I went down to the floor below with him and got him my lighter
gas-projector and a couple of spare fills for it, and found the bottle
of Baldur honey-rum that Dad had been sure was around somewhere. I was
kind of doubtful about that, and he noticed my hesitation in giving it
to him and laughed.
"Don't worry, Walt," he said. "This is strictly for protective
coloration--and odoration. I shall be quite sparing with it, I assure
you."
I shook hands with him, trying not to be too solemn about it, and he
went down in the elevator and I went up the stairs to the floor above.
By this time, the Port Sandor Vigilance Committee had gotten itself
sorted out. The rank-and-file Vigilantes were standing around yacking
at one another, and a smaller group--Dad and Sigurd Ngozori and the
Reverend Sugitsuma and Oscar and Joe and Corkscrew and Nip and the
Mahatma--were in a huddle around Dad's editorial table, discussing
strategy and tactics.
"Well, we'd better get back to the docks before it starts," Corkscrew
was saying. "No hunter crew will follow anybody but their own ships'
officers."
"We'll have to have somebody the uptown people will follow," Oscar
said. "These people won't take orders from a woolly-pants hunter
captain. 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 a
job that's going to have to be run from one central command. We've got
to make sure the demonstration against Hallstock and the operation
against Hunters' Hall are synchronized."
"I have about a hundred and fifty workmen, and they all have or can
get something to shoot with," another man said. I looked around, and
saw that it was Casmir Oughourlian, of Rodriguez & Oughourlian
Shipyards. "They'll follow me, but I'm not too well known uptown."
"Hey, Professor Hartzenbosch," Mohandas Feinberg said. "You're a
respectable-looking duck; you ever have any experience leading a
lynch 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 to
the 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 to
take over-all command of the hunters. Casmir, you'll command your
workmen, and anybody else from the shipyards and engine works and
repair shops and so on. Sigurd, you and the Reverend, here, and
Professor Hartzenbosch gather up all the uptown people you can. Now,
we'll have to decide on how much force we need to scare Mort
Hallstock, and how we're going to place the main force that will
attack Hunters' Hall."
"I think we ought to wait till we see what Bish Ware can do," Oscar
said. "Get our gangs together, and find out where we're going to put
who, but hold off the attack for a while. If he can get inside
Hunters' Hall, we may not even need this demonstration at the
Municipal Building."
Joe Kivelson started to say something. The rest of his fellow ship
captains looked at him severely, and he shut up. Dad kept on jotting
down figures of men and 50-mm guns and vehicles and auto weapons we
had available.
He was still doing it when the fire alarm started.
16