"Nip Spazoni and a few others are bringing men and guns up from the
docks and putting a cordon around the place on the Main City Level,"
Oscar said. "Your father will probably be hearing that they're moving
into position now."
He had. He also said that he had called all the vehicles on the First
and Second Levels Down; they all reported no activity in Hunters' Hall
except 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 have
gotten both the man on the jeep and Bish."
"He could have left the jeep," Joe said. "Maybe he went inside after
Bish."
"Funny he didn't call in and say so," somebody said.
"No, it isn't," I contradicted. "Manufacturers' claims to the
contrary, there is no such thing as a tap-proof radio. Maybe he wasn't
supposed to leave his post, but if he did, he used his head not
advertising it."
"That makes sense," Oscar agreed. "Well, whatever happened, we're not
doing 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 their
ships to rally their crews. I hurried over to the jeep and checked my
equipment. There wasn't too much film left in the big audiovisual, so
I replaced it with a fresh sound-and-vision reel, good for another
couple of hours, and then lifted to the ceiling. Worrying about Tom
wouldn't help Tom, and worrying about Bish wouldn't help Bish, and I
had a job to do.
What I was getting now, and I was glad I was starting a fresh reel for
it, was the beginning of the First Fenris Civil War. A long time from
now, when Fenris was an important planet in the Federation, maybe
they'd make today a holiday, like Bastille Day or the Fourth of July
or Federation Day. Maybe historians, a couple of centuries from now,
would call me an important primary source, and if Cesário's religion
was right, maybe I'd be one of them, saying, "Well, after all, is
Boyd such a reliable source? He was only seventeen years old at the
time."
Finally, after a lot of yelling and confusion, the Rebel Army got
moving. We all went up to Main City Level and went down Broadway,
spreading out side streets when we began running into the cordon that
had been thrown around Hunters' Hall. They were mostly men from the
waterfront who hadn't gotten to the wax fire, and they must have
stripped the guns off half the ships in the harbor and mounted them on
lorries or cargo skids.
Nobody, not even Joe Kivelson, wanted to begin with any massed frontal
attack on Hunters' Hall.
"We'll have to bombard the place," he was saying. "We try to rush it
and we'll lose half our gang before we get in. One man with good cover
and 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 built
with our money. Let's don't burn the house down to get rid of the
cockroaches."
"Well, how are you going to do it, then?" Joe wanted to know. Rule out
frontal attack and Joe's at the end of his tactics.
"You stay up here. Keep them amused with a little smallarms fire at
the windows and so on. I'll take about a dozen men and go down to
Second Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple of
skins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out."
That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing how
much wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in on
some of the smoke. I mentioned that if we got into the building and up
to Main City Level, we'd need some way of signaling to avoid being
shot by our own gang, and got the wave-length combination of the
Pequod 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 went
uptown and down a vehicle shaft to Second Level. I followed in my
jeep, even after Oscar and his crowd let down and got out, and hovered
behind them as they advanced on foot to Hunters' Hall.
The Second Level Down was the vehicle storage, where the derricks and
other equipment had been kept. It was empty now except for a
workbench, a hand forge and some other things like that, a few drums
of lubricant, and several piles of sheet metal. Oscar and his men got
inside and I followed, going up to the ceiling. I was the one who saw
the man lying back of a pile of sheet metal, and called their
attention.
He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and a
pistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple of
Oscar's followers, dragging him out, said:
"He's been sleep-gassed."
Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been on
guard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight.
I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been what
had gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weapons
on Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it looked
to me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used it
to knock out our guard. Taken it off his body I guessed. That crowd
wasn'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 head
for a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't think
we were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close to
my gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and none
of them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to.
The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any of
them. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hear
firing outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked my
handphone.
"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 arched
vehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half a
dozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing.
"We're going up," I said. "They've all lammed out. The place is
empty."
"You don't know that," Oscar chided. "It might be bulging with
Ravick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down."
Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren't
running, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush by
starting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that I
wasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of us
went over and looked behind the bar, which was the only hiding place
in 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 in
all of them, expecting to find Bish Ware's body. Maybe a couple of
other bodies, too. I'd seen him shoot the tread-snail, and I didn't
think he'd die unpaid for. In Steve Ravick's office, the safe was open
and 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 he
wasn't expecting to find anybody any more. We went to the third floor.
Ravick's living quarters were there, and they were magnificently
luxurious. The hunters, whose money had paid for all that magnificence
and luxury, cursed.
There were no bodies there, either, or on the landing stage above. I
unhooked the radio again.
"You can come in, now," I said. "The place is empty. Nobody here but
us Vigilantes."
"Huh?" Joe couldn't believe that. "How'd they get out?"
"They got out on the Second Level Down." I told him about the
sleep-gassed guard.
"Did you bring him to? What did he say?"
"Nothing; we didn't. We can't. You get sleep-gassed, you sleep till
you 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 drinks
or drawn themselves beers at the bar and rung up no sale on the cash
register. Somebody else had a box of cigars he'd picked up in Ravick's
quarters on the fourth floor and was passing them around. Joe and
about two or three hundred other hunters came crowding up the
escalator, 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 guard
was knocked out with Walt's gas gadget, that Bish was carrying."
"Ha!" Joe cried. "Bet you it was the other way round; Bish took them
out."
That started an argument. While it was going on, I went to the
communication screen and got the _Times_, and told Dad what had
happened.
"Yes," he said. "That was what I was afraid you'd find. Glenn Murell
called in from the spaceport a few minutes ago. He says Mort Hallstock
came in with his car, and he heard from some of the workmen that Bish
Ware, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher came in on the Main City Level in a
jeep. They claimed protection from a mob, and Captain Courtland's
police are protecting them."
19