Chapter 9

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

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

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 and smoke. It passed over the boat and the hut beside it and the crowd of us outside, and I could see Oscar in the machine gunner's seat aiming a portable audiovisual telecast camera. After he got a view of us, cheering and waving our arms, the boat came back and let down. We ran to it, all of us except the man with the broken leg and a couple who didn't have enough clothes to leave the fire, and as the boat opened I could hear Oscar saying:

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

He gave me the camera when he got out, followed by his gunner, and I got a view of them, and of the boat lifting and starting west to guide the 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 the search."

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

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

"Aah, just an act," Oscar said. "That was to fool the city cops, and anybody else who needed fooling. It worked so well that he was able to crash a party Steve Ravick was throwing at Hunters' Hall, after the meeting. That was where he picked up some hints that Ravick had a spy in the _Javelin_ crew. He spent the next twenty or so hours following that up, and heard about your man Devis straining his back. He found out what Devis did on the _Javelin_, and that gave him the idea that whatever the sabotage was, it would be something to the engines. What did 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 father began calling and we heard from Nip."

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

"Well, it's lucky anybody listened to him," he grudged. "I wouldn't have."

"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 a good private detective agency in Port Sandor. Maybe I could talk him into opening one. He could make a go of it. He had all kinds of contacts, he was handy with a gun, and if he recruited a couple of tough but honest citizens who were also handy with guns and built up a protective and investigative organization, it would fill a long-felt need and at the same time give him something beside Baldur honey-rum to take his mind off whatever he was drinking to keep from thinking about. If he only stayed sober half the time, that would be a fifty per cent success.

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

"We didn't have time to bother with any Al Devises," Oscar said. "As soon as Bish figured out what had happened aboard the _Javelin_, we knew you'd need help and need it fast. He's keeping an eye on Al for us 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 had been picked up, was the first ship in. She let down into the ravine, after some maneuvering around, and Mohandas Feinberg and half a dozen of his crew got off with an improvised stretcher on a lifter and a lot of blankets. We got our broken-leg case aboard, and Abdullah Monnahan, and the man with the broken wrist. There were more ships coming, so the rest of us waited. Joe Kivelson should have gone on the _Helldiver_, to have his broken arm looked at, but a captain's always the 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 are all bachelors, and they use the _Pequod_ to throw parties on when they're not hunting, so it is more comfortably fitted than the usual hunter-ship. Joe decided not to try to take anything away from the boat. He was going to do something about raising the _Javelin_, and the salvage ship could stop here and pick everything up.

"Well, one thing," Oscar told him. "Bring that machine gun, and what small arms you have. I think things are going to get sort of rough in Port 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 _Dirty Gertie_ and Nip Spazoni's _Bulldog_ were all talking about what was going to have to be done about Steve Ravick. Bombing _Javelin_ would have 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 of hoodlums, and he could count on Morton Hallstock's twenty or thirty city police; they'd put up a fight, and a hard one. And they were all together, and the hunter fleet was coming in one ship at a time. I wondered if the Ravick-Hallstock gang would try to stop them at the water front, or concentrate at Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Building to stand siege. I knew one thing, though. However things turned out, there was going to be an awful lot of shooting in Port Sandor before it was over.

Finally, everybody had been gotten onto one ship or another but Oscar and his gunner and the Kivelsons and Murell and myself. Then the _Pequod_, which had been circling around at five thousand feet, let down and we went aboard. The conning tower was twice as long as usual on a hunter-ship, and furnished with a lot of easy chairs and a couple of 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-length combination. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he was wearing a gun. I guess we made kind of a show of ourselves, but, after all, he'd come within an ace of being all out of family, and I'd come within an ace of 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 bomb planted aboard the _Javelin_, and everybody's taking just one guess who 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 we know it."

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

"The condition of the hull looked very much like the effect of a charge 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, has expressed the opinion that it could hardly be anything but a small demolition bomb. Would you say accident can be ruled out?"

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

"That's good enough," Dad said. "We'll run it as 'very convincing and almost conclusive' evidence of sabotage." He'd shut off the recorder for 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 brief account of our experiences in the boat, the landing and wreck, and our camp, and the firewood cutting, and how we had repaired the radio. Joe Kivelson talked for a while, and so did Tom and Glenn Murell. I was going to say something when they finished, and I sat down on one of the 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 lying down and that somebody had thrown a blanket over me. Tom Kivelson was still asleep under a blanket on the other couch, across from me. The clock over the instrument panel had moved eight G.S. hours. Joe Kivelson wasn't in sight, but Glenn Murell and Oscar were drinking coffee. I went to the front window, and there was a scarlet glow on the horizon ahead of me.

That's another sight Cesário Vieria will miss, if he takes his next reincarnation 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, and floodlighted from below. I looked at it for a while, and then got myself a cup of coffee and when I had finished it I went to the screen.

It was still tuned to the _Times_, and Mohandas Feinberg was sitting in front of it, smoking one of his twisted black cigars. He had a big 10-mm Sterberg stuffed into the waistband of his trousers.

"You guys poked along," he said. "I always thought the _Pequod_ was fast. 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 ships that were farthest west and didn't go to your camp have been in quite a while. We're having a meeting here. We are organizing the Port Sandor Vigilance Committee and Renegade Hunters' Co-operative."

15

VIGILANTES

When the _Pequod_ surfaced under the city roof, I saw what was cooking. There were twenty or more ships, either on the concrete docks or afloat in the pools. The waterfront was crowded with men in boat clothes, forming little knots and breaking up to join other groups, all milling about talking excitedly. Most of them were armed; not just knives and pistols, which is normal costume, but heavy rifles or submachine guns. Down to the left, there was a commotion and people were 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 not liking the looks of things, and Glenn Murell, who had come up from his nap below, was liking it even less. He'd come to Fenris to buy tallow-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 under the head of civic improvements, but towns are rarely improved by having battles fought in them.

Maybe I should have played dumb and waited till I'd talked to Dad face to 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 general call had gone out to the hunter-fleet, everybody had been positive of what 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 could take. They weren't going to have any more of him, and that was all there was to it.

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

"Knock off the argument, down there; you people are all going to stay on the ship. I'm going up to the _Times_; as soon as I'm off, float her out into the inner channel and keep her afloat, and don't let anybody 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 to find 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 around to buy tallow-wax, Ravick's won the war."

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

There was a big crowd around the _Times_, mostly business district people and quite a few women. They were mostly out on the street and inside the street-floor vehicle port. Not a disorderly crowd, but I noticed quite a few rifles and submachine guns. As we slipped into the vehicle port, they recognized the _Pequod's_ boat, and there was a rush after it. We had trouble getting down without setting it on anybody, and more trouble getting out of it. They were all friendly--too friendly for comfort. They began cheering us as soon as they saw us.

Oscar got Joe Kivelson, with his arm in a sling, out in front where he could be seen, and began shouting: "Please make way; this man's been injured. Please don't crowd; we have an injured man here." The crowd began 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 been hurt real bad; just listen to him!"

When we got up to the editorial floor, Dad and Bish Ware and a few others were waiting at the elevator for us. Bish was dressed as he always was, in his conservative black suit, with the organic opal glowing in his neckcloth. Dad had put a coat on over his gun. Julio was wearing two pistols and a knife a foot long. There was a big crowd in the editorial office--ships' officers, merchants, professional people. I noticed Sigurd Ngozori, the banker, and Professor Hartzenbosch--he was wearing a pistol, too, rather self-consciously--and the Zen Buddhist priest, who evidently had something under his kimono. They all greeted us enthusiastically and shook hands with us. I noticed that Joe Kivelson was something less than comfortable about shaking hands with Bish Ware. The fact that Bish had started the search for the _Javelin_ that had saved our lives didn't alter the opinion Joe had formed long ago that Bish was just a worthless old souse. Joe's opinions are all collapsium-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 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."