Four-Day Planet Part 23

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 s.p.a.ceport 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

MASKS OFF

There was dead silence for two or three seconds. If a kitten had sneezed, everybody would have heard it. Then it started, first an inarticulate roar, and then a babel of unprintabilities. I thought I'd heard some bad language from these same men in this room when Leo Belsher's announcement of the price cut had been telecast, but that was prayer meeting to this. Dad was still talking. At least, I saw his lips 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't a 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. The rest kept on shouting curses. Oscar waited a second, and then pointed his submachine gun at the ceiling and hammered off the whole clip.

"Shut up, a couple of hundred of you, and listen!" he commanded, on the heels of the blast. Then he turned to the screen again. "Now, Ralph; what was it you were saying?"

"Hallstock got to the s.p.a.ceport about half an hour ago," Dad said. "He bought a ticket to Terra. Sigurd Ngozori's here; he called the bank and one of the clerks there told him that Hallstock had checked out his whole account, around three hundred thousand sols. Took some of it in cash and the rest in Banking Cartel drafts. Murell says that his information is that Bish Ware, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher arrived earlier, about an hour ago. He didn't see them himself, but he talked with s.p.a.ceport workmen who did."

The men who had crowded up to the screen seemed to have run out of oaths and obscenities now. Oscar was fitting another clip into his submachine gun.

"Well, we'll have to go to the s.p.a.ceport and get them," he said. "And take four ropes instead of three."

"You'll have to fight your way in," Dad told him. "Odin Dock & s.h.i.+pyard won't let you take people out of their s.p.a.ceport without a fight. They've all bought tickets by now, and Fieschi will have to protect them."

"Then we'll kick the blankety-blank s.p.a.ceport apart," somebody shouted.

That started it up again. Oscar wondered if getting silence was worth another clip of cartridges, and decided it wasn't. He managed to make himself heard without it.

"We'll do nothing of the kind. We need that s.p.a.ceport 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 have three or four thousand men."

Three or four thousand undisciplined hunters, against fifty trained, disciplined and organized soldiers, because that was what the s.p.a.ceport police were. I knew their captain, and the lieutenants. They were old Regular Army, and they ran the police force like a military unit.

"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 Oscar and the Mahatma on the bomb aboard the _Javelin_? That wasn't any help to Ravick."

"I get it," Oscar said. "He never was working for anybody but Bish Ware. When Ravick got into a jam, he saw a way to make something for himself by getting Ravick out of it. I'll bet, ever since he came here, he was planning to cut in on Ravick somehow. You notice, he knew just how much money Ravick had stashed away on Terra? When he saw the spot Ravick was in, Bish just thought he had a chance to develop himself another rich uncle."

I'd been worse stunned than anybody by Dad's news. The worst of it was that Oscar could be right. I hadn't thought of that before. I'd just thought that Ravick and Belsher had gotten Bish drunk and found out about the way the men were posted around Hunters' Hall and the lone man in the jeep on Second Level Down.

Then it occurred to me that Bish might have seen a way of getting Fenris rid of Ravick and at the same time save everybody the guilt of lynching him. Maybe he'd turned traitor to save the rest of us from ourselves.

I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have what you wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whether Ravick 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 of million sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in the hospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin toss whether 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's back. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turn to Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby d.i.c.k_, the book he'd named his s.h.i.+p from.

"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market._"

He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then he shrugged.

"I know, Walt," he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrels of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax."

Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are also perfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not to make it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.

They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted in pillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, the troops stopped to loot the enemy's camp._ I'd come across that line fifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had been expensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, at least, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannon and machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity in the street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now, and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and the whole ma.s.s, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started up Broadway.

Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back to get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot ill.u.s.tration for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.

Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the s.p.a.ceport area.

There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in an olive-green uniform stood.

I knew him; Lieutenant Ranjit Singh, Captain Courtland's second-in-command. He was a Sikh. Instead of a steel helmet, he wore a striped turban, and he had a black beard that made Joe Kivelson's blond one look like Tom Kivelson's chin-fuzz. On his belt, along with his pistol, he wore the little kirpan, the dagger all Sikhs carry. He also carried a belt radio, and as we approached he lifted the phone to his mouth and a loudspeaker on the combat car threw his voice at us:

"All right, that's far enough, now. The first vehicle that comes within a hundred yards of this gate will be shot down."

One man, and one combat car, against five thousand, with twenty-odd guns and close to a hundred machine guns. He'd last about as long as a pint of trade gin at a Sheshan funeral. The only thing was, before he and the crew of the combat car were killed, they'd wipe out about ten or fifteen of our vehicles and a couple of hundred men, and they would be the men and vehicles in the lead.

Mobs are a little different from soldiers, and our Rebel Army was still a mob. Mobs don't like to advance into certain death, and they don't like to advance over the bodies and wreckage of their own forward elements. Neither do soldiers, but soldiers will do it.

Soldiers realize, when they put on the uniform, that some day they may face death in battle, and if this is it, this is it.

I got the combat car and the lone soldier in the turban--that would look good in anybody's history book--and moved forward, taking care that he saw the _Times_ lettering on the jeep and taking care to stay well 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 the jeep. Then I walked forward.

"Lieutenant Ranjit," I said, "I'm representing the _Times_. I have business inside the s.p.a.ceport. I want to get the facts about this. It may be that when I get this story, these people will be satisfied."

"We will, like Nifflheim!" I heard Joe Kivelson bawling, above and behind me. "We want the men who started the fire my son got burned in."

"Is that the Kivelson boy's father?" the Sikh asked me, and when I nodded, he lifted the phone to his lips again. "Captain Kivelson," the loudspeaker said, "your son is alive and under skin-grafting treatment here at the s.p.a.ceport hospital. His life is not, repeat not, in danger. The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of them are guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authority than an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turned over for trial. But they will not be taken from this s.p.a.ceport by force, 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 that s.h.i.+p's boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody in this mob makes."

"Yes, sir. With pleasure," another voice replied.

n.o.body in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had any comment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me.