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
