“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 Cooperative, 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 Cooperative. 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,
