19
MASKS OFF
There was dead silence for two or three seconds. If a kitten hadsneezed, everybody would have heard it. Then it started, first aninarticulate roar, and then a babel of unprintabilities. I thought I'dheard some bad language from these same men in this room when LeoBelsher's announcement of the price cut had been telecast, but thatwas prayer meeting to this. Dad was still talking. At least, I saw hislips 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'ta 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. Therest kept on shouting curses. Oscar waited a second, and then pointedhis submachine gun at the ceiling and hammered off the whole clip.
"Shut up, a couple of hundred of you, and listen!" he commanded, onthe heels of the blast. Then he turned to the screen again. "Now,Ralph; what was it you were saying?"
"Hallstock got to the spaceport about half an hour ago," Dad said. "Hebought a ticket to Terra. Sigurd Ngozori's here; he called the bankand one of the clerks there told him that Hallstock had checked outhis whole account, around three hundred thousand sols. Took some of itin cash and the rest in Banking Cartel drafts. Murell says that hisinformation is that Bish Ware, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher arrivedearlier, about an hour ago. He didn't see them himself, but he talkedwith spaceport workmen who did."
The men who had crowded up to the screen seemed to have run out ofoaths and obscenities now. Oscar was fitting another clip into hissubmachine gun.
"Well, we'll have to go to the spaceport and get them," he said. "Andtake four ropes instead of three."
"You'll have to fight your way in," Dad told him. "Odin Dock &Shipyard won't let you take people out of their spaceport without afight. They've all bought tickets by now, and Fieschi will have toprotect them."
"Then we'll kick the blankety-blank spaceport apart," somebodyshouted.
That started it up again. Oscar wondered if getting silence was worthanother clip of cartridges, and decided it wasn't. He managed to makehimself heard without it.
"We'll do nothing of the kind. We need that spaceport 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 havethree or four thousand men."
Three or four thousand undisciplined hunters, against fifty trained,disciplined and organized soldiers, because that was what thespaceport police were. I knew their captain, and the lieutenants. Theywere old Regular Army, and they ran the police force like a militaryunit.
"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 Oscarand the Mahatma on the bomb aboard the _Javelin_? That wasn't any helpto Ravick."
"I get it," Oscar said. "He never was working for anybody but BishWare. When Ravick got into a jam, he saw a way to make something forhimself by getting Ravick out of it. I'll bet, ever since he camehere, he was planning to cut in on Ravick somehow. You notice, he knewjust how much money Ravick had stashed away on Terra? When he saw thespot Ravick was in, Bish just thought he had a chance to develophimself another rich uncle."
I'd been worse stunned than anybody by Dad's news. The worst of it wasthat Oscar could be right. I hadn't thought of that before. I'd justthought that Ravick and Belsher had gotten Bish drunk and found outabout the way the men were posted around Hunters' Hall and the loneman in the jeep on Second Level Down.
Then it occurred to me that Bish might have seen a way of gettingFenris rid of Ravick and at the same time save everybody the guilt oflynching him. Maybe he'd turned traitor to save the rest of us fromourselves.
I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have whatyou wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whetherRavick 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 ofmillion sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in thehospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin tosswhether 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'sback. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turnto Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby Dick_, thebook he'd named his ship from.
"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettestit, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in ourNantucket market._"
He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then heshrugged.
"I know, Walt," he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrelsof whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax."
Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are alsoperfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not tomake it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.
They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted inpillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, thetroops stopped to loot the enemy's camp._ I'd come across that linefifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had beenexpensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, atleast, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannonand machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity inthe street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now,and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and thewhole mass, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started upBroadway.
Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gottenoutside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera backto get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustrationfor somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.
Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area.There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfwayto the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcherpointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in anolive-green uniform stood.
I knew him; Lieutenant Ranjit Singh, Captain Courtland'ssecond-in-command. He was a Sikh. Instead of a steel helmet, he wore astriped turban, and he had a black beard that made Joe Kivelson'sblond one look like Tom Kivelson's chin-fuzz. On his belt, along withhis pistol, he wore the little kirpan, the dagger all Sikhs carry. Healso carried a belt radio, and as we approached he lifted the phone tohis mouth and a loudspeaker on the combat car threw his voice at us:
"All right, that's far enough, now. The first vehicle that comeswithin a hundred yards of this gate will be shot down."
One man, and one combat car, against five thousand, with twenty-oddguns and close to a hundred machine guns. He'd last about as long as apint of trade gin at a Sheshan funeral. The only thing was, before heand the crew of the combat car were killed, they'd wipe out about tenor fifteen of our vehicles and a couple of hundred men, and they wouldbe the men and vehicles in the lead.
Mobs are a little different from soldiers, and our Rebel Army wasstill a mob. Mobs don't like to advance into certain death, and theydon't like to advance over the bodies and wreckage of their ownforward elements. Neither do soldiers, but soldiers will do it.Soldiers realize, when they put on the uniform, that some day they mayface death in battle, and if this is it, this is it.
I got the combat car and the lone soldier in the turban--that wouldlook good in anybody's history book--and moved forward, taking carethat he saw the _Times_ lettering on the jeep and taking care to staywell 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 thejeep. Then I walked forward.
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"Lieutenant Ranjit," I said, "I'm representing the _Times_. I havebusiness inside the spaceport. I want to get the facts about this. Itmay be that when I get this story, these people will be satisfied."
"We will, like Nifflheim!" I heard Joe Kivelson bawling, above andbehind me. "We want the men who started the fire my son got burnedin."
"Is that the Kivelson boy's father?" the Sikh asked me, and when Inodded, he lifted the phone to his lips again. "Captain Kivelson," theloudspeaker said, "your son is alive and under skin-grafting treatmenthere at the spaceport hospital. His life is not, repeat not, indanger. The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of themare guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authoritythan an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turnedover for trial. But they will not be taken from this spaceport byforce, 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 thatship's boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody inthis mob makes."
"Yes, sir. With pleasure," another voice replied.
Nobody in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had anycomment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me.
"Mr. Boyd," he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was aman of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. "If I admityou to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly asyou learn them?"
"That's what the _Times_ always does, Lieutenant." Well, almost allthe facts almost always.
"Will you people accept what this _Times_ reporter tells you he haslearned?"
"Yes, of course." That was Oscar Fujisawa.
"I won't!" That was Joe Kivelson. "He's always taking the part of thatold rumpot of a Bish Ware."
"Lieutenant, that remark was a slur on my paper, as well as myself," Isaid. "Will you permit Captain Kivelson to come in along with me? Andsomebody else," I couldn't resist adding, "so that people will believehim?"
Ranjit Singh considered that briefly. He wasn't afraid to die--Ibelieve he was honestly puzzled when he heard people talking aboutfear--but his job was to protect some fugitives from a mob, not to diea useless hero's death. If letting in a small delegation would preventan attack on the spaceport without loss of life and ammunition--ormaybe he reversed the order of importance--he was obliged to try it.
"Yes. You may choose five men to accompany Mr. Boyd," he said. "Theymay not bring weapons in with them. Sidearms," he added, "will notcount as weapons."
After all, a kirpan was a sidearm, and his religion required him tocarry that. The decision didn't make me particularly happy. Respectfor the dignity of others is a fine thing in an officer, but likejournalistic respect for facts, it can be carried past the point ofbeing a virtue. I thought he was over-estimating Joe Kivelson'sself-control.
Vehicles in front began grounding, and men got out and bunchedtogether on the street. Finally, they picked their delegation: JoeKivelson, Oscar Fujisawa, Casmir Oughourlian the shipyard man, one ofthe engineers at the nutrient plant, and the Reverend Hiram Zilker,the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher. They all had pistols, even theReverend Zilker, so I went back to the jeep and put mine on. RanjitSingh had switched his radio off the speaker and was talking tosomebody else. After a while, an olive-green limousine piloted by apoliceman in uniform and helmet floated in and grounded. The six of usgot into it, and it lifted again.
The car let down in a vehicle hall in the administrative area, and thepolice second lieutenant, Chris Xantos, was waiting alone, armed onlywith the pistol that was part of his uniform and wearing a beretinstead of a helmet. He spoke to us, and ushered us down a hallwaytoward Guido Fieschi's office.
I get into the spaceport administrative area about once in twenty orso hours. Oughourlian is a somewhat less frequent visitor. The othershad never been there, and they were visibly awed by all the gleamingglass and brightwork, and the soft lights and the thick carpets. AllPort Sandor ought to look like this, I thought. It could, and maybenow it might, after a while.
There were six chairs in a semicircle facing Guido Fieschi's desk, andthree men sitting behind it. Fieschi, who had changed clothes andwashed since the last time I saw him, sat on the extreme right.Captain Courtland, with his tight mouth under a gray mustache and thequadruple row of medal ribbons on his breast, was on the left. In themiddle, the seat of honor, was Bish Ware, looking as though he werepresiding over a church council to try some rural curate for heresy.
As soon as Joe Kivelson saw him, he roared angrily:
"There's the dirty traitor who sold us out! He's the worst of the lot;I wouldn't be surprised if--"
Bish looked at him like a bishop who has just been contradicted on apoint of doctrine by a choirboy.
"Be quiet!" he ordered. "I did not follow this man you call Ravickhere to this ... this running-hot-and-cold Paradise planet, and I didnot spend five years fraternizing with its unwashed citizenry andcreating for myself the role of town drunkard of Port Sandor, to havehim taken from me and lynched after I have arrested him. People do notlynch my prisoners."
"And who in blazes are you?" Joe demanded.
Bish took cognizance of the question, if not the questioner.
"Tell them, if you please, Mr. Fieschi," he said.
"Well, Mr. Ware is a Terran Federation Executive Special Agent,"Fieschi said. "Captain Courtland and I have known that for the pastfive years. As far as I know, nobody else was informed of Mr. Ware'sposition."
After that, you could have heard a gnat sneeze.
Everybody knows about Executive Special Agents. There are all kinds ofsecret agents operating in the Federation--Army and Navy Intelligence,police of different sorts, Colonial Office agents, private detectives,Chartered Company agents. But there are fewer Executive Specials thanthere are inhabited planets in the Federation. They rank, ex officio,as Army generals and Space Navy admirals; they have the privilege ofthe floor in Parliament, they take orders from nobody but thePresident of the Federation. But very few people have ever seen one,or talked to anybody who has.
And Bish Ware--_good ol' Bish; he'sh everybodysh frien'_--was one ofthem. And I had been trying to make a man of him and reform him. I'deven thought, if he stopped drinking, he might make a success as aprivate detective--at Port Sandor, on Fenris! I wondered what colormy face had gotten now, and I started looking around for a crack inthe floor, to trickle gently and unobtrusively into.
And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was anExecutive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly. Theway he'd gone four hours without a drink, and seemed to be just asdrunk as ever. That was right--just as drunk as he'd ever been; whichwas to say, cold sober. There was the time I'd seen him catch thatfalling bottle and set it up. No drunken man could have done that; aman's reflexes are the first thing to be affected by alcohol. And theway he shot that tread-snail. I've seen men who could shoot well onliquor, but not quick-draw stuff. That calls for perfectco-ordination. And the way he went into his tipsy act at the_Times_--veteran actor slipping into a well-learned role.
He drank, sure. He did a lot of drinking. But there are men whosesystems resist the effects of alcohol better than others, and he musthave been an exceptional example of the type, or he'd never haveadopted the sort of cover personality he did. It would have beenfairly easy for him. Space his drinks widely, and never take a drinkunless he _had_ to, to maintain the act. When he was at the Times withjust Dad and me, what did he have? A fruit fizz.
Well, at least I could see it after I had my nose rubbed in it. JoeKivelson was simply gaping at him. The Reverend Zilker seemed to behaving trouble adjusting, too. The shipyard man and the chemicalengineer weren't saying anything, but it had kicked them for a loss,too. Oscar Fujisawa was making a noble effort to be completelyunsurprised. Oscar is one of our better poker players.
"I thought it might be something like that," he lied brazenly. "But,Bish
... Excuse me, I mean, Mr. Ware..."
"Bish, if you please, Oscar."
"Bish, what I'd like to know is what you wanted with Ravick," he said."They didn't send any Executive Special Agent here for five years toinvestigate this tallow-wax racket of his."
"No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, andI've been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a careerof him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit."
Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, "Aha!The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!" We didn't. Wejust looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to thename. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam.
"I know that name," he said. "Something on Loki, wasn't it?"
Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it.
"The Loki enslavements. Was that it?" I asked. "I read about it, but Inever seem to have heard of Gerrit."
"He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago,were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He wasresponsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousandLokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom wereworked to death in the mines."
No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking forhim. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down anorphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something triviallike that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonablysafe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers?Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and theFederation depends on every planet to do its own policing.
But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is agovernment of and for--if occasionally not by--all sapient peoples ofall races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all.Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow ateverything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept huntingfifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements.
"Gerrit got away, with a month's start. By the time we had traced himto Baldur, he had a year's start on us. He was five years ahead of uswhen we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago,nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from thebest information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of thelocal-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There aresix planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man toeach of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.
"When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a mananswering to Gerrit's description had come in on the _Peenemuende_ fromOdin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The manwho called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anythinglike the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'dtaken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get hisfingerprints."
Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunkenoversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and litit. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I wentto the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.
"Thank you, Walt. I wouldn't have been able to do this if I hadn't hadthat. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick's fingerprints,which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent themin. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. Accordingto his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named ErnestineCoyon, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of ahospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago."
"Why, that's incredible!" the Reverend Zilker burst out, and JoeKivelson was saying: "Steve Ravick isn't any woman...."
"Least of all one who died fourteen years ago," Bish agreed. "But thefingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a bighospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small,woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get thepicture now?"
"They're doing the same thing on Tom's back, right here," I told Joe."Only you can't grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you canhuman tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfacesfrom a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatmentward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter." Then I thoughtof something else. "That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettesin his palm," I said.
Bish nodded commendingly. "Exactly. He'd have about as much sensationin his palms as I'd have wearing thick leather gloves. I'd noticedthat.
"Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reportsfrom other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn't untilthe _Peenemuende_ got in from Terra, the last time, that I got finalconfirmation. Dr. Watson, you'll recall."
"Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan," I mentioned, trying tosalvage something. Showing off. The one I was trying to impress wasWalt Boyd.
"You caught that? Careless of me," Bish chided himself. "What he gaveme was a report that they had finally located a man who had been astaff surgeon at this hospital on Baldur at the time. He's now doing astretch for another piece of malpractice he was unlucky enough to getcaught at later. We will not admit making deals with any criminals, injail or out, but he is willing to testify, and is on his way to Terranow. He can identify pictures of Anton Gerrit as those of the man heoperated on fourteen years ago, and his testimony and ErnestineCoyon's fingerprints will identify Ravick as that man. With all theColonial Constabulary and Army Intelligence people got on Gerrit onLoki, simple identification will be enough. Gerrit was proven guiltylong ago, and it won't be any trouble, now, to prove that Ravick isGerrit."
"Why didn't you arrest him as soon as you got the word from yourfriend from Afghanistan?" I wanted to know.
"Good question; I've been asking myself that," Bish said, a triflewryly. "If I had, the _Javelin_ wouldn't have been bombed, that waxwouldn't have been burned, and Tom Kivelson wouldn't have beeninjured. What I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabularydetective, to Gimli, the next planet out. There's a Navy base there,and always at least a couple of destroyers available. He's coming backwith one of them to pick Gerrit up and take him to Terra. They oughtto be in in about two hundred and fifty hours. I thought it would besafer all around to let Gerrit run loose till then. There's no placehe could go.
"What I didn't realize, at the time, was what a human H-bomb this manMurell would turn into. Then everything blew up at once. Finally, Iwas left with the choice of helping Gerrit escape from Hunters' Hallor having him lynched before I could arrest him." He turned toKivelson. "In the light of what you knew, I don't blame you forcalling me a dirty traitor."
"But how did I know..." Kivelson began.
"That's right. You weren't supposed to. That was before you found out.You ought to have heard what Gerrit and Belsher--as far as I know,that is his real name--called me after they found out, when they gotout of that jeep and Captain Courtland's men snapped the handcuffs onthem. It even shocked a hardened sinner like me."
There was a lot more of it. Bish had managed to get into Hunters' Halljust about the time Al Devis and his companion were starting the fireRavick--Gerrit--had ordered for a diversion. The whole gang was goingto crash out as soon as the fire had attracted everybody away. Bishled them out onto the Second Level Down, sleep-gassed the lone man inthe jeep, and took them to the spaceport, where the police werewaiting for them.
As soon as I'd gotten everything, I called the _Times_. I'd had myradio on all the time, and it had been coming in perfectly. Dad, I washappy to observe, was every bit as flabbergasted as I had been at whoand what Bish Ware was. He might throw my campaign to reform Bish upat me later on, but at the moment he wasn't disposed to, and I waspraising Allah silently that I hadn't had a chance to mention thedetective agency idea to him. That would have been a little too much.
"What are they doing about Belsher and Hallstock?" he asked.
"Belsher goes back to Terra with Ravick. Gerrit, I mean. That's wherehe collected his
cut on the tallow-wax, so that is where he'd have tobe tried. Bish is convinced that somebody in Kapstaad Chemical musthave been involved, too. Hallstock is strictly a local matter."
"That's about what I thought. With all this interstellarback-and-forth, it'll be a long time before we'll be able to writethirty under the story."
"Well, we can put thirty under the Steve Ravick story," I said.
Then it hit me. The Steve Ravick story was finished; that is, thelocal story of racketeer rule in the Hunters' Co-operative. But theAnton Gerrit story was something else. That was Federation-wide news;the end of a fifteen-year manhunt for the most wanted criminal in theknown Galaxy. And who had that story, right in his hot little hand?Walter Boyd, the ace--and only--reporter for the mighty Port Sandor_Times_.
"Yes," I continued. "The Ravick story's finished. But we still havethe Anton Gerrit story, and I'm going to work on it right now."