4
MAIN CITY LEVEL
The ceiling on Main City Level is two hundred feet high; in order topermit free circulation of air and avoid traffic jams, nothing isbuilt higher than a hundred and fifty feet except the squarebuildings, two hundred yards apart, which rest on foundations on theBottom Level and extend up to support the roof. The _Times_ has one ofthese pillar-buildings, and we have the whole thing to ourselves. In acity built for a quarter of a million, twenty thousand people don'thave to crowd very closely on one another. Naturally, we don't have atop landing stage, but except for the buttresses at the corners andsolid central column, the whole street floor is open.
Tom hadn't said anything after we left the stacks of wax and the menguarding them. We came up a vehicle shaft a few blocks up Broadway,and he brought the jeep down and floated it in through one of thearchways. As usual, the place was cluttered with equipment we hadn'tgotten around to repairing or installing, merchandise we'd taken inexchange for advertising, and vehicles, our own and everybody else's.A couple of mechanics were tinkering on one of them. I decided, forthe oomptieth time, to do something about cleaning it up. Say inanother two or three hundred hours, when the ships would all be inport and work would be slack, and I could hire a couple of good men tohelp.
We got Murell's stuff off the jeep, and I hunted around till I found ahand-lifter.
"Want to stay and have dinner with us, Tom?" I asked.
"Uh?" It took him a second or so to realize what I'd said. "Why, no,thanks, Walt. I have to get back to the ship. Father wants to see mebefore the meeting."
"How about you, Bish? Want to take potluck with us?"
"I shall be delighted," he assured me.
Tom told us good-by absent-mindedly, lifted the jeep, and floated itout into the street. Bish and I watched him go; Bish looked as thoughhe had wanted to say something and then thought better of it. Wefloated Murell's stuff and mine over to the elevator beside thecentral column, and I ran it up to the editorial offices on the topfloor.
We came out in a big room, half the area of the floor, full ofworktables and radios and screens and photoprinting machines. Dad, asusual, was in a gray knee-length smock, with a pipe jutting out underhis ragged mustache, and, as usual, he was stopping every minute or soto relight it. He was putting together the stuff I'd transmitted infor the audiovisual newscast. Over across the room, the rest of the_Times_ staff, Julio Kubanoff, was sitting at the composing machine,his peg leg propped up and an earphone on, his fingers punchingrapidly at the keyboard as he burned letters onto the white plasticsheet with ultraviolet rays for photographing. Julio was an oldhunter-ship man who had lost a leg in an accident and taught himselfhis new trade. He still wore the beard, now white, that waspractically the monster-hunters' uniform.
"The stuff come in all right?" I asked Dad, letting down the lifter.
"Yes. What do you think of that fellow Belsher?" he asked. "Did youever hear such an impudent string of lies in your life?" Then, out ofthe corner of his eye, he saw the lifter full of luggage, and sawsomebody with me. "Mr. Murell? Please excuse me for a moment, till Iget this blasted thing together straight." Then he got the filmspliced and the sound record matched, and looked up. "Why, Bish?Where's Mr. Murell, Walt?"
"Mr. Murell has had his initiation to Fenris," I said. "He gotsquirted by a tread-snail almost as soon as he got off the ship. Theyhave him at the spaceport hospital; it'll be 2400 before they get allthe poison sweated out of him."
I went on to tell him what had happened. Dad's eyes widened slightly,and he took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at Bish withsomething very reasonably like respect.
"That was mighty sharp work," he said. "If you'd been a second slower,we'd be all out of visiting authors. That would have been a nicebusiness; story would have gotten back to Terra, and been mostunfortunate publicity for Fenris. And, of course," he afterthoughted,"most unfortunate for Mr. Murell, too."
"Well, if you give this any publicity, I would rather you passed myown trifling exploit over in silence," Bish said. "I gather thespaceport people wouldn't be too happy about giving the public theimpression that their area is teeming with tread-snails, either. Theyhave enough trouble hiring shipping-floor help as it is."
"But don't you want people to know what you did?" Dad demanded,incredulously. Everybody wanted their names in print or on 'cast; thatwas one of his basic articles of faith. "If the public learned aboutthis--" he went on, and then saw where he was heading and pulled upshort. It wouldn't be tactful to say something like, "Maybe theywouldn't think you were just a worthless old soak."
Bish saw where Dad was heading, too, but he just smiled, as though hewere about to confer his episcopal blessing.
"Ah, but that would be a step out of character for me," he said. "Imust not confuse my public. Just as a favor to me, Ralph, say nothingabout it."
"Well, if you'd rather I didn't.... Are you going to cover thismeeting at Hunters' Hall, tonight, Walt?" he asked me.
"Would I miss it?"
He frowned. "I could handle that myself," he said. "I'm afraid thismeeting's going to get a little rough."
I shook my head. "Let's face it, Dad," I said. "I'm a little short ofeighteen, but you're sixty. I can see things coming better than youcan, and dodge them quicker."
Dad gave a rueful little laugh and looked at Bish.
"See how it goes?" he asked. "We spend our lives shielding our youngand then, all of a sudden, we find they're shielding us." His pipe hadgone out again and he relit it. "Too bad you didn't get an audiovisualof Belsher making that idiotic statement."
"He didn't even know I was getting a voice-only. All the time he wastalking, I was doodling in a pad with a pencil."
"Synthetic substitutes!" Dad snorted. "Putting a synthetic tallow-waxmolecule together would be like trying to build a spaceship with ajackknife and a tack hammer." He puffed hard on his pipe, and thenexcused himself and went back to his work.
Editing an audiovisual telecast is pretty much a one-man job. Bishwanted to know if he could be of assistance, but there was nothingeither of us could do, except sit by and watch and listen. Dad handledthe Belsher thing by making a film of himself playing off therecording, and interjecting sarcastic comments from time to time. Whenit went on the air, I thought, Ravick wasn't going to like it. I wouldhave to start wearing my pistol again. Then he made a tape on thelanding of the _Peenemuende_ and the arrival of Murell, who he said hadmet with a slight accident after leaving the ship. I took that over toJulio when Dad was finished, along with a tape on the announcedtallow-wax price cut. Julio only grunted and pushed them aside. He wassetting up the story of the fight in Martian Joe's--a "local bar," ofcourse; nobody ever gets shot or stabbed or slashed or slugged inanything else. All the news _is_ fit to print, sure, but you can'tgive your advertisers and teleprinter customers any worse name thanthey have already. A paper has to use some judgment.
Then Dad and Bish and I went down to dinner. Julio would have his alittle later, not because we're too good to eat with the help butbecause, around 1830, the help is too busy setting up the next paperto eat with us. The dining room, which is also the library, livingroom, and general congregating and loafing place, is as big as theeditorial room above. Originally, it was an office, at a time when alot of Fenris Company office work was being done here. Some of thefurniture is original, and some was made for us by local cabinetmakersout of native hardwood. The dining table, big enough for two ships'crews to eat at, is an example of the latter. Then, of course, thereare screens and microbook cabinets and things like that, and arefrigerator to save going a couple of hundred feet to the pantry incase anybody wants a snack.
I went to that and opened it, and got out a bulb of concentrated fruitjuice and a bottle of carbonated water. Dad, who seldom drinks, keepsa few bottles around for guests. Seems most of our "guests" part withinformation easier if they have something like the locally madehydroponic potato schnapps inside them for courage.
"You drink Baldur honey-ru
m, don't you, Bish?" he said, pawing amongthe bottles in the liquor cabinet next to the refrigerator. "I'm sureI have a bottle of it. Now wait a minute; it's here somewhere."
When Dad passes on and some medium claims to have produced a spiritcommunication from him, I will not accept it as genuine without theexpression: "Now wait a minute; it's here somewhere."
Bish wanted to know what I was fixing for myself, and I told him.
"Never mind the rum, Ralph. I believe," he said, "that I shall joinWalt in a fruit fizz."
Well, whattaya know! Maybe my stealthy temperance campaign was havingresults. Dad looked positively startled, and then replaced the bottlehe was holding.
"I believe I'll make it unanimous," he said. "Fix me up a fruit fizz,too, Walt."
I mixed two more fruit fizzes, and we carried them over to the table.Bish sipped at his critically.
"Palatable," he pronounced it. "Just a trifle on the mild side, butdefinitely palatable."
Dad looked at him as though he still couldn't believe the whole thing.Dinner was slow coming. We finished our fizzes, and Bish and I bothwanted repeats, and Dad felt that he had to go along. So I made threemore. We were finishing them when Mrs. Laden started bringing in thedinner. Mrs. Laden is a widow; she has been with us since my motherdied, the year after I was born. She is violently anti-liquor.Reluctantly, she condones Dad taking a snort now and then, but as soonas she saw Bish Ware, her face started to stiffen.
She put the soup on the table and took off for the kitchen. She alwayshas her own dinner with Julio. That way, while they're eating he cantell her all the news that's fit to print, and all the gossip thatisn't.
For the moment, the odd things I'd been noticing about ourdistinguished and temporarily incapacitated visitor came under thelatter head. I told Dad and Bish about my observations, beginning withthe deafening silence about Glenn Murell at the library. Dad beganpopping immediately.
"Why, he must be an impostor!" he exclaimed. "What kind of a racket doyou think he's up to?"
"Mmm-mm; I wouldn't say that, not right away," Bish said. "In thefirst place, Murell may be his true name and he may publish under anom de plume. I admit, some of the other items are a littlesuspicious, but even if he isn't an author, he may have somelegitimate business here and, having heard a few stories about thisplanetary Elysium, he may be exercising a little caution. Walt, tellyour father about that tallow-wax we saw, down in Bottom Level FourthWard."
I did, and while I was talking Dad sat with his soup spoon poisedhalfway to his mouth for at least a minute before he remembered he washolding it.
"Now, that is funny," he said when I was through. "Why do yousuppose...?"
"Somebody," Bish said, "some group of ship captains, is holding waxout from the Co-operative. There's no other outlet for it, so my guessis that they're holding it for a rise in price. There's only one waythat could happen, and that, literally, would be over Steve Ravick'sdead body. It could be that they expect Steve's dead body to be aroundfor a price rise to come in over."
I was expecting Dad to begin spouting law-and-order. Instead, he hitthe table with his fist; not, fortunately, the one that was holdingthe soup spoon.
"Well, I hope so! And if they do it before the _Cape Canaveral_ getsin, they may fix Leo Belsher, too, and then, in the generalexcitement, somebody might clobber Mort Hallstock, and that'd be grandslam. After the triple funeral, we could go to work on setting up anhonest co-operative and an honest government."
"Well, I never expected to hear you advocating lynch law, Dad," Isaid.
He looked at me for a few seconds.
"Tell the truth, Walt, neither did I," he admitted. "Lynch law is ahorrible thing; don't make any mistake about that. But there's onething more horrible, and that's no law at all. And that is the presentsituation in Port Sandor.
"You know what the trouble is, here? We have no government. No legalgovernment, anyhow; no government under Federation law. We don't evenhave a Federation Resident-Agent. Before the Fenris Company wentbroke, it was the government here; when the Space Navy evacuated thecolonists, they evacuated the government along with them. The thousandwho remained were all too busy keeping alive to worry about that. Theydidn't even care when Fenris was reclassified from Class III,uninhabited but inhabitable, to Class II, inhabitable only inartificial environment, like Mercury or Titan. And when Mort Hallstockgot hold of the town-meeting pseudo government they put together fiftyyears ago and turned it into a dictatorship, nobody realized what hadhappened till it was too late. Lynch law's the only recourse we have."
"Ralph," Bish told him, "if anything like that starts, Belsher andHallstock and Ravick won't be the only casualties. Between Ravick'sgoons and Hallstock's police, they have close to a hundred men. Iwon't deny that they could be cleaned out, but it wouldn't be alynching. It would be a civil war."
"Well, that's swell!" Dad said. "The Federation Government has neverpaid us any attention; the Federation planets are scattered over toomany million cubic light-years of space for the Government to runaround to all of them wiping everybody's noses. As long as things arequiet here, they'll continue to do nothing for us. But let a story hitthe big papers on Terra, _Revolution Breaks Out on Fenris_--andthat'll be the story I'll send to Interworld News--and watch whathappens."
"I will tell you what will happen," Bish Ware said. "A lot of peoplewill get killed. That isn't important, in itself. People are gettingkilled all the time, in a lot worse causes. But these people will allhave friends and relatives who will take it up for them. Start killingpeople here in a faction fight, and somebody will be shooting somebodyin the back out of a dark passage a hundred years from now over it.You want this planet poisoned with blood feuds for the next century?"
Dad and I looked at one another. That was something that hadn'toccurred to either of us, and it should have. There were feuds, evennow. Half the little settlements on the other islands and on themainland had started when some group or family moved out of PortSandor because of the enmity of some larger and more powerful group orfamily, and half our shootings and knife fights grew out of oldgrudges between families or hunting crews.
"We don't want it poisoned for the next century with the sort of thingMort Hallstock and Steve Ravick started here, either," Dad said.
"Granted." Bish nodded. "If a civil war's the only possible way to getrid of them, that's what you'll have to have, I suppose. Only makesure you don't leave a single one of them alive when it's over. But ifyou can get the Federation Government in here to clean the mess up,that would be better. Nobody starts a vendetta with the TerranFederation."
"But how?" Dad asked. "I've sent story after story off about crime andcorruption on Fenris. They all get the file-and-forget treatment."
Mrs. Laden had taken away the soup plates and brought us our maincourse. Bish sat toying with his fork for a moment.
"I don't know what you can do," he said slowly. "If you can stall offthe blowup till the _Cape Canaveral_ gets in, and you can sendsomebody to Terra...."
All of a sudden, it hit me. Here was something that would give Bish apurpose; something to make him want to stay sober.
"Well, don't say, 'If _you_ can,'" I said. "Say, 'If _we_ can.' Youlive on Fenris, too, don't you?"