Chapter 2: Reporter Working

Bish came over and greeted us solemnly.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Captain Ahab, I believe,” he said, bowing to Tom, who seemed slightly puzzled; the education Tom had been digging out for himself was technical rather than literary. “And Mr. Pulitzer. Or is it Horace Greeley?”

“Lord Beaverbrook, your Grace,” I replied. “Have you any little news items for us from your diocese?”

Bish teetered slightly, getting out a cigar and inspecting it carefully before lighting it.

“We-el,” he said carefully, “my diocese is full to the hatch covers with sinners, but that’s scarcely news.” He turned to Tom. “One of your hands on the Javelin got into a fight in Martian Joe’s, a while ago. Lumped the other man up pretty badly.” He named the Javelin crewman, and the man who had been pounded. The latter was one of Steve Ravick’s goons. “But not fatally, I regret to say,” Bish added. “The local Gestapo are looking for your man, but he made it aboard Nip Spazoni’s Bulldog, and by this time he’s halfway to Hermann Reuch’s Land.”

“Isn’t Nip going to the meeting, tonight?” Tom asked.

Bish shook his head. “Nip is a peace-loving man. He has a well-founded suspicion that peace is going to be in short supply around Hunters’ Hall this evening. You know, of course, that Leo Belsher’s coming in on the Peenemünde and will be there to announce another price cut. The new price, I understand, will be thirty-five centisols a pound.”

Seven hundred sols a ton, I thought; why, that would barely pay ship expenses.

“Where did you get that?” Tom asked, a trifle sharply.

“Oh, I have my spies and informers,” Bish said. “And even if I hadn’t, it would figure. The only reason Leo Belsher ever comes to this Eden among planets is to negotiate a new contract, and who ever heard of a new contract at a higher price?”

That had all happened before, a number of times. When Steve Ravick had gotten control of the Hunters’ Co-operative, the price of tallow-wax, on the loading floor at Port Sandor spaceport, had been fifteen hundred sols a ton. As far as Dad and I could find out, it was still bringing the same price on Terra as it always had. It looked to us as if Ravick and Leo Belsher, who was the Co-op representative on Terra, and Mort Hallstock were simply pocketing the difference. I was just as sore about what was happening as anybody who went out in the hunter-ships. Tallow-wax is our only export. All our imports are paid for with credit from the sale of wax.

It isn’t really wax, and it isn’t tallow. It’s a growth on the Jarvis’s sea-monster; there’s a layer of it under the skin, and around organs that need padding. An average-sized monster, say a hundred and fifty feet long, will yield twelve to fifteen tons of it, and a good hunter kills about ten monsters a year. Well, at the price Belsher and Ravick were going to cut from, that would run a little short of a hundred and fifty thousand sols for a year. If you say it quick enough and don’t think, that sounds like big money, but the upkeep and supplies for a hunter-ship are big money, too, and what’s left after that’s paid off is divided, on a graduated scale, among ten to fifteen men, from the captain down. A hunter-boat captain, even a good one like Joe Kivelson, won’t make much more in a year than Dad and I make out of the Times.

Chemically, tallow-wax isn’t like anything else in the known Galaxy. The molecules are huge; they can be seen with an ordinary optical microscope, and a microscopically visible molecule is a curious-looking object, to say the least. They use the stuff to treat fabric for protective garments. It isn’t anything like collapsium, of course, but a suit of waxed coveralls weighing only a couple of pounds will stop as much radiation as half an inch of lead.

Back when they were getting fifteen hundred a ton, the hunters had been making good money, but that was before Steve Ravick’s time.

It was slightly before mine, too. Steve Ravick had showed up on Fenris about twelve years ago. He’d had some money, and he’d bought shares in a couple of hunter-ships and staked a few captains who’d had bad luck and got them in debt to him. He also got in with Morton Hallstock, who controlled what some people were credulous enough to take for a government here. Before long, he was secretary of the Hunters’ Co-operative. Old Simon MacGregor, who had been president then, was a good hunter, but he was no businessman. He came to depend very heavily on Ravick, up till his ship, the Claymore, was lost with all hands down in Fitzwilliam Straits. I think that was a time bomb in the magazine, but I have a low and suspicious mind. Professor Hartzenbosch has told me so repeatedly. After that, Steve Ravick was president of the Co-op. He immediately began a drive to increase the membership. Most of the new members had never been out in a hunter-ship in their lives, but they could all be depended on to vote the way he wanted them to.

First, he jacked the price of wax up, which made everybody but the wax buyers happy. Everybody who wasn’t already in the Co-op hurried up and joined. Then he negotiated an exclusive contract with Kapstaad Chemical Products, Ltd., in South Africa, by which they agreed to take the entire output for the Co-op. That ended competitive wax buying, and when there was nobody to buy the wax but Kapstaad, you had to sell it through the Co-operative or you didn’t sell it at all. After that, the price started going down. The Co-operative, for which read Steve Ravick, had a sales representative on Terra, Leo Belsher. He wrote all the contracts, collected all the money, and split with Ravick. What was going on was pretty generally understood, even if it couldn’t be proven, but what could anybody do about it?

Maybe somebody would try to do something about it at the meeting this evening. I would be there to cover it. I was beginning to wish I owned a bullet-proof vest.

Bish and Tom were exchanging views on the subject, some of them almost printable. I had my eyes to my binoculars, watching the tugs go up to meet the Peenemünde.

“What we need for Ravick, Hallstock and Belsher,” Tom was saying, “is about four fathoms of harpoon line apiece, and something to haul up to.”

That kind of talk would have shocked Dad. He is very strong for law and order, even when there is no order and the law itself is illegal. I’d always thought there was a lot of merit in what Tom was suggesting. Bish Ware seemed to have his doubts, though.

“Mmm, no; there ought to be some better way of doing it than that.”

“Can you think of one?” Tom challenged.

I didn’t hear Bish’s reply. By that time, the tugs were almost to the ship. I grabbed up the telephoto camera and aimed it. It has its own power unit, and transmits directly. In theory, I could tune it to the telecast station and put what I was getting right on the air, and what I was doing was transmitting to the Times, to be recorded and ‘cast later. Because it’s not a hundred per cent reliable, though, it makes its own audiovisual record, so if any of what I was sending didn’t get through, it could be spliced in after I got back.

I got some footage of the tugs grappling the ship, which was now completely weightless, and pulling her down. Through the finder, I could see that she had her landing legs extended; she looked like a big overfed spider being hauled in by a couple of gnats. I kept the butt of the camera to my shoulder, and whenever anything interesting happened, I’d squeeze the trigger. The first time I ever used a real submachine gun had been to kill a blue slasher that had gotten into one of the ship pools at the waterfront. I used three one-second bursts, and threw bits of slasher all over the place, and everybody wondered how I’d gotten the practice.

A couple more boats, pushers, went up to help hold the ship against the wind, and by that time she was down to a thousand feet, which was half her diameter. I switched from the shoulder-stock telephoto to the big tripod job, because this was the best part of it. The ship was weightless, of course, but she had mass and an awful lot of it. If anybody goofed getting her down, she’d take the side of the landing pit out, and about ten per cent of the population of Fenris, including the ace reporter for the Times, along with it.

At the same time, some workmen and a couple of spaceport cops had appeared, taken out a section of railing and put in a gate. The Peenemünde settled down, turned slowly to get her port in line with the gate, and lurched off contragravity and began running out a bridge to the promenade. I got some shots of that, and then began packing my stuff back in the hamper.

“You going aboard?” Tom asked. “Can I come along? I can carry some of your stuff and let on I’m your helper.”

Glory be, I thought; I finally got that apprentice.

“Why, sure,” I said. “You tow the hamper; I’ll carry this.” I got out what looked like a big camera case and slung it over my shoulder. “But you’ll have to take me out on the Javelin, sometime, and let me shoot a monster.”

He said it was a deal, and we shook on it. Then I had another idea.

“Bish, suppose you come with us, too,” I said. “After all, Tom and I are just a couple of kids. If you’re with us, it’ll look a lot more big-paperish.”

That didn’t seem to please Tom too much. Bish shook his head, though, and Tom brightened.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, Walt,” Bish said. “But I’m going aboard, myself, to see a friend who is en route through to Odin. A Dr. Watson; I have not seen him for years.”

I’d caught that name, too, when we’d gotten the passenger list. Dr. John Watson. Now, I know that all sorts of people call themselves Doctor, and Watson and John aren’t too improbable a combination, but I’d read Sherlock Holmes long ago, and the name had caught my attention. And this was the first, to my knowledge, that Bish Ware had ever admitted to any off-planet connections.