Four-Day Planet | Page 4

school together,
which is to say a couple of years at Professor Hartzenbosch's, learning
to read and write and put figures together. That is all the schooling
anybody on Fenris gets, although Joe Kivelson sent Tom's older sister,
Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody who stays here has to dig out
education for himself. Tom and I were still digging for ours.
Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about
it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and
romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot

stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized
that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot.
Tom couldn't string three sentences--no, one sentence--together to save
his life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in something that isn't
pitching end-for-end every minute.
Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds
heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard, though at
present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him dressed as
I was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a light jacket.
Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked around behind
him, and saw the brass tip of a scabbard under the jacket. Any time a
hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife on, he isn't wearing anything
else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew Joe Kivelson
wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the Peenemünde, with only a
couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms and the cold.
"I thought you were down in the South Ocean," I said.
"There's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op," he said. "We only
heard about it last evening," by which he meant after 1800 of the
previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship captain
who had called the Javelin by screen. "We screened everybody else we
could."
That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. Steve
Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast of
Hermann Reuch's Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack it
with his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted voted
through. I had always wondered how long the real hunters were going
to stand for that. They'd been standing for it ever since I could
remember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn't
been too long.
I was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled,
"There she is!" I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see which way
they were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught a tiny
twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmetic to

figure how high she'd have to be to catch the sunlight, I relaxed. Even
with the telephoto, I'd only get a picture the size of a pinhead, so I fixed
the position in my mind and then looked around at the crowd.
Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and
slender, with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with a
scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his
left arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The
former was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Co-operative, and
his companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port
Sandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris.
They had held their respective positions for as long as I could
remember anything at all. I could never remember an election in Port
Sandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of
goons and triggermen--I could see a couple of them loitering in the
background--who kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, only
his wore badges and called themselves police.
Once in a while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one or the
other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun on, and so
would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third
member of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure
nobody got behind Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and
that always rather hurt me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they
didn't need to care what the Times printed or 'cast about them.
Hallstock glanced over in my direction and said something to Ravick.
Ravick gave a sneering laugh, and then he crushed out the cigarette he
was smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of
his. Showing how tough he was. Dad says