Four-Day Planet | Page 5

that when you see somebody
showing off, ask yourself whether he's trying to impress other people,
or himself. I wondered which was the case with Steve Ravick.
Then I looked up again. The Peenemünde was coming down as fast as
she could without over-heating from atmosphere friction. She was
almost buckshot size to the naked eye, and a couple of tugs were
getting ready to go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera out of

the hamper, checked it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock and
handgrips and a trigger like a submachine gun. I caught the ship in the
finder and squeezed the trigger for a couple of seconds. It would be
about five minutes till the tugs got to her and anything else happened,
so I put down the camera and looked around.
Coming through the crowd, walking as though the concrete under him
was pitching and rolling like a ship's deck on contragravity in a storm,
was Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself
and recovered, and then changed course to starboard and bore down on
us. He was carrying about his usual cargo, and as usual the manifest
would read, Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar.
Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd
first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamed
him the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable. He
looked like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's never seen a
bishop outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like. He was
a big man, not fat, but tall and portly; he had a ruddy face that always
wore an expression of benevolent wisdom, and the more cargo he took
on the wiser and more benevolent he looked.
He had iron-gray hair, but he wasn't old. You could tell that by the
backs of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veins didn't
protrude. And drunk or sober--though I never remembered seeing him
in the latter condition--he had the fastest reflexes of anybody I knew. I
saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock over an
open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed it by the
neck and set it up, all in one motion, without spilling a drop, and he
went on talking as though nothing had happened. He was quoting
Homer, I remembered, and you could tell that he was thinking in the
original ancient Greek and translating to Lingua Terra as he went.
He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, the
jacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an Uller
organic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly--once every
planetary day--a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in for him,
and he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. If anybody

was unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said he had a
rich uncle on Terra.
When I was a kid--well, more of a kid than I am now--I used to believe
he really was a bishop--unfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, or
whatever they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot of
people who weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him on
every denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even
missing the Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what
he'd done to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that
somewhere there was a cathedral standing unfinished because he'd
hypered out with the building fund. It was generally agreed that his
ecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay out there in the
boondocks where he wouldn't cause them further embarrassment.
I was pretty sure, myself, that he was being paid by somebody,
probably his family, to stay out of sight. The colonial planets are full of
that sort of remittance men.
Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, of
both sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was an
example, who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associate
with him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a
reporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He
knew all the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having to
associate with all of them, and it is sad but true that you get very few
news stories in Sunday school. Far from fearing that Bish would be a
bad influence on me, he rather hoped I'd be a good one on Bish.
I had that in mind, too, if I could think of any way of managing it.