Four-Day Planet | Page 6

Bish
had been a good man, once. He still was, except for one thing. You
could tell that before he'd started drinking, he'd really been somebody,
somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to him,
and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a bottle.
Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feet again. I
hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turning himself
into the rumpot he was now was waste of the worst kind.

It would take a lot of doing, though, and careful tactical planning.
Preaching at him would be worse than useless, and so would simply
trying to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky,
at the hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was
make him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to
manage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on
the Times, but we barely made enough money out of it for ourselves,
and with his remittance he didn't need to work. I had a lot of other ideas,
now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick
and died.

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,