18
THE TREASON OF BISH WARE
I wanted to find out who had been splashed, but Joe Kivelson was toobusy directing the new phase of the fight to hand out casualty reportsto the press, and besides, there were too many things happening all atonce that I had to get. I went around to the other side where theincendiaries had met their end, moving slowly as close to the face ofthe fire as I could get and shooting the burning wax flowing out fromit. A lot of equipment, including two of the three claw-derricks and adredger--they'd brought a second one up from the waterfront--weremoving to that side. By the time I had gotten around, the blowers hadbeen maneuvered into place and were ready to start. There was a lot ofback-and-forth yelling to make sure that everybody was out from infront, and then the blowers started.
It looked like a horizontal volcanic eruption; burning wax blowingaway from the fire for close to a hundred feet into the clear spacebeyond. The derricks and manipulators and the cars and jeeps withgrapnels went in on both sides, snatching and dragging wax away.Because they had the wind from the blowers behind them, the men couldwork a lot closer, and the fire wasn't spreading as rapidly. They weresaving a lot of wax; each one of those big sausages that the lifterspicked up and floated away weighed a thousand pounds, and was worth,at the new price, eight hundred sols.
Finally, they got everything away that they could, and then theblowers were shut down and the two dredge shovels moved in, scoopingup the burning sludge and carrying it away, scattering it on theconcrete. I would have judged that there had been six or seven millionsols' worth of wax in the piles to start with, and that a little morethan half of it had been saved before they pulled the last cylinderaway.
The work slacked off; finally, there was nothing but the two dredgesdoing anything, and then they backed away and let down, and it was allover but standing around and watching the scattered fire burn itselfout. I looked at my watch. It was two hours since the first alarm hadcome in. I took a last swing around, got the spaceport peoplegathering up wax and hauling it away, and the broken lake of fire thatextended downtown from where the stacks had been, and then I floatedmy jeep over to the sandwich-and-coffee stand and let down, gettingout. Maybe, I thought, I could make some kind of deal with somebodylike Interworld News on this. It would make a nice thrillingfeature-program item. Just a little slice of life from Fenris, theGarden Spot of the Galaxy.
I got myself a big zhoumy-loin sandwich with hot sauce and a cup ofcoffee, made sure that my portable radio was on, and circulated amongthe fire fighters, getting comments. Everybody had been a hero,natch, and they were all very unbashful about admitting it. There wasa great deal of wisecracking about Al Devis buying himself a ringsideseat for the fire he'd started. Then I saw Cesario Vieira and joinedhim.
"Have all the fire you want, for a while?" I asked him.
"Brother, and how! We could have used a little of this over on HermannReuch's Land, though. Have you seen Tom around anywhere?"
"No. Have you?"
"I saw him over there, about an hour ago. I guess he stayed on thisside. After they started blowing it, I was over on Al Devis's side."He whistled softly. "Was that a mess!"
There was still a crowd at the fire, but they seemed all to betownspeople. The hunters had gathered where Joe Kivelson had beendirecting operations. We finished our sandwiches and went over to jointhem. As soon as we got within earshot, I found that they were all ina very ugly mood.
"Don't fool around," one man was saying as we came up. "Don't evenbother looking for a rope. Just shoot them as soon as you see them."
Well, I thought, a couple of million sols' worth of tallow-wax, inwhich they all owned shares, was something to get mean about. I saidsomething like that.
"It's not that," another man said. "It's Tom Kivelson."
"What about him?" I asked, alarmed.
"Didn't you hear? He got splashed with burning wax," the hunter said."His whole back was on fire; I don't know whether he's alive now ornot."
So that was who I'd seen screaming in agony while the firemen tore hisburning clothes away. I pushed through, with Cesario behind me, andfound Joe Kivelson and Mohandas Feinberg and Corkscrew Finnegan andOscar Fujisawa and a dozen other captains and ships' officers in ahuddle.
"Joe," I said, "I just heard about Tom. Do you know anything yet?"
Joe turned. "Oh, Walt. Why, as far as we know, he's alive. He wasalive when they got him to the hospital."
"That's at the spaceport?" I unhooked my handphone and got Dad. He'dheard about a man being splashed, but didn't know who it was. He saidhe'd call the hospital at once. A few minutes later, he was calling meback.
"He's been badly burned, all over the back. They're preparing to do adeep graft on him. They said his condition was serious, but he wasalive five minutes ago."
I thanked him and hung up, relaying the information to the others.They all looked worried. When the screen girl at a hospital tells yousomebody's serious, instead of giving you the well-as-can-be-expectedroutine, you know it is serious. Anybody who makes it alive to ahospital, these days, has an excellent chance, but injury cases dodie, now and then, after they've been brought in. They are the"serious" cases.
"Well, I don't suppose there's anything we can do," Joe said heavily.
"We can clean up on the gang that started this fire," Oscar Fujisawasaid. "Do it now; then if Tom doesn't make it, he's paid for inadvance."
Oscar, I recalled, was the one who had been the most impressed withBish Ware's argument that lynching Steve Ravick would cost the huntersthe four million sols they might otherwise be able to recover, after afew years' interstellar litigation, from his bank account on Terra.That reminded me that I hadn't even thought of Bish since I'd left the_Times_. I called back. Dad hadn't heard a word from him.
"What's the situation at Hunters' Hall?" I asked.
"Everything's quiet there. The police left when Hallstock commandeeredthat fire-fighting equipment. They helped the shipyard men get it out,and then they all went to the Municipal Building. As far as I know,both Ravick and Belsher are still in Hunters' Hall. I'm in contactwith the vehicles on guard at the approaches; I'll call them now."
I relayed that. The others nodded.
"Nip Spazoni and a few others are bringing men and guns up from thedocks and putting a cordon around the place on the Main City Level,"Oscar said. "Your father will probably be hearing that they're movinginto position now."
He had. He also said that he had called all the vehicles on the Firstand Second Levels Down; they all reported no activity in Hunters' Hallexcept one jeep on Second Level Down, which did not report at all.
Everybody was puzzled about that.
"That's the jeep that reported Bish Ware going in on the bottom,"Mohandas Feinberg said. "I wonder if somebody inside mightn't havegotten both the man on the jeep and Bish."
"He could have left the jeep," Joe said. "Maybe he went inside afterBish."
"Funny he didn't call in and say so," somebody said.
"No, it isn't," I contradicted. "Manufacturers' claims to thecontrary, there is no such thing as a tap-proof radio. Maybe he wasn'tsupposed to leave his post, but if he did, he used his head notadvertising it."
"That makes sense," Oscar agreed. "Well, whatever happened, we're notdoing anything standing around up here. Let's get it started."
He walked away, raising his voice and calling, "_Pequod_! _Pequod_!All hands on deck!"
The others broke away from the group, shouting the names of theirships to rally their crews. I hurried over to the jeep and checked myequipment. There wasn't too much film left in the big audiovisual, soI replaced it with a fresh sound-and-vision reel, good for anothercouple of hours, and then lifted to the ceiling. Worrying about Tomwouldn't help Tom, and worrying about Bish wouldn't help Bish, and Ihad a job to do.
What I was getting now, and I was glad I was starting a fresh reel forit, was the beginning of the First Fenris Civil War. A long time fromnow, when Fenris was an important planet in the Federati
on, maybethey'd make today a holiday, like Bastille Day or the Fourth of Julyor Federation Day. Maybe historians, a couple of centuries from now,would call me an important primary source, and if Cesario's religionwas right, maybe I'd be one of them, saying, "Well, after all, isBoyd such a reliable source? He was only seventeen years old at thetime."
Finally, after a lot of yelling and confusion, the Rebel Army gotmoving. We all went up to Main City Level and went down Broadway,spreading out side streets when we began running into the cordon thathad been thrown around Hunters' Hall. They were mostly men from thewaterfront who hadn't gotten to the wax fire, and they must havestripped the guns off half the ships in the harbor and mounted them onlorries or cargo skids.
Nobody, not even Joe Kivelson, wanted to begin with any massed frontalattack on Hunters' Hall.
"We'll have to bombard the place," he was saying. "We try to rush itand we'll lose half our gang before we get in. One man with good coverand a machine gun's good for a couple of hundred in the open."
"Bish may be inside," I mentioned.
"Yes," Oscar said, "and even aside from that, that building was builtwith our money. Let's don't burn the house down to get rid of thecockroaches."
"Well, how are you going to do it, then?" Joe wanted to know. Rule outfrontal attack and Joe's at the end of his tactics.
"You stay up here. Keep them amused with a little smallarms fire atthe windows and so on. I'll take about a dozen men and go down toSecond Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple ofskins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out."
That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing howmuch wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in onsome of the smoke. I mentioned that if we got into the building and upto Main City Level, we'd need some way of signaling to avoid beingshot by our own gang, and got the wave-length combination of thePequod scout boat, which Joe and Oscar were using for a command car.Oscar picked ten or twelve men, and they got into a lorry and wentuptown and down a vehicle shaft to Second Level. I followed in myjeep, even after Oscar and his crowd let down and got out, and hoveredbehind them as they advanced on foot to Hunters' Hall.
The Second Level Down was the vehicle storage, where the derricks andother equipment had been kept. It was empty now except for aworkbench, a hand forge and some other things like that, a few drumsof lubricant, and several piles of sheet metal. Oscar and his men gotinside and I followed, going up to the ceiling. I was the one who sawthe man lying back of a pile of sheet metal, and called theirattention.
He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and apistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple ofOscar's followers, dragging him out, said:
"He's been sleep-gassed."
Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been onguard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight.
I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been whathad gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weaponson Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it lookedto me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used itto knock out our guard. Taken it off his body I guessed. That crowdwasn't any more interested in taking prisoners alive than we were.
We laid the man on a workbench and put a rolled-up sack under his headfor a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't thinkwe were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close tomy gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and noneof them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to.
The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any ofthem. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hearfiring outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked myhandphone.
"We're in," I said when Joe Kivelson answered. "Stop the shooting;we're coming up to the vehicle port."
"Might as well. Nobody's paying any attention to it," he said.
The firing slacked off as the word was passed around the perimeter,and finally it stopped entirely. We went up into the open archedvehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half adozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing.
"We're going up," I said. "They've all lammed out. The place isempty."
"You don't know that," Oscar chided. "It might be bulging withRavick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down."
Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren'trunning, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush bystarting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that Iwasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of uswent over and looked behind the bar, which was the only hiding placein it. Then we went back to the rear and tiptoed to the third floor.
The meeting room was empty. So were the offices behind it. I looked inall of them, expecting to find Bish Ware's body. Maybe a couple ofother bodies, too. I'd seen him shoot the tread-snail, and I didn'tthink he'd die unpaid for. In Steve Ravick's office, the safe was openand a lot of papers had been thrown out. I pointed that out to Oscar,and he nodded. After seeing that, he seemed to relax, as though hewasn't expecting to find anybody any more. We went to the third floor.Ravick's living quarters were there, and they were magnificentlyluxurious. The hunters, whose money had paid for all that magnificenceand luxury, cursed.
There were no bodies there, either, or on the landing stage above. Iunhooked the radio again.
"You can come in, now," I said. "The place is empty. Nobody here butus Vigilantes."
"Huh?" Joe couldn't believe that. "How'd they get out?"
"They got out on the Second Level Down." I told him about thesleep-gassed guard.
"Did you bring him to? What did he say?"
"Nothing; we didn't. We can't. You get sleep-gassed, you sleep tillyou wake up. That ought to be two to four hours for this fellow."
"Well, hold everything; we're coming in."
We were all in the social room; a couple of the men had poured drinksor drawn themselves beers at the bar and rung up no sale on the cashregister. Somebody else had a box of cigars he'd picked up in Ravick'squarters on the fourth floor and was passing them around. Joe andabout two or three hundred other hunters came crowding up theescalator, which they had turned on below.
"You didn't find Bish Ware, either, I'll bet," Joe was saying.
"I'm afraid they took him along for a hostage," Oscar said. "The guardwas knocked out with Walt's gas gadget, that Bish was carrying."
"Ha!" Joe cried. "Bet you it was the other way round; Bish took themout."
That started an argument. While it was going on, I went to thecommunication screen and got the _Times_, and told Dad what hadhappened.
"Yes," he said. "That was what I was afraid you'd find. Glenn Murellcalled in from the spaceport a few minutes ago. He says Mort Hallstockcame in with his car, and he heard from some of the workmen that BishWare, Steve Ravick and Leo Belsher came in on the Main City Level in ajeep. They claimed protection from a mob, and Captain Courtland'spolice are protecting them."