Four-Day Planet, H. Beam Piper [free novels to read .txt] 📗

was still a crowd at the fire, but they seemed all to be townspeople. The hunters had gathered where Joe Kivelson had been directing operations. We finished our sandwiches and went over to join them. As soon as we got within earshot, I found that they were all in a very ugly mood.

"Don't fool around," one man was saying as we came up. "Don't even bother 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, in which they all owned shares, was something to get mean about. I said something 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 or not."

So that was who I'd seen screaming in agony while the firemen tore his burning clothes away. I pushed through, with Cesário behind me, and found Joe Kivelson and Mohandas Feinberg and Corkscrew Finnegan and Oscar Fujisawa and a dozen other captains and ships' officers in a huddle.

"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 was alive when they got him to the hospital."

"That's at the spaceport?" I unhooked my handphone and got Dad. He'd heard about a man being splashed, but didn't know who it was. He said he'd call the hospital at once. A few minutes later, he was calling me back.

"He's been badly burned, all over the back. They're preparing to do a deep graft on him. They said his condition was serious, but he was alive 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 you somebody's serious, instead of giving you the well-as-can-be-expected routine, you know it is serious. Anybody who makes it alive to a hospital, these days, has an excellent chance, but injury cases do die, 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 Fujisawa said. "Do it now; then if Tom doesn't make it, he's paid for in advance."

Oscar, I recalled, was the one who had been the most impressed with Bish Ware's argument that lynching Steve Ravick would cost the hunters the four million sols they might otherwise be able to recover, after a few 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 commandeered that 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 contact with 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 the docks and putting a cordon around the place on the Main City Level," Oscar said. "Your father will probably be hearing that they're moving into position now."

He had. He also said that he had called all the vehicles on the First and Second Levels Down; they all reported no activity in Hunters' Hall except 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 have gotten both the man on the jeep and Bish."

"He could have left the jeep," Joe said. "Maybe he went inside after Bish."

"Funny he didn't call in and say so," somebody said.

"No, it isn't," I contradicted. "Manufacturers' claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as a tap-proof radio. Maybe he wasn't supposed to leave his post, but if he did, he used his head not advertising it."

"That makes sense," Oscar agreed. "Well, whatever happened, we're not doing 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 their ships to rally their crews. I hurried over to the jeep and checked my equipment. There wasn't too much film left in the big audiovisual, so I replaced it with a fresh sound-and-vision reel, good for another couple of hours, and then lifted to the ceiling. Worrying about Tom wouldn't help Tom, and worrying about Bish wouldn't help Bish, and I had a job to do.

What I was getting now, and I was glad I was starting a fresh reel for it, was the beginning of the First Fenris Civil War. A long time from now, when Fenris was an important planet in the Federation, maybe they'd make today a holiday, like Bastille Day or the Fourth of July or Federation Day. Maybe historians, a couple of centuries from now, would call me an important primary source, and if Cesário's religion was right, maybe I'd be one of them, saying, "Well, after all, is Boyd such a reliable source? He was only seventeen years old at the time."

Finally, after a lot of yelling and confusion, the Rebel Army got moving. We all went up to Main City Level and went down Broadway, spreading out side streets when we began running into the cordon that had been thrown around Hunters' Hall. They were mostly men from the waterfront who hadn't gotten to the wax fire, and they must have stripped the guns off half the ships in the harbor and mounted them on lorries or cargo skids.

Nobody, not even Joe Kivelson, wanted to begin with any massed frontal attack on Hunters' Hall.

"We'll have to bombard the place," he was saying. "We try to rush it and we'll lose half our gang before we get in. One man with good cover and 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 built with our money. Let's don't burn the house down to get rid of the cockroaches."

"Well, how are you going to do it, then?" Joe wanted to know. Rule out frontal attack and Joe's at the end of his tactics.

"You stay up here. Keep them amused with a little smallarms fire at the windows and so on. I'll take about a dozen men and go down to Second Level. If we can't do anything else, we can bring a couple of skins of tallow-wax down and set fire to it and smoke them out."

That sounded like a pretty expensive sort of smudge, but seeing how much wax Ravick had burned uptown, it was only fair to let him in on some of the smoke. I mentioned that if we got into the building and up to Main City Level, we'd need some way of signaling to avoid being shot by our own gang, and got the wave-length combination of the Pequod 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 went uptown and down a vehicle shaft to Second Level. I followed in my jeep, even after Oscar and his crowd let down and got out, and hovered behind them as they advanced on foot to Hunters' Hall.

The Second Level Down was the vehicle storage, where the derricks and other equipment had been kept. It was empty now except for a workbench, a hand forge and some other things like that, a few drums of lubricant, and several piles of sheet metal. Oscar and his men got inside and I followed, going up to the ceiling. I was the one who saw the man lying back of a pile of sheet metal, and called their attention.

He wore boat-clothes and had black whiskers, and he had a knife and a pistol on his belt. At first I thought he was dead. A couple of Oscar's followers, dragging him out, said:

"He's been sleep-gassed."

Somebody else recognized him. He was the lone man who had been on guard in the jeep. The jeep was nowhere in sight.

I began to be really worried. My lighter gadget could have been what had gassed him. It probably was; there weren't many sleep-gas weapons on Fenris. I had to get fills made up specially for mine. So it looked to me as though somebody had gotten mine off Bish, and then used it to knock out our guard. Taken it off his body I guessed. That crowd wasn'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 head for a pillow. Then we started up the enclosed stairway. I didn't think we were going to run into any trouble, though I kept my hand close to my gun. If they'd knocked out the guard, they had a way out, and none of them wanted to stay in that building any longer than they had to.

The First Level Down was mostly storerooms, with nobody in any of them. As we went up the stairway to the Main City Level, we could hear firing outside. Nobody inside was shooting back. I unhooked my handphone.

"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 arched vehicle port. It was barricaded all around, and there were half a dozen machine guns set up, but not a living thing.

"We're going up," I said. "They've all lammed out. The place is empty."

"You don't know that," Oscar chided. "It might be bulging with Ravick's thugs, waiting for us to come walking up and be mowed down."

Possible. Highly improbable, though, I thought. The escalators weren't running, and we weren't going to alert any hypothetical ambush by starting them. We tiptoed up, and I even drew my pistol to show that I wasn't being foolhardy. The big social room was empty. A couple of us went over and looked behind the bar, which was the only hiding place in 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 in all of them, expecting to find Bish Ware's body. Maybe a couple of other bodies, too. I'd seen him shoot the tread-snail, and I didn't think he'd die unpaid for. In Steve Ravick's office, the safe was open and 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 he wasn't expecting to find anybody any more. We went to the third floor. Ravick's living quarters were there, and they were magnificently luxurious. The hunters, whose money had paid for all that magnificence and luxury, cursed.

There were no bodies there, either, or on the landing stage above. I unhooked the radio again.

"You can come in, now," I said. "The place is empty. Nobody here but us Vigilantes."

"Huh?" Joe couldn't believe that. "How'd they get out?"

"They got out on the Second Level Down." I told him about the sleep-gassed guard.

"Did you bring him to? What did he say?"

"Nothing; we didn't. We