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

right here," I told Joe. "Only you can't grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you can human tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfaces from a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatment ward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter." Then I thought of something else. "That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettes in his palm," I said.

Bish nodded commendingly. "Exactly. He'd have about as much sensation in his palms as I'd have wearing thick leather gloves. I'd noticed that.

"Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reports from other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn't until the Peenemünde got in from Terra, the last time, that I got final confirmation. Dr. Watson, you'll recall."

"Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan," I mentioned, trying to salvage something. Showing off. The one I was trying to impress was Walt Boyd.

"You caught that? Careless of me," Bish chided himself. "What he gave me was a report that they had finally located a man who had been a staff surgeon at this hospital on Baldur at the time. He's now doing a stretch for another piece of malpractice he was unlucky enough to get caught at later. We will not admit making deals with any criminals, in jail or out, but he is willing to testify, and is on his way to Terra now. He can identify pictures of Anton Gerrit as those of the man he operated on fourteen years ago, and his testimony and Ernestine Coyón's fingerprints will identify Ravick as that man. With all the Colonial Constabulary and Army Intelligence people got on Gerrit on Loki, simple identification will be enough. Gerrit was proven guilty long ago, and it won't be any trouble, now, to prove that Ravick is Gerrit."

"Why didn't you arrest him as soon as you got the word from your friend from Afghanistan?" I wanted to know.

"Good question; I've been asking myself that," Bish said, a trifle wryly. "If I had, the Javelin wouldn't have been bombed, that wax wouldn't have been burned, and Tom Kivelson wouldn't have been injured. What I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabulary detective, to Gimli, the next planet out. There's a Navy base there, and always at least a couple of destroyers available. He's coming back with one of them to pick Gerrit up and take him to Terra. They ought to be in in about two hundred and fifty hours. I thought it would be safer all around to let Gerrit run loose till then. There's no place he could go.

"What I didn't realize, at the time, was what a human H-bomb this man Murell would turn into. Then everything blew up at once. Finally, I was left with the choice of helping Gerrit escape from Hunters' Hall or having him lynched before I could arrest him." He turned to Kivelson. "In the light of what you knew, I don't blame you for calling me a dirty traitor."

"But how did I know..." Kivelson began.

"That's right. You weren't supposed to. That was before you found out. You ought to have heard what Gerrit and Belsher—as far as I know, that is his real name—called me after they found out, when they got out of that jeep and Captain Courtland's men snapped the handcuffs on them. It even shocked a hardened sinner like me."

There was a lot more of it. Bish had managed to get into Hunters' Hall just about the time Al Devis and his companion were starting the fire Ravick—Gerrit—had ordered for a diversion. The whole gang was going to crash out as soon as the fire had attracted everybody away. Bish led them out onto the Second Level Down, sleep-gassed the lone man in the jeep, and took them to the spaceport, where the police were waiting for them.

As soon as I'd gotten everything, I called the Times. I'd had my radio on all the time, and it had been coming in perfectly. Dad, I was happy to observe, was every bit as flabbergasted as I had been at who and what Bish Ware was. He might throw my campaign to reform Bish up at me later on, but at the moment he wasn't disposed to, and I was praising Allah silently that I hadn't had a chance to mention the detective agency idea to him. That would have been a little too much.

"What are they doing about Belsher and Hallstock?" he asked.

"Belsher goes back to Terra with Ravick. Gerrit, I mean. That's where he collected his cut on the tallow-wax, so that is where he'd have to be tried. Bish is convinced that somebody in Kapstaad Chemical must have been involved, too. Hallstock is strictly a local matter."

"That's about what I thought. With all this interstellar back-and-forth, it'll be a long time before we'll be able to write thirty under the story."

"Well, we can put thirty under the Steve Ravick story," I said.

Then it hit me. The Steve Ravick story was finished; that is, the local story of racketeer rule in the Hunters' Co-operative. But the Anton Gerrit story was something else. That was Federation-wide news; the end of a fifteen-year manhunt for the most wanted criminal in the known Galaxy. And who had that story, right in his hot little hand? Walter Boyd, the ace—and only—reporter for the mighty Port Sandor Times.

"Yes," I continued. "The Ravick story's finished. But we still have the Anton Gerrit story, and I'm going to work on it right now."

20 FINALE

They had Tom Kivelson in a private room at the hospital; he was sitting up in a chair, with a lot of pneumatic cushions around him, and a lunch tray on his lap. He looked white and thin. He could move one arm completely, but the bandages they had loaded him with seemed to have left the other free only at the elbow. He was concentrating on his lunch, and must have thought I was one of the nurses, or a doctor, or something of the sort.

"Are you going to let me have a cigarette and a cup of coffee, when I'm through with this?" he asked.

"Well, I don't have any coffee, but you can have one of my cigarettes," I said.

Then he looked up and gave a whoop. "Walt! How'd you get in here? I thought they weren't going to let anybody in to see me till this afternoon."

"Power of the press," I told him. "Bluff, blarney, and blackmail. How are they treating you?"

"Awful. Look what they gave me for lunch. I thought we were on short rations down on Hermann Reuch's Land. How's Father?"

"He's all right. They took the splint off, but he still has to carry his arm in a sling."

"Lucky guy; he can get around on his feet, and I'll bet he isn't starving, either. You know, speaking about food, I'm going to feel like a cannibal eating carniculture meat, now. My whole back's carniculture." He filled his mouth with whatever it was they were feeding him and asked, through it: "Did I miss Steve Ravick's hanging?"

I was horrified. "Haven't these people told you anything?" I demanded.

"Nah; they wouldn't even tell me the right time. Afraid it would excite me."

So I told him; first who Bish Ware really was, and then who Ravick really was. He gaped for a moment, and then shoveled in more food.

"Go on; what happened?"

I told him how Bish had smuggled Gerrit and Leo Belsher out on Second Level Down and gotten them to the spaceport, where Courtland's men had been waiting for them.

"Gerrit's going to Terra, and from there to Loki. They want the natives to see what happens to a Terran who breaks Terran law; teach them that our law isn't just to protect us. Belsher's going to Terra, too. There was a big ship captains' meeting; they voted to reclaim their wax and sell it individually to Murell, but to retain membership in the Co-op. They think they'll have to stay in the Co-op to get anything that's gettable out of Gerrit's and Belsher's money. Oscar Fujisawa and Cesário Vieira are going to Terra on the Cape Canaveral to start suit to recover anything they can, and also to petition for reclassification of Fenris. Oscar's coming back on the next ship, but Cesário's going to stay on as the Co-op representative. I suppose he and Linda will be getting married."

"Natch. They'll both stay on Terra, I suppose. Hey, whattaya know! Cesário's getting off Fenris without having to die and reincarnate."

He finished his lunch, such as it was and what there was of it, and I relieved him of the tray and set it on the floor beyond his chair. I found an ashtray and lit a cigarette for him and one for myself, using the big lighter. Tom looked at it dubiously, predicting that sometime I'd push the wrong thing and send myself bye-byes for a couple of hours. I told him how Bish had used it.

"Bet a lot of people wanted to hang him, too, before they found out who he was and what he'd really done. What's my father think of Bish, now?"

"Bish Ware is a great and good man, and the savior of Fenris," I said. "And he was real smart, to keep an act like that up for five years. Your father modestly admits that it even fooled him."

"Bet Oscar Fujisawa knew it all along."

"Well, Oscar modestly admits that he suspected something of the sort, but he didn't feel it was his place to say anything."

Tom laughed, and then wanted to know if they were going to hang Mort Hallstock. "I hope they wait till I can get out of here."

"No, Odin Dock & Shipyard claim he's a political refugee and they won't give him up. They did loan us a couple of accountants to go over the city books, to see if we could find any real evidence of misappropriation, and whattaya know, there were no city books. The city of Port Sandor didn't keep books. We can't even take that three hundred thousand sols away from him; for all we can prove, he saved them out of his five-thousand-sol-a-year salary. He's shipping out on the Cape Canaveral, too."

"Then we don't have any government at all!"

"Are you fooling yourself we ever had one?"

"No, but—"

"Well, we have one now. A temporary dictatorship; Bish Ware is dictator. Fieschi loaned him Ranjit Singh and some of his men. The first thing he did was gather up the city treasurer and the chief of police and march them to the spaceport; Fieschi made Hallstock buy them tickets, too. But there aren't going to be any unofficial hangings. This is a law-abiding planet, now."

A nurse came in, and disapproved of Tom smoking and of me being in the room at all.

"Haven't you had your lunch yet?" she asked Tom.

He looked at her guilelessly and said, "No; I was waiting for it."

"Well, I'll get it," she said. "I thought the other nurse had brought it." She started out, and then she came back and had to fuss with his cushions, and then she saw the tray on the floor.

"You did so have your lunch!" she accused.

Tom looked at her as innocently as ever. "Oh, you mean these samples? Why, they were good; I'll take all of them. And a big slab of roast beef, and brown gravy, and mashed potatoes. And how about some ice cream?"

It was a good try; too bad it didn't work.

"Don't worry, Tom," I told him. "I'll get my lawyer to spring you out of this jug, and then we'll take you to my place and fill you up on Mrs. Laden's cooking."

The nurse sniffed. She suspected, quite correctly, that whoever Mrs. Laden was, she didn't know