Then it occurred to me that Bish might have seen a way of getting
Fenris rid of Ravick and at the same time save everybody the guilt of
lynching him. Maybe he'd turned traitor to save the rest of us from
ourselves.
I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have what
you wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whether
Ravick got away or not, as long as you got him out of the Co-op. Well,
he's out for good now."
"That was before the fire," Oscar said. "We didn't have a couple of
million sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in the
hospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin toss
whether he lives or not."
"Yes. I thought you were Tom's friend," Joe Kivelson reproached me.
I wondered how much skin hanging Steve Ravick would grow on Tom's
back. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turn
to Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby Dick_, the
book he'd named his ship from.
"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettest
it, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in our
Nantucket market._"
He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then he
shrugged.
"I know, Walt," he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrels
of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax."
Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are also
perfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not to
make it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.
They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted in
pillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, the
troops stopped to loot the enemy's camp._ I'd come across that line
fifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had been
expensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, at
least, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannon
and machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity in
the street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now,
and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and the
whole mass, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started up
Broadway.
Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten
outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back
to get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustration
for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.
Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area.
There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway
to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher
pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in an
olive-green uniform stood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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