“Least of all one who died fourteen years ago,” Bish agreed. “But the fingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a big hospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small, woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get the picture now?”
“They’re doing the same thing on Tom’s back, 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 F
enris. 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 anything about scientific dietetics.
* * * *
When I got back to the Times, Dad and Julio had had their lunch and were going over the teleprint edition. Julio was printing corrections on blank sheets of plastic and Dad was cutting them out and cementing them over things that needed correcting on the master sheets. I gave Julio a short item to the effect that Tom Kivelson, son of Captain and Mrs. Joe Kivelson, one of the Javelin survivors who had been burned in the tallow-wax fire, was now out of all danger, and recovering. Dad was able to scrounge that onto the first page.
There was a lot of other news. The T.F.N. destroyer Simón Bolivar, en route from Gimli to pick up the notorious Anton Gerrit, alias Steve Ravick, had come out of hyperspace and into radio range. Dad had talked to the skipper by screen and gotten interviews, which would be telecast, both with him and Detective-Major MacBride of the Colonial Constabulary. The Simón Bolivar would not make landing, but go into orbit and send down a boat. Detective-Major MacBride (alias Dr. John Watson) would remain on Fenris to take over local police activities.
More evidence had been unearthed at Hunters’ Hall on the frauds practiced by Leo Belsher and Gerrit-alias-Ravick; it looked as though a substantial sum of money might be recovered, eventually, from the bank accounts and other holdings of both men on Terra. Acting Resident-Agent Gonzalo Ware—Ware, it seemed, really was his right name, but look what he had in front of it—had promulgated more regulations and edicts, and a crackdown on the worst waterfront dives was in progress. I’ll bet the devoted flock was horrified at what their beloved bishop had turned into. Bish would leave his diocese in a lot healthier condition than he’d found it, that was one thing for sure. And most of the gang of thugs and plug-uglies who had been used to intimidate and control the Hunters’ Co-operative had been gathered up and jailed on vagrancy charges; prisoners were being put to work cleaning up the city.
And there was a lot about plans for a registration of voters, and organization of election boards, and a local electronics-engineering firm had been awarded a contract for voting machines. I didn’t think there had ever been a voting machine on Fenris before.
“The commander of the Bolivar says he’ll take your story to Terra with him, and see that it gets to Interworld News,” Dad told me as we were sorting the corrected master sheets and loading them into the photoprint machine, to be sent out on the air. “The Bolivar’ll make Terra at least two hundred hours ahead of the Cape Canaveral. Interworld will be glad to have it. It isn’t often they get a story like that with the first news of anything, and this’ll be a big story.”
“You shouldn’t have given me the exclusive by-line,” I said. “You did as much work on it as I did.”
“No, I didn’t, either,” he contradicted, “and I knew what I was doing.”
With the work done, I remembered that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and I went down to take inventory of the refrigerator. Dad went along with me, and after I had assembled a lunch and sat down to it, he decided that his pipe needed refilling, lit it, poured a cup of coffee and sat down with me.
“You know, Walt, I’ve been thinking, lately,” he began.
Oh-oh, I thought. When Dad makes that remark, in just that tone, it’s all hands to secure ship for diving.
“We’ve all had to do a lot of thinking, lately,” I agreed.
“Yes. You know, they want me to be mayor of Port Sandor.”
I nodded and waited till I got my mouth empty. I could see a lot of sense in that. Dad is honest and scrupulous and public-spirited; too much so, sometimes, for his own good. There wasn’t any question of his ability, and while there had always been antagonism between the hunter-ship crews and waterfront people and the uptown business crowd, Dad was well liked and trusted by both parties.
“Are you going to take it?” I asked.
“I suppose I’ll have to, if they really want me. Be a sort of obligation.”
That would throw a lot more work on me. Dad could give some attention to the paper as mayor, but not as much as now.
“What do you want me to try to handle for you?” I asked.
“Well, Walt, that’s what I’ve been thinking about,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and particularly since things got changed around here. I think you ought to go to school some more.”
That made me laugh. “What, back to Hartzenbosch?” I asked. “I could teach him more than he could teach me, now.”
“I doubt that, Walt. Professor Hartzenbosch may be an old maid in trousers, but he’s really a very sound scholar. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about your going to Terra to school.”
“I didn’t start kidding; I meant it.”
“Well, think again, Dad. It costs money to go to school on Terra. It even costs money to go to Terra.”
“We have a little money, Walt. Maybe more than you think we do. And with things getting better, we’ll lease more teleprinters and get more advertising. You’re likely to get better than the price of your passage out of that story we’re sending off on the Bolivar, and that won’t be the end of it, either. Fenris is going to be in the news for a while. You may make some more money writing. That’s why I was careful to give you the by-line on that Gerrit story.” His pipe had gone out again; he took time out to relight it, and then added: “Anything I spend on this is an investment. The Times will get it back.”
“Yes, that’s another thing; the paper,” I said. “If you’re going to be mayor, you won’t be able to do everything you’re doing on the paper now, and then do all my work too.”
“Well, shocking as the idea may be, I think we can find somebody to replace you.”
“Name one,” I challenged.
“Well, Lillian Arnaz, at the Library, has always been interested in newspaper work,” he began.
“A girl!” I hooted. “You have any idea of some of the places I have to go to get stories?”
“Yes. I have always deplored the necessity. But a great many of them have been closed lately, and the rest are being run in a much more seemly manner. And she wouldn’t be the only reporter. I hesitate to give you any better opinion of yourself than you have already, but it would take at least three people to do the work you’ve been doing. When you get back from Terra, you’ll find the Times will have a very respectable reportorial staff.”
“What’ll I be, then?” I wondered.
“Editor,” Dad told me. “I’ll retire and go into politics full time. And if Fenris is going to develop the way I believe it will, the editor of the Times will need a much better education than I have.”
I kept on eating, to give myself an excuse for silence. He was right, I knew that. But college on Terra; why, that would be at least four years, maybe five, and then a year for the round trip.…
The H. Beam Piper Megapack Page 135
