dozen
guards there now, all heavily armed.

We got out of the car, I carrying the chopper, and one of the gang
there produced a probe rod and microscope and a testing kit and a
microray scanner. Murell took his time going over the wax, jabbing the
probe rod in and pulling samples out of the big plastic-skinned
sausages at random, making chemical tests, examining them under the
microscope, and scanning other cylinders to make sure there was no
foreign matter in them. He might not know what a literary agent was,
but he knew tallow-wax.

I found out from the guards that there hadn't been any really serious
trouble after we left Hunter's Hall. The city police had beaten a few
men up, natch, and run out all the anti-Ravick hunters, and then
Ravick had reconvened the meeting and acceptance of the thirty-five
centisol price had been voted unanimously. The police were still
looking for the Kivelsons. Ravick seemed to have gotten the idea that
Joe Kivelson was the mastermind of the hunters' cabal against him. I
know if I'd found that Joe Kivelson and Oscar Fujisawa were in any
kind of a conspiracy together, I wouldn't pick Joe for the mastermind.
It was just possible, I thought, that Oscar had been fostering this
himself, in case anything went wrong. After all, self-preservation is
the first law, and Oscar is a self-preserving type.

After Murell had finished his inspection and we'd gotten back in the
car and were lifting, I asked him what he was going to offer, just as
though I were the skipper of the biggest ship out of Port Sandor.
Well, it meant as much to us as it did to the hunters. The more wax
sold for, the more advertising we'd sell to the merchants, and the
more people would rent teleprinters from us.

"Eighty centisols a pound," he said. Nice and definite; quite a
difference from the way he stumbled around over listing his previous
publications. "Seventy-five's the Kapstaad price, regardless of what
you people here have been getting from that crook of a Belsher. We'll
have to go far enough beyond that to make him have to run like blazes
to catch up. You can put it in the _Times_ that the day of
monopolistic marketing on Fenris is over."

* * * * *

When we got back to the _Times_, I asked Dad if he'd heard anything
more from Bish.

"Yes," he said unhappily. "He didn't call in, this morning, so I
called his apartment and didn't get an answer. Then I called Harry
Wong's. Harry sa