ming, so
the rest of us waited. Joe Kivelson should have gone on the
_Helldiver_, to have his broken arm looked at, but a captain's always
the last man off, so he stayed.

Oscar said he'd take Tom and Joe, and Glenn Murell and me, on the
_Pequod_. I was glad of that. Oscar and his mate and his navigator are
all bachelors, and they use the _Pequod_ to throw parties on when
they're not hunting, so it is more comfortably fitted than the usual
hunter-ship. Joe decided not to try to take anything away from the
boat. He was going to do something about raising the _Javelin_, and
the salvage ship could stop here and pick everything up.

"Well, one thing," Oscar told him. "Bring that machine gun, and what
small arms you have. I think things are going to get sort of rough in
Port Sandor, in the next twenty or so hours."

I was beginning to think so, myself. The men who had gotten off the
_Helldiver_, and the ones who got off Corkscrew Finnegan's _Dirty
Gertie_ and Nip Spazoni's _Bulldog_ were all talking about what was
going to have to be done about Steve Ravick. Bombing _Javelin_ would
have been a good move for Ravick, if it had worked. It hadn't, though,
and now it was likely to be the thing that would finish him for good.

It wasn't going to be any picnic, either. He had his gang of
hoodlums, and he could count on Morton Hallstock's twenty or thirty
city police; they'd put up a fight, and a hard one. And they were all
together, and the hunter fleet was coming in one ship at a time. I
wondered if the Ravick-Hallstock gang would try to stop them at the
water front, or concentrate at Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Building
to stand siege. I knew one thing, though. However things turned out,
there was going to be an awful lot of shooting in Port Sandor before
it was over.

Finally, everybody had been gotten onto one ship or another but Oscar
and his gunner and the Kivelsons and Murell and myself. Then the
_Pequod_, which had been circling around at five thousand feet, let
down and we went aboard. The conning tower was twice as long as usual
on a hunter-ship, and furnished with a lot of easy chairs and a couple
of couches. There was a big combination view and communication screen,
and I hurried to that and called the _Times_.

Dad came on, as soon as I finished punching the wave-length
combination. He was in his shirt sleeves, and he was wearing a gun. I
guess we made kind of a show of ourselves, but, after all, he'd come
w