tty sure, myself, that he was being paid by somebody,
probably his family, to stay out of sight. The colonial planets are
full of that sort of remittance men.

Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, of
both sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was an
example, who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associate
with him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a
reporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knew
all the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having to
associate with all of them, and it is sad but true that you get very
few news stories in Sunday school. Far from fearing that Bish would be
a bad influence on me, he rather hoped I'd be a good one on Bish.

I had that in mind, too, if I could think of any way of managing it.
Bish had been a good man, once. He still was, except for one thing.
You could tell that before he'd started drinking, he'd really been
somebody, somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to
him, and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a
bottle. Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feet
again. I hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turning
himself into the rumpot he was now was waste of the worst kind.

It would take a lot of doing, though, and careful tactical planning.
Preaching at him would be worse than useless, and so would simply
trying to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky,
at the hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was
make him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to
manage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on
the Times, but we barely made enough money out of it for ourselves,
and with his remittance he didn't need to work. I had a lot of other
ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it
got sick and died.

2

REPORTER WORKING

Bish came over and greeted us solemnly.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Captain Ahab, I believe," he said, bowing
to Tom, who seemed slightly puzzled; the education Tom had been
digging out for himself was technical rather than literary. "And Mr.
Pulitzer. Or is it Horace Greeley?"

"Lord Beaverbrook, your Grace," I replied. "Have you any little news
items for us from your diocese?"

Bish teetered slightly, getting out a cigar and inspecting it
carefully before li