ghting it.

"We-el," he said carefully, "my diocese is full to the hatch covers
with sinners, but that's scarcely news." He turned to Tom. "One of
your hands on the _Javelin_ got into a fight in Martian Joe's, a while
ago. Lumped the other man up pretty badly." He named the Javelin
crewman, and the man who had been pounded. The latter was one of Steve
Ravick's goons. "But not fatally, I regret to say," Bish added. "The
local Gestapo are looking for your man, but he made it aboard Nip
Spazoni's _Bulldog_, and by this time he's halfway to Hermann Reuch's
Land."

"Isn't Nip going to the meeting, tonight?" Tom asked.

Bish shook his head. "Nip is a peace-loving man. He has a well-founded
suspicion that peace is going to be in short supply around Hunters'
Hall this evening. You know, of course, that Leo Belsher's coming in
on the _Peenemuende_ and will be there to announce another price cut.
The new price, I understand, will be thirty-five centisols a pound."

Seven hundred sols a ton, I thought; why, that would barely pay ship
expenses.

"Where did you get that?" Tom asked, a trifle sharply.

"Oh, I have my spies and informers," Bish said. "And even if I hadn't,
it would figure. The only reason Leo Belsher ever comes to this Eden
among planets is to negotiate a new contract, and who ever heard of a
new contract at a higher price?"

That had all happened before, a number of times. When Steve Ravick had
gotten control of the Hunters' Co-operative, the price of tallow-wax,
on the loading floor at Port Sandor spaceport, had been fifteen
hundred sols a ton. As far as Dad and I could find out, it was still
bringing the same price on Terra as it always had. It looked to us as
if Ravick and Leo Belsher, who was the Co-op representative on Terra,
and Mort Hallstock were simply pocketing the difference. I was just as
sore about what was happening as anybody who went out in the
hunter-ships. Tallow-wax is our only export. All our imports are paid
for with credit from the sale of wax.

It isn't really wax, and it isn't tallow. It's a growth on the
Jarvis's sea-monster; there's a layer of it under the skin, and around
organs that need padding. An average-sized monster, say a hundred and
fifty feet long, will yield twelve to fifteen tons of it, and a good
hunter kills about ten monsters a year. Well, at the price Belsher and
Ravick were going to cut from, that would run a little short of a
hundred and fifty thousand sols for a