over to join
them. As soon as we got within earshot, I found that they were all in
a very ugly mood.

"Don't fool around," one man was saying as we came up. "Don't even
bother looking for a rope. Just shoot them as soon as you see them."

Well, I thought, a couple of million sols' worth of tallow-wax, in
which they all owned shares, was something to get mean about. I said
something like that.

"It's not that," another man said. "It's Tom Kivelson."

"What about him?" I asked, alarmed.

"Didn't you hear? He got splashed with burning wax," the hunter said.
"His whole back was on fire; I don't know whether he's alive now or
not."

So that was who I'd seen screaming in agony while the firemen tore his
burning clothes away. I pushed through, with Cesario behind me, and
found Joe Kivelson and Mohandas Feinberg and Corkscrew Finnegan and
Oscar Fujisawa and a dozen other captains and ships' officers in a
huddle.

"Joe," I said, "I just heard about Tom. Do you know anything yet?"

Joe turned. "Oh, Walt. Why, as far as we know, he's alive. He was
alive when they got him to the hospital."

"That's at the spaceport?" I unhooked my handphone and got Dad. He'd
heard about a man being splashed, but didn't know who it was. He said
he'd call the hospital at once. A few minutes later, he was calling me
back.

"He's been badly burned, all over the back. They're preparing to do a
deep graft on him. They said his condition was serious, but he was
alive five minutes ago."

I thanked him and hung up, relaying the information to the others.
They all looked worried. When the screen girl at a hospital tells you
somebody's serious, instead of giving you the well-as-can-be-expected
routine, you know it is serious. Anybody who makes it alive to a
hospital, these days, has an excellent chance, but injury cases do
die, now and then, after they've been brought in. They are the
"serious" cases.

"Well, I don't suppose there's anything we can do," Joe said heavily.

"We can clean up on the gang that started this fire," Oscar Fujisawa
said. "Do it now; then if Tom doesn't make it, he's paid for in
advance."

Oscar, I recalled, was the one who had been the most impressed with
Bish Ware's argument that lynching Steve Ravick would cost the hunters
the four million sols they might otherwise be able to recover, after a
few years' interstellar litigation, from his bank account on Terra.
That reminded me that I hadn't even thought of Bish si