sher and Hallstock--"

"And that etaoin shrdlu traitor of a Ware!" Joe Kivelson added.

"And Bish Ware," Oscar agreed. "They only have fifty police; we have
three or four thousand men."

Three or four thousand undisciplined hunters, against fifty trained,
disciplined and organized soldiers, because that was what the
spaceport police were. I knew their captain, and the lieutenants. They
were old Regular Army, and they ran the police force like a military
unit.

"I'll bet Ware was working for Ravick all along," Joe was saying.

That wasn't good thinking even for Joe Kivelson. I said:

"If he was working for Ravick all along, why did he tip Dad and Oscar
and the Mahatma on the bomb aboard the _Javelin_? That wasn't any help
to Ravick."

"I get it," Oscar said. "He never was working for anybody but Bish
Ware. When Ravick got into a jam, he saw a way to make something for
himself by getting Ravick out of it. I'll bet, ever since he came
here, he was planning to cut in on Ravick somehow. You notice, he knew
just how much money Ravick had stashed away on Terra? When he saw the
spot Ravick was in, Bish just thought he had a chance to develop
himself another rich uncle."

I'd been worse stunned than anybody by Dad's news. The worst of it was
that Oscar could be right. I hadn't thought of that before. I'd just
thought that Ravick and Belsher had gotten Bish drunk and found out
about the way the men were posted around Hunters' Hall and the lone
man in the jeep on Second Level Down.

Then it occurred to me that Bish might have seen a way of getting
Fenris rid of Ravick and at the same time save everybody the guilt of
lynching him. Maybe he'd turned traitor to save the rest of us from
ourselves.

I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have what
you wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whether
Ravick got away or not, as long as you got him out of the Co-op. Well,
he's out for good now."

"That was before the fire," Oscar said. "We didn't have a couple of
million sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in the
hospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin toss
whether he lives or not."

"Yes. I thought you were Tom's friend," Joe Kivelson reproached me.

I wondered how much skin hanging Steve Ravick would grow on Tom's
back. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turn
to Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby Dick_, the