book he'd named his ship from.

"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettest
it, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in our
Nantucket market._"

He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then he
shrugged.

"I know, Walt," he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrels
of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax."

Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are also
perfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not to
make it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.

They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted in
pillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, the
troops stopped to loot the enemy's camp._ I'd come across that line
fifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had been
expensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, at
least, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannon
and machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity in
the street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now,
and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and the
whole mass, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started up
Broadway.

Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten
outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back
to get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustration
for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.

Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area.
There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway
to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher
pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in an
olive-green uniform stood.

I knew him; Lieutenant Ranjit Singh, Captain Courtland's
second-in-command. He was a Sikh. Instead of a steel helmet, he wore a
striped turban, and he had a black beard that made Joe Kivelson's
blond one look like Tom Kivelson's chin-fuzz. On his belt, along with
his pistol, he wore the little kirpan, the dagger all Sikhs carry. He
also carried a belt radio, and as we approached he lifted the phone to
his mouth and a loudspeaker on the combat car threw his voice at us:

"All right, that's far enough, now. The first vehicle that comes
within a hundred yards of this gate will be shot down."

One man, and one combat car, against f