sed
halfway to his mouth for at least a minute before he remembered he was
holding it.

"Now, that is funny," he said when I was through. "Why do you
suppose...?"

"Somebody," Bish said, "some group of ship captains, is holding wax
out from the Co-operative. There's no other outlet for it, so my guess
is that they're holding it for a rise in price. There's only one way
that could happen, and that, literally, would be over Steve Ravick's
dead body. It could be that they expect Steve's dead body to be around
for a price rise to come in over."

I was expecting Dad to begin spouting law-and-order. Instead, he hit
the table with his fist; not, fortunately, the one that was holding
the soup spoon.

"Well, I hope so! And if they do it before the _Cape Canaveral_ gets
in, they may fix Leo Belsher, too, and then, in the general
excitement, somebody might clobber Mort Hallstock, and that'd be grand
slam. After the triple funeral, we could go to work on setting up an
honest co-operative and an honest government."

"Well, I never expected to hear you advocating lynch law, Dad," I
said.

He looked at me for a few seconds.

"Tell the truth, Walt, neither did I," he admitted. "Lynch law is a
horrible thing; don't make any mistake about that. But there's one
thing more horrible, and that's no law at all. And that is the present
situation in Port Sandor.

"You know what the trouble is, here? We have no government. No legal
government, anyhow; no government under Federation law. We don't even
have a Federation Resident-Agent. Before the Fenris Company went
broke, it was the government here; when the Space Navy evacuated the
colonists, they evacuated the government along with them. The thousand
who remained were all too busy keeping alive to worry about that. They
didn't even care when Fenris was reclassified from Class III,
uninhabited but inhabitable, to Class II, inhabitable only in
artificial environment, like Mercury or Titan. And when Mort Hallstock
got hold of the town-meeting pseudo government they put together fifty
years ago and turned it into a dictatorship, nobody realized what had
happened till it was too late. Lynch law's the only recourse we have."

"Ralph," Bish told him, "if anything like that starts, Belsher and
Hallstock and Ravick won't be the only casualties. Between Ravick's
goons and Hallstock's police, they have close to a hundred men. I
won't deny that they could be cleaned out, but it wouldn't be a