before would be the center of so much interest
in monster-hunting circles. I kept looking at my watch while we were
talking. After a while, the Times newscast came on the big screen
across the room, and everybody moved over toward it.

They watched the _Peenemuende_ being towed down and berthed, and the
audiovisual interview with Murell. Then Dad came on the screen with a
record player in front of them, and gave them a play-off of my
interview with Leo Belsher.

Ordinary bad language I do not mind. I'm afraid I use a little myself,
while struggling with some of the worn-out equipment we have at the
paper. But when Belsher began explaining about how the price of wax
had to be cut again, to thirty-five centisols a pound, the language
those hunters used positively smelled. I noticed, though, that a lot
of the crowd weren't saying anything at all. They would be Ravick's
boys, and they would have orders not to start anything before the
meeting.

"Wonder if he's going to try to give us that stuff about substitutes?"
Oscar said.

"Well, what are you going to do?" I asked.

"I'll tell you what we're not going to do," Joe Kivelson said. "We're
not going to take his price cut. If he won't pay our price, he can use
his [deleted by censor] substitutes."

"You can't sell wax anywhere else, can you?"

"Is that so, we can't?" Joe started.

Before he could say anything else, Oscar was interrupting:

"We can eat for a while, even if we don't sell wax. Sigurd Ngozori'll
carry us for a while and make loans on wax. But if the wax stops
coming in, Kapstaad Chemical's going to start wondering why...."

By this time, other _Javelin_ men came drifting over--Ramon Llewellyn,
the mate, and Abdullah Monnahan, the engineer, and Abe Clifford, the
navigator, and some others. I talked with some of them, and then
drifted off in the direction of the bar, where I found another hunter
captain, Mohandas Gandhi Feinberg, whom everybody simply called the
Mahatma. He didn't resemble his namesake. He had a curly black beard
with a twisted black cigar sticking out of it, and nobody, after one
look at him, would have mistaken him for any apostle of nonviolence.

He had a proposition he was enlisting support for. He wanted balloting
at meetings to be limited to captains of active hunter-ships, the
captains to vote according to expressed wishes of a majority of their
crews. It was a good scheme, though it would have sounded better if
the man who was