H. Beam Piper- Four-Day Planet

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Four-Day Planet by H.

Beam Piper

Chapter One

THE SHIP FROM TERRA

I WENT THROUGH the gateway, towing my equipment in a

contragravity hamper over my head. As usual, I was wondering what it

would take, short of a revolution, to get the city of Port Sandor as clean

and tidy and well lighted as the spaceport area. I knew Dad's editorials

and my sarcastic news stories wouldn't do it. We'd been trying long

enough.

The two girls in bikinis in front of me pushed on, still gabbling about

the fight one of them had had with her boy friend, and I closed up behind

the half dozen monster-hunters in long trousers, ankle boots and short

boat-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must have all been from

the same crew, because they weren't arguing about whose ship was fastest,

had the toughest skipper, and made the most money. They were talking

about the price of tallow-wax, and they seemed to have picked up a rumor

that it was going to be cut another ten centisols a pound. I eavesdropped

shamelessly, but it was the same rumor I'd picked up, myself, a little

earlier.

"Hi, Walt," somebody behind me called out. "Looking for some news

that's fit to print?"

I turned my head. It was a man of about thirty-five with curly brown

hair and a wide grin. Adolf Lautier, the entertainment promoter. He and

Dad each owned a share in the Port Sandor telecast station, and split their

time between his music and drama-films and Dad's newscasts.

"All the news is fit to print, and if it's news the Times prints it," I told

him. "Think you're going to get some good thrillers this time?"

He shrugged. I'd just asked that to make conversation; he never had

any way of knowing what sort of films would come in. The ones the

Peenemünde was bringing should be fairly new, because she was

outbound from Terra. He'd go over what was aboard, and trade one for

one for the old films he'd shown already.

"They tell me there's a real Old-Terran-style Western been showing on

Volund that ought to be coming our way this time," he said. "It was filmed

in South America, with real horses."

That would go over big here. Almost everybody thought horses were as

extinct as dinosaurs. I've seen so-called Westerns with the cowboys riding

Freyan oukry. I mentioned that, and then added:

"They'll think the old cattle towns like Dodge and Abilene were awful

sissy places, though."

"I suppose they were, compared to Port Sandor," Lautier said. "Are you

going aboard to interview the distinguished visitor?"

"Which one?" I asked. "Glenn Murell or Leo Belsher?"

Lautier called Leo Belsher something you won't find in the dictionary

but which nobody needs to look up. The hunters, ahead of us, heard him

and laughed. They couldn't possibly have agreed more. He was going to

continue with the fascinating subject of Mr. Leo Belsher's ancestry and

personal characteristics, and then bit it off short. I followed his eyes, and

saw old Professor Hartzenbosch, the principal of the school, approaching.

"Ah, here you are, Mr. Lautier," he greeted. "I trust that I did not keep

you waiting." Then he saw me. "Why, it's Walter Boyd. How is your father,

Walter?"

I assured him as to Dad's health and inquired about his own, and then

asked him how things were going at school. As well as could be expected,

he told me, and I gathered that he kept his point of expectation safely low.

Then he wanted to know if I were going aboard to interview Mr. Murell.

"Really, Walter, it is a wonderful thing that a famous author like Mr.

Murell should come here to write a book about our planet," he told me,

very seriously, and added, as an afterthought: "Have you any idea where

he intends staying while he is among us?"

"Why, yes," I admitted. "After the Peenemünde radioed us their

passenger list, Dad talked to him by screen, and invited him to stay with

us. Mr. Murell accepted, at least until he can find quarters of his own."

There are a lot of good poker players in Port Sandor, but Professor Jan

Hartzenbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment would have

been comical if it hadn't been so utterly pathetic. He'd been hoping to

lasso Murell himself.

"I wonder if Mr. Murell could spare time to come to the school and

speak to the students," he said, after a moment.

"I'm sure he could. I'll mention it to him, Professor," I promised.

Professor Hartzenbosch bridled at that. The great author ought to be

coming to his school out of respect for him, not because a

seventeen-year-old cub reporter sent him. But then, Professor

Hartzenbosch always took the attitude that he was conferring a favor on

the Times when he had anything he wanted publicity on.

The elevator door opened, and Lautier and the professor joined in the

push to get into it. I hung back, deciding to wait for the next one so that I

could get in first and get back to the rear, where my hamper wouldn't be

in people's way. After a while, it came back empty and I got on, and when

the crowd pushed off on the top level, I put my hamper back on

contragravity and towed it out into the outdoor air, which by this time

had gotten almost as cool as a bake-oven.

looked up at the sky, where everybody else was looking. The

Peenemünde wasn't visible; it was still a few thousand miles off-planet.

Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the

sunset was even brighter and redder than when I had seen it last, ten

hours before. It was now about 1630.

Now, before anybody starts asking just who's crazy, let me point out

that this is not on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor

any other rational planet. This is Fenris, and on Fenris the sunsets, like

many other things, are somewhat peculiar.

Fenris is the second planet of a G» star, six hundred and fifty

light-years to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everything else

equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a cooler

primary and getting about the same amount of radiation. At least, that's

what the book says. I was born on Fenris, and have never been off it in the

seventeen years since.

Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle shorter

than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight thousand and a

few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris makes almost

exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one side the sun is

continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down unceasing

heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when

you get up and go outside—in an insulated vehicle, or an^

extreme-environment suit—you find that the* shadows have moved only

an inch or so, and it's that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls down to

the horizon and hangs there for a few days-periods of twenty-four G.S.

hours—and then slides slowly out of sight. Then, for about a hundred

hours, there is a beautiful unfading sunset, and it's really pleasant

outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder until, just before sunrise, it gets

almost cold enough to freeze . C02

You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenris is nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and spacemen

haven't made a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram

Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of those planets the Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with.

The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have

taken that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two

hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everything they'd put into the company, which, for most of them, was all

they had. Not a few lost their lives before the Federation Space Navy could get ships here to evacuate them.

But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh start elsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, took over

all the ' equipment and installations the Fenris Company had abandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least, they stayed

alive. There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while we are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it.

There were about two thousand people—ten per cent of the planetary population—on the wide concrete promenade around the

spaceport landing pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my telecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I

could find some ten- or twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be a reporter when he grew up, so that I could have an

apprentice to help me with my junk.

As the star—and only—reporter of the greatest—and only—paper on the planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on

the Terra-Odin milk run, the Peenemünde and the Cape Canaveral, landed. Of course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as they come

out of hyperspace and into radio range, and get the passenger list, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the latest

native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on Venus. Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all, or the

Federation Member Republic of Venus will have some nonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story to end

man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at least six months old, some more than a year. A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd hours, but

radio waves still crawl along at the same old 186,000 mps.

I still have to meet the ships. There's always something that has to be picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP

traveling through. This time, though, the big story coming in on the Peenemünde was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such thing.

He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structural contradiction, and you

just call it an impossibility and let it go at that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was going to write a travel book

about Fenris, the planet with the four-day year. Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de plume, and nobody here had ever

heard of him.

That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides the toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people

have to stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/or frozen to death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one of the

cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And travel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybody is

hoping to read about a worse place than Fenris. I had checked on Glenn Murell at the library. None of the librarians had ever heard of him,

and there wasn't a single mention of him in any of the big catalogues of publications.

The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell was some swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that

was that I couldn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what he'd expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he

could be on the lam from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all the cover story? Some of our better-known citizens came here

dodging warrants on other planets.

I was still wondering about Murell when somebody behind me greeted me, and I turned around. It was Tom Kivelson.

Tom and I are buddies, when he's in port. He's just a shade older than I am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday

won't come till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is Joe Kivelson, the skipper of the Javelin ; Tom is sort of junior engineer,

second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to school together, which is to say a couple of years at Professor Hartzenbosch's,

learning to read and write and put figures together. That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although Joe Kivelson sent Tom's older

sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody who stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I were still digging for ours.

Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully

thrilling and romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though,

we realized that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot. Tom couldn't string three sentences—no, one

sentence—together to save his life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in something that isn't pitching end-for-end every minute.

Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard,

though at present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him dressed as I was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a light

jacket. Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked around behind him, and saw the brass tip of a scabbard under the jacket.

Any time a hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife on, he isn't wearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew Joe

Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the Peenemünde, with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms and the

cold.

"I thought you were down in the South Ocean," I said.

"There's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op," he said. "We only heard about it last evening," by which he meant after 1800 of the

previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship captain who had called the Javelin by screen. "We screened everybody else

we could."

That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. Steve Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the

coast of Hermann Reuch's Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack it with his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted

voted through. I had always wondered how long the real hunters were going to stand for that. They'd been standing for it ever since I could

remember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn't been too long.

was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled, "There she is!" I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see which

way they were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught a tiny twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmetic

to figure how high she'd have to be to catch the sunlight, I relaxed. Even with the telephoto, I'd only get a picture the size of a pinhead, so I

fixed the position in my mind and then looked around at the crowd.

Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and slender, with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with a

scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his left arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The

former was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Cooperative, and his companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port

Sandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris.

They had held their respective positions for as long as I could remember anything at all. I could never remember an election in Port

Sandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of goons and triggermen—I could see a couple of them loitering in the

background—who kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, only his wore badges and called themselves police.

Once in a while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one or the other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun

on, and so would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third member of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure

nobody got behind Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and that always rather hurt me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they

didn't need to care what the Times printed or 'cast about them.

Hallstock glanced over in my direction and said something to Ravick. Ravick gave a sneering laugh, and then he crushed out the

cigarette he was smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of his. Showing how tough he was. Dad says that when you see

somebody showing off, ask yourself whether he's trying to impress other people, or himself. I wondered which was the case with Steve

Ravick.

Then I looked up again. The Peenemünde was coming down as fast as she could without overheating from atmosphere friction. She was

almost buckshot size to the naked eye, and a couple of tugs were getting ready to go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera out of the

hamper, checked it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock and handgrips and a trigger like a submachine gun. I caught the ship in the finder

and squeezed the trigger for a couple of seconds. It would be about five minutes till the tugs got to her and anything else happened, so I put

down the camera and looked around.

Coming through the crowd, walking as though the concrete under him was pitching and rolling like a ship's deck on contragravity in a

storm, was Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself and recovered, and then changed course to starboard and bore

down on us. He was carrying about his usual cargo, and as usual the manifest would read, Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar.

Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had

nicknamed him the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable. He looked like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's

never seen a bishop outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like. He was a big man, not fat, but tall and portly; he had a ruddy

face that always wore an expression of benevolent wisdom, and the more cargo he took on the wiser and more benevolent he looked.

He had iron-gray hair, but he wasn't old. You could tell that by the backs of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veins

didn't protrude. And drunk or sober—though I never remembered seeing him in the latter condition-he had the fastest reflexes of anybody I

knew. I saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock over an open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed it

by the neck and set it up, all in one motion, without spilling a drop, and he went on talking as though nothing had happened. He was quoting

Homer, I remembered, and you could tell that he was thinking in the original ancient Greek and translating to Lingua Terra as he went.

He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, the jacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an

Uller organic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly—once every planetary day—a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in

for him, and he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. If anybody was unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said he

had a rich uncle on Terra.

When I was a kid—well, more of a kid than I am now—I used to believe he really was a bishop-unfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, or

whatever they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot of people who weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him on

every denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missing the Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what he'd

done to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that somewhere there was a cathedral standing unfinished because he'd hypered out

with the building fund. It was generally agreed that his ecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay out there in the boondocks

where he wouldn't cause them further embarrassment.

I was pretty sure, myself, that he was being paid by somebody, probably his family, to stay out of sight. The colonial planets are full of

that sort of remittance men.

Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, of both sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was an

example, who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associate with him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a

reporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knew all the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having to

associate with all of them, and it is sad but true that you get very few news stories in Sunday school. Far from fearing that Bish would be a

bad influence on me, he rather hoped I'd be a good one on Bish.

! had that in mind, too, if I could think of any way of managing it. Bish had been a good man, once. He still was, except for one thing. You

could tell that before he'd started drinking, he'd really beep somebody, somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to him,

and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a bottle. Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feet again. I

hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turning himself into the rumpot he was now was waste of the worst kind.

It would take a lot of doing, though, and careful tactical planning. Preaching at him would be worse than useless, and so would simply

trying to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky, at the hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was

make him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to manage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on

the Times, but we barely made enough money out of it for ourselves, and with his remittance he didn't need to work. I had a lot of other ideas,

now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

Chapter Two

REPORTER WORKING

BISH CAME OVER and greeted us solemnly.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Captain Ahab, I believe," he said, bowing

to Tom, who seemed slightly puzzled; the education Tom had been digging

out for himself was technical rather than literary. "And Mr. Pulitzer. Or is

it Horace Greeley?"

"Lord Beaverbrook, your Grace," I replied. "Have you any little news

items for us from your diocese?"

Bish teetered slightly, getting out a cigar and inspecting it carefully

before lighting it.

"We-el," he said carefully, "my diocese is full to the hatch covers with

sinners, but that's scarcely news." He turned to Tom. "One of your hands on

the Javelin got into a fight in Martian Joe's, a while ago. Lumped the other

man up pretty badly." He named the Javelin crewman, and the man who

had been pounded. The latter was one of Steve Ravick's goons. "But not

fatally, I regret to say," Bish added. "The local Gestapo are looking for

your man, but he made it aboard Nip Spazoni's Bulldog, and by this time

he's halfway to Hermann Reuch's Land."

"Isn't Nip going to the meeting, tonight?" Tom asked.

Bish shook his head. "Nip is a peace-loving man. He has a well-founded

suspicion that peace is going to be in short supply around Hunters' Hall

this evening. You know, of course, that Leo Belsher's coming in on the

Peenemünde and will be there to announce another price cut. The new

price, I understand, will be thirty-five centisols a pound."

Seven hundred sols a ton, I thought; why, that would barely pay ship

expenses.

"Where did you get that?" Tom asked, a trifle sharply.

"Oh, I have my spies and informers," Bish said. "And even if I hadn't, it

would figure. The only reason Leo Belsher ever comes to this Eden among

planets is to negotiate a new contract, and who ever heard of a new

contract at a higher price?"

That had all happened before, a number of times. When Steve Ravick

had gotten control of the Hunters' Co-operative, the price of tallow-wax, on

the loading floor at Port Sandor spaceport, had been fifteen hundred sols a

ton. As far as Dad and I could find out, it was still bringing the same price

on Terra as it always had. It looked to us as if Ravick and Leo Belsher, who

was the Co-op representative on Terra, and Mort Hallstock were simply

pocketing the difference. I was just as sore about what was happening as

anybody who went out in the hunter-ships. Tallow-wax is our only export.

All our imports are paid for with credit from the sale of wax.

It isn't really wax, and it isn't tallow. It's a growth on the Jarvis's

sea-monster; there's a layer of it under the skin, and around organs that

need padding. An average-sized monster, say a hundred and fifty feet long,

will yield twelve to fifteen tons of it, and a good hunter kills about ten

monsters a year. Well, at the price Belsher and Ravick were going to cut

from, that would run a little short of a hundred and fifty thousand sols for

a year. If you say it quick enough and don't think, that sounds like big

money, but the upkeep and supplies for a hunter-ship are big money, too,

and what's left after that's paid off is divided, on a graduated scale, among

ten to fifteen men, from the captain down. A hunter-boat captain even a

good one like Joe Kivelson, won't make much more in a year than Dad and I

make out of the Times.

Chemically, tallow-wax isn't like anything else in the known Galaxy.

The molecules are huge; they can be seen with an ordinary optical

microscope, and a microscopically visible molecule is a curious-looking

object, to say the least. They use the stuff to treat fabric for protective

garments. It isn't anything like collapsium, of course, but a suit of waxed

coveralls weighing only a couple of pounds will stop as much radiation as

half an inch of lead.

Back when they were getting fifteen hundred a ton, the hunters had

been making good money, but that was before Steve Ravick's time.

It was slightly before mine, too. Steve Ravick had showed up on Fenris

about twelve years ago. He'd had some money, and he'd bought shares in a

couple of hunter-ships and staked a few captains who'd had bad luck and

got them in debt to him. He also got in with Morton Hallstock, who

controlled what some people were credulous enough to take for a

government here. Before long, he was secretary of the Hunters'

Co-operative. Old Simon MacGregor, who had been president then, was a

good hunter, but he was no businessman. He came to depend very heavily

on Ravick, up till his ship, the Claymore, was lost with all hands down in

Fitzwilliam Straits. I think that was a time bomb in the magazine, but I

have a low and suspicious mind. Professor Hartzenbosch has told me so

repeatedly. After that, Steve Ravick was president of the Co-op. He

immediately began a drive to increase the membership. Most of the new

members had never been out in a hunter-ship in their lives, but they could

all be depended on to vote the way he wanted them to.

First, he jacked the price of wax up, which made everybody but the wax

buyers happy. Everybody who wasn't already in the Co-op hurried up and

joined. Then he negotiated an exclusive contract with Kapstaad Chemical

Products, Ltd., in South Africa, by which they agreed to take the entire

output for the Co-op. That ended competitive wax buying, and when there

was nobody to buy the wax but Kapstaad, you had to sell it through the

Co-operative or you didn't sell it at all. After that, the price started going

down. The Co-operative, for which read Steve Ravick, had a sales

representative on Terra, Leo Belsher. He wrote all the contracts, collected

all the money, and split with Ravick. What was going on was pretty

generally understood, even if it couldn't be proven, but what could

anybody do about it?

Maybe somebody would try to do something about it at the meeting this

evening. I would be there to cover it. I was beginning to wish I owned a

bullet-proof vest.

Bish and Tom were exchanging views on the subject, some of them

almost printable. I had my eyes to my binoculars, watching the tugs go up

to meet the Peenemünde.

"What we need for Ravick, Hallstock and Belsher," Tom was saying, "is

about four fathoms of harpoon line apiece, and something to haul up to."

That kind of talk would have shocked Dad. He is very strong for law and

order, even when there is no order and the law itself is illegal. I'd always

thought there was a lot of merit in what Tom was suggesting. Bish Ware

seemed to have his doubts, though.

"Mmm, no; there ought to be some better way of doing it than that."

"Can you think of one?" Tom challenged.

I didn't hear Bish's reply. By that time, the tugs were almost to the ship.

I grabbed up the tele-photo camera and aimed it. It has its own power

unit, and transmits directly. In theory, I could tune it to the telecast

station and put what I was getting right on the air, and what I was doing

was transmitting to the Times, to be recorded and 'cast later. Because it's

not a hundred per cent reliable, though, it makes its own audiovisual

record, so if any of what I was sending didn't get through, it could be

spliced in after I got back.

I got some footage of the tugs grappling the ship, which was now

completely weightless, and pulling her down. Through the finder, I could

see that she had her landing legs extended; she looked like a big overfed

spider being hauled in by a couple of gnats. I kept the butt of the camera to

my shoulder, and whenever anything interesting happened, I'd squeeze the

trigger. The first time I ever used a real submachine gun had been to kill a

blue slasher that had gotten into one of the ship pools at the waterfront. I

used three one-second bursts, and threw bits of slasher all over the place,

and everybody wondered how I'd gotten the practice.

A couple more boats, pushers, went up to help hold the ship against the

wind, and by that time she was down to a thousand feet, which was half

her diameter. I switched from the shoulder-stock telephoto to the big

tripod job, because this was the best part of it. The ship was weightless, of

course, but she had mass and an awful lot of it. If anybody goofed getting

her down, she'd take the side of the landing pit out, and about ten per cent

of the population of Fenris, including the ace reporter for the Times, along

with it.

At the same time, some workmen and a couple of spaceport cops had

appeared, taken out a section of railing and put in a gate. The Peenemünde

settled down, turned slowly to get her port in line with the gate, and

lurched off contragravity and began running out a bridge to the

promenade. I got some shots of that, and then began packing my stuff back

in the hamper.

"You going aboard?" Tom asked. "Can I come along? I can carry some of

your stuff and let on I'm your helper."

Glory be, I thought; I finally got that apprentice.

"Why, sure," I said. "You tow the hamper; I'll carry this." I got out what

looked like a big camera case and slung it over my shoulder. "But you'll

have to take me out on the Javelin, sometime, and let me shoot a monster."

He said it was a deal, and we shook on it. Then I had another idea.

"Bish, suppose you come with us, too," I said. "After all, Tom and I are

just a couple of kids. If you're with us, it'll look a lot more big-paperish."

That didn't seem to please Tom too much. Bish shook his head, though,

and Tom brightened.

"I'm dreadfully sorry, Walt," Bish said. "But I'm going aboard, myself,

to see a friend who is en route through to Odin. A Dr. Watson; I have not

seen him for years."

I'd caught that name, too, when we'd gotten the passenger list. Dr. John

Watson. Now, I know that all sorts of people call themselves Doctor, and

Watson and John aren't too improbable a combination, but I'd read

Sherlock Holmes long ago, and the name had caught my attention. And

this was the first, to my knowledge, that Bish Ware had ever admitted to

any off-planet connections.

We started over to the gate. Hallstock and Ravick were ahead of us. So

was Sigurd Ngozori, the president of the Fidelity & Trust, carrying a heavy

briefcase and accompanied by a character with a submachine gun, and

Adolf Lautier and Professor Hartzenbosch. There were a couple of

spaceport cops at the gate, in olive-green uniforms that looked as though

they had been sprayed on, and steel helmets. I wished we had a city police

force like that. They were Odin Dock & Shipyard Company men, all former

Federation Regular Army or Colonial Constabulary. The spaceport wasn't

part of Port Sandor, or even Fenris; the Odin Dock & Shipyard Company

was the government there, and it was run honestly and efficiently.

They knew me, and when they saw Tom towing my hamper they

cracked a few jokes about the new Times cub reporter and waved us

through. I thought they might give Bish an argument, but they just nodded

and let him pass, too. We all went out onto the bridge, and across the pit to

the equator of the two-thousand-foot globular ship.

We went into the main lounge, and the captain introduced us to Mr.

Glenn Murell. He was fairly tall, with light gray hair, prematurely so, I

thought, and a pleasant, noncommittal face. I'd have pegged him for a

businessman. Well, I suppose authoring is a business, if that was his

business. He shook hands with us, and said:

"Aren't you rather young to be a newsman?"

I started to burn on that. I get it all the time, and it burns me all the

time, but worst of all on the job. Maybe I am only going-on-eighteen, but

I'm doing a man's work, and I'm doing it competently.

"Well, they grow up young on Fenris, Mr. Murell," Captain Marshak

earned my gratitude by putting in. "Either that or they don't live to grow

up."

H. Beam Piper- Four-Day Planet

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