Four-Day Planet - H. Beam Piper (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📗

an act like that up for five years. Your father modestly admits that it even fooled him.”

“Bet Oscar Fujisawa knew it all along.”

“Well, Oscar modestly admits that he suspected something of the sort, but he didn’t feel it was his place to say anything.”

Tom laughed, and then wanted to know if they were going to hang Mort Hallstock. “I hope they wait till I can get out of here.”

“No, Odin Dock & Shipyard claim he’s a political refugee and they won’t give him up. They did loan us a couple of accountants to go over the city books, to see if we could find any real evidence of misappropriation, and whattaya know, there were no city books. The city of Port Sandor didn’t keep books. We can’t even take that three hundred thousand sols away from him; for all we can prove, he saved them out of his five-thousand-sol-a-year salary. He’s shipping out on the Cape Canaveral, too.”

“Then we don’t have any government at all!”

“Are you fooling yourself we ever had one?”

“No, but⁠—”

“Well, we have one now. A temporary dictatorship; Bish Ware is dictator. Fieschi loaned him Ranjit Singh and some of his men. The first thing he did was gather up the city treasurer and the chief of police and march them to the spaceport; Fieschi made Hallstock buy them tickets, too. But there aren’t going to be any unofficial hangings. This is a law-abiding planet, now.”

A nurse came in, and disapproved of Tom smoking and of me being in the room at all.

“Haven’t you had your lunch yet?” she asked Tom.

He looked at her guilelessly and said, “No; I was waiting for it.”

“Well, I’ll get it,” she said. “I thought the other nurse had brought it.” She started out, and then she came back and had to fuss with his cushions, and then she saw the tray on the floor.

“You did so have your lunch!” she accused.

Tom looked at her as innocently as ever. “Oh, you mean these samples? Why, they were good; I’ll take all of them. And a big slab of roast beef, and brown gravy, and mashed potatoes. And how about some ice cream?”

It was a good try; too bad it didn’t work.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” I told him. “I’ll get my lawyer to spring you out of this jug, and then we’ll take you to my place and fill you up on Mrs. Laden’s cooking.”

The nurse sniffed. She suspected, quite correctly, that whoever Mrs. Laden was, she didn’t know anything about scientific dietetics.

When I got back to the Times, Dad and Julio had had their lunch and were going over the teleprint edition. Julio was printing corrections on blank sheets of plastic and Dad was cutting them out and cementing them over things that needed correcting on the master sheets. I gave Julio a short item to the effect that Tom Kivelson, son of Captain and Mrs. Joe Kivelson, one of the Javelin survivors who had been burned in the tallow-wax fire, was now out of all danger, and recovering. Dad was able to scrounge that onto the first page.

There was a lot of other news. The T.F.N. destroyer Simón Bolivar, en route from Gimli to pick up the notorious Anton Gerrit, alias Steve Ravick, had come out of hyperspace and into radio range. Dad had talked to the skipper by screen and gotten interviews, which would be telecast, both with him and Detective-Major MacBride of the Colonial Constabulary. The Simón Bolivar would not make landing, but go into orbit and send down a boat. Detective-Major MacBride (alias Dr. John Watson) would remain on Fenris to take over local police activities.

More evidence had been unearthed at Hunters’ Hall on the frauds practiced by Leo Belsher and Gerrit-alias-Ravick; it looked as though a substantial sum of money might be recovered, eventually, from the bank accounts and other holdings of both men on Terra. Acting Resident-Agent Gonzalo Ware⁠—Ware, it seemed, really was his right name, but look what he had in front of it⁠—had promulgated more regulations and edicts, and a crackdown on the worst waterfront dives was in progress. I’ll bet the devoted flock was horrified at what their beloved bishop had turned into. Bish would leave his diocese in a lot healthier condition than he’d found it, that was one thing for sure. And most of the gang of thugs and plug-uglies who had been used to intimidate and control the Hunters’ Cooperative had been gathered up and jailed on vagrancy charges; prisoners were being put to work cleaning up the city.

And there was a lot about plans for a registration of voters, and organization of election boards, and a local electronics-engineering firm had been awarded a contract for voting machines. I didn’t think there had ever been a voting machine on Fenris before.

“The commander of the Bolivar says he’ll take your story to Terra with him, and see that it gets to Interworld News,” Dad told me as we were sorting the corrected master sheets and loading them into the photoprint machine, to be sent out on the air. “The Bolivar’ll make Terra at least two hundred hours ahead of the Cape Canaveral. Interworld will be glad to have it. It isn’t often they get a story like that with the first news of anything, and this’ll be a big story.”

“You shouldn’t have given me the exclusive by-line,” I said. “You did as much work on it as I did.”

“No, I didn’t, either,” he contradicted, “and I knew what I was doing.”

With the work done, I remembered that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and I went down to take inventory of the refrigerator. Dad went along with me, and after I had assembled a lunch and sat down to it, he decided that his pipe needed refilling, lit it, poured a cup of coffee and sat down with me.

“You know, Walt, I’ve been thinking, lately,” he began.

Oh-oh, I thought. When Dad makes that remark, in just that