The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of them
are guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authority
than an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turned
over for trial. But they will not be taken from this spaceport by
force, as long as I or one of my men remains alive."
"That's easy. We'll get them afterward," Joe Kivelson shouted.
"Somebody may. You won't," Ranjit Singh told him. "Van Steen, hit that
ship's boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody in
this mob makes."
"Yes, sir. With pleasure," another voice replied.
Nobody in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had any
comment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me.
"Mr. Boyd," he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was a
man of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. "If I admit
you to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly as
you learn them?"
"That's what the _Times_ always does, Lieutenant." Well, almost all
the facts almost always.
"Will you people accept what this _Times_ reporter tells you he has
learned?"
"Yes, of course." That was Oscar Fujisawa.
"I won't!" That was Joe Kivelson. "He's always taking the part of that
old rumpot of a Bish Ware."
"Lieutenant, that remark was a slur on my paper, as well as myself," I
said. "Will you permit Captain Kivelson to come in along with me? And
somebody else," I couldn't resist adding, "so that people will believe
him?"
Ranjit Singh considered that briefly.
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