Dad, I was
happy to observe, was every bit as flabbergasted as I had been at who
and what Bish Ware was. He might throw my campaign to reform Bish up
at me later on, but at the moment he wasn't disposed to, and I was
praising Allah silently that I hadn't had a chance to mention the
detective agency idea to him. That would have been a little too much.
"What are they doing about Belsher and Hallstock?" he asked.
"Belsher goes back to Terra with Ravick. Gerrit, I mean. That's where
he collected his cut on the tallow-wax, so that is where he'd have to
be tried. Bish is convinced that somebody in Kapstaad Chemical must
have been involved, too. Hallstock is strictly a local matter."
"That's about what I thought. With all this interstellar
back-and-forth, it'll be a long time before we'll be able to write
thirty under the story."
"Well, we can put thirty under the Steve Ravick story," I said.
Then it hit me. The Steve Ravick story was finished; that is, the
local story of racketeer rule in the Hunters' Co-operative. But the
Anton Gerrit story was something else. That was Federation-wide news;
the end of a fifteen-year manhunt for the most wanted criminal in the
known Galaxy. And who had that story, right in his hot little hand?
Walter Boyd, the ace--and only--reporter for the mighty Port Sandor
_Times_.
"Yes," I continued. "The Ravick story's finished. But we still have
the Anton Gerrit story, and I'm going to work on it right now.
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