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From the minute the Javelin had failed to respond to Dad's screen-call and the general call had gone out to the hunter-fleet, everybody had been positive of what had happened. It was too much like the loss of the Claymore, which had made Ravick president of the Co-op. Port Sandor had just gotten all of Steve Ravick that anybody could take.
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.
Going up the sunny street of the little town, he felt as if all the folk he met said to themselves: "He's going to the Co-op. reading-room to look in the papers for a place. He can't get a job. I suppose he's living on his mother." Then he crept up the stone stairs behind the drapery shop at the Co-op., and peeped in the reading-room.
I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have what you wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whether Ravick got away or not, as long as you got him out of the Co-op. Well, he's out for good now." "That was before the fire," Oscar said. "We didn't have a couple of million sols' worth of wax burned.
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.
Ravick and Belsher and the secretary of the Co-op, who was a little scrawny henpecked-husband type who never had an opinion of his own in his life, were all sitting back of a big desk on a dais in front.
"It's a long way from the docks, and a long way from the spaceport." "Oh, just temporary storage," Tom said. "It hasn't been checked in with the Co-op yet." That wasn't any answer or maybe it was. I let it go at that. Then we came to an open space about fifty feet square.
There's a blind home at Exeter, an' likewise a cathedral choir, an' Sunday school, an' a boys' brigade, with other sundries; an' this year the good people financin' half a dozen o' these shows had discovered that by clubbin' two sixpences together a shillin' could be made to go as far as eighteenpence; and how, doin' it on the co-op, instead of an afternoon treat for each, they could manage a two days' outin' for all Exeter to Penzance an' the Land's End, sleepin' one night at Penzance, an' back to Exeter at some ungodly hour the next.
"Why, then the Co-op would have been stuck with it." "That's right. And as soon as Murell's price was announced, everybody would drop out of the Co-operative and reclaim their wax, even the captains who owe Ravick money. He'd have nobody left but a handful of thugs and barflies." "But that would smash the Co-operative," Joe Kivelson objected.
It was a little club of women attached to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which met on Monday night in the long room over the grocery shop of the Bestwood "Co-op". The women were supposed to discuss the benefits to be derived from co-operation, and other social questions. Sometimes Mrs. Morel read a paper.
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