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I want you to understand that Kapstaad Chemical wants to give you every cent they can, but business conditions no longer permit them to pay the old price. Thirty-five is the absolute maximum they can pay and still meet competition " "Aaah, knock it off, Belsher!" somebody shouted. "We heard all that rot on the screen." "How about our contract?" somebody else asked.
The more wax sold for, the more advertising we'd sell to the merchants, and the more people would rent teleprinters from us. "Eighty centisols a pound," he said. Nice and definite; quite a difference from the way he stumbled around over listing his previous publications. "Seventy-five's the Kapstaad price, regardless of what you people here have been getting from that crook of a Belsher.
Dad hadn't heard a word from him. "What's the situation at Hunters' Hall?" I asked. "Everything's quiet there. The police left when Hallstock commandeered that fire-fighting equipment. They helped the shipyard men get it out, and then they all went to the Municipal Building. As far as I know, both Ravick and Belsher are still in Hunters' Hall.
The Simón Bolivar would not make landing, but go into orbit and send down a boat. 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.
"Then we'll kick the blankety-blank spaceport apart," somebody shouted. That started it up again. Oscar wondered if getting silence was worth another clip of cartridges, and decided it wasn't. He managed to make himself heard without it. "We'll do nothing of the kind. We need that spaceport to stay alive. But we will take Ravick and Belsher and Hallstock "
And when Mort Hallstock got hold of the town-meeting pseudo government they put together fifty years ago and turned it into a dictatorship, nobody realized what had happened till it was too late. Lynch law's the only recourse we have." "Ralph," Bish told him, "if anything like that starts, Belsher and Hallstock and Ravick won't be the only casualties.
"Too bad you didn't get an audiovisual of Belsher making that idiotic statement." "He didn't even know I was getting a voice-only. All the time he was talking, I was doodling in a pad with a pencil." "Synthetic substitutes!" Dad snorted. "Putting a synthetic tallow-wax molecule together would be like trying to build a spaceship with a jackknife and a tack hammer."
I told him how Bish had smuggled Gerrit and Leo Belsher out on Second Level Down and gotten them to the spaceport, where Courtland's men had been waiting for them. "Gerrit's going to Terra, and from there to Loki. They want the natives to see what happens to a Terran who breaks Terran law; teach them that our law isn't just to protect us. Belsher's going to Terra, too.
"And Leo Belsher doesn't have the floor; he's not a member of the Co-operative," Tom Kivelson declared. "He's our hired employee, and as soon as this present motion is dealt with, I intend moving that we fire him and hire somebody else." "I move to amend Captain Fujisawa's motion," Joe Kivelson said.
At the same time, I was watching Steve Ravick, Morton Hallstock and Leo Belsher at one side of the room, and Bish Ware at the other. Bish was within ear-straining range. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another man, younger in appearance and looking like an Army officer in civvies, approach him. "My dear Bishop!" this man said in greeting.
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