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I ought to be in such a hurry I'd take the Simón Bolivar to Terra and let this place go to to anywhere you might imagine to be worse." "You know, I don't think you like Fenris." "I don't. If I were a drinking man, this planet would have made a drunkard of me. Now, you forget about these six years chopped out of your busy life.
There are a lot of valuable mineral deposits over on the mainland; maybe in another century our grandchildren will start working them again. "But about six years before the Fenris Company went to pieces, they decided to concentrate in one city, here in the archipelago. The sea water stays cooler in the daytime and doesn't lose heat so rapidly in the nighttime.
The creature on the opposite side of the glade seemed as bereft of motion as the spruce trees in the moonlight, or the cliff above the cave. "What is it?" Beatrice whispered. The man's eyes strained into the gloom. "I don't know. It may be just a moose, or maybe a caribou. But it may be " He tiptoed to the door of the cave, and his eye fell to the crouching form of Fenris.
Ben's eyes met those of the wolf, commanding and unafraid. "Down, Fenris," Ben said again. "Down!" Then slowly, steadily, Ben moved toward him. Watching unbelieving, Morris saw the fierce eyes begin to lose their fire. The stiff hair on the shoulders fell into place, tense muscle relaxed. He saw in wonder that the animal was trembling all over. Ben stood beside him now, his hand reaching.
The slender one had a bulge under his left arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The former was Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Co-operative, and his companion was the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port Sandor and consequently the planetary government of Fenris. They had held their respective positions for as long as I could remember anything at all.
Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamed him the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable. He looked like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's never seen a bishop outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like.
I'd even thought, if he stopped drinking, he might make a success as a private detective at Port Sandor, on Fenris! I wondered what color my face had gotten now, and I started looking around for a crack in the floor, to trickle gently and unobtrusively into. And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was an Executive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly.
As he spoke, he pulled it even longer and became as doleful as an undertaker at a ten-thousand-sol funeral. "The price has gone down, again. Somebody has developed a synthetic substitute. Of course, it isn't anywhere near as good as real Fenris tallow-wax, but try and tell the public that.
"Hiram didn't leave anything, far as I know, except his old gun and his pet. Lord knows, I'd let anybody take that pet of his that's fool enough to say he's got any claim to him, and you can be sure I ain't going to dispute his claim." "Fenris, then, is, something of a problem?" "The worst I ever had. His old gun is a good enough weapon, but I'm willing to trust you with it to get rid of Fenris.
And when the next ship gets in here and they find out what happened, they'll send the Federation Space Navy, and this planet'll get it worse than Fenris did. They'll blast anything that has four arms and a face like a lizard...." Half a dozen aircars lifted suddenly from the airport and streaked away to the north-east.
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