Four-Day Planet

hat it would take, short of a revolution, to get the city of Port Sandor as clean and tidy and well lighted as the

t-jackets, with big knives on their belts. They must have all been from the same crew, because they weren't arguing about whose ship was fastest, had the toughest skipper, and made the most money. They were talking about

e called out. "Looking for so

dolf Lautier, the entertainment promoter. He and Dad each owned a share in the Port Sandor t

s the Times prints it," I told him. "Think you

lms would come in. The ones the Peenemünde was bringing should be fairly new, because she was outbound

howing on V?lund that ought to be coming our way this time,"

re as extinct as dinosaurs. I've seen so-called Westerns with t

towns like Dodge and Abilene w

ndor," Lautier said. "Are you going aboar

ked. "Glenn Murel

laughed. They couldn't possibly have agreed more. He was going to continue with the fascinating subject of Mr. Leo Belsher's ancestry and perso

t that I did not keep you waiting." Then he saw me.

going at school. As well as could be expected, he told me, and I gathered that he kept his point

come here to write a book about our planet," he told me, very seriously, and added, a

er list, Dad talked to him by screen, and invited him to stay with us.

nbosch is not one of them. The look of disappointment would have been comical

me to come to the school and speak to

ll mention it to him,

for him, not because a seventeen-year-old cub reporter sent him. But then, Professor Hartzenbosch always

in first and get back to the rear, where my hamper wouldn't be in people's way. After a while, it came back empty and I got on, and when the crowd pushed of

ew thousand miles off-planet. Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the s

on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor any other rational planet. Th

thing else equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a cooler primary and getting about the same amount of

uring down unceasing heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when you get up and go outside-in an insulated vehicle, or an extreme-environment suit-you find that the shadows have moved only an inch or so, and it's that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls down to the horizon and hangs there for a few da

haven't made a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram Zi

en Terra and Fenris hadn't been a matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everyth

ver all the equipment and installations the Fenris Company had abandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least, th

it. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my telecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could find some ten or

into radio range, and get the passenger list, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the latest native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on Venus. Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all, or the Federation Member Republic of Venus w

Dad says there is no such thing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structural contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at that. In th

death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one of the cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And travel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybody is hoping to r

dn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what he'd expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could be on the lam fro

en somebody behind me greeted me, and

of the Javelin; Tom is sort of junior engineer, second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to school together, which is to say a couple of years at Professor Hartzenbosch's, learning to read and write and put figures tog

being a newsman was real hot stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized that neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot. Tom

s and sandals and a white shirt and a light jacket. Ordinarily, even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked around behind him, and saw the brass tip of a scabbard under the jacket. Any time a hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife

re down in the So

ening," by which he meant after 1800 of the previous Galactic Standard day. He named another h

nd then he would call a meeting and pack it with his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted voted through. I had always wondered how long the real hunt

d followed them up to the sky, and caught a tiny twinkle through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmetic to figure how high she'd have to be to catch the

mustache. 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

Port Sandor, or an election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of goons and triggermen-I could see a couple of them lo

ubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third member of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure nobody got behind Dad's back. Nothing eve

he was smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of his. Showing how tough he was. Dad says that when you see some

getting ready to go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera out of the hamper, checked it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock and handgrips and a trigger like a submachine gun. I caught the

storm, was Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself and recovered, and then changed course to starboard and bo

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. He was a big

on-he had the fastest reflexes of anybody I knew. I saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock over an open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed it by the neck and set it up, all in one motion,

anic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly-once every planetary day-a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in for him, and he'd d

at, and they blamed him on every denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missing the Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what he'd done to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that somewhere there was

mebody, probably his family, to stay out of sight. The

ith him. Dad simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a reporter, I'd have to have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knew all the disreputable characters in town, which saved me having to a

king, he'd really been somebody, somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to him, and now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a bottle. Something oug

ospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was make him want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to manage that. I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on the Times