nde_, posing as
a travel-book author. Well, he's here, now."

"You'd better keep an eye on him," I advised. "If Steve Ravick gets
to him, he won't be much use to you."

"You think Ravick would really harm Murell?" Dad asked.

He thought so, too. He was just trying to comfort himself by
pretending he didn't.

"What do you think, Ralph?" Oscar asked him. "If we get competitive
wax buying, again, seventy-five a pound will be the starting price.
I'm not spending the money till I get it, but I wouldn't be surprised
to see wax go to a sol a pound on the loading floor here. And you know
what that would mean."

"Thirty for Steve Ravick," Dad said. That puzzled Oscar, till I
explained that "thirty" is newsese for "the end." "I guess Walt's
right. Ravick would do anything to prevent that." He thought for a
moment. "Joe, you were using the wrong strategy. You should have let
Ravick get that thirty-five centisol price established for the
Co-operative, and then had Murell offer seventy-five or something like
that."

"You crazy?" Joe demanded. "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.
"Listen, Ralph; I've been in the Co-operative all my life, since
before Steve Ravick was heard of on this planet. I've worked hard for
the Co-operative, and--"

You didn't work hard enough, I thought. You let Steve Ravick take it
away from you. Dad told Joe pretty much the same thing:

"You don't have a Co-operative, Joe. Steve Ravick has a racket. The
only thing you can do with this organization is smash it, and then
rebuild it with Ravick and his gang left out."

Joe puzzled over that silently. He'd been thinking that it was the
same Co-operative his father and Simon MacGregor and the other old
hunters had organized, and that getting rid of Ravick was simply a
matter of voting him out. He was beginning to see, now, that
parliamentary procedure wasn't any weapon against Ravick's force and
fraud and intimidation.

"I think Walt has something," Oscar Fujisawa said. "As long as
Murell's in the hospital at the spaceport, he's safe, but as soon as
he gets out of Odin Dock & Shipyard territory, he's going to be a clay
pigeon."

Tom hadn't