anything at all for boot.
Tom couldn't string three sentences--no, one sentence--together to
save his life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in something
that isn't pitching end-for-end every minute.

Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds
heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard, though
at present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him
dressed as I was, in shorts 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 on, he isn't
wearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew
Joe Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the _Peenemuende_,
with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms and
the cold.

"I thought you were down in the South Ocean," I said.

"There's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op," he said. "We
only heard about it last evening," by which he meant after 1800 of
the previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship
captain who had called the _Javelin_ by screen. "We screened everybody
else we could."

That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. Steve
Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast of
Hermann Reuch's Land, and 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 hunters were going to
stand for that. They'd been standing for it ever since I could
remember anything outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn't
been too long.

I was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled,
"There she is!" I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see which
way they were pointed and 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 sunlight, I relaxed.
Even with the telephoto, I'd only get a picture the size of a pinhead,
so I fixed the position in my mind and then looked around at the
crowd.

Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and slender,
with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with a
scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his
left arm, and the s