Mobs are a little different from soldiers, and our Rebel Army was still a mob. Mobs don't like to advance into certain death, and they don't like to advance over the bodies and wreckage of their own forward elements. Neither do soldiers, but soldiers will do it. Soldiers realize, when they put on the uniform, that some day they may face death in battle, and if this is it, this is it.
I got the combat car and the lone soldier in the turban—that would look good in anybody's history book—and moved forward, taking care that he saw the Times lettering on the jeep and taking care to stay well short of the deadline. I let down to the street and got out, taking off my gun belt and hanging it on the control handle of the jeep. Then I walked forward.
"Lieutenant Ranjit," I said, "I'm representing the Times. I have business inside the spaceport. I want to get the facts about this. It may be that when I get this story, these people will be satisfied."
"We will, like Nifflheim!" I heard Joe Kivelson bawling, above and behind me. "We want the men who started the fire my son got burned in."
"Is that the Kivelson boy's father?" the Sikh asked me, and when I nodded, he lifted the phone to his lips again. "Captain Kivelson," the loudspeaker said, "your son is alive and under skin-grafting treatment here at the spaceport hospital. His life is not, repeat not, in danger. The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of them are guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authority than an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turned over for trial. But they will not be taken from this spaceport by force, as long as I or one of my men remains alive."
"That's easy. We'll get them afterward," Joe Kivelson shouted.
"Somebody may. You won't," Ranjit Singh told him. "Van Steen, hit that ship's boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody in this mob makes."
"Yes, sir. With pleasure," another voice replied.
Nobody in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had any comment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me.
"Mr. Boyd," he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was a man of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. "If I admit you to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly as you learn them?"