He finished his lunch, such as it was and what there was of it, and I relieved him of the tray and set it on the floor beyond his chair. I found an ashtray and lit a cigarette for him and one for myself, using the big lighter. Tom looked at it dubiously, predicting that sometime I'd push the wrong thing and send myself bye-byes for a couple of hours. I told him how Bish had used it.
"Bet a lot of people wanted to hang him, too, before they found out who he was and what he'd really done. What's my father think of Bish, now?"
"Bish Ware is a great and good man, and the savior of Fenris," I said. "And he was real smart, to keep an act like that up for five years. Your father modestly admits that it even fooled him."
"Bet Oscar Fujisawa knew it all along."
"Well, Oscar modestly admits that he suspected something of the sort, but he didn't feel it was his place to say anything."
Tom laughed, and then wanted to know if they were going to hang Mort Hallstock. "I hope they wait till I can get out of here."
"No, Odin Dock & Shipyard claim he's a political refugee and they won't give him up. They did loan us a couple of accountants to go over the city books, to see if we could find any real evidence of misappropriation, and whattaya know, there were no city books. The city of Port Sandor didn't keep books. We can't even take that three hundred thousand sols away from him; for all we can prove, he saved them out of his five-thousand-sol-a-year salary. He's shipping out on the Cape Canaveral, too."
"Then we don't have any government at all!"
"Are you fooling yourself we ever had one?"
"No, but—"