"I doubt it," he said. "Not unless it was absolutely necessary. That sort of thing would have a discouraging effect the next time Ravick wanted a special job done. I'm pretty sure he isn't at Hunters' Hall, but he's hiding somewhere."
Joe Kivelson had finished telling what had happened aboard the Javelin when we joined the main crowd, and everybody was talking about what ought to be done with Steve Ravick. Oddly enough, the most bloodthirsty were the banker and the professor. Well, maybe it wasn't so odd. They were smart enough to know what Steve Ravick was really doing to Port Sandor, and it hurt them as much as it did the hunters. Dad and Bish seemed to be the only ones present who weren't in favor of going down to Hunters' Hall right away and massacring everybody in it, and then doing the same at the Municipal Building.
"That's what I say!" Joe Kivelson was shouting. "Let's go clean out both rats' nests. Why, there must be a thousand hunter-ship men at the waterfront, and look how many people in town who want to help. We got enough men to eat Hunters' Hall whole."
"You'll find it slightly inedible, Joe," Bish told him. "Ravick has about thirty men of his own and fifteen to twenty city police. He has at least four 50-mm's on the landing stage above, and he has half a dozen heavy machine guns and twice that many light 7-mm's."
"Bish is right," somebody else said. "They have the vehicle port on the street level barricaded, and they have the two floors on the level below sealed off. We got men all around it and nobody can get out, but if we try to blast our way in, it's going to cost us like Nifflheim."
"You mean you're just going to sit here and talk about it and not do anything?" Joe demanded.
"We're going to do something, Joe," Dad told him. "But we've got to talk about what we're going to do, and how we're going to do it, or it'll be us who'll get wiped out."
"Well, we'll have to decide on what it'll be, pretty quick," Mohandas Gandhi Feinberg said.
"What are things like at the Municipal Building?" Oscar Fujisawa asked. "You say Ravick has fifteen to twenty city cops at Hunters' Hall. Where are the rest of them? That would only be five to ten."
"At the Municipal Building," Bish said. "Hallstock's holed up there, trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary is happening."