I turned to Oscar. "Why get excited about it?" I asked. "You have what you wanted. You said yourself that you couldn't care less whether Ravick got away or not, as long as you got him out of the Co-op. Well, he's out for good now."
"That was before the fire," Oscar said. "We didn't have a couple of million sols' worth of wax burned. And Tom Kivelson wasn't in the hospital with half the skin burned off his back, and a coin toss whether he lives or not."
"Yes. I thought you were Tom's friend," Joe Kivelson reproached me.
I wondered how much skin hanging Steve Ravick would grow on Tom's back. I didn't see much percentage in asking him, though. I did turn to Oscar Fujisawa with a quotation I remembered from _Moby Dick_, the book he'd named his ship from.
"_How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee, even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?_" I asked. "_It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market._"
He looked at me angrily and started to say something. Then he shrugged.
"I know, Walt," he said. "But you can't measure everything in barrels of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax."
Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are also perfectly meaningless. I gave up. My job's to get the news, not to make it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.
They finally got the mob sorted out, after a lot of time wasted in pillaging Ravick's living quarters on the fourth floor. _However, the troops stopped to loot the enemy's camp._ I'd come across that line fifty to a hundred times in history books. Usually, it had been expensive looting; if the enemy didn't counterattack, they managed, at least, to escape. More to the point, they gathered up all the cannon and machine guns around the place and got them onto contragravity in the street. There must have been close to five thousand men, by now, and those who couldn't crowd onto vehicles marched on foot, and the whole mass, looking a little more like an army than a mob, started up Broadway.
Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back to get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustration for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.