“We’ll be able to block that plan,” Addie Barnett said. “We’ll merely print it in full.”

“Each one,” Paul Barnett observed, “will think the other blabbed. And they’ll all probably blame old Einar.”

Thor said, almost sadly, “It’s like that old cartoon of Nast’s—the famous one—of the circle of political thieves each pointing to the man next him and saying, ‘He did it.’ They’re old-fashioned plunderers, but it still seems to work.”

Now, in the big luxurious Seattle office, as Czar cautiously indicated the child at the far end of the room, some atavistic instinct told Christine to shut her eyes. The men saw the golden head, snuggled in the engulfing depths of the vast chair by the window, touchingly cushioned against the plump tufted leather. She was breathing lightly, regularly, the innocent half-smile of pleasant dreams curving the lovely lips.

Czar relaxed. “She’s asleep.”

Dave Husack did not relish this cosy interlude in the battle of big business. “You shouldn’t of brought her here in the first place.”

Czar’s tone was mild, paternal. “Never you mind, Dave, about what I should or shouldn’t do. Though it’s real thoughtful of you toward the child. I make it a rule never to go any place I couldn’t bring her to if I was so minded.” His eyes were cobalt.

“How’s that again about who was it?” old Einar Wendt asked. Czar’s father-in-law, he was over eighty now, tough as a tree, he had come to Seattle from Tacoma for this meeting, he wanted to get on with it and go home. He cupped his right ear with his hand, he spoke in the high monotonous voice of the deaf.

“Storm!” Husack bellowed. “Thor Storm, you know him, the old crackpot who runs that paper.”

“What about him?”

“He’s raising a stink, that’s what. Papers outside are copying his stuff, he’s been running articles and editorials and so on, he’s got a column full of snide remarks about me and Kleet and the whole cannery crowd. He comes right out with names in Washington, right in the government, it’s libel, we could sue him for a million dollars only the poor old moosehead—–”

“No libel suits,” Sid Kleet snapped. “Too much publicity in libel suits. There’s other ways.”

“Such as what?” Mort Caswell demanded. The Caswells were Ships, this Mort was Ships and old Mortimer had been Ships, and old old Mortimer, and old old old Mortimer in the days of the Yankee Clippers long before his descendants had transferred their sea heritage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was said that the first Mort of the New England line had run slave ships, and now young Mort ran slave ships of a sort, though legitimately. The Caswell Clipper North Coast Line made sure of that. Cannery workers from the mainland for two or three frantic summer months—thousands of cannery workers shipped to Alaska, shipped back home again to California, to Washington State, to Oregon, their summer wages, unspent, bursting their pockets. Young Mort and any surviving old Morts were no fools, they realized that planes, rather than ships, would now be the means of transporting the cannery workers and every other passenger Alaska-bound. So now the Caswell Clipper Air Line was about to add its glint to the spangled Arctic skies. This massive mahogany office in whose great chair Chris now sat so comfortably cuddled was, in fact, the Caswell office; and young Mort (fortyish) and young young Mort (twentyish) each would one day soon fly his own small pleasure plane and have only a somewhat remote loyalty for the ship models which now sailed the mantel shelf and the walls.