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"Still, there's not a hope of them controlling a real riot," said Valentine.
"They handled things last night," said Bishop Peregrino. "Tonight the first shock will have worn off."
"On the contrary," said Valentine. "Tonight the word will have spread. Everybody will know about Quim's death and the anger will be all the hotter."
"Perhaps," said Mayor Kovano. "But what worries me is the next day, when Andrew brings the body home. Father Estevao wasn't all that popular a figure--he never went drinking with the boys--but he was a kind of spiritual symbol. As a martyr, he'll have a lot more people wanting to avenge him than he ever had disciples wanting to follow him during his life."
"So you're saying we should have a small and simple funeral," said Peregrino.
"I don't know," said Kovano. "Maybe what the people need is a big funeral, where they can vent their grief and get it all out and over with."
"The funeral is nothing," said Valentine. "Your problem is tonight."
"Why tonight?" said Kovano. "The first shock of the news of Father Estevao's death will be over. The body won't be back till tomorrow. What's tonight?"
"Tonight you have to close all the bars. Don't allow any alcohol to flow. Arrest Grego and confine him until after the funeral. Declare a curfew at sundown and put every policeman on duty. Patrol the city all night in groups of four, with nightsticks and sidearms."
"Our police don't have sidearms."
"Give them sidearms anyway. They don't have to load them, they just have to have them. A nightstick is an invitation to argue with authority, because you can always run away. A pistol is an incentive to behave politely."
"This sounds very extreme," said Bishop Peregrino. "A curfew! What about night shifts?"
"Cancel all but vital services."
"Forgive me, Valentine," said Mayor Kovano, "but if we overreact so badly, won't that just blow things out of proportion? Maybe even cause the kind of panic we want to avoid?"
"You've never seen a riot, have you?"
"Only what happened last night," said the Mayor.
"Milagre is a very small town," said Bishop Peregrino. "Only about fifteen thousand people. We're hardly large enough to have a real riot--that's for big cities, on heavily populated worlds."
"It's not a function of population size," said Valentine, "it's a function of population density and public fear. Your fifteen thousand people are crammed together in a space hardly large enough to be the downtown of a city. They have a fence around them--by choice--because outside that fence there are creatures who are unbearably strange and who think they own the whole world, even though everybody can see vast prairies that should be open for humans to use except the piggies refuse to let them. The city has been scarred by plague, and now they're cut off from every other world and there's a fleet coming sometime in the ne
ar future to invade and oppress and punish them. And in their minds, all of this, all of it, is the piggies' fault. Last night they first learned that the piggies have killed again, even after they took a solemn vow not to harm a human being. No doubt Grego gave them a very colorful account of the piggies' treachery--the boy has a way with words, especially nasty ones--and the few men who were in the bars reacted with violence. I assure you, things will only be worse tonight, unless you head them off."
"If we take that kind of oppressive action, they'll think we're panicking," said Bishop Peregrino.
"They'll think you're firmly in control. The levelheaded people will be grateful to you. You'll restore public trust."
"I don't know," said Mayor Kovano. "No mayor has ever done anything like that before."
"No other mayor ever had the need."
"People will say that I used the slightest excuse to take dictatorial powers."
"Maybe they will," said Valentine.
"They'll never believe that there would have been a riot."
"So perhaps you'll get defeated at the next election," said Valentine. "What of that?"
Peregrino laughed aloud. "She thinks like a cleric," he said.
"I'm willing to lose an election in order to do the right thing," said Kovano, a little resentfully.
"You're just not sure it's the right thing," said Valentine.
