"H. Beam Piper - Fuzzies and other People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

i.

Officially, on all the half-thousand human-populated
planets of the Terran Federation, the date was Septem-
ber 14, 654 Atomic Era, but on Zarathustra it was First
Day, Year Zero, Anno Fuzzy.

It wasn't the day that the Fuzzies were discoveredтАФ
that had been in early June, when old Jack Holloway
had found a small and unfamiliar being crouching in his
shower stall at his camp up Cold Creek Valley on Beta
Continent. He had made friends with the uninvited visi-
tor and named him Little Fuzzy. A week later, four
more Fuzzies and a baby Fuzzy had moved in, and Ben-
nett Rainsford, then a field naturalist for the Institute of
Xeno-Sciences, had seen them. They were completely-
new to him, too. He named the order Hollowayans, in
honor of their discoverer, and called the genus Fuzzy
and the species Holloway's Fuzzy: Fuzzy fuzzy hollo-
way.

Fuzzies were erect bipeds, two feet tall and weighing
fifteen to twenty pounds; their bodies were covered with
silky golden fur. They had five-fingered hands with op-
posable thumbs, large eyes set close enough together for
stereoscopic vision, and vaguely humanoid features.
They seemed to know nothing of fire and, as far as Hol-
loway and Rainsford were able to determine, they were
incapable of speech. The fact that they spoke in the
ultrasonic range was yet to be discovered. They made a
few artifacts, however, and their reasoning ability

2 H. Beam Piper

amazed both men. As soon as he saw them, Rainsford
insisted that Jack tape an account of them.

Twenty-four hours later, a number of people had
heard that tape. One was Victor Grego, manager-in-
chief of the Chartered Zarathustra Company. If, as
seemed probable, these Fuzzies were sapient beings,
Zarathustra automatically became a Class-IV inhabited
planet. The Company's charter, conferring outright
ownership of Zarathustra as a Class-111 uninhabited
planet, would be just as automatically void.

Grego's instinct was to fight, and he was a resource-
ful, resolute and ruthless fighter. He was not stupid, but
some of his subordinates were; a week later, everybody
on the planet had heard of the Fuzzies because a CZC