BEN RAINSFORD WENT back to Beta Continent, and Gerd van Riebeek
remained in Mallorysport. The constabulary at Post Fifteen had made
steel chopper-diggers for their Fuzzies, and reported a gratifying
abatement of the land-prawn nuisance. They also made a set of
scaled-down carpenter tools, and their Fuzzies were building
themselves a house out of scrap crates and boxes. A pair of Fuzzies
showed up at Ben Rainsford’s camp, and he adopted them,
naming them Flora and Fauna.
Everybody had Fuzzies now, and Pappy Jack only had Baby. He was
lying on the floor of the parlor, teaching Baby to tie knots in a
piece of string. Gus Brannhard, who spent most of the day in the
office in the Central Courts building which had been furnished to
him as special prosecutor, was lolling in an armchair in
red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee—his whisky
consumption was down to a couple of drinks a day—and studying texts
on two reading screens at once, making an occasional remark into a
stenomemophone. Gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper in an
effort to work something out by symbolic logic. Suddenly he
crumpled a sheet and threw it across the room, cursing. Brannhard
looked away from his screens.
“Trouble, Gerd?”
Gerd cursed again. “How the devil can I tell whether
Fuzzies generalize?” he demanded. “How can I tell
whether they form abstract ideas? How can I prove, even, that they
have ideas at all? Hell’s blazes, how can I even prove, to
your satisfaction, that I think consciously?”
“Working on that idea I mentioned?” Brannhard
asked.
“I was. It seemed like a good idea but . . . ”
“Suppose we go back to specific instances of Fuzzy
behavior, and present them as evidence of sapience?”
Brannhard asked. “That funeral, for instance.”
“They’ll still insist that we define
sapience.”
The communication screen began buzzing. Baby Fuzzy looked up
disinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a
figure-eight knot he had tied. Jack shoved himself to his feet and
put the screen on. It was Max Fane, and for the first time that he
could remember, the Colonial Marshal was excited.
“Jack, have you had any news on the screen
lately?”
“No. Something turn up?”
“God, yes! The cops are all over the city hunting the
Fuzzies; they have orders to shoot on sight. Nick Emmert was just
on the air with a reward offer—five hundred sols apiece, dead or
alive.”
It took a few seconds for that to register. Then he became
frightened. Gus and Gerd were both on their feet and crowding to
the screen behind him.
“They have some bum from that squatters’ camp over
on the East Side who claims the Fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old
daughter,” Fane was saying. “They have both of them at
police headquarters, and they’ve handed the story out to
Zarathustra News, and Planetwide Coverage. Of course, they’re
Company controlled; they’re playing it for all it’s
worth.”
“Have they been veridicated?” Brannhard
demanded.
“No, and the city cops are keeping them under cover. The
girl says she was playing outdoors and these Fuzzies jumped her and
began beating her with sticks. Her injuries are listed as multiple
bruises, fractured wrist and general shock.”
“I don’t believe it! They wouldn’t attack a
child.”
“I want to talk to that girl and her father,”
Brannhard was saying. “And I’m going to demand that
they make their statements under veridication. This thing’s a
frame-up, Max; I’d bet my ears on it. Timing’s just
right; only a week till the trial.”
Maybe the Fuzzies had wanted the child to play with them, and
she’d gotten frightened and hurt one of them. A ten-year-old
human child would look dangerously large to a Fuzzy, and if they
thought they were menaced they would fight back savagely.
They were still alive and in the city. That was one thing. But
they were in worse danger than they had ever been; that was
another. Fane was asking Brannhard how soon he could be
dressed.
“Five minutes? Good, I’ll be along to pick you
up,” he said. “Be seeing you.”
Jack hurried into the bedroom he and Brannhard shared; he kicked
off his moccasins and began pulling on his boots. Brannhard,
pulling his trousers up over his pajama pants, wanted to know where
he thought he was going.
“With you. I’ve got to find them before some dumb
son of a Khooghra shoots them.”
“You stay here,” Gus ordered. “Stay by the
communication screen, and keep the viewscreen on for the news. But
don’t stop putting your boots on; you may have to get out of
here fast if I call you and tell you they’ve been located.
I’ll call you as soon as I get anything definite.”
Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide,
openly owned and operated by the Company. The newscaster was
wrought up about the brutal attack on the innocent child, but he
was having trouble focusing the blame. After all, who’d let
the Fuzzies escape in the first place? And even a skilled
semanticist had trouble making anything called a Fuzzy sound
menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at
about twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six
Fuzzies, armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged
her down and beaten her severely. Her screams had brought her
father, and he had driven the Fuzzies away. Police had brought both
the girl and her father, Oscar Lurkin, to headquarters, where they
had told their story. City police, Company police and constabulary
troopers and parties of armed citizens were combing the eastern
side of the city; Resident General Emmert had acted at once to
offer a reward of five thousand sols apiece . . .
“The kid’s lying, and if they ever get a veridicator
on her, they’ll prove it,” he said. “Emmert, or
Grego, or the two of them together, bribed those people to tell
that story.”
“Oh, I take that for granted,” Gerd said. “I
know that place. Junktown. Ruth does a lot of work there for
juvenile court.” He stopped briefly, pain in his eyes, and
then continued: “You can hire anybody to do anything over
there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in
advance.”
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering
the Fuzzy hunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies
of Junktown were floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating
the brush and poking among them. Once a car passed directly below
the pickup, a man staring at the ground from it over a machine
gun.
“Wooo! Am I glad I’m not in that mess!” Gerd
exclaimed. “Anybody sees something he thinks is a Fuzzy and
half that gang’ll massacre each other in ten
seconds.”
“I hope they do!”
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was
being extremely saracastic about the whole thing. Into the middle
of one view of a rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the
studio cut a view of the Fuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up
appealing while waiting for breakfast. “These,” a voice
said, “are the terrible monsters against whom all these brave
men are protecting us.”
A few moments later, a rife flash and a bang, and then a
fusillade brought Jack’s heart into his throat. The pickup
car jetted toward it; by the time it reached the spot, the shooting
had stopped, and a crowd was gathering around something white on
the ground. He had to force himself to look, then gave a shuddering
breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, a three-horned domesticated
ungulate.
“Oh-Oh! Some squatter’s milk supply finished.”
The commentator laughed. “Not the first one tonight either.
Attorney General—former Chief Prosecutor—O’Brien’s
going to have quite a few suits against the administration to
defend as a result of this business.”
“He’s going to have a goddamn thundering big one
from Jack Holloway!”
The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on.
“I just talked to Judge Pendarvis,” Gus Brannhard
reported out of it. “He’s issuing an order restraining
Emmert from paying any reward except for Fuzzies turned over alive
and uninjured to Marshal Fane. And he’s issuing a warning
that until the status of the Fuzzies is determined, anybody killing
one will face charges of murder.”
“That’s fine, Gus! Have you seen the girl or her
father yet?”
Brannhard snarled angrily. “The girl’s in the
Company hospital, in a private room. The doctors won’t let
anybody see her. I think Emmert’s hiding the father in the
Residency. And I haven’t seen the two cops who brought them
in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the detective
lieutenant who was on duty here. They’ve all lammed out. Max
has a couple of men over in Junktown, trying to find out who called
the cops in the first place. We may get something out of
that.”
The Chief Justice’s action was announced a few minutes
later; it got to the hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy
hunt began falling apart. The City and Company police dropped out
immediately. Most of the civilians, hoping to grab five thousand
sols’ worth of live Fuzzy, stayed on for twenty minutes, and
so, apparently to control them, did the constabulary. Then the
reward was canceled, the airborne floodlights went off and
the whole thing broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as
soon as he heeled the door shut after him. When he had his jacket
and neckcloth off, he dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler
with whisky, gulped half of it and then began pulling off his
boots.
“If that drink has a kid sister, I’ll take
it,” Gerd muttered. “What happened, Gus?”
Brannhard began to curse. “The whole thing’s a fake;
it stinks from here to Nifflheim. It would stink on
Nifflheim.” He picked up a cigar butt he had laid aside when
Fane’s call had come in and relighted it. “We found the
woman who called the police. Neighbor; she says she saw Lurkin come
home drunk, and a little later she heard the girl screaming. She
says he beats her up every time he gets drunk, which is about five
times a week, and she’d made up her mind to stop it the next
chance she got. She denied having seen anything that even looked
like a Fuzzy anywhere around.”
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of
Fuzzy reports; Jack went to the marshal’s office to interview
the people making them. The first dozen were of a piece with the
ones that had come in originally. Then he talked to a young man who
had something of different quality.
“I saw them as plain as I’m seeing you, not more
than fifty feet away,” he said. “I had an autocarbine,
and I pulled up on them, but, gosh, I couldn’t shoot them.
They were just like little people, Mr. Holloway, and they looked so
scared and helpless. So I held over their heads and let off a
two-second burst to scare them away before anybody else saw them
and shot them.”
“Well, son, I’d like to shake your hand for that.
You know, you thought you were throwing away a lot of money there.
How many did you see?”
“Well, only four. I’d heard that there were six, but
the other two could have been back in the brush where I
didn’t see them.”
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were
three other people who had actually seen Fuzzies; none was sure how
many, but they were all positive about locations and times.
Plotting the reports on the map, it was apparent that the Fuzzies
were moving north and west across the outskirts of the city.
Brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel, still swearing, but
half amusedly.
“They’ve exhumed Ham O’Brien, and
they’ve put him to work harassing us,” he said.
“Whole flock of civil suits and dangerous-nuisance complaints
and that sort of thing; idea’s to keep me amused with them
while Leslie Coombes is working up his case for the trial. Even
tried to get the manager here to evict Baby; I threatened him with
a racial-discrimination suit, and that stopped that. And I just
filed suit against the Company for seven million sols on behalf of
the Fuzzies—million apiece for them and a million for their
lawyer.”
“This evening,” Jack said, “I’m going
out in a car with a couple of Max’s deputies. We’re
going to take Baby, and we’ll have a loud-speaker on the
car.” He unfolded the city map. “They seem to be
traveling this way; they ought to be about here, and with Baby at
the speaker, we ought to attract their attention.”
They
didn’t see anything, though they kept at it till dusk. Baby
had a wonderful time with the loudspeaker; when he yeeked into it,
he produced an ear-splitting noise, until the three humans in the
car flinched every time he opened his mouth. It affected dogs too;
as the car moved back and forth, it was followed by a chorus of
howling and baying on the ground.
The next day, there were some scattered reports, mostly of small
thefts. A blanket spread on the grass behind a house had vanished.
A couple of cushions had been taken from a porch couch. A frenzied
mother reported having found her six-year-old son playing with some
Fuzzies; when she had rushed to rescue him, the Fuzzies had
scampered away and the child had begun weeping. Jack and Gerd
rushed to the scene. The child’s story, jumbled and
imagination colored, was definite on one point—the Fuzzies had been
nice to him and hadn’t hurt him. They got a recording of that
on the air at once.
When they got back to the hotel, Gus Brannhard was there,
bubbling with glee.
“The Chief Justice gave me another job of special
prosecuting,” he said. “I’m to conduct an
investigation into the possibility that this thing, the other
night, was a frame-up, and I’m to prepare complaints against
anybody who’s done anything prosecutable. I have authority to
hold hearings, and subpoena witnesses, and interrogate them under
veridication. Max Fane has specific orders to cooperate.
We’re going to start, tomorrow, with Chief of Police Dumont
and work down. And maybe we can work up, too, as far as Nick Emmert
and Victor Grego.” He gave a rumbling laugh. “Maybe
that’ll give Leslie Coombes something to worry
about.”
GERD BROUGHT THE car down beside the rectangular excavation. It
was fifty feet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper,
with a power shovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside. Five
or six men in coveralls and ankle boots advanced to meet them as
they got out.
“Good morning, Mr. Holloway,” one of them said.
“It’s right down over the edge of the hill. We
haven’t disturbed anything.”
“Mind running over what you saw again? My partner here
wasn’t in when you called.”
The foreman turned to Gerd. “We put off a couple of shots
about an hour ago. Some of the men, who’d gone down over the
edge of the hill, saw these Fuzzies run out from under that rock
ledge down there, and up the hollow, that way.” He pointed.
“They called me, and I went down for a look, and saw where
they’d been camping. The rock’s pretty hard here, and
we used pretty heavy charges. Shock waves in the ground was what
scared them.”
They started down a path through the flower-dappled tall grass
toward the edge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of
limestone that formed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a
hundred in length. Under an overhanging ledge, they found two
cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, and some odds and ends of old
garments that looked as though they had once been used for
polishing rags. There was a broken kitchen spoon, and a cold
chisel, and some other metal articles.
“That’s it, all right. I talked to the people who
lost the blanket and the cushions. They must have made camp last
night, after your gang stopped work; the blasting chased them out.
You say you saw them go up that way?” he asked, pointing up
the little stream that came down from the mountains to the
north.
The stream was deep and rapid, too much so for easy fording by
Fuzzies; they’d follow it back into the foothills. He took
everybody’s names and thanked them. If he found the Fuzzies
himself and had to pay off on an information received basis, it
would take a mathematical genius to decide how much reward to pay
whom.
“Gerd, if you were a Fuzzy, where would you go up
there?” he asked.
Gerd looked up the stream that came rushing down from among the
wooded foothills.
“There are a couple more houses farther up,” he
said. “I’d get above them. Then I’d go up one of
those side ravines, and get up among the rocks, where the
damnthings couldn’t get me. Of course, there are no
damnthings this close to town, but they wouldn’t know
that.”
“We’ll need a few more cars. I’ll call Colonel
Ferguson and see what he can do for me. Max is going to have his
hands full with this investigation Gus started.”
PIET DUMONT, THE Mallorysport chief of police, might have been a
good cop once, but for as long as Gus Brannhard had known him, he
had been what he was now—an empty shell of unsupported arrogance,
with a sagging waistline and a puffy face that tried to look tough
and only succeeded in looking unpleasant. He was sitting in a seat
that looked like an oldfashioned electric chair, or like one of
those instruments of torture to which beauty-shop customers submit
themselves. There was a bright conical helmet on his head, and
electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his anatomy. On
the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have been
a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark blue
through violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt
and anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated
interrogation. Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of
bright red as he toyed mentally with some deliberate misstatement
of fact.
“You know, yourself, that the Fuzzies didn’t hurt
that girl,” Brannhard told him.
“I don’t know anything of the kind,” the
police chief retorted. “All I know’s what was reported
to me.”
That had started out a bright red; gradually it faded into
purple. Evidently Piet Dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence
definition of truth.
“Who told you about it?”
“Luther Woller. Detective lieutenant on duty at the
time.”
The veridicator agreed that that was the truth and not much of
anything but the truth.
“But you know that what really happened was that Lurkin
beat the girl himself, and Woller persuaded them both to say the
Fuzzies did it,” Max Fane said.
“I don’t know anything of the kind!” Dumont
almost yelled. The screen blazed red. “All I know’s
what they told me; nobody said anything else.” Red and blue,
juggling in a typical quibbling pattern. “As far as I know,
it was the Fuzzies done it.”
“Now, Piet,” Fane told him patiently.
“You’ve used the same veridicator here often enough to
know you can’t get away with lying on it. Woller’s
making you the patsy for this, and you know that, too. Isn’t
it true, now, that to the best of your knowledge and belief those
Fuzzies never touched that girl, and it wasn’t till Woller
talked to Lurkin and his daughter at headquarters that anybody even
mentioned Fuzzies?”
The screen darkened to midnight blue, and then, slowly, it
lightened.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Dumont admitted. He
avoided their eyes, and his voice was surly. “I thought that
was how it was, and I asked Woller. He just laughed at me and told
me to forget it.” The screen seethed momentarily with anger.
“That son of a Khooghra thinks he’s chief, not me. One
word from me and he does just what he damn pleases!”
“Now your being smart, Piet,” Fane said.
“Let’s start all over . . . ”
A CONSTABULARY CORPORAL was at the controls of the car Jack had
rented from the hotel: Gerd had taken his place in one of the two
constabulary cars. The third car shuttled between them, and all
three talked back and forth by radio.
“Mr. Holloway.” It was the trooper in the car Gerd
had been piloting. “Your partner’s down on the ground;
he just called me with his portable. He’s found a cracked
prawn shell.”
“Keep talking; give me direction,” the corporal at
the control said, lifting up.
In a moment, they sighted the other car, hovering over a narrow
ravine on the left bank of the stream. The third car was coming in
from the north. Gerd was still squatting on the ground when they
let down beside him. He looked up as they jumped out.
“This is it, Jack,” he said. “Regular Fuzzy
job.”
So it was. Whatever they had used, it hadn’t been anything
sharp; the head was smashed instead of being cleanly severed. The
shell, however, had been broken from underneath in the standard
manner, and all four mandibles had been broken off for picks. They
must have all eaten at the prawn, share alike. It had been done
quite recently.
They sent the car up, and while all three of them circled about,
they went up the ravine on foot, calling: “Little Fuzzy!
Little Fuzzy!” They found a footprint, and then another,
where seepage water had moistened the ground. Gerd was talking
excitedly into the portable radio he carried slung on his
chest.
“One of you, go ahead a quarter of a mile, and then circle
back. They’re in here somewhere.”
“I see them! I see them!” a voice whooped out of the
radio. “They’re going up the slope on you right, among
the rocks!”
“Keep them in sight; somebody come and pick us up, and
we’ll get above them and head them off.”
The rental car dropped quickly, the corporal getting the door
open. He didn’t bother going off contragravity; as soon as
they were in and had pulled the door shut behind them, he was
lifting again. For a moment, the hill sung giddily as the car
turned, and then Jack saw them, climbing the steep slope among the
rocks. Only four of them, and one was helping another. He wondered
which ones they were, what had happened to the other two and if the
one that needed help had been badly hurt.
The car landed on the top, among the rocks, settling at an
awkward angle. He, Gerd and the pilot piled out and started
climbing and sliding down the declivity. Then he found himself in
reach of a Fuzzy and grabbed. Two more dashed past him, up the
steep hill. The one he snatched at had something in his hand, and
aimed a vicious blow at his face with it; he had barely time to
block it with his forearm. Then he was clutching the Fuzzy and
disarming him; the weapon was a quarter-pound ball-peen hammer. He
put it in his hip pocket and then picked up the struggling Fuzzy
with both hands.
“You hit Pappy Jack!” he said reproachfully.
“Don’t you know Pappy any more? Poor scared little
thing!”
The Fuzzy in his arms yeeked angrily. Then he looked, and it was
no Fuzzy he had ever seen before—not Little Fuzzy, nor funny,
pompous Ko-Ko, not mischievous Mike. It was a stranger Fuzzy.
“Well, no wonder; of course you didn’t know Pappy
Jack. You aren’t one of Pappy Jack’s Fuzzies at
all!”
At the top, the constabulary corporal was sitting on a rock,
clutching two Fuzzies, one under each arm. They stopped struggling
and yeeked piteously when they saw their companion also a
captive.
“Your partner’s down below, chasing the other
one,” the corporal said. “You’d better take these
too; you know them and I don’t.”
“Hang onto them; they don’t know me any better than
they do you.”
With one hand, he got a bit of Extee Three out of his coat and
offered it; the Fuzzy gave a cry of surprised pleasure, snatched it
and gobbled it. He must have eaten it before. When he gave some to
the corporal, the other two, a male and a female, also seemed
familiar with it. From below, Gerd was calling:
“I got one. It’s a girl Fuzzy; I don’t know if
it’s Mitzi or Cinderella. And, my God, wait till you see what
she was carrying.”
Gerd came into sight, the fourth Fuzzy struggling under one arm
and a little kitten, black with a white face, peeping over the
crook of his other elbow. He was too stunned with disappointment to
look at it with more than vague curiosity.
“They aren’t our Fuzzies, Gerd. I never saw any of
them before.”
“Jack, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” He was indignant.
“Don’t you think I know my own Fuzzies? Don’t you
think they’d know me?”
“Where’d the pussy come from?” the corporal
wanted to know.
“God knows. They must have picked it up somewhere. She was
carrying it in her arms, like a baby.”
“They’re somebody’s Fuzzies. They’ve
been fed Extee Three. We’ll take them to the hotel. Whoever
it is, I’ll bet he misses them as much as I do
mine.”
His own Fuzzies, whom he would never see again. The full
realization didn’t hit him until he and Gerd were in the car
again. There had been no trace of his Fuzzies from the time they
had broken out of their cages at Science Center. This quartet had
appeared the night the city police had manufactured the story of
the attack on the Lurkin girl, and from the moment they had been
seen by the youth who couldn’t bring himself to fire on them,
they had left a trail that he had been able to pick up at once and
follow. Why hadn’t his own Fuzzies attracted as much notice
in the three weeks since they had vanished?
Because his own Fuzzies didn’t exist anymore? They had
never gotten out of the Science Center alive. Somebody Max Fane
hadn’t been able to question under veridication had murdered
them. There was no use, anymore, trying to convince himself
differently.
“We’ll stop at their camp and pick up the blanket
and the cushions and the rest of the things. I’ll send the
people who lost them checks,” he said. “The Fuzzies
ought to have those things.”
BEN RAINSFORD WENT back to Beta Continent, and Gerd van Riebeek
remained in Mallorysport. The constabulary at Post Fifteen had made
steel chopper-diggers for their Fuzzies, and reported a gratifying
abatement of the land-prawn nuisance. They also made a set of
scaled-down carpenter tools, and their Fuzzies were building
themselves a house out of scrap crates and boxes. A pair of Fuzzies
showed up at Ben Rainsford’s camp, and he adopted them,
naming them Flora and Fauna.
Everybody had Fuzzies now, and Pappy Jack only had Baby. He was
lying on the floor of the parlor, teaching Baby to tie knots in a
piece of string. Gus Brannhard, who spent most of the day in the
office in the Central Courts building which had been furnished to
him as special prosecutor, was lolling in an armchair in
red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee—his whisky
consumption was down to a couple of drinks a day—and studying texts
on two reading screens at once, making an occasional remark into a
stenomemophone. Gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper in an
effort to work something out by symbolic logic. Suddenly he
crumpled a sheet and threw it across the room, cursing. Brannhard
looked away from his screens.
“Trouble, Gerd?”
Gerd cursed again. “How the devil can I tell whether
Fuzzies generalize?” he demanded. “How can I tell
whether they form abstract ideas? How can I prove, even, that they
have ideas at all? Hell’s blazes, how can I even prove, to
your satisfaction, that I think consciously?”
“Working on that idea I mentioned?” Brannhard
asked.
“I was. It seemed like a good idea but . . . ”
“Suppose we go back to specific instances of Fuzzy
behavior, and present them as evidence of sapience?”
Brannhard asked. “That funeral, for instance.”
“They’ll still insist that we define
sapience.”
The communication screen began buzzing. Baby Fuzzy looked up
disinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a
figure-eight knot he had tied. Jack shoved himself to his feet and
put the screen on. It was Max Fane, and for the first time that he
could remember, the Colonial Marshal was excited.
“Jack, have you had any news on the screen
lately?”
“No. Something turn up?”
“God, yes! The cops are all over the city hunting the
Fuzzies; they have orders to shoot on sight. Nick Emmert was just
on the air with a reward offer—five hundred sols apiece, dead or
alive.”
It took a few seconds for that to register. Then he became
frightened. Gus and Gerd were both on their feet and crowding to
the screen behind him.
“They have some bum from that squatters’ camp over
on the East Side who claims the Fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old
daughter,” Fane was saying. “They have both of them at
police headquarters, and they’ve handed the story out to
Zarathustra News, and Planetwide Coverage. Of course, they’re
Company controlled; they’re playing it for all it’s
worth.”
“Have they been veridicated?” Brannhard
demanded.
“No, and the city cops are keeping them under cover. The
girl says she was playing outdoors and these Fuzzies jumped her and
began beating her with sticks. Her injuries are listed as multiple
bruises, fractured wrist and general shock.”
“I don’t believe it! They wouldn’t attack a
child.”
“I want to talk to that girl and her father,”
Brannhard was saying. “And I’m going to demand that
they make their statements under veridication. This thing’s a
frame-up, Max; I’d bet my ears on it. Timing’s just
right; only a week till the trial.”
Maybe the Fuzzies had wanted the child to play with them, and
she’d gotten frightened and hurt one of them. A ten-year-old
human child would look dangerously large to a Fuzzy, and if they
thought they were menaced they would fight back savagely.
They were still alive and in the city. That was one thing. But
they were in worse danger than they had ever been; that was
another. Fane was asking Brannhard how soon he could be
dressed.
“Five minutes? Good, I’ll be along to pick you
up,” he said. “Be seeing you.”
Jack hurried into the bedroom he and Brannhard shared; he kicked
off his moccasins and began pulling on his boots. Brannhard,
pulling his trousers up over his pajama pants, wanted to know where
he thought he was going.
“With you. I’ve got to find them before some dumb
son of a Khooghra shoots them.”
“You stay here,” Gus ordered. “Stay by the
communication screen, and keep the viewscreen on for the news. But
don’t stop putting your boots on; you may have to get out of
here fast if I call you and tell you they’ve been located.
I’ll call you as soon as I get anything definite.”
Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide,
openly owned and operated by the Company. The newscaster was
wrought up about the brutal attack on the innocent child, but he
was having trouble focusing the blame. After all, who’d let
the Fuzzies escape in the first place? And even a skilled
semanticist had trouble making anything called a Fuzzy sound
menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at
about twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six
Fuzzies, armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged
her down and beaten her severely. Her screams had brought her
father, and he had driven the Fuzzies away. Police had brought both
the girl and her father, Oscar Lurkin, to headquarters, where they
had told their story. City police, Company police and constabulary
troopers and parties of armed citizens were combing the eastern
side of the city; Resident General Emmert had acted at once to
offer a reward of five thousand sols apiece . . .
“The kid’s lying, and if they ever get a veridicator
on her, they’ll prove it,” he said. “Emmert, or
Grego, or the two of them together, bribed those people to tell
that story.”
“Oh, I take that for granted,” Gerd said. “I
know that place. Junktown. Ruth does a lot of work there for
juvenile court.” He stopped briefly, pain in his eyes, and
then continued: “You can hire anybody to do anything over
there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in
advance.”
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering
the Fuzzy hunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies
of Junktown were floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating
the brush and poking among them. Once a car passed directly below
the pickup, a man staring at the ground from it over a machine
gun.
“Wooo! Am I glad I’m not in that mess!” Gerd
exclaimed. “Anybody sees something he thinks is a Fuzzy and
half that gang’ll massacre each other in ten
seconds.”
“I hope they do!”
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was
being extremely saracastic about the whole thing. Into the middle
of one view of a rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the
studio cut a view of the Fuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up
appealing while waiting for breakfast. “These,” a voice
said, “are the terrible monsters against whom all these brave
men are protecting us.”
A few moments later, a rife flash and a bang, and then a
fusillade brought Jack’s heart into his throat. The pickup
car jetted toward it; by the time it reached the spot, the shooting
had stopped, and a crowd was gathering around something white on
the ground. He had to force himself to look, then gave a shuddering
breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, a three-horned domesticated
ungulate.
“Oh-Oh! Some squatter’s milk supply finished.”
The commentator laughed. “Not the first one tonight either.
Attorney General—former Chief Prosecutor—O’Brien’s
going to have quite a few suits against the administration to
defend as a result of this business.”
“He’s going to have a goddamn thundering big one
from Jack Holloway!”
The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on.
“I just talked to Judge Pendarvis,” Gus Brannhard
reported out of it. “He’s issuing an order restraining
Emmert from paying any reward except for Fuzzies turned over alive
and uninjured to Marshal Fane. And he’s issuing a warning
that until the status of the Fuzzies is determined, anybody killing
one will face charges of murder.”
“That’s fine, Gus! Have you seen the girl or her
father yet?”
Brannhard snarled angrily. “The girl’s in the
Company hospital, in a private room. The doctors won’t let
anybody see her. I think Emmert’s hiding the father in the
Residency. And I haven’t seen the two cops who brought them
in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the detective
lieutenant who was on duty here. They’ve all lammed out. Max
has a couple of men over in Junktown, trying to find out who called
the cops in the first place. We may get something out of
that.”
The Chief Justice’s action was announced a few minutes
later; it got to the hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy
hunt began falling apart. The City and Company police dropped out
immediately. Most of the civilians, hoping to grab five thousand
sols’ worth of live Fuzzy, stayed on for twenty minutes, and
so, apparently to control them, did the constabulary. Then the
reward was canceled, the airborne floodlights went off and
the whole thing broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as
soon as he heeled the door shut after him. When he had his jacket
and neckcloth off, he dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler
with whisky, gulped half of it and then began pulling off his
boots.
“If that drink has a kid sister, I’ll take
it,” Gerd muttered. “What happened, Gus?”
Brannhard began to curse. “The whole thing’s a fake;
it stinks from here to Nifflheim. It would stink on
Nifflheim.” He picked up a cigar butt he had laid aside when
Fane’s call had come in and relighted it. “We found the
woman who called the police. Neighbor; she says she saw Lurkin come
home drunk, and a little later she heard the girl screaming. She
says he beats her up every time he gets drunk, which is about five
times a week, and she’d made up her mind to stop it the next
chance she got. She denied having seen anything that even looked
like a Fuzzy anywhere around.”
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of
Fuzzy reports; Jack went to the marshal’s office to interview
the people making them. The first dozen were of a piece with the
ones that had come in originally. Then he talked to a young man who
had something of different quality.
“I saw them as plain as I’m seeing you, not more
than fifty feet away,” he said. “I had an autocarbine,
and I pulled up on them, but, gosh, I couldn’t shoot them.
They were just like little people, Mr. Holloway, and they looked so
scared and helpless. So I held over their heads and let off a
two-second burst to scare them away before anybody else saw them
and shot them.”
“Well, son, I’d like to shake your hand for that.
You know, you thought you were throwing away a lot of money there.
How many did you see?”
“Well, only four. I’d heard that there were six, but
the other two could have been back in the brush where I
didn’t see them.”
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were
three other people who had actually seen Fuzzies; none was sure how
many, but they were all positive about locations and times.
Plotting the reports on the map, it was apparent that the Fuzzies
were moving north and west across the outskirts of the city.
Brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel, still swearing, but
half amusedly.
“They’ve exhumed Ham O’Brien, and
they’ve put him to work harassing us,” he said.
“Whole flock of civil suits and dangerous-nuisance complaints
and that sort of thing; idea’s to keep me amused with them
while Leslie Coombes is working up his case for the trial. Even
tried to get the manager here to evict Baby; I threatened him with
a racial-discrimination suit, and that stopped that. And I just
filed suit against the Company for seven million sols on behalf of
the Fuzzies—million apiece for them and a million for their
lawyer.”
“This evening,” Jack said, “I’m going
out in a car with a couple of Max’s deputies. We’re
going to take Baby, and we’ll have a loud-speaker on the
car.” He unfolded the city map. “They seem to be
traveling this way; they ought to be about here, and with Baby at
the speaker, we ought to attract their attention.”
They
didn’t see anything, though they kept at it till dusk. Baby
had a wonderful time with the loudspeaker; when he yeeked into it,
he produced an ear-splitting noise, until the three humans in the
car flinched every time he opened his mouth. It affected dogs too;
as the car moved back and forth, it was followed by a chorus of
howling and baying on the ground.
The next day, there were some scattered reports, mostly of small
thefts. A blanket spread on the grass behind a house had vanished.
A couple of cushions had been taken from a porch couch. A frenzied
mother reported having found her six-year-old son playing with some
Fuzzies; when she had rushed to rescue him, the Fuzzies had
scampered away and the child had begun weeping. Jack and Gerd
rushed to the scene. The child’s story, jumbled and
imagination colored, was definite on one point—the Fuzzies had been
nice to him and hadn’t hurt him. They got a recording of that
on the air at once.
When they got back to the hotel, Gus Brannhard was there,
bubbling with glee.
“The Chief Justice gave me another job of special
prosecuting,” he said. “I’m to conduct an
investigation into the possibility that this thing, the other
night, was a frame-up, and I’m to prepare complaints against
anybody who’s done anything prosecutable. I have authority to
hold hearings, and subpoena witnesses, and interrogate them under
veridication. Max Fane has specific orders to cooperate.
We’re going to start, tomorrow, with Chief of Police Dumont
and work down. And maybe we can work up, too, as far as Nick Emmert
and Victor Grego.” He gave a rumbling laugh. “Maybe
that’ll give Leslie Coombes something to worry
about.”
GERD BROUGHT THE car down beside the rectangular excavation. It
was fifty feet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper,
with a power shovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside. Five
or six men in coveralls and ankle boots advanced to meet them as
they got out.
“Good morning, Mr. Holloway,” one of them said.
“It’s right down over the edge of the hill. We
haven’t disturbed anything.”
“Mind running over what you saw again? My partner here
wasn’t in when you called.”
The foreman turned to Gerd. “We put off a couple of shots
about an hour ago. Some of the men, who’d gone down over the
edge of the hill, saw these Fuzzies run out from under that rock
ledge down there, and up the hollow, that way.” He pointed.
“They called me, and I went down for a look, and saw where
they’d been camping. The rock’s pretty hard here, and
we used pretty heavy charges. Shock waves in the ground was what
scared them.”
They started down a path through the flower-dappled tall grass
toward the edge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of
limestone that formed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a
hundred in length. Under an overhanging ledge, they found two
cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, and some odds and ends of old
garments that looked as though they had once been used for
polishing rags. There was a broken kitchen spoon, and a cold
chisel, and some other metal articles.
“That’s it, all right. I talked to the people who
lost the blanket and the cushions. They must have made camp last
night, after your gang stopped work; the blasting chased them out.
You say you saw them go up that way?” he asked, pointing up
the little stream that came down from the mountains to the
north.
The stream was deep and rapid, too much so for easy fording by
Fuzzies; they’d follow it back into the foothills. He took
everybody’s names and thanked them. If he found the Fuzzies
himself and had to pay off on an information received basis, it
would take a mathematical genius to decide how much reward to pay
whom.
“Gerd, if you were a Fuzzy, where would you go up
there?” he asked.
Gerd looked up the stream that came rushing down from among the
wooded foothills.
“There are a couple more houses farther up,” he
said. “I’d get above them. Then I’d go up one of
those side ravines, and get up among the rocks, where the
damnthings couldn’t get me. Of course, there are no
damnthings this close to town, but they wouldn’t know
that.”
“We’ll need a few more cars. I’ll call Colonel
Ferguson and see what he can do for me. Max is going to have his
hands full with this investigation Gus started.”
PIET DUMONT, THE Mallorysport chief of police, might have been a
good cop once, but for as long as Gus Brannhard had known him, he
had been what he was now—an empty shell of unsupported arrogance,
with a sagging waistline and a puffy face that tried to look tough
and only succeeded in looking unpleasant. He was sitting in a seat
that looked like an oldfashioned electric chair, or like one of
those instruments of torture to which beauty-shop customers submit
themselves. There was a bright conical helmet on his head, and
electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his anatomy. On
the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have been
a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark blue
through violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt
and anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated
interrogation. Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of
bright red as he toyed mentally with some deliberate misstatement
of fact.
“You know, yourself, that the Fuzzies didn’t hurt
that girl,” Brannhard told him.
“I don’t know anything of the kind,” the
police chief retorted. “All I know’s what was reported
to me.”
That had started out a bright red; gradually it faded into
purple. Evidently Piet Dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence
definition of truth.
“Who told you about it?”
“Luther Woller. Detective lieutenant on duty at the
time.”
The veridicator agreed that that was the truth and not much of
anything but the truth.
“But you know that what really happened was that Lurkin
beat the girl himself, and Woller persuaded them both to say the
Fuzzies did it,” Max Fane said.
“I don’t know anything of the kind!” Dumont
almost yelled. The screen blazed red. “All I know’s
what they told me; nobody said anything else.” Red and blue,
juggling in a typical quibbling pattern. “As far as I know,
it was the Fuzzies done it.”
“Now, Piet,” Fane told him patiently.
“You’ve used the same veridicator here often enough to
know you can’t get away with lying on it. Woller’s
making you the patsy for this, and you know that, too. Isn’t
it true, now, that to the best of your knowledge and belief those
Fuzzies never touched that girl, and it wasn’t till Woller
talked to Lurkin and his daughter at headquarters that anybody even
mentioned Fuzzies?”
The screen darkened to midnight blue, and then, slowly, it
lightened.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Dumont admitted. He
avoided their eyes, and his voice was surly. “I thought that
was how it was, and I asked Woller. He just laughed at me and told
me to forget it.” The screen seethed momentarily with anger.
“That son of a Khooghra thinks he’s chief, not me. One
word from me and he does just what he damn pleases!”
“Now your being smart, Piet,” Fane said.
“Let’s start all over . . . ”
A CONSTABULARY CORPORAL was at the controls of the car Jack had
rented from the hotel: Gerd had taken his place in one of the two
constabulary cars. The third car shuttled between them, and all
three talked back and forth by radio.
“Mr. Holloway.” It was the trooper in the car Gerd
had been piloting. “Your partner’s down on the ground;
he just called me with his portable. He’s found a cracked
prawn shell.”
“Keep talking; give me direction,” the corporal at
the control said, lifting up.
In a moment, they sighted the other car, hovering over a narrow
ravine on the left bank of the stream. The third car was coming in
from the north. Gerd was still squatting on the ground when they
let down beside him. He looked up as they jumped out.
“This is it, Jack,” he said. “Regular Fuzzy
job.”
So it was. Whatever they had used, it hadn’t been anything
sharp; the head was smashed instead of being cleanly severed. The
shell, however, had been broken from underneath in the standard
manner, and all four mandibles had been broken off for picks. They
must have all eaten at the prawn, share alike. It had been done
quite recently.
They sent the car up, and while all three of them circled about,
they went up the ravine on foot, calling: “Little Fuzzy!
Little Fuzzy!” They found a footprint, and then another,
where seepage water had moistened the ground. Gerd was talking
excitedly into the portable radio he carried slung on his
chest.
“One of you, go ahead a quarter of a mile, and then circle
back. They’re in here somewhere.”
“I see them! I see them!” a voice whooped out of the
radio. “They’re going up the slope on you right, among
the rocks!”
“Keep them in sight; somebody come and pick us up, and
we’ll get above them and head them off.”
The rental car dropped quickly, the corporal getting the door
open. He didn’t bother going off contragravity; as soon as
they were in and had pulled the door shut behind them, he was
lifting again. For a moment, the hill sung giddily as the car
turned, and then Jack saw them, climbing the steep slope among the
rocks. Only four of them, and one was helping another. He wondered
which ones they were, what had happened to the other two and if the
one that needed help had been badly hurt.
The car landed on the top, among the rocks, settling at an
awkward angle. He, Gerd and the pilot piled out and started
climbing and sliding down the declivity. Then he found himself in
reach of a Fuzzy and grabbed. Two more dashed past him, up the
steep hill. The one he snatched at had something in his hand, and
aimed a vicious blow at his face with it; he had barely time to
block it with his forearm. Then he was clutching the Fuzzy and
disarming him; the weapon was a quarter-pound ball-peen hammer. He
put it in his hip pocket and then picked up the struggling Fuzzy
with both hands.
“You hit Pappy Jack!” he said reproachfully.
“Don’t you know Pappy any more? Poor scared little
thing!”
The Fuzzy in his arms yeeked angrily. Then he looked, and it was
no Fuzzy he had ever seen before—not Little Fuzzy, nor funny,
pompous Ko-Ko, not mischievous Mike. It was a stranger Fuzzy.
“Well, no wonder; of course you didn’t know Pappy
Jack. You aren’t one of Pappy Jack’s Fuzzies at
all!”
At the top, the constabulary corporal was sitting on a rock,
clutching two Fuzzies, one under each arm. They stopped struggling
and yeeked piteously when they saw their companion also a
captive.
“Your partner’s down below, chasing the other
one,” the corporal said. “You’d better take these
too; you know them and I don’t.”
“Hang onto them; they don’t know me any better than
they do you.”
With one hand, he got a bit of Extee Three out of his coat and
offered it; the Fuzzy gave a cry of surprised pleasure, snatched it
and gobbled it. He must have eaten it before. When he gave some to
the corporal, the other two, a male and a female, also seemed
familiar with it. From below, Gerd was calling:
“I got one. It’s a girl Fuzzy; I don’t know if
it’s Mitzi or Cinderella. And, my God, wait till you see what
she was carrying.”
Gerd came into sight, the fourth Fuzzy struggling under one arm
and a little kitten, black with a white face, peeping over the
crook of his other elbow. He was too stunned with disappointment to
look at it with more than vague curiosity.
“They aren’t our Fuzzies, Gerd. I never saw any of
them before.”
“Jack, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” He was indignant.
“Don’t you think I know my own Fuzzies? Don’t you
think they’d know me?”
“Where’d the pussy come from?” the corporal
wanted to know.
“God knows. They must have picked it up somewhere. She was
carrying it in her arms, like a baby.”
“They’re somebody’s Fuzzies. They’ve
been fed Extee Three. We’ll take them to the hotel. Whoever
it is, I’ll bet he misses them as much as I do
mine.”
His own Fuzzies, whom he would never see again. The full
realization didn’t hit him until he and Gerd were in the car
again. There had been no trace of his Fuzzies from the time they
had broken out of their cages at Science Center. This quartet had
appeared the night the city police had manufactured the story of
the attack on the Lurkin girl, and from the moment they had been
seen by the youth who couldn’t bring himself to fire on them,
they had left a trail that he had been able to pick up at once and
follow. Why hadn’t his own Fuzzies attracted as much notice
in the three weeks since they had vanished?
Because his own Fuzzies didn’t exist anymore? They had
never gotten out of the Science Center alive. Somebody Max Fane
hadn’t been able to question under veridication had murdered
them. There was no use, anymore, trying to convince himself
differently.
“We’ll stop at their camp and pick up the blanket
and the cushions and the rest of the things. I’ll send the
people who lost them checks,” he said. “The Fuzzies
ought to have those things.”