WITH A SIGH of relief, Victor Grego entered the living room of
his penthouse apartment. His hand rose to the switch beside the
door, then dropped; the faint indirect glow from around the edge of
the ceiling was enough. He’d just pour himself a drink and
sit here in the crepuscular silence, resting. His body was tired,
more so than it should be, at his age, but his brain was still
racing at top speed. No use trying to go to sleep now.
He took off his jacket and neckcloth and dropped them on a
chair, opening his shirt collar as he went to the cellaret; he
poured a big inhaler-glass half full of brandy and started for his
favorite chair, then returned to get the bottle. It would take more
than one glass to brake the speeding wheels inside his head. He
placed the bottle on a low table, beside the fluted glass bowl, and
sat down, wondering what he had noticed that had disturbed him.
Nothing important; he sipped from the glass and leaned back,
closing his eyes.
They had the trouble in the veldbeest country on Beta and Delta
Continents worked out, at least to where they knew what to do about
it. Close down all the engineering jobs, the Big Blackwater
drainage project on Beta, and the various construction jobs, and
shift men to the cattle ranges; issue them combat equipment and put
them on fighting pay, to deal with these gangs of rustlers that
were springing up. Maybe if they started a couple of range-wars,
Ian Ferguson and his Colonial Constabulary would have to take a
hand. But the main thing was to keep the herds together. And the
wild veldbeest; Ben Rainsford was a conservationist, he ought to be
interested in protecting them.
And he still hadn’t decided on a sunstone buying policy.
Not enough information on the present situation. He’d have to
do something about that.
Oh, Nifflheim with it; think about it tomorrow.
He drank more brandy, and reached to the glass bowl on the low
table, and found that it was empty. That was what had bothered him.
It had been half full of the sort of tidbits he privately called
nibblements—salted nuts, wafers, things like that—when he and
Leslie Coombes had gone through the room on their way down for
dinner.
Or had it? Maybe he just thought it had been. He began worrying
about that, too. And the way he’d forgotten, this morning,
about the sunstone inventory. Better call in Ernst Mallin to give
him a checkup.
Then he laughed mirthlessly. If anybody needed a checkup, it was
the company psychologist himself. Poor Ernst; he’d had a
pretty shattering time of it, and now he probably thought he was
being blamed for everything.
He wasn’t, of course. Mallin had done the best anybody
could have done, in an impossible situation. The Fuzzies had been
sapient beings, and that was all there’d been to it, and that
wasn’t Mallin’s fault. That Mallin had been forced so
to testify in court had been the fault of his immediate
subordinate, Dr. Ruth Ortheris, who had also, it developed, been
Lieutenant j.g. Ortheris, TFN Intelligence. She’d been the
one who’d tipped Navy Intelligence about the Fuzzies in the
first place. She’d been the one who’d smuggled Jack
Holloway’s Fuzzy family out of Science Center after Leslie
Coombes had gotten hold of them on a bogus court order. And
she’d been the one who’d insisted on live-trapping that
other Fuzzy family and exposing Mallin to them.
That had been a beautiful piece of work. He’d watched the
trial by screen; he could still see poor Mallin on the stand,
trying to insist that Fuzzies were just silly little animals, with
the red-blazing globe of the veridicator calling him a liar every
time he opened his mouth. Why, she’d made the company defeat
itself with its own witness.
He ought to hate her for that. He didn’t; he admired her
for it, as he admired anybody who had a job to do and did it
competently. He had too damned few people like that in his own
organization.
Have to do something nice for Ernst, though. He couldn’t
stay in charge at Science Center, but he’d have to be
promoted out of it. Probably have to invent a job for him.
Finally, he decided that he could go to sleep, now. He took the
brandy bottle back to the cellaret, gathered up the garments he had
thrown down, and went into the bedroom, putting on the lights.
Then he looked at the bed and saw the golden-furred shape
snuggled against the pillows. He swore. One of those life-size
Fuzzy dolls that had been on sale ever since the Fuzzies had gotten
into the news. If this was somebody’s idea of a joke . . .
Then the thing he had taken for a doll sat up, blinked, and
said, “Yeek?”
“Why, the damn thing’s alive!” he yelled.
“It’s a real Fuzzy!” The Fuzzy was afraid;
watching him and at the same time seeking an avenue of escape.
“Don’t be scared, kid,” he soothed. “I
won’t hurt you. How’d you get in here,
anyhow?”
One thing, the puzzle of the empty bowl was solved; the contents
were now inside the Fuzzy. This, however, posed the question of how
the Fuzzy got there. When he had thought this was a joke, he had
been angry. Now he doubted that it was a joke, and he was on the
edge of being worried.
The Fuzzy, who had been regarding him warily, had evidently
decided that he was not hostile and might even be friendly. He got
to his feet, tried to walk on the yielding pneumatic mattress, and
tumbled heels-over-head. Instantly he was on his feet again,
leaping twice his height into the air, bouncing, and yeeking
happily. He caught him on the second bounce and sat down on the bed
with him.
“Are you hungry, kid?” That bowl of nibblements
wasn’t much of a meal, even for a Fuzzy. The stuff was all
heavily salted, too. “Bet you’re thirsty.” What
was it Jack Holloway’s Fuzzies called him? Pappy Jack.
“Well, Pappy Vic’ll get you something.”
In the kitchenette-breakfast room, the uninvited guest drank two
small aperitif-glasses of water and part of a third, while his host
wondered about what he’d like to eat. Jack Holloway gave his
Fuzzies Extee-Three, but he didn’t have . . . Oh, yes; maybe he
did.
He went into the bedroom and opened one of the closets, where
his field equipment was kept, rifles, sleeping-bag, cameras and
binoculars, and a couple of rectangular steel cases to be carried
in an aircar, full of camping paraphernalia. He opened one, which
contained mess-gear he’d brought with him from Terra and used
on field trips ever since, and sure enough, there were a couple of
tins of Extee-Three.
The Fuzzy, who had been watching beside him, yeeked excitedly
when he saw the blue labels, and ran ahead of him to the
kitchenette. He could hardly wait till the tin was open. Somebody
had given him Extee-Three before.
He made a sandwich for himself and sat down at the table while
the Fuzzy ate, and he was still worried. There were only four doors
into Company House from the ground, and all of them were constantly
guarded. There were no windows less than sixty feet from the
ground. While no bet on what Fuzzies couldn’t do was really
safe, he doubted that they had learned to pilot aircars just yet.
So somebody had brought this Fuzzy here, and beside How, which
would be by aircar, the question branched out into When and Who and
Why.
Why was what worried him most. Fuzzies, as he didn’t need
to remind himself, were people, and wards of the Terran Federation,
and all sort of crimes could be committed against them. Leonard
Kellogg would have been executed for killing one of them, if he
hadn’t done the job for himself in his cell at the jail. And
beside murder, there was abduction, and illegal restraint. Maybe
somebody was trying to frame him.
He put on the communication screen and punched the call
combination of the Chief’s office at company police
headquarters. He got Captain Morgan Lansky, who held down Chief
Steefer’s desk from midnight to six. As soon as Lansky saw
who was calling, he got rid of his cigar, zipped up his tunic, and
tried to look alert, wide awake and busy.
“Why, Mr. Grego! Is anything wrong?”
“That’s what I want to know, Captain. I have a Fuzzy
up here in my apartment. I want to know how he got here.”
“A Fuzzy? Are you sure, Mr. Grego?”
He stooped and picked up his visitor, setting him on the table.
The Fuzzy was clutching half a cake of Extee-Three. He saw Lansky
looking out of the wall at him and yeeked in astonishment.
“What is your opinion, Captain?”
Captain Lansky’s opinion was that he’d be damned.
“How did he get in, Mr. Grego?”
Grego prayed silently for patience. “That is precisely
what I want to know. To begin with, have you any idea how he got in
the building?”
“Somebody,” the captain decided, after deliberation,
“must have brought him in. In an aircar,” he added,
after more cogitation.
“I had gotten that far, myself. Would you have any idea
when?”
Lansky began to shake his head. Then he was smitten with an
idea.
“Hey, Mr. Grego! The pilfering!”
“What pilfering?”
“Why, the pilfering. Pilfering, and ransacking; in offices
and like that. And somebody’s been getting into supply rooms at
some of the cafeterias, and where they keep the candy and stuff for
the vending robots. The first musta been the night of the
sixteenth.” That would be three days ago. “The first
report came in day before yesterday morning, after the 0600-1200
shift came on. It’s been like that ever since; every morning,
places being ransacked and candy and stuff like that taken. You
think that Fuzzy’s been doing all of it?”
He could see no reason why not. Fuzzies were small people, able
to make themselves very inconspicuous when they wanted to.
Hadn’t they survived for oomphty-thousand years in the woods,
dodging harpies and bush-goblins? And Company House was full of
hiding places. It had been built twelve years ago, three years
after he came to Zarathustra, and it had been built big. It
wasn’t going to be like the buildings they ran up on Terra,
to be torn down in a couple of decades; it was meant to be the
headquarters of the Chartered Zarathustra Company for a couple of
centuries. Eighteen levels, six to eight floors to a level; more
than half of them were empty and many unfinished, waiting for the
CZC to grow into them.
“The ones Dr. Jimenez trapped for Dr. Mallin,”
Lansky said. “Maybe this is one of them.”
He winced, mentally, at the thought of those Fuzzies. Catching
them and letting Mallin study them had been the worst error of the
whole business, and the way they had gotten rid of them had been a
close runner-up.
It had been a Mallorysport police lieutenant, on his own
lame-brained responsibility, who had started the story about a
ten-year-old girl, Lolita Lurkin, being attacked by Fuzzies, and it
had been Resident-General Nick Emmert, now bound for Terra aboard a
destroyer from Xerxes to face malfeasance charges, who had posted a
reward of five thousand sols apiece on Jack Holloway’s
Fuzzies, supposed to be at large in the city. Dead or alive; that
had touched off a hysterical Fuzzy-hunt.
That had been when he and Leslie Coombes had perpetrated their
own masterpiece of imbecility, by turning loose the Fuzzies Mallin
had been studying, whom everybody was now passionately eager to see
the last of, in the hope that they would be shot for Emmert’s
reward money. Instead, Jack Holloway, hunting for his own Fuzzies
in ignorance of the fact that they were safe on Xerxes Naval Base,
had found them, and now he was very glad of it. Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek had them now.
“No, Captain. Those Fuzzies are all accounted for. And Dr.
Jimenez didn’t bring any others to Mallorysport.”
That put Lansky back where he had started. He went off on
another tangent:
“Well, I’ll send somebody up right away to get him,
Mr. Grego.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, Captain. The
Fuzzy’s quite all right here; I’m taking care of him.
All I want to know is how he got into Company House. And I want the
investigation made discreetly. Tell the Chief when he comes
in.” He thought of something else. “Get hold of a case
of Extee-Three; do it before you go off duty. And have it put on my
delivery lift, where I’ll find it the first thing
tomorrow.”
The Fuzzy was disappointed when he blanked the screen; he
wondered where the funny man in the wall had gone. He finished his
Extee-Three, and didn’t seem to want anything else. Well, no
wonder; one of those cakes would keep a man going for twenty-four
hours.
He’d have to fix up some place for the Fuzzy to sleep. And
some way for him to get water; the sink in the kitchenette was too
high to be convenient. There was a low sink outside, which the
gardener used; he turned the faucet on slightly, set a bowl under
it, and put a little metal cup beside it. The Fuzzy understood
about that, and yeeked appreciatively. He’d have to get one
of those earphones the Navy people had developed, and learn the
Fuzzy language.
Then he remembered that Fuzzies were most meticulous about their
sanitary habits. Going back inside, he entered the big room behind
the kitchenette which served the chef as a pantry, the houseboy for
equipment storage, the gardener as a seed house and tool shed, and
all of them as a general junkroom. He hadn’t been inside the
place, himself, for some time. He swore disgustedly when he saw it,
then began rummaging for something the Fuzzy could use as a digging
tool.
Selecting a stout-handled basting spoon, he took it out into the
garden and dug a hole in a flower bed, sticking the spoon in the
ground beside it. The Fuzzy knew what the hole was for, and used
it, and then filled it in and stuck the spoon back where he found
it. He made some ultrasonic remarks, audible as yeeks, in
gratification at finding that human-type people had civilized
notions about sanitation too.
Find him something better tomorrow, a miniature spade. And fix
up a real place for him to sleep, and put in a little fountain, and . . .
It suddenly occurred to him that he was assuming that the Fuzzy
would want to stay with him permanently, and also to wonder whether
he wanted a Fuzzy living with him. Of course he did. A Fuzzy was
fun, and fun was something he ought to have more of. And a Fuzzy
would be a friend. A Fuzzy wouldn’t care whether he was
manager-in-chief of the Charterless Zarathustra Company or not, and
friends like that were hard to come by, once you’d gotten to
the top.
Except for Leslie Coombes, he didn’t have any friends like
that.
Some time during the night, he was awakened by something soft
and warm squirming against his shoulder.
“Hey; I thought I fixed you a bed of your own.”
“Yeek?”
“Oh, you want to bunk with Pappy Vic. All
right.”
They both went back to sleep.
WITH A SIGH of relief, Victor Grego entered the living room of
his penthouse apartment. His hand rose to the switch beside the
door, then dropped; the faint indirect glow from around the edge of
the ceiling was enough. He’d just pour himself a drink and
sit here in the crepuscular silence, resting. His body was tired,
more so than it should be, at his age, but his brain was still
racing at top speed. No use trying to go to sleep now.
He took off his jacket and neckcloth and dropped them on a
chair, opening his shirt collar as he went to the cellaret; he
poured a big inhaler-glass half full of brandy and started for his
favorite chair, then returned to get the bottle. It would take more
than one glass to brake the speeding wheels inside his head. He
placed the bottle on a low table, beside the fluted glass bowl, and
sat down, wondering what he had noticed that had disturbed him.
Nothing important; he sipped from the glass and leaned back,
closing his eyes.
They had the trouble in the veldbeest country on Beta and Delta
Continents worked out, at least to where they knew what to do about
it. Close down all the engineering jobs, the Big Blackwater
drainage project on Beta, and the various construction jobs, and
shift men to the cattle ranges; issue them combat equipment and put
them on fighting pay, to deal with these gangs of rustlers that
were springing up. Maybe if they started a couple of range-wars,
Ian Ferguson and his Colonial Constabulary would have to take a
hand. But the main thing was to keep the herds together. And the
wild veldbeest; Ben Rainsford was a conservationist, he ought to be
interested in protecting them.
And he still hadn’t decided on a sunstone buying policy.
Not enough information on the present situation. He’d have to
do something about that.
Oh, Nifflheim with it; think about it tomorrow.
He drank more brandy, and reached to the glass bowl on the low
table, and found that it was empty. That was what had bothered him.
It had been half full of the sort of tidbits he privately called
nibblements—salted nuts, wafers, things like that—when he and
Leslie Coombes had gone through the room on their way down for
dinner.
Or had it? Maybe he just thought it had been. He began worrying
about that, too. And the way he’d forgotten, this morning,
about the sunstone inventory. Better call in Ernst Mallin to give
him a checkup.
Then he laughed mirthlessly. If anybody needed a checkup, it was
the company psychologist himself. Poor Ernst; he’d had a
pretty shattering time of it, and now he probably thought he was
being blamed for everything.
He wasn’t, of course. Mallin had done the best anybody
could have done, in an impossible situation. The Fuzzies had been
sapient beings, and that was all there’d been to it, and that
wasn’t Mallin’s fault. That Mallin had been forced so
to testify in court had been the fault of his immediate
subordinate, Dr. Ruth Ortheris, who had also, it developed, been
Lieutenant j.g. Ortheris, TFN Intelligence. She’d been the
one who’d tipped Navy Intelligence about the Fuzzies in the
first place. She’d been the one who’d smuggled Jack
Holloway’s Fuzzy family out of Science Center after Leslie
Coombes had gotten hold of them on a bogus court order. And
she’d been the one who’d insisted on live-trapping that
other Fuzzy family and exposing Mallin to them.
That had been a beautiful piece of work. He’d watched the
trial by screen; he could still see poor Mallin on the stand,
trying to insist that Fuzzies were just silly little animals, with
the red-blazing globe of the veridicator calling him a liar every
time he opened his mouth. Why, she’d made the company defeat
itself with its own witness.
He ought to hate her for that. He didn’t; he admired her
for it, as he admired anybody who had a job to do and did it
competently. He had too damned few people like that in his own
organization.
Have to do something nice for Ernst, though. He couldn’t
stay in charge at Science Center, but he’d have to be
promoted out of it. Probably have to invent a job for him.
Finally, he decided that he could go to sleep, now. He took the
brandy bottle back to the cellaret, gathered up the garments he had
thrown down, and went into the bedroom, putting on the lights.
Then he looked at the bed and saw the golden-furred shape
snuggled against the pillows. He swore. One of those life-size
Fuzzy dolls that had been on sale ever since the Fuzzies had gotten
into the news. If this was somebody’s idea of a joke . . .
Then the thing he had taken for a doll sat up, blinked, and
said, “Yeek?”
“Why, the damn thing’s alive!” he yelled.
“It’s a real Fuzzy!” The Fuzzy was afraid;
watching him and at the same time seeking an avenue of escape.
“Don’t be scared, kid,” he soothed. “I
won’t hurt you. How’d you get in here,
anyhow?”
One thing, the puzzle of the empty bowl was solved; the contents
were now inside the Fuzzy. This, however, posed the question of how
the Fuzzy got there. When he had thought this was a joke, he had
been angry. Now he doubted that it was a joke, and he was on the
edge of being worried.
The Fuzzy, who had been regarding him warily, had evidently
decided that he was not hostile and might even be friendly. He got
to his feet, tried to walk on the yielding pneumatic mattress, and
tumbled heels-over-head. Instantly he was on his feet again,
leaping twice his height into the air, bouncing, and yeeking
happily. He caught him on the second bounce and sat down on the bed
with him.
“Are you hungry, kid?” That bowl of nibblements
wasn’t much of a meal, even for a Fuzzy. The stuff was all
heavily salted, too. “Bet you’re thirsty.” What
was it Jack Holloway’s Fuzzies called him? Pappy Jack.
“Well, Pappy Vic’ll get you something.”
In the kitchenette-breakfast room, the uninvited guest drank two
small aperitif-glasses of water and part of a third, while his host
wondered about what he’d like to eat. Jack Holloway gave his
Fuzzies Extee-Three, but he didn’t have . . . Oh, yes; maybe he
did.
He went into the bedroom and opened one of the closets, where
his field equipment was kept, rifles, sleeping-bag, cameras and
binoculars, and a couple of rectangular steel cases to be carried
in an aircar, full of camping paraphernalia. He opened one, which
contained mess-gear he’d brought with him from Terra and used
on field trips ever since, and sure enough, there were a couple of
tins of Extee-Three.
The Fuzzy, who had been watching beside him, yeeked excitedly
when he saw the blue labels, and ran ahead of him to the
kitchenette. He could hardly wait till the tin was open. Somebody
had given him Extee-Three before.
He made a sandwich for himself and sat down at the table while
the Fuzzy ate, and he was still worried. There were only four doors
into Company House from the ground, and all of them were constantly
guarded. There were no windows less than sixty feet from the
ground. While no bet on what Fuzzies couldn’t do was really
safe, he doubted that they had learned to pilot aircars just yet.
So somebody had brought this Fuzzy here, and beside How, which
would be by aircar, the question branched out into When and Who and
Why.
Why was what worried him most. Fuzzies, as he didn’t need
to remind himself, were people, and wards of the Terran Federation,
and all sort of crimes could be committed against them. Leonard
Kellogg would have been executed for killing one of them, if he
hadn’t done the job for himself in his cell at the jail. And
beside murder, there was abduction, and illegal restraint. Maybe
somebody was trying to frame him.
He put on the communication screen and punched the call
combination of the Chief’s office at company police
headquarters. He got Captain Morgan Lansky, who held down Chief
Steefer’s desk from midnight to six. As soon as Lansky saw
who was calling, he got rid of his cigar, zipped up his tunic, and
tried to look alert, wide awake and busy.
“Why, Mr. Grego! Is anything wrong?”
“That’s what I want to know, Captain. I have a Fuzzy
up here in my apartment. I want to know how he got here.”
“A Fuzzy? Are you sure, Mr. Grego?”
He stooped and picked up his visitor, setting him on the table.
The Fuzzy was clutching half a cake of Extee-Three. He saw Lansky
looking out of the wall at him and yeeked in astonishment.
“What is your opinion, Captain?”
Captain Lansky’s opinion was that he’d be damned.
“How did he get in, Mr. Grego?”
Grego prayed silently for patience. “That is precisely
what I want to know. To begin with, have you any idea how he got in
the building?”
“Somebody,” the captain decided, after deliberation,
“must have brought him in. In an aircar,” he added,
after more cogitation.
“I had gotten that far, myself. Would you have any idea
when?”
Lansky began to shake his head. Then he was smitten with an
idea.
“Hey, Mr. Grego! The pilfering!”
“What pilfering?”
“Why, the pilfering. Pilfering, and ransacking; in offices
and like that. And somebody’s been getting into supply rooms at
some of the cafeterias, and where they keep the candy and stuff for
the vending robots. The first musta been the night of the
sixteenth.” That would be three days ago. “The first
report came in day before yesterday morning, after the 0600-1200
shift came on. It’s been like that ever since; every morning,
places being ransacked and candy and stuff like that taken. You
think that Fuzzy’s been doing all of it?”
He could see no reason why not. Fuzzies were small people, able
to make themselves very inconspicuous when they wanted to.
Hadn’t they survived for oomphty-thousand years in the woods,
dodging harpies and bush-goblins? And Company House was full of
hiding places. It had been built twelve years ago, three years
after he came to Zarathustra, and it had been built big. It
wasn’t going to be like the buildings they ran up on Terra,
to be torn down in a couple of decades; it was meant to be the
headquarters of the Chartered Zarathustra Company for a couple of
centuries. Eighteen levels, six to eight floors to a level; more
than half of them were empty and many unfinished, waiting for the
CZC to grow into them.
“The ones Dr. Jimenez trapped for Dr. Mallin,”
Lansky said. “Maybe this is one of them.”
He winced, mentally, at the thought of those Fuzzies. Catching
them and letting Mallin study them had been the worst error of the
whole business, and the way they had gotten rid of them had been a
close runner-up.
It had been a Mallorysport police lieutenant, on his own
lame-brained responsibility, who had started the story about a
ten-year-old girl, Lolita Lurkin, being attacked by Fuzzies, and it
had been Resident-General Nick Emmert, now bound for Terra aboard a
destroyer from Xerxes to face malfeasance charges, who had posted a
reward of five thousand sols apiece on Jack Holloway’s
Fuzzies, supposed to be at large in the city. Dead or alive; that
had touched off a hysterical Fuzzy-hunt.
That had been when he and Leslie Coombes had perpetrated their
own masterpiece of imbecility, by turning loose the Fuzzies Mallin
had been studying, whom everybody was now passionately eager to see
the last of, in the hope that they would be shot for Emmert’s
reward money. Instead, Jack Holloway, hunting for his own Fuzzies
in ignorance of the fact that they were safe on Xerxes Naval Base,
had found them, and now he was very glad of it. Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek had them now.
“No, Captain. Those Fuzzies are all accounted for. And Dr.
Jimenez didn’t bring any others to Mallorysport.”
That put Lansky back where he had started. He went off on
another tangent:
“Well, I’ll send somebody up right away to get him,
Mr. Grego.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, Captain. The
Fuzzy’s quite all right here; I’m taking care of him.
All I want to know is how he got into Company House. And I want the
investigation made discreetly. Tell the Chief when he comes
in.” He thought of something else. “Get hold of a case
of Extee-Three; do it before you go off duty. And have it put on my
delivery lift, where I’ll find it the first thing
tomorrow.”
The Fuzzy was disappointed when he blanked the screen; he
wondered where the funny man in the wall had gone. He finished his
Extee-Three, and didn’t seem to want anything else. Well, no
wonder; one of those cakes would keep a man going for twenty-four
hours.
He’d have to fix up some place for the Fuzzy to sleep. And
some way for him to get water; the sink in the kitchenette was too
high to be convenient. There was a low sink outside, which the
gardener used; he turned the faucet on slightly, set a bowl under
it, and put a little metal cup beside it. The Fuzzy understood
about that, and yeeked appreciatively. He’d have to get one
of those earphones the Navy people had developed, and learn the
Fuzzy language.
Then he remembered that Fuzzies were most meticulous about their
sanitary habits. Going back inside, he entered the big room behind
the kitchenette which served the chef as a pantry, the houseboy for
equipment storage, the gardener as a seed house and tool shed, and
all of them as a general junkroom. He hadn’t been inside the
place, himself, for some time. He swore disgustedly when he saw it,
then began rummaging for something the Fuzzy could use as a digging
tool.
Selecting a stout-handled basting spoon, he took it out into the
garden and dug a hole in a flower bed, sticking the spoon in the
ground beside it. The Fuzzy knew what the hole was for, and used
it, and then filled it in and stuck the spoon back where he found
it. He made some ultrasonic remarks, audible as yeeks, in
gratification at finding that human-type people had civilized
notions about sanitation too.
Find him something better tomorrow, a miniature spade. And fix
up a real place for him to sleep, and put in a little fountain, and . . .
It suddenly occurred to him that he was assuming that the Fuzzy
would want to stay with him permanently, and also to wonder whether
he wanted a Fuzzy living with him. Of course he did. A Fuzzy was
fun, and fun was something he ought to have more of. And a Fuzzy
would be a friend. A Fuzzy wouldn’t care whether he was
manager-in-chief of the Charterless Zarathustra Company or not, and
friends like that were hard to come by, once you’d gotten to
the top.
Except for Leslie Coombes, he didn’t have any friends like
that.
Some time during the night, he was awakened by something soft
and warm squirming against his shoulder.
“Hey; I thought I fixed you a bed of your own.”
“Yeek?”
“Oh, you want to bunk with Pappy Vic. All
right.”
They both went back to sleep.