HE WASN’T ABLE to get Juan Jimenez immediately. Juan was
doing something at the zoo, and the zoo was spread over too much
area to track him down. He left word to call him as soon as
possible, and went back to his own work, and finally had his lunch
brought in and ate it at the desk. The outside office got noisy
again, for a while. The girls seemed to be feeding the Fuzzy, and
he wondered apprehensively on what. Some of the things those girls
ate would give a billygoat indigestion. About an hour afterward,
Jimenez was on the screen.
The chief mammalogist was a young man, with one of those
cheerful, alert, agreeable, sincere and accommodating faces you saw
everywhere on the upper echelons of big corporations or
institutions. He might or might not be a good scientist, but he was
a real two-hundred-proof Company man.
“Hello, Juan; calling from Science Center?”
“Yes, Mr. Grego. I was at the zoo; they have some new
panzer pigs from Gamma. When I got back, they told me you wanted to
talk to me.”
“Yes. When you came back, just before the trial, from
Beta, did you bring any Fuzzies along with you?”
“Good Lord, no!” Jimenez was startled. “I got
the impression that we needed Fuzzies like we needed a hole in the
head. I got the impression that the one was about equal to the
other.”
“Just like Ernst Mallin: the more you saw of them, the
more sapient they looked. Well, dammit, what else were they? What
were you doing on Beta?”
“Well, as I told you, Mr. Grego, we had a camp and
we’d attracted about a dozen of them around it with
Extee-Three, and we were photographing them and studying behavior,
but we never made any attempt to capture any, after the first
four.”
“Beside yourself, who were ‘we’?”
“The two men helping me, a couple of rangers from Survey
Division; their names were Herckerd and Novaes. They helped me
live-trap the four I gave to Dr. Mallin, and they helped with the
camp work, and with photographing and so on.”
“Well, here’s the situation.” He went into it
again, realizing why witnesses in court who have been taken a dozen
times over their stories by the police and the prosecuting
attorney’s people always sounded so glib. “So, you see,
I want to find out what this is. It may be something quite
innocent, but I want to be sure.”
“Well, I didn’t bring him in, and Herckerd and
Novaes came in along with me; they didn’t.”
“I wish you, or they, had brought him; then I’d know
what this is all about. Oh, another thing, Juan. As you know, Dr.
Mallin was only in temporary charge at Science Center after Kellogg
was arrested. He’s going back to what’s left of his
original job, most happily, I might add. Do you think you could
handle it? If you do, you can have it.”
One thing you had to give Jimenez, he wasn’t a hypocrite.
He didn’t pretend to be overcome with the honor, and he
didn’t question his own fitness. “Why, thank you, Mr.
Grego!” Then he went into a little speech of acceptance which
sounded suspiciously premeditated. Yes; he would definitely accept.
So Grego made a little speech of his own, ending:
“I suggest you contact Dr. Mallin at once. He knows of my
decision to appoint you, and you’ll find him quite pleased to
turn over to you. Oh, suppose we have lunch together tomorrow; by
that time you should know what you have, and we can talk over
future plans.”
As soon as he had Jimenez off the screen he got Harry Steefer
onto it.
“Mallin says he knows nothing about it, and so does Juan
Jimenez. I have the names of two men who were helping Jimenez on
Beta . . . ”
Steefer grinned. “Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd; they
both worked for the Survey Division. Herckerd’s a geologist,
and Novaes is a hunter and wildlife man. They came in along with
Jimenez the day before the trial, and then they vanished. A company
aircar vanished along with them. My guess is they either went
prospecting or down into the veldbeest country to do a little
rustling. Want me to put out a wanted for them?”
“Yes, do that, Chief, about the car. Too many company
vehicles have been vanishing along with employees since this turned
into a Class-IV planet. And I still want to know who brought that
Fuzzy here—and why.”
“We’re working on it,” Steefer said.
“There are close to a hundred people in half a dozen
divisions who might have been over on Beta, in Fuzzy country, and
picked up a Fuzzy for a pet. Then, say the Fuzzy got away here in
Company House. Whoever was responsible would keep quiet about it
afterward. I’m trying to find out, but you said you wanted it
done discreetly.”
“As discreetly as possible; I want it done, though. And
you might start a search on some of the unoccupied floors on the
eighth and ninth levels down, for evidence of where the Fuzzy was
kept before he got away.”
Steefer nodded. “We haven’t any more men than we
need,” he mentioned. “Well, I’ll do the best I
can.”
On past performance, Harry Steefer’s best was likely to be
pretty good. He nodded, satisfied, and went back to work, trying to
figure what sort of a cargo could be scraped up for the
Terra-Baldur-Marduk liner City of Kapstaad, which would be getting
in, in a week. He was still at it, calculating values on the Terra
market against cubic feet of hold-space, when the door from the
computer room opened behind him.
He turned, to see Sandra Glenn in the doorway. Her red hair and
lipstick and her green eyes were vivid against a face that was
white as paper.
“Mr. Grego.” It was a barely audible whisper,
shocked and frightened. “Were you doing anything with the
board?”
“Good God, no!” He shoved his chair back and came to
his feet. “I keep my ignorant fingers off that. What’s
been done to it?”
She stepped forward and aside and pointed. When he looked he saw
the middle of the board a blaze of many-colored lights; not the
random-looking pattern that would make sense only to a computer or
a computerman, but a studied design, symmetrical and harmonious. A
beautiful design. But God, Allah to Zeus, take your pick—only
knew what gibbering nonsense it was putting into the trusting
innards of that computer. Sandra was close to the screaming
meemies; she had some idea of what kind of a computation would
emerge.
“That,” he said, “was our little friend Fuzzy
fuzzy holloway. He came in here and saw the lights and found out
they could be pulled out and shifted around, and he decided to make
a real pretty thing. Weren’t you, or any of the other girls,
watching him?”
“Well, I had some work, and Gertrude was watching him, and
then he lay down for a nap after lunch, and somebody called
Gertrude to the screen . . . ”
“All right. You’re not the first one to be fooled by
a Fuzzy, and neither’s Gertrude. They fooled a guy named
Grego pretty badly a few times. Has anything been done about
this?”
“No; I just saw it a moment ago . . . ”
“All right. Call Joe Verganno. No; I’ll do it, his
screen girl won’t try to argue with me. You go find that
Fuzzy.”
He crossed in two long steps to the communication screen and
punched a combination from the card taped up beside it. The girl
who answered started to say, “Master computerman’s
office,” and then saw who she had on screen. “Why, Mr.
Grego!”
“Give me Verganno, quick.”
Her hand moved; the screen exploded into a shatter of light and
cleared with the computerman looking out of it.
“Joe, hell’s to pay,” he said, before Verganno
could speak. “Somebody shoved a lot of plugs into the input
board here and bitched everything up. Here.” He reached under
the screen and grabbed something that looked vaguely like a pistol,
with a wide-angle lens where the muzzle should be, connected with
the screen by a length of minicable. Aiming at the colored pattern
on the board, he squeezed the trigger switch. Behind him, Joe
Verganno’s voice howled:
“Good God! Who did that?”
“A Fuzzy. No, I’m not kidding; that’s right.
You got it?”
“Just a sec. Yeah, turn it off.” In the screen,
Verganno grabbed a handphone. “General warning, all computer
outlets. False data has been added affecting Executive One and
Executive Two; no reliance is to be placed on computations from
Executive One or Two until further notice. All right, Mr. Grego,
I’ll be right up. You mean there’s a Fuzzy loose in
your office?”
“Yes, he’s been here all day. I don’t
think,” he added, “that he’ll be here much
longer.”
One of the girls looked into the room from operation-center.
“We can’t find him anywhere, Mr. Grego!” she
almost wailed. “And it’s all my fault; I was supposed
to be watching him!”
“Hell with whose fault it is; find him. If it’s
anybody’s fault it’s mine for bringing him
here.”
That was a fault that would be rectified directly. He saw Myra
dithering in the door of her office.
“Get Ernst Mallin. Tell him to come here and get that
damned Fuzzy to Nifflheim out of here.”
Argue about the legal aspects later; if Mallin wanted a Fuzzy to
study, he could have one. Myra said something about better late
than never, and retracted into her office. The door from the
outside hall opened cautiously, and a couple of police and three
mechanics from one of the aircar hangars entered; somebody’s
had sense enough to call for reinforcements. One of the mechanics
had a blanket over his arm; that was smart, too. The girls were
searching the big room, and keeping watch on the doors. The hall
door opened again, and Joe Verganno and one of his technicians came
in with a hand lifter loaded with tools.
“Anything been done to the board yet?” he asked.
“Nifflheim, no! We’re not making a bad matter worse
than it is. See if you can figure out what’s happening in the
computer.”
“A couple of my men are going to find that out down below.
Lemme see this screen, now.” He went into the room, followed
by the technician with the lifter. The technician said something
obscenely blasphemous a moment later.
He went back to the big room; through the open door of her
office, he could hear Myra talking to somebody. “Come and get
him, right away. No, we don’t know where he is . . . Eeeeeeh!
Get away from me, you little monster! Mr. Grego, here he
is!”
“Grab him and hold him,” he ordered. “Go help
her,” he told one of the cops. “Don’t hurt the
Fuzzy; just get hold of him.”
Then he turned and ran through the computer room almost
colliding with Verganno’s helper, and ran into his own
office. As he skidded around his desk, the Fuzzy dashed through the
door of Myra’s office. The blanket the aircar mechanic had
been carrying sailed after him, missing him. Myra, the cop, and the
mechanic came running after it; the mechanic caught his feet in it
and went down. The cop tripped over him, and Myra tripped over the
cop. The cop was cursing. Myra was screaming. The mechanic, knocked
breathless under both of them, was merely gasping. The Fuzzy landed
on top of the desk, saw Grego, and took off from there, landing
against his chest and throwing his arms around Grego’s neck.
One of the girls, coming through from Myra’s office and
avoiding the struggling heap in front of the door, whooped,
“Come on, everybody! Mr. Grego’s caught him!”
The cop, who had gotten to his feet, said, “I’ll
take him, Mr. Grego,” and reached for the Fuzzy. The Fuzzy
yeeked loudly, and clung tighter to Grego.
“No, I’ll hold him. He isn’t afraid of
me.” He sat down in his desk chair, holding the Fuzzy and
stroking him. “It’s all right, kid. Nobody’s
going to hurt you. And we’re going to take you out of here,
to a nice place where you can have fun, and people’ll be good
to you . . . ”
The words meant nothing to the Fuzzy; the voice, and the
stroking hands, were comforting and reassuring. He snuggled closer,
making happy little sounds. He was safe, now.
“What are you gonna do with him, Mr. Grego?” the cop
asked.
Grego hugged the Fuzzy to him. “I’m not going to do
anything with him. Look at him; he trusts me; he thinks I
won’t let anybody do anything to him. Well, I won’t. I
never let anybody who trusted me down yet, and be damned if
I’ll start now, with a Fuzzy.”
“You mean, you’re going to keep him?” Myra
demanded. “After what he did?”
“He didn’t mean to do anything bad, Myra. He just
wanted to make a pretty thing with the lights. I’ll bet
he’s as proud as anything of it. It’s just going to be
up to me to see that he doesn’t get at anything else he can
make trouble with.”
“Dr. Mallin said he was coming right away. He’ll be
disappointed.”
“He’ll have to be disappointed, then. He can study
the Fuzzy here. And get the building superintendent and the chief
decorator; tell them I want them to start putting in a Fuzzy garden
up on my terrace. Tell both of them to come up to my suite
personally; tell them I want work started immediately, and
I’ll authorize double time for overtime till it’s
finished.”
The Fuzzy wasn’t scared, anymore. Pappy Vic was taking
care of him. And all these other Big Ones were listening to Pappy
Vic; they wouldn’t hurt him or chase him anymore.
“And call Tregaskis at Electronics Equipment; ask him
what’s holding up those hearing-aids he was going to send me.
And I’ll need somebody to help look after the kid. Sandra, do
you do anything we can’t replace you at? Then you’ve
just been appointed Fuzzy-Sitter in Chief. You start immediately;
ten percent raise as of this morning.”
Sandra was happy. “I’ll love that, Mr. Grego.
What’s his name?”
“Name? I don’t have a name for him, yet. Anybody
have any ideas?”
“I have a few!” Myra said savagely.
“Call him Diamond,” Joe Verganno, in the doorway of
the computer room, suggested.
“Because he’s so small and precious? I like that.
But don’t be a piker. Call him Sunstone.”
“No; that was probably why the original Diamond was named,
but I was thinking of calling him after a little dog that belonged
to Sir Isaac Newton,” Verganno said. “It seems Diamond
got hold of a manuscript Sir Isaac had just finished and was going
to send to his publisher. Mostly math, all done with a quill pen,
no carbons of course. So Diamond got this manuscript down on the
floor and he tore hell out of it, which meant about three
months’ work to do over. When Newton saw it, he just looked
at it, and then sat down with the dog on his lap, and said,
‘Oh, Diamond, poor Diamond; how little you know what mischief
you have done!’ ”
“That’s a nice little story, Joe. It’s
something I’ll want to remind myself of, now and then. Bet
you’ll give a lot of reasons to, won’t you,
Diamond?”
HE WASN’T ABLE to get Juan Jimenez immediately. Juan was
doing something at the zoo, and the zoo was spread over too much
area to track him down. He left word to call him as soon as
possible, and went back to his own work, and finally had his lunch
brought in and ate it at the desk. The outside office got noisy
again, for a while. The girls seemed to be feeding the Fuzzy, and
he wondered apprehensively on what. Some of the things those girls
ate would give a billygoat indigestion. About an hour afterward,
Jimenez was on the screen.
The chief mammalogist was a young man, with one of those
cheerful, alert, agreeable, sincere and accommodating faces you saw
everywhere on the upper echelons of big corporations or
institutions. He might or might not be a good scientist, but he was
a real two-hundred-proof Company man.
“Hello, Juan; calling from Science Center?”
“Yes, Mr. Grego. I was at the zoo; they have some new
panzer pigs from Gamma. When I got back, they told me you wanted to
talk to me.”
“Yes. When you came back, just before the trial, from
Beta, did you bring any Fuzzies along with you?”
“Good Lord, no!” Jimenez was startled. “I got
the impression that we needed Fuzzies like we needed a hole in the
head. I got the impression that the one was about equal to the
other.”
“Just like Ernst Mallin: the more you saw of them, the
more sapient they looked. Well, dammit, what else were they? What
were you doing on Beta?”
“Well, as I told you, Mr. Grego, we had a camp and
we’d attracted about a dozen of them around it with
Extee-Three, and we were photographing them and studying behavior,
but we never made any attempt to capture any, after the first
four.”
“Beside yourself, who were ‘we’?”
“The two men helping me, a couple of rangers from Survey
Division; their names were Herckerd and Novaes. They helped me
live-trap the four I gave to Dr. Mallin, and they helped with the
camp work, and with photographing and so on.”
“Well, here’s the situation.” He went into it
again, realizing why witnesses in court who have been taken a dozen
times over their stories by the police and the prosecuting
attorney’s people always sounded so glib. “So, you see,
I want to find out what this is. It may be something quite
innocent, but I want to be sure.”
“Well, I didn’t bring him in, and Herckerd and
Novaes came in along with me; they didn’t.”
“I wish you, or they, had brought him; then I’d know
what this is all about. Oh, another thing, Juan. As you know, Dr.
Mallin was only in temporary charge at Science Center after Kellogg
was arrested. He’s going back to what’s left of his
original job, most happily, I might add. Do you think you could
handle it? If you do, you can have it.”
One thing you had to give Jimenez, he wasn’t a hypocrite.
He didn’t pretend to be overcome with the honor, and he
didn’t question his own fitness. “Why, thank you, Mr.
Grego!” Then he went into a little speech of acceptance which
sounded suspiciously premeditated. Yes; he would definitely accept.
So Grego made a little speech of his own, ending:
“I suggest you contact Dr. Mallin at once. He knows of my
decision to appoint you, and you’ll find him quite pleased to
turn over to you. Oh, suppose we have lunch together tomorrow; by
that time you should know what you have, and we can talk over
future plans.”
As soon as he had Jimenez off the screen he got Harry Steefer
onto it.
“Mallin says he knows nothing about it, and so does Juan
Jimenez. I have the names of two men who were helping Jimenez on
Beta . . . ”
Steefer grinned. “Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd; they
both worked for the Survey Division. Herckerd’s a geologist,
and Novaes is a hunter and wildlife man. They came in along with
Jimenez the day before the trial, and then they vanished. A company
aircar vanished along with them. My guess is they either went
prospecting or down into the veldbeest country to do a little
rustling. Want me to put out a wanted for them?”
“Yes, do that, Chief, about the car. Too many company
vehicles have been vanishing along with employees since this turned
into a Class-IV planet. And I still want to know who brought that
Fuzzy here—and why.”
“We’re working on it,” Steefer said.
“There are close to a hundred people in half a dozen
divisions who might have been over on Beta, in Fuzzy country, and
picked up a Fuzzy for a pet. Then, say the Fuzzy got away here in
Company House. Whoever was responsible would keep quiet about it
afterward. I’m trying to find out, but you said you wanted it
done discreetly.”
“As discreetly as possible; I want it done, though. And
you might start a search on some of the unoccupied floors on the
eighth and ninth levels down, for evidence of where the Fuzzy was
kept before he got away.”
Steefer nodded. “We haven’t any more men than we
need,” he mentioned. “Well, I’ll do the best I
can.”
On past performance, Harry Steefer’s best was likely to be
pretty good. He nodded, satisfied, and went back to work, trying to
figure what sort of a cargo could be scraped up for the
Terra-Baldur-Marduk liner City of Kapstaad, which would be getting
in, in a week. He was still at it, calculating values on the Terra
market against cubic feet of hold-space, when the door from the
computer room opened behind him.
He turned, to see Sandra Glenn in the doorway. Her red hair and
lipstick and her green eyes were vivid against a face that was
white as paper.
“Mr. Grego.” It was a barely audible whisper,
shocked and frightened. “Were you doing anything with the
board?”
“Good God, no!” He shoved his chair back and came to
his feet. “I keep my ignorant fingers off that. What’s
been done to it?”
She stepped forward and aside and pointed. When he looked he saw
the middle of the board a blaze of many-colored lights; not the
random-looking pattern that would make sense only to a computer or
a computerman, but a studied design, symmetrical and harmonious. A
beautiful design. But God, Allah to Zeus, take your pick—only
knew what gibbering nonsense it was putting into the trusting
innards of that computer. Sandra was close to the screaming
meemies; she had some idea of what kind of a computation would
emerge.
“That,” he said, “was our little friend Fuzzy
fuzzy holloway. He came in here and saw the lights and found out
they could be pulled out and shifted around, and he decided to make
a real pretty thing. Weren’t you, or any of the other girls,
watching him?”
“Well, I had some work, and Gertrude was watching him, and
then he lay down for a nap after lunch, and somebody called
Gertrude to the screen . . . ”
“All right. You’re not the first one to be fooled by
a Fuzzy, and neither’s Gertrude. They fooled a guy named
Grego pretty badly a few times. Has anything been done about
this?”
“No; I just saw it a moment ago . . . ”
“All right. Call Joe Verganno. No; I’ll do it, his
screen girl won’t try to argue with me. You go find that
Fuzzy.”
He crossed in two long steps to the communication screen and
punched a combination from the card taped up beside it. The girl
who answered started to say, “Master computerman’s
office,” and then saw who she had on screen. “Why, Mr.
Grego!”
“Give me Verganno, quick.”
Her hand moved; the screen exploded into a shatter of light and
cleared with the computerman looking out of it.
“Joe, hell’s to pay,” he said, before Verganno
could speak. “Somebody shoved a lot of plugs into the input
board here and bitched everything up. Here.” He reached under
the screen and grabbed something that looked vaguely like a pistol,
with a wide-angle lens where the muzzle should be, connected with
the screen by a length of minicable. Aiming at the colored pattern
on the board, he squeezed the trigger switch. Behind him, Joe
Verganno’s voice howled:
“Good God! Who did that?”
“A Fuzzy. No, I’m not kidding; that’s right.
You got it?”
“Just a sec. Yeah, turn it off.” In the screen,
Verganno grabbed a handphone. “General warning, all computer
outlets. False data has been added affecting Executive One and
Executive Two; no reliance is to be placed on computations from
Executive One or Two until further notice. All right, Mr. Grego,
I’ll be right up. You mean there’s a Fuzzy loose in
your office?”
“Yes, he’s been here all day. I don’t
think,” he added, “that he’ll be here much
longer.”
One of the girls looked into the room from operation-center.
“We can’t find him anywhere, Mr. Grego!” she
almost wailed. “And it’s all my fault; I was supposed
to be watching him!”
“Hell with whose fault it is; find him. If it’s
anybody’s fault it’s mine for bringing him
here.”
That was a fault that would be rectified directly. He saw Myra
dithering in the door of her office.
“Get Ernst Mallin. Tell him to come here and get that
damned Fuzzy to Nifflheim out of here.”
Argue about the legal aspects later; if Mallin wanted a Fuzzy to
study, he could have one. Myra said something about better late
than never, and retracted into her office. The door from the
outside hall opened cautiously, and a couple of police and three
mechanics from one of the aircar hangars entered; somebody’s
had sense enough to call for reinforcements. One of the mechanics
had a blanket over his arm; that was smart, too. The girls were
searching the big room, and keeping watch on the doors. The hall
door opened again, and Joe Verganno and one of his technicians came
in with a hand lifter loaded with tools.
“Anything been done to the board yet?” he asked.
“Nifflheim, no! We’re not making a bad matter worse
than it is. See if you can figure out what’s happening in the
computer.”
“A couple of my men are going to find that out down below.
Lemme see this screen, now.” He went into the room, followed
by the technician with the lifter. The technician said something
obscenely blasphemous a moment later.
He went back to the big room; through the open door of her
office, he could hear Myra talking to somebody. “Come and get
him, right away. No, we don’t know where he is . . . Eeeeeeh!
Get away from me, you little monster! Mr. Grego, here he
is!”
“Grab him and hold him,” he ordered. “Go help
her,” he told one of the cops. “Don’t hurt the
Fuzzy; just get hold of him.”
Then he turned and ran through the computer room almost
colliding with Verganno’s helper, and ran into his own
office. As he skidded around his desk, the Fuzzy dashed through the
door of Myra’s office. The blanket the aircar mechanic had
been carrying sailed after him, missing him. Myra, the cop, and the
mechanic came running after it; the mechanic caught his feet in it
and went down. The cop tripped over him, and Myra tripped over the
cop. The cop was cursing. Myra was screaming. The mechanic, knocked
breathless under both of them, was merely gasping. The Fuzzy landed
on top of the desk, saw Grego, and took off from there, landing
against his chest and throwing his arms around Grego’s neck.
One of the girls, coming through from Myra’s office and
avoiding the struggling heap in front of the door, whooped,
“Come on, everybody! Mr. Grego’s caught him!”
The cop, who had gotten to his feet, said, “I’ll
take him, Mr. Grego,” and reached for the Fuzzy. The Fuzzy
yeeked loudly, and clung tighter to Grego.
“No, I’ll hold him. He isn’t afraid of
me.” He sat down in his desk chair, holding the Fuzzy and
stroking him. “It’s all right, kid. Nobody’s
going to hurt you. And we’re going to take you out of here,
to a nice place where you can have fun, and people’ll be good
to you . . . ”
The words meant nothing to the Fuzzy; the voice, and the
stroking hands, were comforting and reassuring. He snuggled closer,
making happy little sounds. He was safe, now.
“What are you gonna do with him, Mr. Grego?” the cop
asked.
Grego hugged the Fuzzy to him. “I’m not going to do
anything with him. Look at him; he trusts me; he thinks I
won’t let anybody do anything to him. Well, I won’t. I
never let anybody who trusted me down yet, and be damned if
I’ll start now, with a Fuzzy.”
“You mean, you’re going to keep him?” Myra
demanded. “After what he did?”
“He didn’t mean to do anything bad, Myra. He just
wanted to make a pretty thing with the lights. I’ll bet
he’s as proud as anything of it. It’s just going to be
up to me to see that he doesn’t get at anything else he can
make trouble with.”
“Dr. Mallin said he was coming right away. He’ll be
disappointed.”
“He’ll have to be disappointed, then. He can study
the Fuzzy here. And get the building superintendent and the chief
decorator; tell them I want them to start putting in a Fuzzy garden
up on my terrace. Tell both of them to come up to my suite
personally; tell them I want work started immediately, and
I’ll authorize double time for overtime till it’s
finished.”
The Fuzzy wasn’t scared, anymore. Pappy Vic was taking
care of him. And all these other Big Ones were listening to Pappy
Vic; they wouldn’t hurt him or chase him anymore.
“And call Tregaskis at Electronics Equipment; ask him
what’s holding up those hearing-aids he was going to send me.
And I’ll need somebody to help look after the kid. Sandra, do
you do anything we can’t replace you at? Then you’ve
just been appointed Fuzzy-Sitter in Chief. You start immediately;
ten percent raise as of this morning.”
Sandra was happy. “I’ll love that, Mr. Grego.
What’s his name?”
“Name? I don’t have a name for him, yet. Anybody
have any ideas?”
“I have a few!” Myra said savagely.
“Call him Diamond,” Joe Verganno, in the doorway of
the computer room, suggested.
“Because he’s so small and precious? I like that.
But don’t be a piker. Call him Sunstone.”
“No; that was probably why the original Diamond was named,
but I was thinking of calling him after a little dog that belonged
to Sir Isaac Newton,” Verganno said. “It seems Diamond
got hold of a manuscript Sir Isaac had just finished and was going
to send to his publisher. Mostly math, all done with a quill pen,
no carbons of course. So Diamond got this manuscript down on the
floor and he tore hell out of it, which meant about three
months’ work to do over. When Newton saw it, he just looked
at it, and then sat down with the dog on his lap, and said,
‘Oh, Diamond, poor Diamond; how little you know what mischief
you have done!’ ”
“That’s a nice little story, Joe. It’s
something I’ll want to remind myself of, now and then. Bet
you’ll give a lot of reasons to, won’t you,
Diamond?”