KNOWING HENRY STENSON’S part in the dischartering of the
Zarathustra Company, Pancho Ybarra was mildly surprised to find him
in the Fuzzyroom Grego had fitted up back of the kitchenette of his
apartment, when Ernst Mallin, who met him on the landing stage,
ushered him in. Grego’s Fuzzy-sitter, Sandra Glenn, was
there, and so, although in the middle of business hours, was Grego
himself. And, of course, Diamond.
“Mr. Stenson,” he greeted noncommittally.
“This is a pleasure.”
Stenson laughed. “We needn’t pretend to distant
acquaintance, Lieutenant,” he said. “Mr. Grego is quite
aware of my, er, other profession. He doesn’t hold it against
me; he just insists that I no longer practice it on him.”
“Mr. Stenson has something here that’ll interest
you,” Grego said, picking up something that looked like a
small nuclear-electric razor. “Turn off your hearing aid, if
you please, Lieutenant. Thank you. Now, Diamond, make talk for Unka
Panko.”
“Heyo, Unka Panko.” Diamond said, when Grego held
the thing to his mouth, very clearly and audibly. “You hear
Diamond make talk like Hagga?”
“I sure do, Diamond! That’s wonderful.”
“How make do?” Diamond asked. “Make talk with
talk-thing, talk like Hagga. Not have talk-thing, no can talk like
Fuzzy, Hagga no hear. How make do?”
Fuzzies could hear all through the human-audibility range; the
race wouldn’t have survived the dangers of the woods if they
hadn’t been able to. They could hear beyond that, to about
40,000 cycles. None of the other Zarathustran mammals could; that
supported Gerd van Riebeek’s theory that Fuzzies were living
fossils, the sole survivors of a large and otherwise extinct order
of Zarathustran quasi-primates. Gerd thought they had developed
ultrasonic hearing to meet some ancient survival-problem long
before they had developed the power of symbolizing ideas in speech,
and had always conversed ultrasonically with one another, probably
to avoid betraying themselves to their natural enemies.
“Fuzzies hear Big Ones talk. Fuzzies little, Hagga big,
make big talk. Hagga not hear Fuzzy talk, Fuzzies little, make
little talk. So, Big Ones make ear-things, make Fuzzy talk big in
ears, can hear. Now, Hagga make talk-things, so Fuzzies make big
talk like Hagga, everybody hear, have ear-things, not have
ear-things.”
That wasn’t the question. Diamond had gotten that far,
himself, already. The question, which he repeated, was, “How
make do?”
Grego was grinning at him. “You’re doing fine,
Lieutenant. Now, go ahead and give him a lecture on ultrasonics and
electronics and acoustics.”
“Has your Chief Fuzzyologist done anything on that
yet?”
“I haven’t even tried,” Mallin said.
“You know much more of the language than I do; what Fuzzy
words would you use to explain anything like that?”
That was right. Any race—Homo sapiens terra, or Fuzzy fuzzy
holloway zarathustra—thought just as far as their verbal symbolism
went, and no further. And they could only comprehend ideas for
which they had words.
“Just tell him it’s Terran black magic,”
Sandra Glenn suggested.
That would work on planets like Loki or Thor or Yggdrasil; on
Shesha or Uller, you could also mention the mysterious ways of the
gods. The Fuzzies had just about as much conception of magic or
religion as they had of electronics or nucleonics or the Abbot
life-and-drive.
He stooped forward and held out his hand. “So-josso-aki,
Diamond. So-pokko Unka Panko.”
The Fuzzy gave him the thing, which he had been holding in both
hands. The resemblance to an electric razor was more than
coincidental; the mechanism was enclosed in the plastic case of
one. The end that would have done the shaving was open; the Fuzzy
talked into that. There was a circular screened opening on the side
from which the transformed sound emerged. It still had the original
thumb-switch.
“Still has the original power-unit, too,” Stenson
said. That would be a little capsule the size of a 6-mm short
pistol cartridge. “A lot of the parts are worked over from
ultrasonic hearing-aid parts. I’m going to have to do
something better than that switch, too. A little handle, maybe like
a pistol grip, with a grip-squeeze switch, so that the Fuzzy will
turn it on when he takes hold of it, and turn it off when he lets
go. And it’ll have to be a lot lighter and a lot
smaller.” He gestured toward some sheets of paper on which he
had been making diagrams and schematics and notes. “I have
some people at my shop working on that now. We’ll have
production prototypes in about a week. The Company’s factory
will start production as soon as they can tool up for
it.”
“We’re getting a patent,” Grego said.
“We’re calling it the Stenson Fuzzyphone.”
“Grego-Stenson; it was your original idea.”
“Hell, I just told you what I wanted; you invented
it,” Grego argued. “As soon as we have all the bugs
chased out, we’ll be in production. We don’t know how
much we’ll have to ask for them. Not more than twenty sols, I
don’t suppose.”
Flora and Fauna were puzzled. They sat on the floor at Pappy
Ben’s feet, looking up at the funny people that came and went
in the picture-thing on the wall and spoke out of it. Long ago they
had found out that nothing in the screen could get out of it, and
they couldn’t get in. It was just one of the strange things
the Big Ones had, and they couldn’t understand it, but it was
fun.
But then, all of a sudden, there was Pappy Ben, right in the
screen. They looked around, startled, thinking he had left them,
but no, there he was, still in the chair smoking his pipe. They
both felt him to make sure he was really there, then they both
climbed onto his lap and pointed at the Pappy Ben in the
screen.
Flora and Fauna didn’t know about audiovisual recordings;
they couldn’t understand how Pappy Ben could be in two places
at the same time. That bothered them. It just couldn’t
happen.
“It’s all right, kids,” he assured them.
“I’m really here. That isn’t me,
there.”
“Is,” Flora contradicted. “I see
it.”
“Is not,” Fauna told her. “Pappy Ben
here.”
Maybe Pancho Ybarra or Ruth van Riebeek could explain it; he
couldn’t.
“Of course I’m here,” he said, hugging both of
them. “That is just not-real look-like.”
“It will be illegal,” the Pappy Ben in the screen
was saying, “to capture any Fuzzy in habitat by any other
means, including the use of intoxicants, narcotics, sleepgas,
sono-stunners or traps. This will constitute kidnapping. It will be
illegal to keep any Fuzzy chained, tied or otherwise physically
restrained. It will be illegal to transport any Fuzzy from Beta
Continent to any other part of this planet without a permit from
the Native Affairs Commission, each permit to bear the fingerprints
of the Fuzzy for whom it is issued. It will be illegal knowingly to
deliver any Fuzzy to anybody intending to so transport him. This
will constitute kidnapping, also, and will be punished
accordingly.”
The Pappy Ben in the screen was scowling menacingly. Flora and
Fauna looked quickly around to see if the real Pappy Ben was mad
about something too.
Flora said: “Make talk about Fuzzy.”
“Yes. Talk about what Big Ones do to bad Big Ones who hurt
Fuzzies,” he told her.
“Make dead, like bad Big One who make Goldilocks
dead?” Fauna asked.
“Something like that.”
That was what all the Fuzzies who had been in court during the
trial thought had happened. Suicide while of unsound mind due to
remorse of conscience was a little too complicated to explain to a
Fuzzy, at least at present.
All the Fuzzies who knew what had happened to Goldilocks thought
that had been no more than the bad Big One deserved.
Captain Ahmed Khadra, chief of detectives, ZNPF, and Colonel Ian
Ferguson, Commandant, Colonial Constabulary, were listening to the
telecast with Max Fane, the Colonial Marshal, in the latter’s
office. In the screen, Governor Rainsford was saying:
“And any person capturing or illegally transporting or
illegally holding in restraint any Fuzzy for purposes of sale will
be guilty of enslavement.”
“Aah!” Max Fane set a stiffly extended index finger
against the base of his skull, cocked his thumb and clicked his
tongue. “Death’s mandatory; no discretion-of-the-court
about it.”
“Yves Janiver’ll try all the Fuzzy cases. He likes
Fuzzies,” Ferguson said. “He won’t like people
who mistreat them.”
“I know Janiver’s attitude on death
penalties,” Fane said. “He doesn’t think people
should be shot for committing crimes; he thinks they should be shot
for being the kind of people who commit them. He thinks shooting
criminals is like shooting diseased veldbeest. A sanitation
measure. So do I.”
“If Herckerd and Novaes are smart, they’ll come in
and surrender now,” Ferguson said. “You think they
still have the other five?”
Khadra shook his head. “I think they sold them to somebody
in Mallorysport as soon as they moved them out of Company House. If
we could find out who that is . . . ”
“I could name a dozen possibilities,” Max Fane told
him. “And back of each one of them is Hugo
Ingermann.”
“I wish we could haul Ingermann in and veridicate
him,” Ferguson said.
“Well, you can’t. Ingermann’s a lawyer, and
the only way you can question a lawyer under veridication is catch
him standing over a corpse with a bloody knife in his hand. And you
have a Nifflheim of a time doing it, even then.”
“A GREAT MANY people want Fuzzies; we know that,”
the Governor was saying. “Many of them should have them; they
would make Fuzzies happy, and would be made happy by them. We are
not going to deny such people an opportunity to adopt these
charming little persons. An adoption bureau has been set up
already; Mrs. Frederic Pendarvis, the wife of the Chief Justice,
will be in charge of it, and the offices have already been set up
in the Central Courts Building, and will open tomorrow morning . . . ”
“Oh, Daddy; Mother!” the little girl cried.
“You hear that, now. The Governor says people can have
Fuzzies of their own. Won’t you get me a Fuzzy? I’ll be
as good as good to it—him, I mean, or her, whichever.”
The parents looked at one another, and then at their
twelve-year-old daughter.
“What do you think, Bob?”
“You’ll have to take care of it, Marjory, and that
will be a lot of work. You’ll have to feed it, and give it
baths, and . . . ”
“Oh, I will; I’ll do anything, just if I can have
one. And people mustn’t call Fuzzies ‘it,’ Daddy;
Fuzzies are people, too, like us. You didn’t call me
‘it,’ when I was a little baby, did you?”
“I’m afraid your father did, my dear. Just at first.
And you’ll have to study and learn the language, so you can
talk to the Fuzzy, because Fuzzies don’t speak Lingua Terra.
You know, Bob, I think I’d enjoy having a Fuzzy around,
myself.”
“You know, I believe I would, too. Well, let’s get
around to this adoption bureau the first thing tomorrow
. . . ”
KNOWING HENRY STENSON’S part in the dischartering of the
Zarathustra Company, Pancho Ybarra was mildly surprised to find him
in the Fuzzyroom Grego had fitted up back of the kitchenette of his
apartment, when Ernst Mallin, who met him on the landing stage,
ushered him in. Grego’s Fuzzy-sitter, Sandra Glenn, was
there, and so, although in the middle of business hours, was Grego
himself. And, of course, Diamond.
“Mr. Stenson,” he greeted noncommittally.
“This is a pleasure.”
Stenson laughed. “We needn’t pretend to distant
acquaintance, Lieutenant,” he said. “Mr. Grego is quite
aware of my, er, other profession. He doesn’t hold it against
me; he just insists that I no longer practice it on him.”
“Mr. Stenson has something here that’ll interest
you,” Grego said, picking up something that looked like a
small nuclear-electric razor. “Turn off your hearing aid, if
you please, Lieutenant. Thank you. Now, Diamond, make talk for Unka
Panko.”
“Heyo, Unka Panko.” Diamond said, when Grego held
the thing to his mouth, very clearly and audibly. “You hear
Diamond make talk like Hagga?”
“I sure do, Diamond! That’s wonderful.”
“How make do?” Diamond asked. “Make talk with
talk-thing, talk like Hagga. Not have talk-thing, no can talk like
Fuzzy, Hagga no hear. How make do?”
Fuzzies could hear all through the human-audibility range; the
race wouldn’t have survived the dangers of the woods if they
hadn’t been able to. They could hear beyond that, to about
40,000 cycles. None of the other Zarathustran mammals could; that
supported Gerd van Riebeek’s theory that Fuzzies were living
fossils, the sole survivors of a large and otherwise extinct order
of Zarathustran quasi-primates. Gerd thought they had developed
ultrasonic hearing to meet some ancient survival-problem long
before they had developed the power of symbolizing ideas in speech,
and had always conversed ultrasonically with one another, probably
to avoid betraying themselves to their natural enemies.
“Fuzzies hear Big Ones talk. Fuzzies little, Hagga big,
make big talk. Hagga not hear Fuzzy talk, Fuzzies little, make
little talk. So, Big Ones make ear-things, make Fuzzy talk big in
ears, can hear. Now, Hagga make talk-things, so Fuzzies make big
talk like Hagga, everybody hear, have ear-things, not have
ear-things.”
That wasn’t the question. Diamond had gotten that far,
himself, already. The question, which he repeated, was, “How
make do?”
Grego was grinning at him. “You’re doing fine,
Lieutenant. Now, go ahead and give him a lecture on ultrasonics and
electronics and acoustics.”
“Has your Chief Fuzzyologist done anything on that
yet?”
“I haven’t even tried,” Mallin said.
“You know much more of the language than I do; what Fuzzy
words would you use to explain anything like that?”
That was right. Any race—Homo sapiens terra, or Fuzzy fuzzy
holloway zarathustra—thought just as far as their verbal symbolism
went, and no further. And they could only comprehend ideas for
which they had words.
“Just tell him it’s Terran black magic,”
Sandra Glenn suggested.
That would work on planets like Loki or Thor or Yggdrasil; on
Shesha or Uller, you could also mention the mysterious ways of the
gods. The Fuzzies had just about as much conception of magic or
religion as they had of electronics or nucleonics or the Abbot
life-and-drive.
He stooped forward and held out his hand. “So-josso-aki,
Diamond. So-pokko Unka Panko.”
The Fuzzy gave him the thing, which he had been holding in both
hands. The resemblance to an electric razor was more than
coincidental; the mechanism was enclosed in the plastic case of
one. The end that would have done the shaving was open; the Fuzzy
talked into that. There was a circular screened opening on the side
from which the transformed sound emerged. It still had the original
thumb-switch.
“Still has the original power-unit, too,” Stenson
said. That would be a little capsule the size of a 6-mm short
pistol cartridge. “A lot of the parts are worked over from
ultrasonic hearing-aid parts. I’m going to have to do
something better than that switch, too. A little handle, maybe like
a pistol grip, with a grip-squeeze switch, so that the Fuzzy will
turn it on when he takes hold of it, and turn it off when he lets
go. And it’ll have to be a lot lighter and a lot
smaller.” He gestured toward some sheets of paper on which he
had been making diagrams and schematics and notes. “I have
some people at my shop working on that now. We’ll have
production prototypes in about a week. The Company’s factory
will start production as soon as they can tool up for
it.”
“We’re getting a patent,” Grego said.
“We’re calling it the Stenson Fuzzyphone.”
“Grego-Stenson; it was your original idea.”
“Hell, I just told you what I wanted; you invented
it,” Grego argued. “As soon as we have all the bugs
chased out, we’ll be in production. We don’t know how
much we’ll have to ask for them. Not more than twenty sols, I
don’t suppose.”
Flora and Fauna were puzzled. They sat on the floor at Pappy
Ben’s feet, looking up at the funny people that came and went
in the picture-thing on the wall and spoke out of it. Long ago they
had found out that nothing in the screen could get out of it, and
they couldn’t get in. It was just one of the strange things
the Big Ones had, and they couldn’t understand it, but it was
fun.
But then, all of a sudden, there was Pappy Ben, right in the
screen. They looked around, startled, thinking he had left them,
but no, there he was, still in the chair smoking his pipe. They
both felt him to make sure he was really there, then they both
climbed onto his lap and pointed at the Pappy Ben in the
screen.
Flora and Fauna didn’t know about audiovisual recordings;
they couldn’t understand how Pappy Ben could be in two places
at the same time. That bothered them. It just couldn’t
happen.
“It’s all right, kids,” he assured them.
“I’m really here. That isn’t me,
there.”
“Is,” Flora contradicted. “I see
it.”
“Is not,” Fauna told her. “Pappy Ben
here.”
Maybe Pancho Ybarra or Ruth van Riebeek could explain it; he
couldn’t.
“Of course I’m here,” he said, hugging both of
them. “That is just not-real look-like.”
“It will be illegal,” the Pappy Ben in the screen
was saying, “to capture any Fuzzy in habitat by any other
means, including the use of intoxicants, narcotics, sleepgas,
sono-stunners or traps. This will constitute kidnapping. It will be
illegal to keep any Fuzzy chained, tied or otherwise physically
restrained. It will be illegal to transport any Fuzzy from Beta
Continent to any other part of this planet without a permit from
the Native Affairs Commission, each permit to bear the fingerprints
of the Fuzzy for whom it is issued. It will be illegal knowingly to
deliver any Fuzzy to anybody intending to so transport him. This
will constitute kidnapping, also, and will be punished
accordingly.”
The Pappy Ben in the screen was scowling menacingly. Flora and
Fauna looked quickly around to see if the real Pappy Ben was mad
about something too.
Flora said: “Make talk about Fuzzy.”
“Yes. Talk about what Big Ones do to bad Big Ones who hurt
Fuzzies,” he told her.
“Make dead, like bad Big One who make Goldilocks
dead?” Fauna asked.
“Something like that.”
That was what all the Fuzzies who had been in court during the
trial thought had happened. Suicide while of unsound mind due to
remorse of conscience was a little too complicated to explain to a
Fuzzy, at least at present.
All the Fuzzies who knew what had happened to Goldilocks thought
that had been no more than the bad Big One deserved.
Captain Ahmed Khadra, chief of detectives, ZNPF, and Colonel Ian
Ferguson, Commandant, Colonial Constabulary, were listening to the
telecast with Max Fane, the Colonial Marshal, in the latter’s
office. In the screen, Governor Rainsford was saying:
“And any person capturing or illegally transporting or
illegally holding in restraint any Fuzzy for purposes of sale will
be guilty of enslavement.”
“Aah!” Max Fane set a stiffly extended index finger
against the base of his skull, cocked his thumb and clicked his
tongue. “Death’s mandatory; no discretion-of-the-court
about it.”
“Yves Janiver’ll try all the Fuzzy cases. He likes
Fuzzies,” Ferguson said. “He won’t like people
who mistreat them.”
“I know Janiver’s attitude on death
penalties,” Fane said. “He doesn’t think people
should be shot for committing crimes; he thinks they should be shot
for being the kind of people who commit them. He thinks shooting
criminals is like shooting diseased veldbeest. A sanitation
measure. So do I.”
“If Herckerd and Novaes are smart, they’ll come in
and surrender now,” Ferguson said. “You think they
still have the other five?”
Khadra shook his head. “I think they sold them to somebody
in Mallorysport as soon as they moved them out of Company House. If
we could find out who that is . . . ”
“I could name a dozen possibilities,” Max Fane told
him. “And back of each one of them is Hugo
Ingermann.”
“I wish we could haul Ingermann in and veridicate
him,” Ferguson said.
“Well, you can’t. Ingermann’s a lawyer, and
the only way you can question a lawyer under veridication is catch
him standing over a corpse with a bloody knife in his hand. And you
have a Nifflheim of a time doing it, even then.”
“A GREAT MANY people want Fuzzies; we know that,”
the Governor was saying. “Many of them should have them; they
would make Fuzzies happy, and would be made happy by them. We are
not going to deny such people an opportunity to adopt these
charming little persons. An adoption bureau has been set up
already; Mrs. Frederic Pendarvis, the wife of the Chief Justice,
will be in charge of it, and the offices have already been set up
in the Central Courts Building, and will open tomorrow morning . . . ”
“Oh, Daddy; Mother!” the little girl cried.
“You hear that, now. The Governor says people can have
Fuzzies of their own. Won’t you get me a Fuzzy? I’ll be
as good as good to it—him, I mean, or her, whichever.”
The parents looked at one another, and then at their
twelve-year-old daughter.
“What do you think, Bob?”
“You’ll have to take care of it, Marjory, and that
will be a lot of work. You’ll have to feed it, and give it
baths, and . . . ”
“Oh, I will; I’ll do anything, just if I can have
one. And people mustn’t call Fuzzies ‘it,’ Daddy;
Fuzzies are people, too, like us. You didn’t call me
‘it,’ when I was a little baby, did you?”
“I’m afraid your father did, my dear. Just at first.
And you’ll have to study and learn the language, so you can
talk to the Fuzzy, because Fuzzies don’t speak Lingua Terra.
You know, Bob, I think I’d enjoy having a Fuzzy around,
myself.”
“You know, I believe I would, too. Well, let’s get
around to this adoption bureau the first thing tomorrow
. . . ”