THE AIR TRAFFIC around Central Courts Building the next morning
seemed normal to Jack Holloway. There were quite a few cars on the
landing stage above the sixth level down when he came in, but no
more than he remembered from the time of the Fuzzy Trial. It was
not until he left the escalator on the fourth floor below, where
the Adoption Bureau offices were, that he began to suspect that
there was a Fuzzy rush on.
The corridor leading back from the main hall to the suite that
had been taken over yesterday was jammed. It was a well behaved,
well dressed crowd, mostly couples clinging to each other to avoid
being jostled apart. Everybody seemed to be happy and excited; it
was more like a Year-End Holidays shopping crowd than anything
else.
A uniformed deputy-marshal saw him and approached, touching his
cap-brim in a half salute.
“Mr. Holloway; are you trying to get in to your offices?
You’d better come this way, sir; there’s a queue down
at the other end.”
There must be five or six hundred of them. Cut that in half;
most of them were couples.
“How long’s this been going on?” he asked,
noticing that several more couples and individuals were coming
behind him.
“Since about 0700. There were a few here before then; the
big rush didn’t start till 0830.”
Some of the people in the rear of the jam saw and recognized
him. “Holloway.” “Jack Holloway; he’s the
Commissioner.” “Mr. Holloway; are there Fuzzies here
now?”
The deputy took him down the hall and unlocked the door of an
office; it was empty, and the desks and chairs and things shrouded
in dust-covers. They went through and out into a back hall, where
another deputy-marshal was arguing with some people who were trying
to get in that way.
“Well, why are they letting him in; who’s he?”
a woman demanded.
“He works here. That’s Jack Holloway.”
“Oh! Mr. Holloway! Can you tell us how soon we can get
Fuzzies?”
His guide rushed him, almost as though he were under arrest,
along the hall, and opened another door.
“In here, Mr. Holloway; Mrs. Pendarvis’s office.
I’ll have to get back and keep that mob in front straightened
out.” He touched his cap-brim again and hastened away.
Mrs. Pendarvis sat at a desk, her back to the door, going over a
stack of forms in front of her. Beside her, at a smaller desk, a
girl was taking them as she finished with them, and talking into
the whisper-mouthpiece of a vocowriter. Two more girls sat at
another desk, one talking to somebody in a communication screen.
Mrs. Pendarvis said, “Who is it?” and turned her head,
then rose, extending her hand. “Oh; Mr. Holloway. Good
morning. What’s it like out in the hall, now?”
“Well, you see how I had to come in. I’d say about
five hundred, now. How are you handling them?”
She gestured toward the door to the front office, and he opened
it and looked through. Five girls sat at five desks; each was
interviewing applicants. Another girl was gathering up
application-forms and carrying them to a desk where they were being
sorted to be passed on to the back office.
“I arrived at 0830,” Mrs. Pendarvis said.
“Just after I dropped Pierrot and Columbine off at Government
House. There was a crowd then, and it’s been going on ever
since. How many Fuzzies have you, Mr. Holloway?”
“Available for adoption? I don’t know. Beside mine
and Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s and the Constabulary Fuzzies,
there were forty day before yesterday. That had gotten up to a
hundred and three by last evening.”
“We have, to date, three hundred and eleven applications;
there are possibly twenty more that haven’t been sent back to
me yet. By the time we close, it’ll be five or six hundred.
How are we going to handle this, anyhow? Some of these people want
just one Fuzzy, some of them want two, some of them will take a
whole family. And we can’t separate Fuzzies who want to stay
together. If you’d separate Pierrot and Columbine,
they’d both grieve themselves to death. And there are
families of five or six who want to stay together, aren’t
there?”
“Well, not permanently. These groups aren’t really
families; they’re sort of temporary gangs for mutual
assistance. Five or six are about as many as can make a living
together in the woods. They’re hunters and food-gatherers,
low Paleolithic economy, and individual small-game hunters at that.
When a gang gets too big to live together, they split up; when one
couple meets another, they team up to hunt together. That’s
why they have such a well-developed and uniform language, and I
imagine that’s how the news about the zatku spread all over
the Fuzzy country as fast as it did. They don’t even mate
permanently. Your pair are just young, first mating for both of
them. They think each other are the most wonderful ever. But you
will have others that won’t want to be separated;
you’ll have to let them be adopted together.” He
thought for a moment. “You can’t begin to furnish
Fuzzies for everybody; why don’t you give them out by lot?
Each of those applications is numbered, isn’t it? Draw
numbers.”
“Like a jury-drawing, of course. Let the
jury-commissioners handle that,” the Chief Justice’s
wife said.
“Fair enough. You’ll have to investigate each of
these applicants, of course; that’ll take a little time,
won’t it?”
“Well, Captain Khadra’s taking charge of them.
He’s borrowed some people from the schools, and some from the
city police juvenile squad and some from the company personnel
division. I’ve been getting my staff together the same
way—parent-teacher groups, Juvenile Welfare. I’m going to get
a paid staff together, as soon as I can. I think they’ll come
from the Company’s public service division; I’m told
that Mr. Grego’s going to suspend all those activities in
ninety days.”
“That’s right. That includes the schools, and the
hospitals. Why don’t you talk to Ernst Mallin? He’ll
find you all the people you want. He’s joined the Friends of
Little Fuzzy, too, now.”
“Well, after we’ve allocated Fuzzies to these
people, what then? Do they come out to your camp and pick their
own?”
“Good Lord, no! We have enough trouble, without having the
place overrun with human people.” He hadn’t given that
thought until now. “What we’ll need will be a place
here in Mallorysport where a couple of hundred Fuzzies can stay and
where the people who have been endorsed for foster-parents can come
and select the ones they want.”
That would have to be a big place, with a park all around it,
that could be fenced in to keep them from wandering off and getting
lost. A nice place, where they could all have fun together. He
didn’t know of any such place, and asked her about it.
“I’ll talk to Mr. Urswick, he’s the Company
Chief of Public Services. He’ll know about something. You
know, Mr. Holloway, I didn’t have any idea, when I took this
job, that it was going to be so complicated.”
“Mrs. Pendarvis, I’ve been saying that every hour on
the hour since I let Ben Rainsford talk me into taking the job I
have. You’re going to have to do something about information,
too—Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies, psychology of; language.
We’ll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and
language-learning tapes. And hearing aids.”
The door at the side of the room was marked investigation. He
found Ahmed Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a
city police uniform by screen.
“Well, have you gotten anything from any of them?”
he was asking.
“Damn little,” the city policeman told him.
“We’ve been pulling them in all day, everybody in town
who has a record. And Hugo Ingermann’s been pulling them away
from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his legmen and
assistants here with portable radios, and as fast as we bring some
punk in, they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ;
order to show grounds for suspicion. Most of them we can’t
question at all; it takes an hour to an hour and a half from the
time they’re brought in before we can veridicate those we
can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do.”
“Well, how about known associates? Didn’t either of
them have any friends?”
“Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they’ve been
cooperating, but none of them knows anything.”
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they
blanked screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a
cigarette.
“Well, you heard it, Jack,” he said. “They
just vanished, and the Fuzzies with them. I’m not surprised
we’re not getting anything out of their friends in the
Company. They wouldn’t know. We searched their rooms; they
seem to have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared.
And we can’t get anything from underworld sources. None of
the city police stool-pigeons knows anything.”
“You know, Ahmed, I’m worried about that. I wonder
what’s happened to those Fuzzies . . . ” He sat down on
the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and tobacco. “How
soon will you be able to start investigating these people who want
Fuzzies?”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across
the table to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they
both ought to. Work was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away.
and Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.
“Eighty-seven,” Lunt said. “That’s not
counting yours and mine and Jack’s.”
“The Extee-Three’s getting low.” They’d
had to start rationing it; tomorrow, they’d not be able to
issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The Fuzzies
wouldn’t like that. “Jack says he thinks speculators
are buying it and holding it off the market. They’ll get big
prices for it when the Fuzzies start coming in to
Mallorysport.”
There wasn’t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept
a tin or so in their aircars, in case of forced landings in the
wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet’s land
surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption
had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for
emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on,
but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four
months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet.
And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.
“Personally, I wish there were eighty-seven hundred of
them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean
it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down
in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of
them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in
on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But
wait till they get down in the real farm country, and among the
sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our
big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to
me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round
too.”
“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the
only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time
Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they
broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them
for that. But they just don’t understand about what they
mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any
idea at all of property in the absence of a visible
owner.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they
won’t understand that somebody’s planted them,
they’ll think they’re just there. And I never saw a
farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to
protect his crops.”
“Education,” Gerd said.
“Recipe for roast turkey—first catch a turkey,” Lunt
said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are
we going to catch all the other ones?”
“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside
Extee-Three?”
“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around
the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patrolling a
couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”
“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t
destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while. I don’t.
That’s what I mean by educating the farmers. A Fuzzy does
X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen land-prawns a day,
and among them they do about X-times-ten damage.”
“Write up a script about it, and we’ll put it on the
air this evening. ‘Be good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the
farmer’s best friend.’ Maybe that’ll help
some.”
Gerd nodded. “Eighty-seven, we have now. How many little
ones?”
“Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?”
“And we think we have five pregnancies. That’s all
Lynne Andrews is sure of; the only way she can tell is listening
with a stethoscope for fetal movements. They seem to be too small
to make any conspicuous visible difference. This is out of eighty
seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call that,
George?”
George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it
automatically. Somewhere, maybe Constabulary School, the coffee had
always been too hot to drink right away. Across the messhall, half
a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it clear the
tables.
“It sure to Nifflheim isn’t any population
explosion,” he said.
“Race extinction, George. I don’t know what the
normal life expectancy is in the woods, but I’d say four out
of five of them die by violence. When the birthrate curve drops
below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out.”
“A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you
said five of the girls were pregnant, didn’t you? And you
admit that’s not complete, if Doc Andrews has to use a
stethoscope for a pregnancy test.”
“I wondered if you’d notice that. That’s not a
bad ratio, for females who have a monthly cycle instead of an
annual mating season. And these four children; we don’t know
anything about the maturation period, but in the three months
we’ve been checking on him, Baby Fuzzy’s only gained
six ounces and an inch. I’d make it about fifteen years, ten
at very least.”
“Then,” Lunt said, “it isn’t birthrate
at all. It’s infant mortality. They just don’t
live.”
“That’s it, George. That’s what I’m
worried about. And Ruth and Lynne, too. If we don’t find out
what causes it, and how to stop it, there won’t be any
Fuzzies after a while.”
“THIS IS LIKE old times, Victor,” Coombes said,
stretching in one of the chairs. “Nobody here but us
humans.”
“That’s right.” He brought the jug and the two
glasses over and put them on the low table, careful not to disturb
a pattern of colored tiles laid on one end of it. “That thing
there is a Fuzzy work of art. It is unfinished, but just see the
deep symbolic significance.”
“You see it. I can’t.” Coombes accepted his
glass with mechanical thanks and sipped. “Where is
everybody?”
“Diamond is a guest, at a place where I’m not
welcome. Government House. He and Flora and Fauna are meeting
Pierrot and Columbine, Judge and Mrs. Pendarvis’s Fuzzies.
Sandra is chaperoning the affair, and Ernst is conferring with Mrs.
Pendarvis about quarters for a couple of hundred Fuzzies who are
coming to town in about a week to be adopted.”
“I’ll say this: your Fuzzy and Fuzzyologists are
getting in with the right people. Did you hear Hugo
Ingermann’s telecast this afternoon?”
“I did not. I pay people to do that kind of work for me. I
went over a semantically correct summary, with a symbolic-logic
study. As nearly as I can interpret it, it reduces to the
propositions that, A) Ben Rainsford is a bigger crook than Victor
Grego, and, B) Victor Grego is a bigger crook than Ben Rainsford,
and, C) between them, they are conspiring to rob and enslave
everybody on the planet, Fuzzies included.”
“I listened to it very carefully, and recorded it, in the
hope that he might forget himself and say something actionable. He
didn’t; he’s lawyer enough to know what’s libel
and what isn’t. Sometimes I dream of being able to sue that
bastard for something, so that I can get him in the stand under
veridication, but . . . ” He shrugged.
“I noticed one thing. He’s attacking the Company,
and he’s attacking Rainsford, but at the same time he’s
trying to drive wedges between us, so we don’t gang up on
him.”
“Yes. That spaceport proposition. ‘Why doesn’t
our honest and upright Governor do something to end this infamous
space-transport monopoly of the Company’s, which is
strangling the economy of the planet?’ ”
“Well, why doesn’t he? Because it would cost about
fifty million sols, and ships using it would have to load and
unload from orbit. But that sounds like a real live issue to the
people who don’t think and have nothing to think with, which
means a large majority of the voters. You know what I’m
worried about, Leslie? Ingermann attacking Rainsford for collusion
with the Company. He hammers at that point long enough, and
Rainsford’s going to do something to prove he isn’t,
and whatever it is, it’ll hurt us.”
“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Coombes
agreed. “You know, among the many benefits of the Pendarvis
Decisions, we now have a democratic government on Zarathustra. That
means, we now have politics here. Ingermann controls all the other
rackets, and politics is the biggest racket there is. Hugo
Ingermann is running himself for political boss of
Zarathustra.”
THE AIR TRAFFIC around Central Courts Building the next morning
seemed normal to Jack Holloway. There were quite a few cars on the
landing stage above the sixth level down when he came in, but no
more than he remembered from the time of the Fuzzy Trial. It was
not until he left the escalator on the fourth floor below, where
the Adoption Bureau offices were, that he began to suspect that
there was a Fuzzy rush on.
The corridor leading back from the main hall to the suite that
had been taken over yesterday was jammed. It was a well behaved,
well dressed crowd, mostly couples clinging to each other to avoid
being jostled apart. Everybody seemed to be happy and excited; it
was more like a Year-End Holidays shopping crowd than anything
else.
A uniformed deputy-marshal saw him and approached, touching his
cap-brim in a half salute.
“Mr. Holloway; are you trying to get in to your offices?
You’d better come this way, sir; there’s a queue down
at the other end.”
There must be five or six hundred of them. Cut that in half;
most of them were couples.
“How long’s this been going on?” he asked,
noticing that several more couples and individuals were coming
behind him.
“Since about 0700. There were a few here before then; the
big rush didn’t start till 0830.”
Some of the people in the rear of the jam saw and recognized
him. “Holloway.” “Jack Holloway; he’s the
Commissioner.” “Mr. Holloway; are there Fuzzies here
now?”
The deputy took him down the hall and unlocked the door of an
office; it was empty, and the desks and chairs and things shrouded
in dust-covers. They went through and out into a back hall, where
another deputy-marshal was arguing with some people who were trying
to get in that way.
“Well, why are they letting him in; who’s he?”
a woman demanded.
“He works here. That’s Jack Holloway.”
“Oh! Mr. Holloway! Can you tell us how soon we can get
Fuzzies?”
His guide rushed him, almost as though he were under arrest,
along the hall, and opened another door.
“In here, Mr. Holloway; Mrs. Pendarvis’s office.
I’ll have to get back and keep that mob in front straightened
out.” He touched his cap-brim again and hastened away.
Mrs. Pendarvis sat at a desk, her back to the door, going over a
stack of forms in front of her. Beside her, at a smaller desk, a
girl was taking them as she finished with them, and talking into
the whisper-mouthpiece of a vocowriter. Two more girls sat at
another desk, one talking to somebody in a communication screen.
Mrs. Pendarvis said, “Who is it?” and turned her head,
then rose, extending her hand. “Oh; Mr. Holloway. Good
morning. What’s it like out in the hall, now?”
“Well, you see how I had to come in. I’d say about
five hundred, now. How are you handling them?”
She gestured toward the door to the front office, and he opened
it and looked through. Five girls sat at five desks; each was
interviewing applicants. Another girl was gathering up
application-forms and carrying them to a desk where they were being
sorted to be passed on to the back office.
“I arrived at 0830,” Mrs. Pendarvis said.
“Just after I dropped Pierrot and Columbine off at Government
House. There was a crowd then, and it’s been going on ever
since. How many Fuzzies have you, Mr. Holloway?”
“Available for adoption? I don’t know. Beside mine
and Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s and the Constabulary Fuzzies,
there were forty day before yesterday. That had gotten up to a
hundred and three by last evening.”
“We have, to date, three hundred and eleven applications;
there are possibly twenty more that haven’t been sent back to
me yet. By the time we close, it’ll be five or six hundred.
How are we going to handle this, anyhow? Some of these people want
just one Fuzzy, some of them want two, some of them will take a
whole family. And we can’t separate Fuzzies who want to stay
together. If you’d separate Pierrot and Columbine,
they’d both grieve themselves to death. And there are
families of five or six who want to stay together, aren’t
there?”
“Well, not permanently. These groups aren’t really
families; they’re sort of temporary gangs for mutual
assistance. Five or six are about as many as can make a living
together in the woods. They’re hunters and food-gatherers,
low Paleolithic economy, and individual small-game hunters at that.
When a gang gets too big to live together, they split up; when one
couple meets another, they team up to hunt together. That’s
why they have such a well-developed and uniform language, and I
imagine that’s how the news about the zatku spread all over
the Fuzzy country as fast as it did. They don’t even mate
permanently. Your pair are just young, first mating for both of
them. They think each other are the most wonderful ever. But you
will have others that won’t want to be separated;
you’ll have to let them be adopted together.” He
thought for a moment. “You can’t begin to furnish
Fuzzies for everybody; why don’t you give them out by lot?
Each of those applications is numbered, isn’t it? Draw
numbers.”
“Like a jury-drawing, of course. Let the
jury-commissioners handle that,” the Chief Justice’s
wife said.
“Fair enough. You’ll have to investigate each of
these applicants, of course; that’ll take a little time,
won’t it?”
“Well, Captain Khadra’s taking charge of them.
He’s borrowed some people from the schools, and some from the
city police juvenile squad and some from the company personnel
division. I’ve been getting my staff together the same
way—parent-teacher groups, Juvenile Welfare. I’m going to get
a paid staff together, as soon as I can. I think they’ll come
from the Company’s public service division; I’m told
that Mr. Grego’s going to suspend all those activities in
ninety days.”
“That’s right. That includes the schools, and the
hospitals. Why don’t you talk to Ernst Mallin? He’ll
find you all the people you want. He’s joined the Friends of
Little Fuzzy, too, now.”
“Well, after we’ve allocated Fuzzies to these
people, what then? Do they come out to your camp and pick their
own?”
“Good Lord, no! We have enough trouble, without having the
place overrun with human people.” He hadn’t given that
thought until now. “What we’ll need will be a place
here in Mallorysport where a couple of hundred Fuzzies can stay and
where the people who have been endorsed for foster-parents can come
and select the ones they want.”
That would have to be a big place, with a park all around it,
that could be fenced in to keep them from wandering off and getting
lost. A nice place, where they could all have fun together. He
didn’t know of any such place, and asked her about it.
“I’ll talk to Mr. Urswick, he’s the Company
Chief of Public Services. He’ll know about something. You
know, Mr. Holloway, I didn’t have any idea, when I took this
job, that it was going to be so complicated.”
“Mrs. Pendarvis, I’ve been saying that every hour on
the hour since I let Ben Rainsford talk me into taking the job I
have. You’re going to have to do something about information,
too—Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies, psychology of; language.
We’ll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and
language-learning tapes. And hearing aids.”
The door at the side of the room was marked investigation. He
found Ahmed Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a
city police uniform by screen.
“Well, have you gotten anything from any of them?”
he was asking.
“Damn little,” the city policeman told him.
“We’ve been pulling them in all day, everybody in town
who has a record. And Hugo Ingermann’s been pulling them away
from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his legmen and
assistants here with portable radios, and as fast as we bring some
punk in, they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ;
order to show grounds for suspicion. Most of them we can’t
question at all; it takes an hour to an hour and a half from the
time they’re brought in before we can veridicate those we
can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do.”
“Well, how about known associates? Didn’t either of
them have any friends?”
“Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they’ve been
cooperating, but none of them knows anything.”
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they
blanked screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a
cigarette.
“Well, you heard it, Jack,” he said. “They
just vanished, and the Fuzzies with them. I’m not surprised
we’re not getting anything out of their friends in the
Company. They wouldn’t know. We searched their rooms; they
seem to have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared.
And we can’t get anything from underworld sources. None of
the city police stool-pigeons knows anything.”
“You know, Ahmed, I’m worried about that. I wonder
what’s happened to those Fuzzies . . . ” He sat down on
the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and tobacco. “How
soon will you be able to start investigating these people who want
Fuzzies?”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across
the table to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they
both ought to. Work was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away.
and Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.
“Eighty-seven,” Lunt said. “That’s not
counting yours and mine and Jack’s.”
“The Extee-Three’s getting low.” They’d
had to start rationing it; tomorrow, they’d not be able to
issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The Fuzzies
wouldn’t like that. “Jack says he thinks speculators
are buying it and holding it off the market. They’ll get big
prices for it when the Fuzzies start coming in to
Mallorysport.”
There wasn’t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept
a tin or so in their aircars, in case of forced landings in the
wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet’s land
surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption
had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for
emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on,
but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four
months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet.
And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.
“Personally, I wish there were eighty-seven hundred of
them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean
it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down
in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of
them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in
on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But
wait till they get down in the real farm country, and among the
sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our
big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to
me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round
too.”
“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the
only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time
Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they
broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them
for that. But they just don’t understand about what they
mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any
idea at all of property in the absence of a visible
owner.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they
won’t understand that somebody’s planted them,
they’ll think they’re just there. And I never saw a
farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to
protect his crops.”
“Education,” Gerd said.
“Recipe for roast turkey—first catch a turkey,” Lunt
said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are
we going to catch all the other ones?”
“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside
Extee-Three?”
“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around
the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patrolling a
couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”
“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t
destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while. I don’t.
That’s what I mean by educating the farmers. A Fuzzy does
X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen land-prawns a day,
and among them they do about X-times-ten damage.”
“Write up a script about it, and we’ll put it on the
air this evening. ‘Be good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the
farmer’s best friend.’ Maybe that’ll help
some.”
Gerd nodded. “Eighty-seven, we have now. How many little
ones?”
“Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?”
“And we think we have five pregnancies. That’s all
Lynne Andrews is sure of; the only way she can tell is listening
with a stethoscope for fetal movements. They seem to be too small
to make any conspicuous visible difference. This is out of eighty
seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call that,
George?”
George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it
automatically. Somewhere, maybe Constabulary School, the coffee had
always been too hot to drink right away. Across the messhall, half
a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it clear the
tables.
“It sure to Nifflheim isn’t any population
explosion,” he said.
“Race extinction, George. I don’t know what the
normal life expectancy is in the woods, but I’d say four out
of five of them die by violence. When the birthrate curve drops
below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out.”
“A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you
said five of the girls were pregnant, didn’t you? And you
admit that’s not complete, if Doc Andrews has to use a
stethoscope for a pregnancy test.”
“I wondered if you’d notice that. That’s not a
bad ratio, for females who have a monthly cycle instead of an
annual mating season. And these four children; we don’t know
anything about the maturation period, but in the three months
we’ve been checking on him, Baby Fuzzy’s only gained
six ounces and an inch. I’d make it about fifteen years, ten
at very least.”
“Then,” Lunt said, “it isn’t birthrate
at all. It’s infant mortality. They just don’t
live.”
“That’s it, George. That’s what I’m
worried about. And Ruth and Lynne, too. If we don’t find out
what causes it, and how to stop it, there won’t be any
Fuzzies after a while.”
“THIS IS LIKE old times, Victor,” Coombes said,
stretching in one of the chairs. “Nobody here but us
humans.”
“That’s right.” He brought the jug and the two
glasses over and put them on the low table, careful not to disturb
a pattern of colored tiles laid on one end of it. “That thing
there is a Fuzzy work of art. It is unfinished, but just see the
deep symbolic significance.”
“You see it. I can’t.” Coombes accepted his
glass with mechanical thanks and sipped. “Where is
everybody?”
“Diamond is a guest, at a place where I’m not
welcome. Government House. He and Flora and Fauna are meeting
Pierrot and Columbine, Judge and Mrs. Pendarvis’s Fuzzies.
Sandra is chaperoning the affair, and Ernst is conferring with Mrs.
Pendarvis about quarters for a couple of hundred Fuzzies who are
coming to town in about a week to be adopted.”
“I’ll say this: your Fuzzy and Fuzzyologists are
getting in with the right people. Did you hear Hugo
Ingermann’s telecast this afternoon?”
“I did not. I pay people to do that kind of work for me. I
went over a semantically correct summary, with a symbolic-logic
study. As nearly as I can interpret it, it reduces to the
propositions that, A) Ben Rainsford is a bigger crook than Victor
Grego, and, B) Victor Grego is a bigger crook than Ben Rainsford,
and, C) between them, they are conspiring to rob and enslave
everybody on the planet, Fuzzies included.”
“I listened to it very carefully, and recorded it, in the
hope that he might forget himself and say something actionable. He
didn’t; he’s lawyer enough to know what’s libel
and what isn’t. Sometimes I dream of being able to sue that
bastard for something, so that I can get him in the stand under
veridication, but . . . ” He shrugged.
“I noticed one thing. He’s attacking the Company,
and he’s attacking Rainsford, but at the same time he’s
trying to drive wedges between us, so we don’t gang up on
him.”
“Yes. That spaceport proposition. ‘Why doesn’t
our honest and upright Governor do something to end this infamous
space-transport monopoly of the Company’s, which is
strangling the economy of the planet?’ ”
“Well, why doesn’t he? Because it would cost about
fifty million sols, and ships using it would have to load and
unload from orbit. But that sounds like a real live issue to the
people who don’t think and have nothing to think with, which
means a large majority of the voters. You know what I’m
worried about, Leslie? Ingermann attacking Rainsford for collusion
with the Company. He hammers at that point long enough, and
Rainsford’s going to do something to prove he isn’t,
and whatever it is, it’ll hurt us.”
“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Coombes
agreed. “You know, among the many benefits of the Pendarvis
Decisions, we now have a democratic government on Zarathustra. That
means, we now have politics here. Ingermann controls all the other
rackets, and politics is the biggest racket there is. Hugo
Ingermann is running himself for political boss of
Zarathustra.”