THE AIRCAR SETTLED to the ground; the Marine sergeant at the
controls, who had been expecting to smash a dozen or so Fuzzies
getting down, gave a whoosh of relief. Pancho Ybarra opened the
door and motioned his companion, in Marine field-greens, to precede
him, then stepped to the ground. George Lunt, still in his slightly
altered Constabulary uniform, and Gerd van Riebeek, in bush-jacket
and field-boots, advanced to meet them, accompanied by a swarm of
Fuzzies. They all greeted him enthusiastically, and then wanted to
know where Pappy Jack was.
“Pappy Jack in Big House Place; not come this place with
Unka Panko. Pappy Jack come this place soon; two
lights-and-darks,” he told them. “Pappy Jack have to
make much talk with other Big Ones.”
“Make talk about Fuzzies?” Little Fuzzy wanted to
know. “Find Big Ones for all Fuzzies?”
“That’s right. Find place for Fuzzies to go in Big
House Place,” he said.
“He’s been on that ever since Jack went away,”
Gerd said. “All the Fuzzies are going to have Big Ones of
their own, now.”
“Well, Jack’s working on it,” he said.
“You’ve both met Captain Casagra, haven’t you?
Gerd van Riebeek; Major Lunt. The captain’s staying with us a
couple of days; tomorrow Lieutenant Paine and some reinforcements
are coming out; fifty men and fifteen combat-cars, to help out with
the patrolling till we can get men and vehicles of our
own.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Captain!” Lunt
said. “We’re very short of both.”
“You have a lot of country to patrol, too,” Casagra
said. “As Navy Lieutenant Ybarra says, I’ll only stay a
few days, to get the feel of the situation. Marine-Lieutenant Paine
will stay till you can get your own force recruited up and trained.
That is, if things don’t blow up again in the veldbeest
country.”
“Well, I hope they don’t,” Lunt said.
“The vehicles are as welcome as the men; we have very few of
our own.”
“The Company’s making some available,” he
said. “And along with his other work, Ahmed Khadra’s
starting a ZNPF recruiting drive.”
“Has Jack been able to get his hands on any more
Extee-Three?” Gerd wanted to know.
He shook his head. “He hasn’t even been able to get
any for the reception center, when the Fuzzies start coming in to
town. The Company’s going to start producing it, but
that’ll take time. After they get the plant set up,
they’ll probably be running off test batches for a couple of
weeks before they get one right.”
“The formula’s very simple,” Casagra said.
“Some of the processes aren’t; I was talking to
Victor Grego. His synthetics people aren’t optimistic, but
Grego’s whip-cracking at them to get it done yesterday
morning.”
“Isn’t that something?” Gerd asked.
“Victor Grego, Fuzzy-lover. And Jimenez, and Mallin; you
ought to have heard the language my refined and delicate wife used
when she heard about that.”
“Last war’s enemies, next war’s allies,”
Casagra laughed. “I spent a couple of years on Thor; clans
that’d be shooting us on sight one season would be our bosom
friends the next, and planning to double-cross us the one
after.”
An aircar rose from behind the ZNPF barracks across the run and
started south; another, which had been circling the camp five miles
out, was coming in.
“Harpy patrol,” Lunt was explaining to Casagra.
“The Fuzzies cleaned out all the zatku, landprawns, around
the camp, and they’ve been hunting farther out each day.
Harpies like Fuzzies the way Fuzzies like zatku, so we have to give
them air-cover. That’s been since you left, Pancho;
we’ve shot about twenty harpies since then. Four up to noon
today; I don’t know how many since.”
“Lost any Fuzzies yet?”
“Not to harpies, no. We almost had a lot of them massacred
yesterday; two of these families or whatever they are got into a
shoppo-diggo fight about some playthings. A couple got chopped up a
little; there’s one.” He pointed to a Fuzzy with a
white bandage turbaned about his head; he seemed quite proud of it.
“One got a broken leg; Doc Andrews has him in the hospital
with his leg in a cast. Before I could get to the fight, Little
Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Mamma Fuzzy and a couple of my crowd had broken
it up; just waded in with their flats as if they’d been doing
riot-work all their lives. And you ought to have heard Little Fuzzy
chewing them out afterward. Talked to them like an old sergeant in
boot camp.”
“Oh, they fight among themselves?” Casagra
asked.
“This is the first time it’s happened here. I
suppose they do, now and then, in the woods, with their wooden
zatku-hodda. They have a regular fencing system. Nothing up to
Interstellar Olympic epee standards, but effective. That’s
why half of them weren’t killed in the first five
seconds.” Lunt looked at his watch. “Well, Captain,
suppose you come with me; we’ll go to Protection Force
headquarters and go over what we’ve been doing and how your
Lieutenant Paine and his men can help out.”
Casagra went over to the car and spoke to the sergeant at the
controls, then he and Lunt climbed in. Ybarra fell in with Gerd and
they started in the direction of the lab-hut.
“One of the pregnancy cases lost her baby,” Gerd
said. “It was born prematurely and dead. We have the baby,
fetus rather, under refrigeration. It seems to be about equivalent
to human six-month stage. It wouldn’t have survived in any
case. Malformed, visibly and I suppose internally as well. We
haven’t done anything with it, yet; Lynne wanted you to see
it. The Fuzzies were all sore; they thought it rated a funeral. We
managed to explain to Little Fuzzy and a couple of others what we
wanted to do with it, and they tried to explain to the others. I
don’t know how far any of it got.”
The Fuzzies with them ran ahead, shouting “Mummy Woof!
Auntie Lynne! Unka Panko bizzo do-mitto!” They were all
making a clamor inside the lab-hut when he and Gerd entered, and
Ruth, who was working at one of the benches making some kind of a
test, was trying to shush them.
“Heyo, Unka Panko,” she greeted him, hastening
through with what she had at hand. “I’ll be loose in a
jiffy.” She made a few notes, set a test-tube in a rack and
made a grease-pencil number on it, and then pulled down the cover
and locked it. “I hadn’t done this since med school.
Lynne’s back in the dispensary with a couple of volunteer
native nurses, looking after the combat casualty.” She got
cigarettes out of her smock-pocket and lit one, then dropped into a
chair. “Pancho, what is this about Ernst Mallin?” she
asked. “Do you believe it?”
“Yes. He’s really interested, now that he
doesn’t have to prove any predetermined Company policy points
about them. And he really likes Fuzzies. I’ve seen him with
that one of Grego’s, and with Ben’s Flora and Fauna,
and Mrs. Pendarvis’s pair.”
“I wouldn’t believe it, even if I saw it. I saw what
he did to Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome. It’s a
wonder all four of them aren’t incurably
psychotic.”
“But they aren’t; they’re just as sane as any
other Fuzzies. Mallin’s sorry for doing what he did with
them, but he isn’t sorry about what he learned from them. He
says Fuzzies are the only people he’s ever seen who are
absolutely sane and can’t be driven out of sanity. He says if
humans could learn to think like Fuzzies, it would empty all the
mental hospitals and throw all the psychiatrists out of
work.”
“But they’re just like little children. Dear, smart
little children, but . . . ”
“Maybe children who are too smart to grow up. Maybe
we’d be like Fuzzies, too, if we didn’t have a lot of
adults around us from the moment we were born, infecting us with
non-sanity. I hope we don’t begin infecting the Fuzzies, now.
What was this fight all about, the other day?”
“Well, it was about some playthings, over in the big
Fuzzy-shelter. This new crowd that came in that day saw them and
wanted to take them. They were things that were intended for
everybody to play with, but they didn’t know that. There was
an argument, and the next thing the shoppo-diggo were going. The
crowd who started it are all sorry, now, and everybody’s
friends.”
Lynne came through the door from the dispensary at the end of
the hut. A couple of Fuzzies were running along with her. Some of
the Fuzzies who had come in from outside with them drifted in
through the dispensary door, to visit their wounded friend. Lynne
came over and joined them. Gerd asked about the patient; the
patient was doing well, and being very good about staying in
bed.
“How about the girl who lost her baby?” he
asked.
“She’s running around as though nothing had
happened. It was heartbreaking, Pancho. The thing—it was so
malformed that I’m not sure it was male or female—was born
dead. She looked at it, and touched it, and then she looked up at
me and said, ‘Hudda. Shi-nozza.’ ”
“Dead. Like always,” Gerd said.
“She acted as
though it were only what she’d expected. I don’t think
more than ten percent of them live more than a few days. You want
to see it, Pancho?”
He didn’t, particularly; it wasn’t his field. But
then, Fuzzy embryology wasn’t anybody’s field, yet.
They went over to one of the refrigerators, and Gerd got it out and
unwrapped it. It was smaller than a mouse, and he had to use a
magnifier to look at it. The arms and legs were short and
underdeveloped; the head was malformed, too.
“I can’t say anything about it,” he said,
“except that it’s a good thing it was born dead. What
are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t want to dissect it myself,” Lynne
said. “I’m not competent. That’s too important to
bungle with.”
“I’m no good at dissection. Take it in to
Mallorysport Hospital; that’s what I’d do.” He
rewrapped the tiny thing and put it back. “The more of you
work on it, the less you’ll miss. You want to find everything
out you can.”
“That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll call
them now, and see who all can help, and when.”
Half a dozen Fuzzies came in from outside; they were carrying a
dead land-prawn. Some of the Fuzzies already in the hut ran ahead
of them, into the dispensary.
“Come on, Pancho; let’s watch,” Gerd said.
“They’re bringing a present for their sick friend. They
must have dragged that thing three or four miles.”
THERE WERE FIVE Fuzzies and two other people in the west lower
garden of Government House, as the aircar came in. The other people
were Captain Ahmed Khadra, ZNPF, and Sandra Glenn, so the five
Fuzzies would be the host and hostess, Fauna and Flora, and Pierrot
and Columbine Pendarvis and Diamond Grego. They had a red and gold
ball, two feet, or one Fuzzy-height, in diameter, and they were
pushing and chasing it about the lawn. Every once in a while, they
would push it to where Khadra was standing, and then he would give
it a kick and send it bounding. Jack Holloway chuckled; it looked
like the kind of romping he and his Fuzzies had done on the lawn
beside his camp, when there had been a lawn there and when there
had just been his own Fuzzies.
“Ben, drop me down there, will you?” he said.
“I feel like a good Fuzzy-romp, right now.”
“So do I,” Rainsford said. “Will, set us down,
if you please.”
The pilot circled downward, holding the car a few inches above
the grass while they climbed out. The Fuzzies had seen the car
descend and came pelting over. At first, he thought they were
carrying pistols; at least, they wore belts and small holsters. The
things in the holsters had pistol-grips, but when they drew them,
he saw that they were three-inch black discs, which the Fuzzies
held to their mouths.
“Pappy Ben; Pappy Jack!” they were all yelling.
“Listen; we talk like Big Ones, now!”
He snapped off his hearing-aid. It was true; they were all
speaking audibly.
“Pappy Vic make,” Diamond said proudly.
“Actually, Henry Stenson made them,” the girl said.
“At least, he invented them. All Mr. Grego did was tell him
what he wanted. They are Fuzzyphones.”
“Heeta, Pappy Jack.” Diamond held his up.
“Yeek-yeek. Yeeek!” He was exasperated, and then
remembered he’d taken it away from his mouth.
“Fuzzy-talk go in here, this side. Inside, grow big. Come out
this side, big like Hagga-talk,” he said, holding the device
to his mouth.
“That good, Diamond. Good-good,” he commended.
“What do you think of this, Ben?”
Rainsford squatted in front of his own Fuzzies, holding out a
hand. “So-pokko-aki, Flora,” he said, and the Fuzzy
handed him hers, first saying, “Keffu, Pappy Ben; do’
brek. “
“I won’t.” Rainsford looked at it curiously,
and handed it back. “That thing’s good. Little switch
on the grip, and it looks as though the frequency
transformer’s in the middle and they can talk into either
side of it.”
It would have to work that way; Fuzzies were ambidextrous. Gerd
had a theory about that. Fuzzies weren’t anatomists, mainly
because they didn’t produce fire and didn’t cut up the
small animals they killed for cooking, and only races who had
learned the location and importance of the heart fought with their
hearts turned away from the enemy. Homo sapiens terra’s
ancestors in the same culture-stage were probably ambidextrous too.
Like most of Gerd’s theories, it made sense.
“Who makes these things?” he asked.
“Stenson?”
“He made these, in his shop. The CZC electronics equipment
plant is going to manufacture them,” the girl said, adding:
“Advertisement.”
“You tell Mr. Grego to tell his electronics plant to get
cracking on them. The Native Affairs Commission wants a lot of
them.”
“You staying for dinner with us, Miss Glenn?”
Rainsford asked.
“Thank you, Governor, but I have to take Diamond
home.”
“I have to take Pierrot and Columbine home, too,”
Khadra said. “What are you doing this evening?”
“I have my homework to do. Fuzzy language
lessons.”
“Well, why can’t I help you with your
homework?” Khadra wanted to know. “I speak Fuzzy like a
native, myself.”
“Well, if it won’t be too much trouble . . . ”
she began.
Holloway laughed. “Who are you trying to kid, Miss Glenn?
Look in the mirror if you think teaching you Fuzzy would be too
much trouble for anybody Ahmed’s age. If I was about ten
years younger, I’d pull rank on him and leave him with the
Fuzzies.”
Pierrot and Columbine thought all this conversation boring and
irrelevant. They trundled the ball over in front of Khadra and
commanded: “Mek kikko!”
Khadra kicked the ball, lifting it from the ground and sending
it soaring away. The Fuzzies ran after it.
“Dr. Mallin says you were looking at the
sanatorium,” Sandra said.
“Yes. That’s going to be a good place. You know
about it?” he asked Khadra.
“Well, it’s a big place,” Khadra said.
“I’ve seen it from the air, of course. They only use
about ten percent of it, now.”
“Yes. We’re taking a building, intended for a mental
ward; about a half square mile of park around it, with a good
fence, so the Fuzzies won’t stray off and get lost. We could
put five-six hundred Fuzzies in there, and they wouldn’t be
crowded a bit. And it’ll be some time before we get that many
there at one time. I expect there’ll be about a hundred to a
hundred and fifty this time next week.”
“There were precisely eight hundred and seventy-two
applications in when the office closed this evening,” Khadra
said. “When are you going back, Jack?”
“Day after tomorrow. I want to make sure the work’s
started on the reception center, and I’m still trying to
locate some Extee-Three. I think a bunch of damn speculators have
cornered the market and are holding it for high prices.”
The Fuzzies had pushed the ball into some shrubbery and were
having trouble dislodging it. Sandra Glenn started off to help
them, Ben Rainsford walking along with her. Khadra said:
“That’ll probably be some of Hugo Ingermann’s
crowd, too.”
“Speaking about Ingermann; how are you making out about
Herckerd and Novaes?” he asked. “And the five
Fuzzies.”
“Jack, I swear. I’m beginning to think Herckerd and
Novaes and those Fuzzies all walked into a mass-energy converter
together. That’s how completely all of them have
vanished.”
“They hadn’t sold them before Ben’s telecast,
evening before last. After that, with the Adoption Bureau opening
all that talk about kidnapping and enslavement and so on, nobody
would buy a bootleg Fuzzy. So they couldn’t sell them, so
they got rid of them.” How? That was what bothered him. If
they’d used sense, they’d have flown them back to Beta
and turned them loose. He was afraid, though, that they’d
killed them. By this time everybody knew that live Fuzzies could
tell tales. “I think those Fuzzies are dead.”
“I don’t know. Eight hundred and seventy-two
applications, and a hundred and fifty Fuzzies at most,”
Khadra said. “There’ll be a market for bootleg Fuzzies.
Jack, you know what I think? I think those Fuzzies weren’t
brought in for sale. I think this gang—Herckerd and Novaes and
whoever else is in with them—are training those Fuzzies to help
catch other Fuzzies. Do you think a Fuzzy could be trained to do
that?”
“Sure. To all intents and purposes, that’s what our
Fuzzies are doing out at the camp. You know how Fuzzies think? Big
Ones are a Good Thing. Any Fuzzy who has a Big One doesn’t
need to worry about anything. All Fuzzies ought to have Big Ones.
That’s what Little Fuzzy has been telling the ones from the
woods, out at camp. Ahmed, I think you have something.”
“I thought of something else, too. If this gang can make a
deal with some tramp freighter captain, they could ship Fuzzies
off-planet and make terrific profits on it. You wait till the news
about the Fuzzies gets around. There’ll be a sale for them
everywhere—Terra, Odin, Freya, Marduk, Aton, Baldur, planets like
that. Anybody can bring a ship into orbit on this planet, now, if
he has his own landing-craft and doesn’t use the CZC
spaceport. In a month, word will have gotten to Gimli, that’s
the nearest planet, and in two more months a ship can get here from
there.”
“Spaceport. That could be why Ingermann’s been
harping on this nefarious CZC space terminal monopoly. If he had a
little spaceport of his own, now . . . ”
“Any kind of smuggling you can think of,” Khadra
said. “Hot sunstones. Narcotics. Or Fuzzies.”
Rainsford and Sandra Glenn were approaching; Sandra carried
Diamond, Pierrot and Columbine ran beside her, and Flora and Fauna
were trundling the ball ahead of them. He wanted to talk to
Rainsford about this. They needed more laws, to prohibit shipping
Fuzzies off-planet; nobody’d thought of that possibility
before. And talk to Grego; the Company controlled the only existing
egress from the planet.
LYNNE ANDREWS STRAIGHTENED and removed the binocular loop and
laid it down, blinking. The others, four men and two women in
lab-smocks, were pushing aside the spotlights and magnifiers and
cameras on their swinging arms and laying down instruments.
“That thing wouldn’t have lived thirty seconds, even
if it hadn’t been premature,” one man said. “And
it doesn’t add a thing to what we don’t know about
Fuzzy embryology.” He was an embryologist, human-type,
himself. “I have dissected over five hundred aborted fetuses
and I never saw one in worse shape than that.”
“It was so tiny,” one of the women said. She was an
obstetrician. “I can’t believe that that’s human
six-months equivalent.”
“Well, I can,” somebody else said. “I know
what a young Fuzzy looks like; I spent a lot of time with Jack
Holloway’s Baby Fuzzy, during the trial. And I don’t
suppose a fertilized Fuzzy ovum is much different from one of ours.
Between the two, there has to be a regular progressive development.
I say this one is two-thirds developed. Misdeveloped, I should
say.”
“Misdeveloped is correct, Doctor. Have you any idea why
this one misdeveloped as it did?”
“No, Doctor, I haven’t.”
“They come from northern Beta; that country’s never
been more than air-scouted. Does anybody know what radioactivity
conditions are, up there? I’ve seen pictures of worse things
than this from nuclear bomb radiations on Terra during and after
the Third and Fourth World Wars, at the beginning of the First
Federation.”
“The country hasn’t been explored, but it’s
been scanned. Any natural radioactivity strong enough to do that
would be detectable from Xerxes.”
“Oh, Nifflheim; that fetus could have been conceived on a
patch of pitchblende no bigger than this table . . . ”
“Well, couldn’t it be chemical? Something in the
pregnant female’s diet?” the other woman asked.
“The Thaladomide Babies!” somebody exclaimed.
“First Century, between the Second and Third World Wars. That
was due to chemicals taken orally by pregnant women.”
“All right; let’s get the biochemists in on this,
then.”
“Chris Hoenveld,” somebody else said.
“It’s not too late to call him now.”
FUZZIES DIDN’T HAVE Cocktail Hour; that was for the Big
Ones, to sit together and make Big One talk. Fuzzies just came
stringing in before dinner, more or less interested in food
depending on how the hunting had been, and after they ate they
romped and played until they were tired, and then sat in groups,
talking idly until they became sleepy.
In the woods, it had not been like that. When the sun began to
go to bed, they had found safe places, where the big animals
couldn’t get at them, and they had snuggled together and
slept, one staying awake all the time. But here the Big Ones kept
the animals away, and killed them with thunder-things when they
came too close, and it was safe. And the Big Ones had things that
made light even when the sky was dark, and there were places where
it was always bright as day. So here, there was more fun, because
there was less danger, and many new things to talk about. This was
the Hoksu-Mitto, the Wonderful Place.
And today, they were even happier, because today Pappy Jack had
come back.
Little Fuzzy got out his pipe, the new one Pappy Jack had
brought from the Big House Place, and stuffed it with tobacco, and
got out the little fire-maker. Some of the Fuzzies around him, who
had just come in from the woods, were frightened. They were not
used to fire; when fire happened in the woods, it was bad. That was
wild fire, though. The Big Ones had tamed fire, and if a person
were careful not to touch it or let it get loose, fire was nothing
to be afraid of.
“We go other places, and all have Big Ones,
tomorrow?” one asked. “Big Ones for us, like Pappy Jack
for you?”
“Not tomorrow. Not next day. Day after that.” He
held up three fingers.
“Then go in high-up-thing, to place like this. Big Ones
come, make talk. You like Big One, Big One like you, you go with
Big One, you live in Big One place.”
“Nice place, like this?”
“Nice place. Not like this. Different place.”
“Not want to go. Nice place here, much fun.”
“Then you not go. Pappy Jack not make you go. You want to
go, Pappy Jack find nice Big One for you, be good to
you.”
“Suppose not good. Suppose bad to us?”
“Then Pappy Jack come, Pappy Jorj, Unka Ahmed, Pappy
Ge’hd, Unka Panko; make much trouble for bad Big One, bang,
bang, bang!”
THE AIRCAR SETTLED to the ground; the Marine sergeant at the
controls, who had been expecting to smash a dozen or so Fuzzies
getting down, gave a whoosh of relief. Pancho Ybarra opened the
door and motioned his companion, in Marine field-greens, to precede
him, then stepped to the ground. George Lunt, still in his slightly
altered Constabulary uniform, and Gerd van Riebeek, in bush-jacket
and field-boots, advanced to meet them, accompanied by a swarm of
Fuzzies. They all greeted him enthusiastically, and then wanted to
know where Pappy Jack was.
“Pappy Jack in Big House Place; not come this place with
Unka Panko. Pappy Jack come this place soon; two
lights-and-darks,” he told them. “Pappy Jack have to
make much talk with other Big Ones.”
“Make talk about Fuzzies?” Little Fuzzy wanted to
know. “Find Big Ones for all Fuzzies?”
“That’s right. Find place for Fuzzies to go in Big
House Place,” he said.
“He’s been on that ever since Jack went away,”
Gerd said. “All the Fuzzies are going to have Big Ones of
their own, now.”
“Well, Jack’s working on it,” he said.
“You’ve both met Captain Casagra, haven’t you?
Gerd van Riebeek; Major Lunt. The captain’s staying with us a
couple of days; tomorrow Lieutenant Paine and some reinforcements
are coming out; fifty men and fifteen combat-cars, to help out with
the patrolling till we can get men and vehicles of our
own.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Captain!” Lunt
said. “We’re very short of both.”
“You have a lot of country to patrol, too,” Casagra
said. “As Navy Lieutenant Ybarra says, I’ll only stay a
few days, to get the feel of the situation. Marine-Lieutenant Paine
will stay till you can get your own force recruited up and trained.
That is, if things don’t blow up again in the veldbeest
country.”
“Well, I hope they don’t,” Lunt said.
“The vehicles are as welcome as the men; we have very few of
our own.”
“The Company’s making some available,” he
said. “And along with his other work, Ahmed Khadra’s
starting a ZNPF recruiting drive.”
“Has Jack been able to get his hands on any more
Extee-Three?” Gerd wanted to know.
He shook his head. “He hasn’t even been able to get
any for the reception center, when the Fuzzies start coming in to
town. The Company’s going to start producing it, but
that’ll take time. After they get the plant set up,
they’ll probably be running off test batches for a couple of
weeks before they get one right.”
“The formula’s very simple,” Casagra said.
“Some of the processes aren’t; I was talking to
Victor Grego. His synthetics people aren’t optimistic, but
Grego’s whip-cracking at them to get it done yesterday
morning.”
“Isn’t that something?” Gerd asked.
“Victor Grego, Fuzzy-lover. And Jimenez, and Mallin; you
ought to have heard the language my refined and delicate wife used
when she heard about that.”
“Last war’s enemies, next war’s allies,”
Casagra laughed. “I spent a couple of years on Thor; clans
that’d be shooting us on sight one season would be our bosom
friends the next, and planning to double-cross us the one
after.”
An aircar rose from behind the ZNPF barracks across the run and
started south; another, which had been circling the camp five miles
out, was coming in.
“Harpy patrol,” Lunt was explaining to Casagra.
“The Fuzzies cleaned out all the zatku, landprawns, around
the camp, and they’ve been hunting farther out each day.
Harpies like Fuzzies the way Fuzzies like zatku, so we have to give
them air-cover. That’s been since you left, Pancho;
we’ve shot about twenty harpies since then. Four up to noon
today; I don’t know how many since.”
“Lost any Fuzzies yet?”
“Not to harpies, no. We almost had a lot of them massacred
yesterday; two of these families or whatever they are got into a
shoppo-diggo fight about some playthings. A couple got chopped up a
little; there’s one.” He pointed to a Fuzzy with a
white bandage turbaned about his head; he seemed quite proud of it.
“One got a broken leg; Doc Andrews has him in the hospital
with his leg in a cast. Before I could get to the fight, Little
Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Mamma Fuzzy and a couple of my crowd had broken
it up; just waded in with their flats as if they’d been doing
riot-work all their lives. And you ought to have heard Little Fuzzy
chewing them out afterward. Talked to them like an old sergeant in
boot camp.”
“Oh, they fight among themselves?” Casagra
asked.
“This is the first time it’s happened here. I
suppose they do, now and then, in the woods, with their wooden
zatku-hodda. They have a regular fencing system. Nothing up to
Interstellar Olympic epee standards, but effective. That’s
why half of them weren’t killed in the first five
seconds.” Lunt looked at his watch. “Well, Captain,
suppose you come with me; we’ll go to Protection Force
headquarters and go over what we’ve been doing and how your
Lieutenant Paine and his men can help out.”
Casagra went over to the car and spoke to the sergeant at the
controls, then he and Lunt climbed in. Ybarra fell in with Gerd and
they started in the direction of the lab-hut.
“One of the pregnancy cases lost her baby,” Gerd
said. “It was born prematurely and dead. We have the baby,
fetus rather, under refrigeration. It seems to be about equivalent
to human six-month stage. It wouldn’t have survived in any
case. Malformed, visibly and I suppose internally as well. We
haven’t done anything with it, yet; Lynne wanted you to see
it. The Fuzzies were all sore; they thought it rated a funeral. We
managed to explain to Little Fuzzy and a couple of others what we
wanted to do with it, and they tried to explain to the others. I
don’t know how far any of it got.”
The Fuzzies with them ran ahead, shouting “Mummy Woof!
Auntie Lynne! Unka Panko bizzo do-mitto!” They were all
making a clamor inside the lab-hut when he and Gerd entered, and
Ruth, who was working at one of the benches making some kind of a
test, was trying to shush them.
“Heyo, Unka Panko,” she greeted him, hastening
through with what she had at hand. “I’ll be loose in a
jiffy.” She made a few notes, set a test-tube in a rack and
made a grease-pencil number on it, and then pulled down the cover
and locked it. “I hadn’t done this since med school.
Lynne’s back in the dispensary with a couple of volunteer
native nurses, looking after the combat casualty.” She got
cigarettes out of her smock-pocket and lit one, then dropped into a
chair. “Pancho, what is this about Ernst Mallin?” she
asked. “Do you believe it?”
“Yes. He’s really interested, now that he
doesn’t have to prove any predetermined Company policy points
about them. And he really likes Fuzzies. I’ve seen him with
that one of Grego’s, and with Ben’s Flora and Fauna,
and Mrs. Pendarvis’s pair.”
“I wouldn’t believe it, even if I saw it. I saw what
he did to Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome. It’s a
wonder all four of them aren’t incurably
psychotic.”
“But they aren’t; they’re just as sane as any
other Fuzzies. Mallin’s sorry for doing what he did with
them, but he isn’t sorry about what he learned from them. He
says Fuzzies are the only people he’s ever seen who are
absolutely sane and can’t be driven out of sanity. He says if
humans could learn to think like Fuzzies, it would empty all the
mental hospitals and throw all the psychiatrists out of
work.”
“But they’re just like little children. Dear, smart
little children, but . . . ”
“Maybe children who are too smart to grow up. Maybe
we’d be like Fuzzies, too, if we didn’t have a lot of
adults around us from the moment we were born, infecting us with
non-sanity. I hope we don’t begin infecting the Fuzzies, now.
What was this fight all about, the other day?”
“Well, it was about some playthings, over in the big
Fuzzy-shelter. This new crowd that came in that day saw them and
wanted to take them. They were things that were intended for
everybody to play with, but they didn’t know that. There was
an argument, and the next thing the shoppo-diggo were going. The
crowd who started it are all sorry, now, and everybody’s
friends.”
Lynne came through the door from the dispensary at the end of
the hut. A couple of Fuzzies were running along with her. Some of
the Fuzzies who had come in from outside with them drifted in
through the dispensary door, to visit their wounded friend. Lynne
came over and joined them. Gerd asked about the patient; the
patient was doing well, and being very good about staying in
bed.
“How about the girl who lost her baby?” he
asked.
“She’s running around as though nothing had
happened. It was heartbreaking, Pancho. The thing—it was so
malformed that I’m not sure it was male or female—was born
dead. She looked at it, and touched it, and then she looked up at
me and said, ‘Hudda. Shi-nozza.’ ”
“Dead. Like always,” Gerd said.
“She acted as
though it were only what she’d expected. I don’t think
more than ten percent of them live more than a few days. You want
to see it, Pancho?”
He didn’t, particularly; it wasn’t his field. But
then, Fuzzy embryology wasn’t anybody’s field, yet.
They went over to one of the refrigerators, and Gerd got it out and
unwrapped it. It was smaller than a mouse, and he had to use a
magnifier to look at it. The arms and legs were short and
underdeveloped; the head was malformed, too.
“I can’t say anything about it,” he said,
“except that it’s a good thing it was born dead. What
are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t want to dissect it myself,” Lynne
said. “I’m not competent. That’s too important to
bungle with.”
“I’m no good at dissection. Take it in to
Mallorysport Hospital; that’s what I’d do.” He
rewrapped the tiny thing and put it back. “The more of you
work on it, the less you’ll miss. You want to find everything
out you can.”
“That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll call
them now, and see who all can help, and when.”
Half a dozen Fuzzies came in from outside; they were carrying a
dead land-prawn. Some of the Fuzzies already in the hut ran ahead
of them, into the dispensary.
“Come on, Pancho; let’s watch,” Gerd said.
“They’re bringing a present for their sick friend. They
must have dragged that thing three or four miles.”
THERE WERE FIVE Fuzzies and two other people in the west lower
garden of Government House, as the aircar came in. The other people
were Captain Ahmed Khadra, ZNPF, and Sandra Glenn, so the five
Fuzzies would be the host and hostess, Fauna and Flora, and Pierrot
and Columbine Pendarvis and Diamond Grego. They had a red and gold
ball, two feet, or one Fuzzy-height, in diameter, and they were
pushing and chasing it about the lawn. Every once in a while, they
would push it to where Khadra was standing, and then he would give
it a kick and send it bounding. Jack Holloway chuckled; it looked
like the kind of romping he and his Fuzzies had done on the lawn
beside his camp, when there had been a lawn there and when there
had just been his own Fuzzies.
“Ben, drop me down there, will you?” he said.
“I feel like a good Fuzzy-romp, right now.”
“So do I,” Rainsford said. “Will, set us down,
if you please.”
The pilot circled downward, holding the car a few inches above
the grass while they climbed out. The Fuzzies had seen the car
descend and came pelting over. At first, he thought they were
carrying pistols; at least, they wore belts and small holsters. The
things in the holsters had pistol-grips, but when they drew them,
he saw that they were three-inch black discs, which the Fuzzies
held to their mouths.
“Pappy Ben; Pappy Jack!” they were all yelling.
“Listen; we talk like Big Ones, now!”
He snapped off his hearing-aid. It was true; they were all
speaking audibly.
“Pappy Vic make,” Diamond said proudly.
“Actually, Henry Stenson made them,” the girl said.
“At least, he invented them. All Mr. Grego did was tell him
what he wanted. They are Fuzzyphones.”
“Heeta, Pappy Jack.” Diamond held his up.
“Yeek-yeek. Yeeek!” He was exasperated, and then
remembered he’d taken it away from his mouth.
“Fuzzy-talk go in here, this side. Inside, grow big. Come out
this side, big like Hagga-talk,” he said, holding the device
to his mouth.
“That good, Diamond. Good-good,” he commended.
“What do you think of this, Ben?”
Rainsford squatted in front of his own Fuzzies, holding out a
hand. “So-pokko-aki, Flora,” he said, and the Fuzzy
handed him hers, first saying, “Keffu, Pappy Ben; do’
brek. “
“I won’t.” Rainsford looked at it curiously,
and handed it back. “That thing’s good. Little switch
on the grip, and it looks as though the frequency
transformer’s in the middle and they can talk into either
side of it.”
It would have to work that way; Fuzzies were ambidextrous. Gerd
had a theory about that. Fuzzies weren’t anatomists, mainly
because they didn’t produce fire and didn’t cut up the
small animals they killed for cooking, and only races who had
learned the location and importance of the heart fought with their
hearts turned away from the enemy. Homo sapiens terra’s
ancestors in the same culture-stage were probably ambidextrous too.
Like most of Gerd’s theories, it made sense.
“Who makes these things?” he asked.
“Stenson?”
“He made these, in his shop. The CZC electronics equipment
plant is going to manufacture them,” the girl said, adding:
“Advertisement.”
“You tell Mr. Grego to tell his electronics plant to get
cracking on them. The Native Affairs Commission wants a lot of
them.”
“You staying for dinner with us, Miss Glenn?”
Rainsford asked.
“Thank you, Governor, but I have to take Diamond
home.”
“I have to take Pierrot and Columbine home, too,”
Khadra said. “What are you doing this evening?”
“I have my homework to do. Fuzzy language
lessons.”
“Well, why can’t I help you with your
homework?” Khadra wanted to know. “I speak Fuzzy like a
native, myself.”
“Well, if it won’t be too much trouble . . . ”
she began.
Holloway laughed. “Who are you trying to kid, Miss Glenn?
Look in the mirror if you think teaching you Fuzzy would be too
much trouble for anybody Ahmed’s age. If I was about ten
years younger, I’d pull rank on him and leave him with the
Fuzzies.”
Pierrot and Columbine thought all this conversation boring and
irrelevant. They trundled the ball over in front of Khadra and
commanded: “Mek kikko!”
Khadra kicked the ball, lifting it from the ground and sending
it soaring away. The Fuzzies ran after it.
“Dr. Mallin says you were looking at the
sanatorium,” Sandra said.
“Yes. That’s going to be a good place. You know
about it?” he asked Khadra.
“Well, it’s a big place,” Khadra said.
“I’ve seen it from the air, of course. They only use
about ten percent of it, now.”
“Yes. We’re taking a building, intended for a mental
ward; about a half square mile of park around it, with a good
fence, so the Fuzzies won’t stray off and get lost. We could
put five-six hundred Fuzzies in there, and they wouldn’t be
crowded a bit. And it’ll be some time before we get that many
there at one time. I expect there’ll be about a hundred to a
hundred and fifty this time next week.”
“There were precisely eight hundred and seventy-two
applications in when the office closed this evening,” Khadra
said. “When are you going back, Jack?”
“Day after tomorrow. I want to make sure the work’s
started on the reception center, and I’m still trying to
locate some Extee-Three. I think a bunch of damn speculators have
cornered the market and are holding it for high prices.”
The Fuzzies had pushed the ball into some shrubbery and were
having trouble dislodging it. Sandra Glenn started off to help
them, Ben Rainsford walking along with her. Khadra said:
“That’ll probably be some of Hugo Ingermann’s
crowd, too.”
“Speaking about Ingermann; how are you making out about
Herckerd and Novaes?” he asked. “And the five
Fuzzies.”
“Jack, I swear. I’m beginning to think Herckerd and
Novaes and those Fuzzies all walked into a mass-energy converter
together. That’s how completely all of them have
vanished.”
“They hadn’t sold them before Ben’s telecast,
evening before last. After that, with the Adoption Bureau opening
all that talk about kidnapping and enslavement and so on, nobody
would buy a bootleg Fuzzy. So they couldn’t sell them, so
they got rid of them.” How? That was what bothered him. If
they’d used sense, they’d have flown them back to Beta
and turned them loose. He was afraid, though, that they’d
killed them. By this time everybody knew that live Fuzzies could
tell tales. “I think those Fuzzies are dead.”
“I don’t know. Eight hundred and seventy-two
applications, and a hundred and fifty Fuzzies at most,”
Khadra said. “There’ll be a market for bootleg Fuzzies.
Jack, you know what I think? I think those Fuzzies weren’t
brought in for sale. I think this gang—Herckerd and Novaes and
whoever else is in with them—are training those Fuzzies to help
catch other Fuzzies. Do you think a Fuzzy could be trained to do
that?”
“Sure. To all intents and purposes, that’s what our
Fuzzies are doing out at the camp. You know how Fuzzies think? Big
Ones are a Good Thing. Any Fuzzy who has a Big One doesn’t
need to worry about anything. All Fuzzies ought to have Big Ones.
That’s what Little Fuzzy has been telling the ones from the
woods, out at camp. Ahmed, I think you have something.”
“I thought of something else, too. If this gang can make a
deal with some tramp freighter captain, they could ship Fuzzies
off-planet and make terrific profits on it. You wait till the news
about the Fuzzies gets around. There’ll be a sale for them
everywhere—Terra, Odin, Freya, Marduk, Aton, Baldur, planets like
that. Anybody can bring a ship into orbit on this planet, now, if
he has his own landing-craft and doesn’t use the CZC
spaceport. In a month, word will have gotten to Gimli, that’s
the nearest planet, and in two more months a ship can get here from
there.”
“Spaceport. That could be why Ingermann’s been
harping on this nefarious CZC space terminal monopoly. If he had a
little spaceport of his own, now . . . ”
“Any kind of smuggling you can think of,” Khadra
said. “Hot sunstones. Narcotics. Or Fuzzies.”
Rainsford and Sandra Glenn were approaching; Sandra carried
Diamond, Pierrot and Columbine ran beside her, and Flora and Fauna
were trundling the ball ahead of them. He wanted to talk to
Rainsford about this. They needed more laws, to prohibit shipping
Fuzzies off-planet; nobody’d thought of that possibility
before. And talk to Grego; the Company controlled the only existing
egress from the planet.
LYNNE ANDREWS STRAIGHTENED and removed the binocular loop and
laid it down, blinking. The others, four men and two women in
lab-smocks, were pushing aside the spotlights and magnifiers and
cameras on their swinging arms and laying down instruments.
“That thing wouldn’t have lived thirty seconds, even
if it hadn’t been premature,” one man said. “And
it doesn’t add a thing to what we don’t know about
Fuzzy embryology.” He was an embryologist, human-type,
himself. “I have dissected over five hundred aborted fetuses
and I never saw one in worse shape than that.”
“It was so tiny,” one of the women said. She was an
obstetrician. “I can’t believe that that’s human
six-months equivalent.”
“Well, I can,” somebody else said. “I know
what a young Fuzzy looks like; I spent a lot of time with Jack
Holloway’s Baby Fuzzy, during the trial. And I don’t
suppose a fertilized Fuzzy ovum is much different from one of ours.
Between the two, there has to be a regular progressive development.
I say this one is two-thirds developed. Misdeveloped, I should
say.”
“Misdeveloped is correct, Doctor. Have you any idea why
this one misdeveloped as it did?”
“No, Doctor, I haven’t.”
“They come from northern Beta; that country’s never
been more than air-scouted. Does anybody know what radioactivity
conditions are, up there? I’ve seen pictures of worse things
than this from nuclear bomb radiations on Terra during and after
the Third and Fourth World Wars, at the beginning of the First
Federation.”
“The country hasn’t been explored, but it’s
been scanned. Any natural radioactivity strong enough to do that
would be detectable from Xerxes.”
“Oh, Nifflheim; that fetus could have been conceived on a
patch of pitchblende no bigger than this table . . . ”
“Well, couldn’t it be chemical? Something in the
pregnant female’s diet?” the other woman asked.
“The Thaladomide Babies!” somebody exclaimed.
“First Century, between the Second and Third World Wars. That
was due to chemicals taken orally by pregnant women.”
“All right; let’s get the biochemists in on this,
then.”
“Chris Hoenveld,” somebody else said.
“It’s not too late to call him now.”
FUZZIES DIDN’T HAVE Cocktail Hour; that was for the Big
Ones, to sit together and make Big One talk. Fuzzies just came
stringing in before dinner, more or less interested in food
depending on how the hunting had been, and after they ate they
romped and played until they were tired, and then sat in groups,
talking idly until they became sleepy.
In the woods, it had not been like that. When the sun began to
go to bed, they had found safe places, where the big animals
couldn’t get at them, and they had snuggled together and
slept, one staying awake all the time. But here the Big Ones kept
the animals away, and killed them with thunder-things when they
came too close, and it was safe. And the Big Ones had things that
made light even when the sky was dark, and there were places where
it was always bright as day. So here, there was more fun, because
there was less danger, and many new things to talk about. This was
the Hoksu-Mitto, the Wonderful Place.
And today, they were even happier, because today Pappy Jack had
come back.
Little Fuzzy got out his pipe, the new one Pappy Jack had
brought from the Big House Place, and stuffed it with tobacco, and
got out the little fire-maker. Some of the Fuzzies around him, who
had just come in from the woods, were frightened. They were not
used to fire; when fire happened in the woods, it was bad. That was
wild fire, though. The Big Ones had tamed fire, and if a person
were careful not to touch it or let it get loose, fire was nothing
to be afraid of.
“We go other places, and all have Big Ones,
tomorrow?” one asked. “Big Ones for us, like Pappy Jack
for you?”
“Not tomorrow. Not next day. Day after that.” He
held up three fingers.
“Then go in high-up-thing, to place like this. Big Ones
come, make talk. You like Big One, Big One like you, you go with
Big One, you live in Big One place.”
“Nice place, like this?”
“Nice place. Not like this. Different place.”
“Not want to go. Nice place here, much fun.”
“Then you not go. Pappy Jack not make you go. You want to
go, Pappy Jack find nice Big One for you, be good to
you.”
“Suppose not good. Suppose bad to us?”
“Then Pappy Jack come, Pappy Jorj, Unka Ahmed, Pappy
Ge’hd, Unka Panko; make much trouble for bad Big One, bang,
bang, bang!”