THEY WERE IN Jack’s living room, and it looked almost
exactly as it had the first night Gerd van Riebeek had seen it,
when he and Ruth and Juan Jimenez had come out to see the Fuzzies,
without the least idea that the validity of the Company’s
charter would be involved. All the new office equipment that had
cluttered it had gone, in the two weeks he and Ruth had been in
Mallorysport, and there was just the sturdy, comfortable furniture
Jack had made himself, and the damnthing and the bush-goblin and
veldbeest skins on the floor, and the gunrack with the tangle of
bedding under it.
There were just five of them, as there had been that other
evening, three months, or was it three ages, ago. Juan Jimenez and
Ben Rainsford were absent, in Mallorysport, but they had been
replaced by Pancho Ybarra, lounging in one of the deep chairs, and
Lynne Andrews, on the couch beside Ruth. Jack sat in the armchair
at his table-desk, trying to keep Baby Fuzzy, on his lap, from
climbing up to sit on his head. On the floor, the adult
Fuzzies—just Jack’s own family; this was their place, and the
others didn’t intrude here—were in the middle of the room,
playing with the things that had been brought back from
Mallorysport. The kind of playthings Fuzzies liked;
ingenuity-challenging toys for putting together shapes and
colors.
He was glad they weren’t playing with their molecule-model
kit. He’d seen enough molecule models in the last two weeks
to last him a lifetime.
“And there isn’t anything we can do about it, at
all?” Lynne was asking.
“No. There isn’t anything anybody can do. The people
in Mallorysport have given up trying. They’re still
investigating, but that’s only to be able to write a
scientifically accurate epitaph for the Fuzzy race.”
“Can’t they do something to reverse it?”
“It’s irreversible,” Ruth told her. “It
isn’t a matter of diet or environment or anything external.
It’s this hormone, NFMp, that they produce in their own
bodies, that inhibits normal development of the embryo. And we
can’t even correct it in individual cases by surgery;
excising the glands that secrete it would result in
sterility.”
“Well, it doesn’t always work,” Jack said,
lifting Baby Fuzzy from his shoulder. “It didn’t work
in Baby’s case.”
“It works in about nine cases out of ten, apparently.
We’ve had ten births so far; one normal and healthy, and the
rest premature and defective, stillbirths, or live births that die
within hours.”
“But there are exceptions, Baby here, and the one over at
the Fuzzy-shelter,” Lynne said. “Can’t we figure
out how the exceptions can be encouraged?”
“They’re working on that, in a half-hearted
way,” he told her. “Fuzzies have a menstrual cycle and
fertility rhythm, the same as Homo s. terra, and apparently the
NFMp output is also cyclic, and when the two are out of phase there
is a normal viable birth, and not otherwise. And this doesn’t
happen often enough, and any correction of it would have to be done
individually in the case of each female Fuzzy, and nobody even
knows how to find out how it could be done.”
“But, Gerd, the whole thing doesn’t make sense to
me,” Pancho objected. “I know, ‘sense’ is
nothing but ignorance rationalized, and this isn’t my
subject, but if this NFMp thing is a racial characteristic, it must
be hereditary, and a hereditary tendency to miscarriages, premature
and defective births, and infant mortality, now what kind of sense
does that make?”
“Well, on the face of it, not much. But we know nothing at
all about the racial history of the Fuzzies, and very little about
the history of this planet. Say that fifty thousand years ago there
were millions of Fuzzies, and say that fifty thousand years ago
environmental conditions were radically different. This NFMp
hormone was evolved to meet some environmental survival demand, and
something in the environment, some article of diet that has now
vanished, kept it from injuriously affecting the unborn Fuzzies.
Then the environment changed—glaciation, glacial recession,
sea-level fluctuation, I can think of dozens of reasons—and after
having adapted to original conditions, they couldn’t re-adapt
to the change. We’ve seen it on every planet we’ve ever
studied; hundreds of cases on Terra alone. The Fuzzies are just
caught in a genetic trap they can’t get out of, and we
can’t get them out of it.”
He looked at them; six happy little people, busily fitting
many-colored jointed blocks together to make a useless and
delightful pretty-thing. Happy in ignorance of their racial
doom.
“If we knew how many children the average female has in
her lifetime, and how many child bearers there are, we could figure
it out mathematically, I suppose. Ten little Fuzzies, nine little
Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies, and finally no little
Fuzzies.”
Little Fuzzy thought he was being talked about; he looked up
inquiringly.
“Well, they won’t all just vanish in the next
minute,” Jack said. “I expect this gang’ll attend
my funeral, and there’ll be Fuzzies as long as any of you
live, and longer. In a couple of million years, there won’t
be any more humans, I suppose. Let’s just be as good to the
Fuzzies we have as we can, and make them as happy as possible . . .
Yes, Baby; you can sit on Pappy’s head if you want to.”
THEY WERE IN Jack’s living room, and it looked almost
exactly as it had the first night Gerd van Riebeek had seen it,
when he and Ruth and Juan Jimenez had come out to see the Fuzzies,
without the least idea that the validity of the Company’s
charter would be involved. All the new office equipment that had
cluttered it had gone, in the two weeks he and Ruth had been in
Mallorysport, and there was just the sturdy, comfortable furniture
Jack had made himself, and the damnthing and the bush-goblin and
veldbeest skins on the floor, and the gunrack with the tangle of
bedding under it.
There were just five of them, as there had been that other
evening, three months, or was it three ages, ago. Juan Jimenez and
Ben Rainsford were absent, in Mallorysport, but they had been
replaced by Pancho Ybarra, lounging in one of the deep chairs, and
Lynne Andrews, on the couch beside Ruth. Jack sat in the armchair
at his table-desk, trying to keep Baby Fuzzy, on his lap, from
climbing up to sit on his head. On the floor, the adult
Fuzzies—just Jack’s own family; this was their place, and the
others didn’t intrude here—were in the middle of the room,
playing with the things that had been brought back from
Mallorysport. The kind of playthings Fuzzies liked;
ingenuity-challenging toys for putting together shapes and
colors.
He was glad they weren’t playing with their molecule-model
kit. He’d seen enough molecule models in the last two weeks
to last him a lifetime.
“And there isn’t anything we can do about it, at
all?” Lynne was asking.
“No. There isn’t anything anybody can do. The people
in Mallorysport have given up trying. They’re still
investigating, but that’s only to be able to write a
scientifically accurate epitaph for the Fuzzy race.”
“Can’t they do something to reverse it?”
“It’s irreversible,” Ruth told her. “It
isn’t a matter of diet or environment or anything external.
It’s this hormone, NFMp, that they produce in their own
bodies, that inhibits normal development of the embryo. And we
can’t even correct it in individual cases by surgery;
excising the glands that secrete it would result in
sterility.”
“Well, it doesn’t always work,” Jack said,
lifting Baby Fuzzy from his shoulder. “It didn’t work
in Baby’s case.”
“It works in about nine cases out of ten, apparently.
We’ve had ten births so far; one normal and healthy, and the
rest premature and defective, stillbirths, or live births that die
within hours.”
“But there are exceptions, Baby here, and the one over at
the Fuzzy-shelter,” Lynne said. “Can’t we figure
out how the exceptions can be encouraged?”
“They’re working on that, in a half-hearted
way,” he told her. “Fuzzies have a menstrual cycle and
fertility rhythm, the same as Homo s. terra, and apparently the
NFMp output is also cyclic, and when the two are out of phase there
is a normal viable birth, and not otherwise. And this doesn’t
happen often enough, and any correction of it would have to be done
individually in the case of each female Fuzzy, and nobody even
knows how to find out how it could be done.”
“But, Gerd, the whole thing doesn’t make sense to
me,” Pancho objected. “I know, ‘sense’ is
nothing but ignorance rationalized, and this isn’t my
subject, but if this NFMp thing is a racial characteristic, it must
be hereditary, and a hereditary tendency to miscarriages, premature
and defective births, and infant mortality, now what kind of sense
does that make?”
“Well, on the face of it, not much. But we know nothing at
all about the racial history of the Fuzzies, and very little about
the history of this planet. Say that fifty thousand years ago there
were millions of Fuzzies, and say that fifty thousand years ago
environmental conditions were radically different. This NFMp
hormone was evolved to meet some environmental survival demand, and
something in the environment, some article of diet that has now
vanished, kept it from injuriously affecting the unborn Fuzzies.
Then the environment changed—glaciation, glacial recession,
sea-level fluctuation, I can think of dozens of reasons—and after
having adapted to original conditions, they couldn’t re-adapt
to the change. We’ve seen it on every planet we’ve ever
studied; hundreds of cases on Terra alone. The Fuzzies are just
caught in a genetic trap they can’t get out of, and we
can’t get them out of it.”
He looked at them; six happy little people, busily fitting
many-colored jointed blocks together to make a useless and
delightful pretty-thing. Happy in ignorance of their racial
doom.
“If we knew how many children the average female has in
her lifetime, and how many child bearers there are, we could figure
it out mathematically, I suppose. Ten little Fuzzies, nine little
Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies, and finally no little
Fuzzies.”
Little Fuzzy thought he was being talked about; he looked up
inquiringly.
“Well, they won’t all just vanish in the next
minute,” Jack said. “I expect this gang’ll attend
my funeral, and there’ll be Fuzzies as long as any of you
live, and longer. In a couple of million years, there won’t
be any more humans, I suppose. Let’s just be as good to the
Fuzzies we have as we can, and make them as happy as possible . . .
Yes, Baby; you can sit on Pappy’s head if you want to.”