GERD VAN RIEBEEK crouched at the edge of the low cliff, slowly
twisting the selector-knob of a small screen in front of him. The
view changed; this time he was looking through the eye of a pickup
fifty feet below and five hundred yards to the left. Nothing in it
moved except a wind-stirred branch that jiggled a spray of ragged
leaves in the foreground. The only thing from the sound-outlet was
a soft drone of insects, and the tweet-twonk, tweet-twonk of a
presumably love-hungry banjo-bird. Then something just out of sight
scuffled softly among the dead leaves. He turned up the
sound-volume slightly.
“What do you think it is?”
Jack Holloway, beside him, rose to one knee, raising his
binoculars.
“I can’t see anything. Try the next one.”
Gerd twisted the knob again. This pickup was closer the ground;
it showed a vista of woods lit by shafts of sunlight falling
between trees. Now he could hear rustling and scampering, and with
ultrasonic earphone, Fuzzy voices:
“This way. Not far. Find hatta-zosa.”
Jack was looking down at the open slope below the cliff.
“If that’s what they call goofers, I see six of them
from here,” he said. “Probably a dozen more I
can’t see.” He watched, listening. “Here they
come, now.”
The Fuzzies had stopped talking and were making very little
noise; then they came into view; eight of them, in single file. The
weapons they carried were longer and heavier than the prawn killers
of the southern Fuzzies, knobbed instead of paddle-shaped, and
sharp-pointed on the other end. All of them had picked up stones
which they carried in their free hands. They all stopped, then
three of them backed away into the brush again. The other five
spread out in a skirmish line and waited. He shut off the screen
and crawled over beside Jack to peep over the edge of the
cliff.
There were seven goofers, now; rodent-looking things with dark
gray fur, a foot and a half long and six inches high at the
shoulder, all industriously tearing off bark and digging at the
roots of young trees. No wonder the woods were so thin, around
here; if there were any number of them it was a wonder there were
any trees at all. He picked up a camera and aimed it, getting some
shots of them.
“Something else figuring on getting some lunch
here,” Jack said, sweeping the sky with his glasses.
“Harpy, a couple of miles off. Ah, another one. We’ll
stick around a while; we may have to help our friends
out.”
The five Fuzzies at the edge of the brush stood waiting. The
goofers hadn’t heard them, and were still tearing and chewing
at the bark and digging at the roots. Then, having circled around,
the other three burst out suddenly, hurling their stones and
running forward with their clubs. One stone hit a goofer and
knocked it down; instantly, one of the Fuzzies ran forward and
brained it with his club. The other two rushed a second goofer,
felling and dispatching it with their clubs. The other fleds, into
the skirmish line on the other side. Two were hit with stones, and
finished off on the ground. The others got away. The eight Fuzzies
gathered in a clump, seemed to debate pursuit for a moment, and
then abandoned the idea. They had four goofers, a half-goofer
apiece. That was a good meal for them.
They dragged their game together and began tearing the carcasses
apart, using teeth and fingers, helping one another dismember them,
tearing off skin and pulling meat loose, using stones to break
bones. Gerd kept his camera going, filming the feast.
“Our gang’s got better table manners,” he
commented.
“Our gang have the knives we make for them. Beside, our
gang mostly eats zatku, and they break off the manibles and make
little lobster-picks out of them. They’re ahead of our gang
in one way, though. The Fuzzies south of the Divide don’t
hunt cooperatively,” Jack said.
The two dots in the sky were larger and closer; a third had
appeared.
“We better do something about that,” he advised,
reaching for his rifle.
“Yes.” Jack put down the binoculars and secured his
own rifle, checking it. “Let them eat as long as they can;
they’ll get a big surprise in a minute or so.”
The Fuzzies seemed to be aware of the presence of the harpies.
Maybe there were ultrasonic wing-vibration sounds they could hear;
he couldn’t be sure, even with the hearing aid. There was so
much ultrasonic noise in the woods, and he hadn’t learned,
yet, to distinguish. The Fuzzies were eating more rapidly. Finally,
one pointed and cried, “Gotza bizzo!” Gotza was another
native zoological name he had learned, though the Fuzzies at
Holloway’s Camp mostly said, “Hah’py,” now.
The diners grabbed their weapons and what meat they could carry and
dashed into the woods. One of the big pterodactyl-things was almost
overhead, another was within a few hundred yards, and the third was
coming in behind him. Jack sat up, put his left arm through his
rifle-sling, cuddled the butt to his cheek and propped his elbows
on his knees. The nearest harpy must have caught a movement in the
brush below; it banked and started to dive. Jack’s 9.7 magnum
bellowed. The harpy made a graceless flop-over in the air and
dropped. The one behind banked quickly and tried to gain altitude;
Gerd shot it. Jack’s rifle thundered again, and the third
harpy thrashed leathery wings and dropped.
From below, there was silence, and then a clamor of Fuzzy
voices:
“Harpies dead; what make do?”
“Thunder; maybe kill harpies! Maybe kill us
next!”
“Bad place, this! Bizzo, fazzu!”
Roughly, fazzu meant, “Scram.”
Jack was laughing. “Little Fuzzy took it a lot calmer the
first time he saw me shoot a harpy,” he said. “By that
time, though, he’d seen so much he wasn’t surprised at
anything.” He replaced the two fired rounds in the magazine
of his rifle. “Well, bizzo, fazzu; we won’t get any
more movies around here.”
They went around with the car, collecting the pickups they had
planted, then lifted out, turning south toward the horizon-line of
the Divide, the mountain range that stretched like the cross-stroke
of an H between the West Coast Range and the Eastern Cordilleras.
Evidently the Fuzzies never crossed it much; the language of the
northern Fuzzies, while comprehensible, differed distinguishably
from that spoken by the ones who had come in to the camp.
Apparently the news of the bumper crop of zatku hadn’t gotten
up here at all.
They talked about that, cruising south at five thousand feet,
with the foothills of the Divide sliding away under them and the
line of sheer mountains drawing closer. They’d have to
establish a permanent camp up here; contact these Fuzzies and make
friends with them, give them tools and weapons, learn about
them.
That was, if the Native Commission budget would permit. They
talked about that, too.
Then they argued about whether to stay up here for another few
days, or start back to the camp.
“I think we’d better go back,” Jack said,
somewhat regretfully. “We’ve been away for a week. I
want to see what’s going on, now.”
“They’d screen us if anything was wrong.”
“I know. I still think we’d better go back.
Let’s cross the Divide and camp somewhere on the other side,
and go on in tomorrow morning.”
“Hokay; bizzo. “ He swung the aircar left a trifle.
“We’ll follow that river to the source and cross over
there.”
The river came down through a wide valley, narrowing and growing
more rapid as they ascended it. Finally, they came to where it
emerged, a white mountain torrent, from the mouth of a canyon that
cut into the main range of the Divide. He took the car down to
within a few hundred feet and cut speed, entering the canyon. At
first, it was wide, with a sandy beach on either side of the stream
and trees back to the mountain face and up the steep talus at the
foot of it. Granite at the bottom, and then weathered sandstone,
and then, for a couple of hundred feet, gray, almost unweathered
flint.
“Gerd,” Jack said, at length, “take her up a
little, and get a little closer to the side of the canyon.”
He shifted in his seat, and got his binoculars. “I want a
close look at that.”
He wondered why, briefly. Then it struck him.
“You think that’s what I think it is?” he
asked.
“Yeah. Sunstone-flint.” Jack didn’t seem
particularly happy about it. “See that little bench, about
halfway up? Set her down there. I’m going to take a look at
that.”
The bench, little more than a wide ledge, was covered with thin
soil; a few small trees and sparse brush grew on it. A sheer face
of gray flint rose for a hundred feet above it. They had no
blasting explosives, but there was a microray scanner and a small
vibrohammer in the toolkit. They set the aircar down and went to
work, cracking and scanning flint, and after two hours they had a
couple of sunstones. They were nothing spectacular—an irregular
globe seven or eight millimeters in diameter and a small elipsoid
not quite twice as big. However, when Jack held them against the
hot bowl of his pipe, they began to glow.
“What are they worth, Jack?”
“I don’t know. Some of these freelance gem-buyers
would probably give as much as six or eight hundred for the big
one. When the Company still had the monopoly, they’d have
paid about four-fifty. Be worth twenty-five hundred on Terra. But
look around. This layer’s three hundred feet thick; it runs
all the way up the canyon, and probably for ten or fifteen miles
along the mountain on either side.” He knocked out his pipe,
blew through the stem, and pocketed it. “And it all belongs
to the Fuzzies.”
He started to laugh at that, and then remembered. This was, by
executive decree, the Fuzzy Reservation. The Fuzzies owned it and
everything on it, and the Government and the Native Commission were
only trustees. Then he began laughing again.
“But, Jack! The Fuzzies can’t mine sunstones, and
they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they
could.”
“No. But this is their country. They were born here, and
they have a right to live here, and beside that, we gave it to
them, didn’t we? It belongs to them, sunstones and
all.”
“But Jack . . . ” He looked up and down the canyon at
the gray flint on either side; as Jack said, it would extend for
miles back into the mountain on either side. Even allowing one
sunstone to ten cubic feet of flint, and even allowing for the
enormous labor of digging them out . . . “You mean, just let a
few Fuzzies scamper around over it and chase goofers, and not do
anything with it?” The idea horrified him. “Why, they
don’t even know this is the Fuzzy Reservation.”
“They know it’s their home. Gerd, this has happened
on other Class-IV planets we’ve moved in on. We give the
natives a reservation; we tell them it’ll be theirs forever,
Terran’s word of honor. Then we find something valuable on
it—gold on Loki, platinum on Thor, vanadium and wolfram on Hathor,
nitrates on Yggdrasil, uranium on Gimli. So the natives get shoved
off onto another reservation, where there isn’t anything
anybody wants, and finally they just get shoved off, period. We
aren’t going to do that here, to the Fuzzies.”
“What are you going to do? Try to keep it a secret?”
he asked. “If that’s what you want, we’ll just
throw those two sunstones in the river and forget about it,”
he agreed. “But how long do you think it’ll be before
somebody else finds out about it?”
“We can keep other people out of here. That’s what
the Fuzzy Reservation’s for, isn’t it?”
“We need people to keep people out; Paine’s Marines,
George Lunt’s Protection Force. I think we can trust George.
I wouldn’t know about Paine. Anybody below them I
wouldn’t trust at all. Sooner or later somebody’ll fly
up this canyon and see this, and their it’ll be out. And you
know what’ll happen then.” He thought for a moment.
“Are you going to tell Ben Rainsford?”
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Gerd.” Jack
fumbled his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket. “I suppose
I’ll have to. Have to give him these stones; they’re
Government property. Well, bizzo; we’ll go straight to
camp.” He looked up at the sun. “Make it in about three
hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to Mallorysport.”
“I’M AFRAID To believe it, Dr. Jimenez,” Ernst
Mallin said. “It would be so wonderful if it were true. Can
you be certain?”
“We’re all certain, now, that this hormone, NFMp, is
what prevents normal embryonic development,” Juan Jimenez, in
the screen, replied. “We’re certain, now, that
hokfusine combines destructively with NFMp; even Chris Hoenveld,
he’s seen it happen in a test tube, and he has to believe it
whether he wants to or not. It appears that hokfusine also has an
inhibitory effect on the glands secreting NFMp. But to be certain,
we’ll have to wait four more months, until the infants
conceived after the mothers began eating Extee-Three are born.
Ideally, we should wait until the females we have begun giving
daily doses of pure hokfusine conceive and bear children. But if
I’m not certain now, I’m confident.”
“What put your people onto this, Dr. Jimenez?”
“A hunch,” the younger man smiled. “A hunch by
the girl in Dr. Hoenveld’s lab, Charlotte Tresca.” The
smile became an audible laugh. “Hoenveld is simply furious
about it. No sound theoretical basis, just a lot of unsupported
surmises. You know how he talks. He did have to grant her results;
they’ve been duplicated. But he rejects her whole line of
reasoning.”
He would; Jan Christiaan Hoenveld’s mind plodded
obstinately along, step by step, from A to B to C to D; it
wasn’t fair for somebody suddenly to leap to W or X and run
from there to Z. For his own part, Ernst Mallin respected hunches;
he knew how much mental activity went on below the level of
consciousness and with what seemingly irrationality fragments of it
rose to the conscious mind. His only regret was that he had so few
good hunches, himself.
“Well, what was her reasoning?” he asked. “Or
was it pure intuition?”
“Well, she just got the idea that hokfusine would
neutralize the NFMp hormone, and worked from there,” Jimenez
said. “As she rationalizes it, all Fuzzies have a craving for
land-prawn meat, without exception. This is a racial constant with
them. Right?”
“Yes, as far as we can tell. I hate to use the word
loosely, but I’d say, instinctual.”
“And all Fuzzies, for which read, all studied individuals,
have a craving for Extee-Three. Once they taste the stuff, they eat
it at every opportunity. This isn’t a learned taste, like our
taste for, say, coffee or tobacco or alcohol; every human has to
learn to like all three. The Fuzzy’s response to Extee-Three
is immediate and automatic. Still with it, Doctor?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve seen quite a few Fuzzies taking their
first taste of Extee-Three. It’s just what you call it; a
physical response.” He gave that a moment’s thought,
adding: “If it’s an instinct, it’s the result of
natural selection.”
“Yes. She reasoned that a taste for the titanium-molecule
compound present both in land-prawns and Extee-Three contributed to
racial survival; that Fuzzies lacking it died out, and Fuzzies
having it to a pronounced degree survived and transmitted it. So
she went to work over Hoenveld’s vehement objections that she
was wasting her time—and showed the effect of hokfusine on the NFMp
hormone. Now, the physiologists who had that theory about cyclic
production of NFMp getting out of phase with the menstrual cycle
and permitting an occasional viable birth are finding that the NFMp
fluctuations aren’t cyclic at all but related to hokfusine
consumption.”
“Well, you have a fine circumstantial case there.
Everything seems to fit together with everything else. As you say,
you’ll have to wait about a year before you can really prove
a one-to-one relationship between hokfusine and viable births, but
if I were inclined to gamble I’d risk a small wager on
it.”
Jimenez grinned. “I have, already, with Dr. Hoenveld. I
think it’s money in the bank now.”
BENNETT RAINSFORD WARMED the two sunstones between his palms,
then rolled them, like a pair of dice, on the desk in front of him.
He had been so happy, ever since Victor Grego had called him to
tell him what had been discovered at Science Center about the
hokfusine and the NFMp hormone. They were on the right track, he
was sure of it, and in a few years all the Fuzzy children would be
born alive and normal.
And then, just after lunch, Jack Holloway had come dropping out
of the sky from Beta Continent with this.
“You can’t keep it a secret, Jack. You can’t
keep any discovery a secret, because anything anybody discovers,
somebody else can, and will, discover later. Look how the power
interests tried to suppress the discovery of direct conversion of
nuclear energy to electric current, back in the First Century. Look
how they tried to suppress the Abbot Drive.”
“This is different,” Jack Holloway argued,
bullheadedly. “This isn’t a scientific principle
anybody, anywhere, can discover. This is something at a certain
place, and if we can keep people away from it . . . ”
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Then, realizing
that Latin was terra incognita to Jack, he translated:
“Who’ll watch the watchmen?”
Jack nodded. “That’s what Gerd said. A thing like
that would be an awful strain on anybody’s moral fiber. And
you know what’ll happen as soon as it gets out.
“There’d be pressure on me to open the Fuzzy
Reservation. Hugo Ingermann’s John Doe and Richard Roe and
all. I suppose I could stall it off till a legislature was elected,
but after that . . . ”
“I wasn’t talking about political pressure. I was
talking about a sunstone rush. There’d be twenty thousand men
stampeding up there, with everything they could put onto
contragravity. And everything they could find to shoot with, too.
And the longer it’s stalled off, the worse it’ll be,
because in six months the off-planet immigrants’ll start
coming in.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He should have; he’d been
on other frontier planets where rich deposits of mineral wealth had
been discovered. And there was nothing in the Galaxy that
concentrated more value in less bulk than sunstones.
“Ben, I’ve been thinking,” Jack continued.
“I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only idea I
have. Those sunstones are in a little section about fifty miles
square on the north side of the Divide. Suppose the Government
makes that a sort of reservation-inside-the-reservation, and
operates the sunstone mines. You do it before anything leaks
out—announce that the Government has discovered sunstones on the
Fuzzy Reservation, that the Government claims all the sunstones on
Fuzzy land in the name of the Fuzzies, and that the Government is
operating all sunstone mines, and it’ll head off the rush, or
the worst of it. And the Fuzzies’ll get out of that immediate
area; they won’t stay around where there’s underground
blasting. And the money the Government gets out of it can go to the
Fuzzies in protection and welfare and medical aid and shoppo-diggo
and shodda-bag and Estee-fee.”
“Have you any idea what it would cost to start an
operation like that, before we could even begin getting out
sunstones in paying quantities?”
“Yes. I’ve been digging sunstones as long as anybody
knew there were sunstones. But this is a good thing, Ben, and if
you have a good thing you can always finance it.”
“It would protect the Fuzzies’ rights, and
they’d benefit enormously. But the initial expense . . . ”
“Well, lease the mineral rights to somebody who could
finance it. The Government would get a royalty, the Fuzzies would
benefit, the Reservation would be kept intact.”
“But who? Who would be able to lease it?”
He knew, even as he asked the question. The Charterless
Zarathustra Company; they could operate that mine. Why, that mine
would be something on the odd-jobs level, compared to what
they’d done on the Big Blackwater Swamp. Lease them the
entire mineral rights for the Reservation; that would keep
everybody else out.
But it would put the Company back where they’d been before
the Pendarvis Decisions; it would give them back their sunstone
monopoly; it would . . . Why, it was unthinkable!
Unthinkable, hell. He was thinking about it now, wasn’t
he?
VICTOR GREGO CRUSHED out his cigarette and leaned back in his
relaxer-chair, closing his eyes. From the Fuzzy-room, he could hear
muted voices, and the frequent popping of shots. Diamond was
enjoying a screen-play. He was very good about keeping the volume
turned down, so as not to bother Pappy Vic, but he’d get some
weird ideas about life among the Hagga from some of those shows.
Well, the good Hagga always licked the bad Hagga in the end, that
was one thing.
He went back to thinking about bad Hagga, four of them in
particular. Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan, Raul Laporte, Leo
Thaxter.
Mallorysport was full of bad Hagga, on the lower echelons, but
those four were the General Staff. Bowlby was the entertainment
business. Beside the telecast show which Diamond was watching at
the moment, that included prize-fights, nightclubs, prostitution
and, without doubt, dope. Maybe he’d like to get Fuzzies as
attractions at his night-spots, and through that part of his
business he could make contacts with well to do people who wanted
Fuzzies, couldn’t adopt them, and would pay fancy prices for
them. If there really were a black market, he’d be in it.
Spike Hennan was gambling; crap-games, numbers racket,
bookmaking. On sport-betting, his lines and Bowlby’s would
cross with mutual profit. Laporte was racketeering, extortion,
plain old-fashioned country-style crime. And stolen goods, of
course, and, while there’d been money in it, illicit
gem-buying.
Leo Thaxter was the biggest, and the most respectably fronted,
of the four. L. Thaxter, Loan Broker & Private Financier. He
loaned money publicly at a righteously legal seven percent; he also
loaned, at much higher rates, to all the shylocks in town, who, in
turn, loaned it at six-for-five to people who could not borrow
elsewhere, including suckers who went broke in Spike Hennan’s
crap-games, and he used Raul Laporte’s hoodlums to do his
collecting.
And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo
Ingermann, Mallorysport’s unconvicted underworld
generalissimo.
Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie
Coombes’s investigators had established that all four of
them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy owners behind whom
Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had unwisely sold
eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now
dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it
was pretty well established that those four had been the John Doe,
Richard Roe, et alii, who had been represented in court by
Ingermann just after the Pendarvis Decisions.
Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the
melodrama was evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another
cigarette, and began going over what he knew about
Ingermann’s four chief henchmen. Thaxter; he’d come to
Zarathustra a few years before Ingermann. Small-time racketeer, at
first, and then he’d tried to organize labor unions, but labor
unions organized by outsiders had been frowned upon by the company,
and he’d been shown the wisdom of stopping that. Then
he’d organized an independent planters’ marketing
cooperative, and from that he’d gotten into shylocking.
There’d been some woman with him, at first, wife or
reasonable facsimile. Maybe she was still around; have Coombes look
into that. She might be willing to talk.
Diamond strolled in from the Fuzzy-room.
“Pappy Vic! Make talk with Diamond, plis. “
LIEUTENANT FITZ MORTLAKE, acting-in-charge of company detective
bureau for the 1800-2400 shift, yawned. Twenty more minutes; less
than that if Bert Eggers got in early to relieve him. He riffled
through the stack of complaint sheet copies on the desk and put a
paperweight on them. In the squadroom outside the mechanical noises
of card-machines and teleprinters and the occasional howl of a
sixty-speed audiovisual transmission were being replaced by human
sounds, voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs, as the
midnight-to-six shift began filtering in. He was wondering whether
to go home and read till he became sleepy, or drift around the bars
to see if he could pick up a girl, when Bert Eggers pushed past a
couple of sergeants at the door and entered.
“Hi, Fitz; how’s it going?”
“Oh, quiet. We found out where Jayser hid that stuff; we
have all of it, now. And Millman and Nogahara caught those kids who
were stealing engine parts out of Warehouse Ten. We have them in
detention; we haven’t questioned them yet.”
“We’ll take care of that. They work for the
Company?”
“Two of them do. The third is just a kid, seventeen.
Juvenile Court can have him. We think they were selling the stuff
to Honest Hymie.”
“Uhuh. I’ll suspect anybody they all call Honest
Anybody or anything,” Eggers said, sitting down as he vacated
the chair.
He took off his coat, pulled his shoulder holster and pistol
from the bottom drawer and put it on, resuming the coat. He
gathered up his lighter and tobacco pouch, and then discovered that
his pipe was missing, and hunted the desk-top for it, unearthing it
from under some teleprinted photographs.
“What are these?” Eggers asked, looking at them.
“Herckerd and Novaes, false alarm number ’steen
thousand. A couple of woods-tramps who turned up on
Epsilon.”
Eggers made a sour face. “Those damn Fuzzies have made
more work for us,” he began. “And now, my kids are
after me to get them one. So’s my wife. You know what? Fuzzies are a status-symbol, now. If you
don’t have a Fuzzy, you might as well move to Junktown with
the rest of the bums.”
“I don’t have a Fuzzy, and I haven’t moved to
Junktown yet.”
“You don’t have kids in high school.”
“No, thank God!”
“Bet he doesn’t have finance-company trouble,
either,” one of the sergeants in the doorway said.
Bert was going to make some retort to that. Before he could,
another voice spoke up:
“Yeeek! “
“Speak of the devil,” somebody said.
“You have that Fuzzy in here, Fitz?” Eggers
demanded. “Where the hell . . . ?”
“There he is,” one of the men in the doorway said,
pointing.
The Fuzzy, who had been behind the desk-chair, came out into
view. He pulled the bottom of Eggers’s coat, yeeking again.
He looked like a hunchback Fuzzy.
“What’s he got on his back?” Eggers reached
down. “Whatta you got there, anyhow?”
It was a little rucksack, with leather shoulder-straps and a
drawstring top. As soon as Eggers displayed an interest in it, the
Fuzzy climbed out of it as though glad to be rid of it. Mortlake
picked it up and put it on the desk; over ten pounds, must weigh
almost as much as the Fuzzy. Eggers opened the drawstrings and put
his hand into it.
“It’s full of gravel,” he said, and brought
out a handful.
The gravel was glowing faintly. Eggers let go of it as though it
were as hot as it looked.
“Holy God!” It was the first time he ever heard
anybody screaming in baritone. “The damn things are
sunstones!”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK crouched at the edge of the low cliff, slowly
twisting the selector-knob of a small screen in front of him. The
view changed; this time he was looking through the eye of a pickup
fifty feet below and five hundred yards to the left. Nothing in it
moved except a wind-stirred branch that jiggled a spray of ragged
leaves in the foreground. The only thing from the sound-outlet was
a soft drone of insects, and the tweet-twonk, tweet-twonk of a
presumably love-hungry banjo-bird. Then something just out of sight
scuffled softly among the dead leaves. He turned up the
sound-volume slightly.
“What do you think it is?”
Jack Holloway, beside him, rose to one knee, raising his
binoculars.
“I can’t see anything. Try the next one.”
Gerd twisted the knob again. This pickup was closer the ground;
it showed a vista of woods lit by shafts of sunlight falling
between trees. Now he could hear rustling and scampering, and with
ultrasonic earphone, Fuzzy voices:
“This way. Not far. Find hatta-zosa.”
Jack was looking down at the open slope below the cliff.
“If that’s what they call goofers, I see six of them
from here,” he said. “Probably a dozen more I
can’t see.” He watched, listening. “Here they
come, now.”
The Fuzzies had stopped talking and were making very little
noise; then they came into view; eight of them, in single file. The
weapons they carried were longer and heavier than the prawn killers
of the southern Fuzzies, knobbed instead of paddle-shaped, and
sharp-pointed on the other end. All of them had picked up stones
which they carried in their free hands. They all stopped, then
three of them backed away into the brush again. The other five
spread out in a skirmish line and waited. He shut off the screen
and crawled over beside Jack to peep over the edge of the
cliff.
There were seven goofers, now; rodent-looking things with dark
gray fur, a foot and a half long and six inches high at the
shoulder, all industriously tearing off bark and digging at the
roots of young trees. No wonder the woods were so thin, around
here; if there were any number of them it was a wonder there were
any trees at all. He picked up a camera and aimed it, getting some
shots of them.
“Something else figuring on getting some lunch
here,” Jack said, sweeping the sky with his glasses.
“Harpy, a couple of miles off. Ah, another one. We’ll
stick around a while; we may have to help our friends
out.”
The five Fuzzies at the edge of the brush stood waiting. The
goofers hadn’t heard them, and were still tearing and chewing
at the bark and digging at the roots. Then, having circled around,
the other three burst out suddenly, hurling their stones and
running forward with their clubs. One stone hit a goofer and
knocked it down; instantly, one of the Fuzzies ran forward and
brained it with his club. The other two rushed a second goofer,
felling and dispatching it with their clubs. The other fleds, into
the skirmish line on the other side. Two were hit with stones, and
finished off on the ground. The others got away. The eight Fuzzies
gathered in a clump, seemed to debate pursuit for a moment, and
then abandoned the idea. They had four goofers, a half-goofer
apiece. That was a good meal for them.
They dragged their game together and began tearing the carcasses
apart, using teeth and fingers, helping one another dismember them,
tearing off skin and pulling meat loose, using stones to break
bones. Gerd kept his camera going, filming the feast.
“Our gang’s got better table manners,” he
commented.
“Our gang have the knives we make for them. Beside, our
gang mostly eats zatku, and they break off the manibles and make
little lobster-picks out of them. They’re ahead of our gang
in one way, though. The Fuzzies south of the Divide don’t
hunt cooperatively,” Jack said.
The two dots in the sky were larger and closer; a third had
appeared.
“We better do something about that,” he advised,
reaching for his rifle.
“Yes.” Jack put down the binoculars and secured his
own rifle, checking it. “Let them eat as long as they can;
they’ll get a big surprise in a minute or so.”
The Fuzzies seemed to be aware of the presence of the harpies.
Maybe there were ultrasonic wing-vibration sounds they could hear;
he couldn’t be sure, even with the hearing aid. There was so
much ultrasonic noise in the woods, and he hadn’t learned,
yet, to distinguish. The Fuzzies were eating more rapidly. Finally,
one pointed and cried, “Gotza bizzo!” Gotza was another
native zoological name he had learned, though the Fuzzies at
Holloway’s Camp mostly said, “Hah’py,” now.
The diners grabbed their weapons and what meat they could carry and
dashed into the woods. One of the big pterodactyl-things was almost
overhead, another was within a few hundred yards, and the third was
coming in behind him. Jack sat up, put his left arm through his
rifle-sling, cuddled the butt to his cheek and propped his elbows
on his knees. The nearest harpy must have caught a movement in the
brush below; it banked and started to dive. Jack’s 9.7 magnum
bellowed. The harpy made a graceless flop-over in the air and
dropped. The one behind banked quickly and tried to gain altitude;
Gerd shot it. Jack’s rifle thundered again, and the third
harpy thrashed leathery wings and dropped.
From below, there was silence, and then a clamor of Fuzzy
voices:
“Harpies dead; what make do?”
“Thunder; maybe kill harpies! Maybe kill us
next!”
“Bad place, this! Bizzo, fazzu!”
Roughly, fazzu meant, “Scram.”
Jack was laughing. “Little Fuzzy took it a lot calmer the
first time he saw me shoot a harpy,” he said. “By that
time, though, he’d seen so much he wasn’t surprised at
anything.” He replaced the two fired rounds in the magazine
of his rifle. “Well, bizzo, fazzu; we won’t get any
more movies around here.”
They went around with the car, collecting the pickups they had
planted, then lifted out, turning south toward the horizon-line of
the Divide, the mountain range that stretched like the cross-stroke
of an H between the West Coast Range and the Eastern Cordilleras.
Evidently the Fuzzies never crossed it much; the language of the
northern Fuzzies, while comprehensible, differed distinguishably
from that spoken by the ones who had come in to the camp.
Apparently the news of the bumper crop of zatku hadn’t gotten
up here at all.
They talked about that, cruising south at five thousand feet,
with the foothills of the Divide sliding away under them and the
line of sheer mountains drawing closer. They’d have to
establish a permanent camp up here; contact these Fuzzies and make
friends with them, give them tools and weapons, learn about
them.
That was, if the Native Commission budget would permit. They
talked about that, too.
Then they argued about whether to stay up here for another few
days, or start back to the camp.
“I think we’d better go back,” Jack said,
somewhat regretfully. “We’ve been away for a week. I
want to see what’s going on, now.”
“They’d screen us if anything was wrong.”
“I know. I still think we’d better go back.
Let’s cross the Divide and camp somewhere on the other side,
and go on in tomorrow morning.”
“Hokay; bizzo. “ He swung the aircar left a trifle.
“We’ll follow that river to the source and cross over
there.”
The river came down through a wide valley, narrowing and growing
more rapid as they ascended it. Finally, they came to where it
emerged, a white mountain torrent, from the mouth of a canyon that
cut into the main range of the Divide. He took the car down to
within a few hundred feet and cut speed, entering the canyon. At
first, it was wide, with a sandy beach on either side of the stream
and trees back to the mountain face and up the steep talus at the
foot of it. Granite at the bottom, and then weathered sandstone,
and then, for a couple of hundred feet, gray, almost unweathered
flint.
“Gerd,” Jack said, at length, “take her up a
little, and get a little closer to the side of the canyon.”
He shifted in his seat, and got his binoculars. “I want a
close look at that.”
He wondered why, briefly. Then it struck him.
“You think that’s what I think it is?” he
asked.
“Yeah. Sunstone-flint.” Jack didn’t seem
particularly happy about it. “See that little bench, about
halfway up? Set her down there. I’m going to take a look at
that.”
The bench, little more than a wide ledge, was covered with thin
soil; a few small trees and sparse brush grew on it. A sheer face
of gray flint rose for a hundred feet above it. They had no
blasting explosives, but there was a microray scanner and a small
vibrohammer in the toolkit. They set the aircar down and went to
work, cracking and scanning flint, and after two hours they had a
couple of sunstones. They were nothing spectacular—an irregular
globe seven or eight millimeters in diameter and a small elipsoid
not quite twice as big. However, when Jack held them against the
hot bowl of his pipe, they began to glow.
“What are they worth, Jack?”
“I don’t know. Some of these freelance gem-buyers
would probably give as much as six or eight hundred for the big
one. When the Company still had the monopoly, they’d have
paid about four-fifty. Be worth twenty-five hundred on Terra. But
look around. This layer’s three hundred feet thick; it runs
all the way up the canyon, and probably for ten or fifteen miles
along the mountain on either side.” He knocked out his pipe,
blew through the stem, and pocketed it. “And it all belongs
to the Fuzzies.”
He started to laugh at that, and then remembered. This was, by
executive decree, the Fuzzy Reservation. The Fuzzies owned it and
everything on it, and the Government and the Native Commission were
only trustees. Then he began laughing again.
“But, Jack! The Fuzzies can’t mine sunstones, and
they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they
could.”
“No. But this is their country. They were born here, and
they have a right to live here, and beside that, we gave it to
them, didn’t we? It belongs to them, sunstones and
all.”
“But Jack . . . ” He looked up and down the canyon at
the gray flint on either side; as Jack said, it would extend for
miles back into the mountain on either side. Even allowing one
sunstone to ten cubic feet of flint, and even allowing for the
enormous labor of digging them out . . . “You mean, just let a
few Fuzzies scamper around over it and chase goofers, and not do
anything with it?” The idea horrified him. “Why, they
don’t even know this is the Fuzzy Reservation.”
“They know it’s their home. Gerd, this has happened
on other Class-IV planets we’ve moved in on. We give the
natives a reservation; we tell them it’ll be theirs forever,
Terran’s word of honor. Then we find something valuable on
it—gold on Loki, platinum on Thor, vanadium and wolfram on Hathor,
nitrates on Yggdrasil, uranium on Gimli. So the natives get shoved
off onto another reservation, where there isn’t anything
anybody wants, and finally they just get shoved off, period. We
aren’t going to do that here, to the Fuzzies.”
“What are you going to do? Try to keep it a secret?”
he asked. “If that’s what you want, we’ll just
throw those two sunstones in the river and forget about it,”
he agreed. “But how long do you think it’ll be before
somebody else finds out about it?”
“We can keep other people out of here. That’s what
the Fuzzy Reservation’s for, isn’t it?”
“We need people to keep people out; Paine’s Marines,
George Lunt’s Protection Force. I think we can trust George.
I wouldn’t know about Paine. Anybody below them I
wouldn’t trust at all. Sooner or later somebody’ll fly
up this canyon and see this, and their it’ll be out. And you
know what’ll happen then.” He thought for a moment.
“Are you going to tell Ben Rainsford?”
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Gerd.” Jack
fumbled his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket. “I suppose
I’ll have to. Have to give him these stones; they’re
Government property. Well, bizzo; we’ll go straight to
camp.” He looked up at the sun. “Make it in about three
hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to Mallorysport.”
“I’M AFRAID To believe it, Dr. Jimenez,” Ernst
Mallin said. “It would be so wonderful if it were true. Can
you be certain?”
“We’re all certain, now, that this hormone, NFMp, is
what prevents normal embryonic development,” Juan Jimenez, in
the screen, replied. “We’re certain, now, that
hokfusine combines destructively with NFMp; even Chris Hoenveld,
he’s seen it happen in a test tube, and he has to believe it
whether he wants to or not. It appears that hokfusine also has an
inhibitory effect on the glands secreting NFMp. But to be certain,
we’ll have to wait four more months, until the infants
conceived after the mothers began eating Extee-Three are born.
Ideally, we should wait until the females we have begun giving
daily doses of pure hokfusine conceive and bear children. But if
I’m not certain now, I’m confident.”
“What put your people onto this, Dr. Jimenez?”
“A hunch,” the younger man smiled. “A hunch by
the girl in Dr. Hoenveld’s lab, Charlotte Tresca.” The
smile became an audible laugh. “Hoenveld is simply furious
about it. No sound theoretical basis, just a lot of unsupported
surmises. You know how he talks. He did have to grant her results;
they’ve been duplicated. But he rejects her whole line of
reasoning.”
He would; Jan Christiaan Hoenveld’s mind plodded
obstinately along, step by step, from A to B to C to D; it
wasn’t fair for somebody suddenly to leap to W or X and run
from there to Z. For his own part, Ernst Mallin respected hunches;
he knew how much mental activity went on below the level of
consciousness and with what seemingly irrationality fragments of it
rose to the conscious mind. His only regret was that he had so few
good hunches, himself.
“Well, what was her reasoning?” he asked. “Or
was it pure intuition?”
“Well, she just got the idea that hokfusine would
neutralize the NFMp hormone, and worked from there,” Jimenez
said. “As she rationalizes it, all Fuzzies have a craving for
land-prawn meat, without exception. This is a racial constant with
them. Right?”
“Yes, as far as we can tell. I hate to use the word
loosely, but I’d say, instinctual.”
“And all Fuzzies, for which read, all studied individuals,
have a craving for Extee-Three. Once they taste the stuff, they eat
it at every opportunity. This isn’t a learned taste, like our
taste for, say, coffee or tobacco or alcohol; every human has to
learn to like all three. The Fuzzy’s response to Extee-Three
is immediate and automatic. Still with it, Doctor?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve seen quite a few Fuzzies taking their
first taste of Extee-Three. It’s just what you call it; a
physical response.” He gave that a moment’s thought,
adding: “If it’s an instinct, it’s the result of
natural selection.”
“Yes. She reasoned that a taste for the titanium-molecule
compound present both in land-prawns and Extee-Three contributed to
racial survival; that Fuzzies lacking it died out, and Fuzzies
having it to a pronounced degree survived and transmitted it. So
she went to work over Hoenveld’s vehement objections that she
was wasting her time—and showed the effect of hokfusine on the NFMp
hormone. Now, the physiologists who had that theory about cyclic
production of NFMp getting out of phase with the menstrual cycle
and permitting an occasional viable birth are finding that the NFMp
fluctuations aren’t cyclic at all but related to hokfusine
consumption.”
“Well, you have a fine circumstantial case there.
Everything seems to fit together with everything else. As you say,
you’ll have to wait about a year before you can really prove
a one-to-one relationship between hokfusine and viable births, but
if I were inclined to gamble I’d risk a small wager on
it.”
Jimenez grinned. “I have, already, with Dr. Hoenveld. I
think it’s money in the bank now.”
BENNETT RAINSFORD WARMED the two sunstones between his palms,
then rolled them, like a pair of dice, on the desk in front of him.
He had been so happy, ever since Victor Grego had called him to
tell him what had been discovered at Science Center about the
hokfusine and the NFMp hormone. They were on the right track, he
was sure of it, and in a few years all the Fuzzy children would be
born alive and normal.
And then, just after lunch, Jack Holloway had come dropping out
of the sky from Beta Continent with this.
“You can’t keep it a secret, Jack. You can’t
keep any discovery a secret, because anything anybody discovers,
somebody else can, and will, discover later. Look how the power
interests tried to suppress the discovery of direct conversion of
nuclear energy to electric current, back in the First Century. Look
how they tried to suppress the Abbot Drive.”
“This is different,” Jack Holloway argued,
bullheadedly. “This isn’t a scientific principle
anybody, anywhere, can discover. This is something at a certain
place, and if we can keep people away from it . . . ”
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Then, realizing
that Latin was terra incognita to Jack, he translated:
“Who’ll watch the watchmen?”
Jack nodded. “That’s what Gerd said. A thing like
that would be an awful strain on anybody’s moral fiber. And
you know what’ll happen as soon as it gets out.
“There’d be pressure on me to open the Fuzzy
Reservation. Hugo Ingermann’s John Doe and Richard Roe and
all. I suppose I could stall it off till a legislature was elected,
but after that . . . ”
“I wasn’t talking about political pressure. I was
talking about a sunstone rush. There’d be twenty thousand men
stampeding up there, with everything they could put onto
contragravity. And everything they could find to shoot with, too.
And the longer it’s stalled off, the worse it’ll be,
because in six months the off-planet immigrants’ll start
coming in.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He should have; he’d been
on other frontier planets where rich deposits of mineral wealth had
been discovered. And there was nothing in the Galaxy that
concentrated more value in less bulk than sunstones.
“Ben, I’ve been thinking,” Jack continued.
“I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only idea I
have. Those sunstones are in a little section about fifty miles
square on the north side of the Divide. Suppose the Government
makes that a sort of reservation-inside-the-reservation, and
operates the sunstone mines. You do it before anything leaks
out—announce that the Government has discovered sunstones on the
Fuzzy Reservation, that the Government claims all the sunstones on
Fuzzy land in the name of the Fuzzies, and that the Government is
operating all sunstone mines, and it’ll head off the rush, or
the worst of it. And the Fuzzies’ll get out of that immediate
area; they won’t stay around where there’s underground
blasting. And the money the Government gets out of it can go to the
Fuzzies in protection and welfare and medical aid and shoppo-diggo
and shodda-bag and Estee-fee.”
“Have you any idea what it would cost to start an
operation like that, before we could even begin getting out
sunstones in paying quantities?”
“Yes. I’ve been digging sunstones as long as anybody
knew there were sunstones. But this is a good thing, Ben, and if
you have a good thing you can always finance it.”
“It would protect the Fuzzies’ rights, and
they’d benefit enormously. But the initial expense . . . ”
“Well, lease the mineral rights to somebody who could
finance it. The Government would get a royalty, the Fuzzies would
benefit, the Reservation would be kept intact.”
“But who? Who would be able to lease it?”
He knew, even as he asked the question. The Charterless
Zarathustra Company; they could operate that mine. Why, that mine
would be something on the odd-jobs level, compared to what
they’d done on the Big Blackwater Swamp. Lease them the
entire mineral rights for the Reservation; that would keep
everybody else out.
But it would put the Company back where they’d been before
the Pendarvis Decisions; it would give them back their sunstone
monopoly; it would . . . Why, it was unthinkable!
Unthinkable, hell. He was thinking about it now, wasn’t
he?
VICTOR GREGO CRUSHED out his cigarette and leaned back in his
relaxer-chair, closing his eyes. From the Fuzzy-room, he could hear
muted voices, and the frequent popping of shots. Diamond was
enjoying a screen-play. He was very good about keeping the volume
turned down, so as not to bother Pappy Vic, but he’d get some
weird ideas about life among the Hagga from some of those shows.
Well, the good Hagga always licked the bad Hagga in the end, that
was one thing.
He went back to thinking about bad Hagga, four of them in
particular. Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan, Raul Laporte, Leo
Thaxter.
Mallorysport was full of bad Hagga, on the lower echelons, but
those four were the General Staff. Bowlby was the entertainment
business. Beside the telecast show which Diamond was watching at
the moment, that included prize-fights, nightclubs, prostitution
and, without doubt, dope. Maybe he’d like to get Fuzzies as
attractions at his night-spots, and through that part of his
business he could make contacts with well to do people who wanted
Fuzzies, couldn’t adopt them, and would pay fancy prices for
them. If there really were a black market, he’d be in it.
Spike Hennan was gambling; crap-games, numbers racket,
bookmaking. On sport-betting, his lines and Bowlby’s would
cross with mutual profit. Laporte was racketeering, extortion,
plain old-fashioned country-style crime. And stolen goods, of
course, and, while there’d been money in it, illicit
gem-buying.
Leo Thaxter was the biggest, and the most respectably fronted,
of the four. L. Thaxter, Loan Broker & Private Financier. He
loaned money publicly at a righteously legal seven percent; he also
loaned, at much higher rates, to all the shylocks in town, who, in
turn, loaned it at six-for-five to people who could not borrow
elsewhere, including suckers who went broke in Spike Hennan’s
crap-games, and he used Raul Laporte’s hoodlums to do his
collecting.
And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo
Ingermann, Mallorysport’s unconvicted underworld
generalissimo.
Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie
Coombes’s investigators had established that all four of
them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy owners behind whom
Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had unwisely sold
eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now
dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it
was pretty well established that those four had been the John Doe,
Richard Roe, et alii, who had been represented in court by
Ingermann just after the Pendarvis Decisions.
Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the
melodrama was evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another
cigarette, and began going over what he knew about
Ingermann’s four chief henchmen. Thaxter; he’d come to
Zarathustra a few years before Ingermann. Small-time racketeer, at
first, and then he’d tried to organize labor unions, but labor
unions organized by outsiders had been frowned upon by the company,
and he’d been shown the wisdom of stopping that. Then
he’d organized an independent planters’ marketing
cooperative, and from that he’d gotten into shylocking.
There’d been some woman with him, at first, wife or
reasonable facsimile. Maybe she was still around; have Coombes look
into that. She might be willing to talk.
Diamond strolled in from the Fuzzy-room.
“Pappy Vic! Make talk with Diamond, plis. “
LIEUTENANT FITZ MORTLAKE, acting-in-charge of company detective
bureau for the 1800-2400 shift, yawned. Twenty more minutes; less
than that if Bert Eggers got in early to relieve him. He riffled
through the stack of complaint sheet copies on the desk and put a
paperweight on them. In the squadroom outside the mechanical noises
of card-machines and teleprinters and the occasional howl of a
sixty-speed audiovisual transmission were being replaced by human
sounds, voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs, as the
midnight-to-six shift began filtering in. He was wondering whether
to go home and read till he became sleepy, or drift around the bars
to see if he could pick up a girl, when Bert Eggers pushed past a
couple of sergeants at the door and entered.
“Hi, Fitz; how’s it going?”
“Oh, quiet. We found out where Jayser hid that stuff; we
have all of it, now. And Millman and Nogahara caught those kids who
were stealing engine parts out of Warehouse Ten. We have them in
detention; we haven’t questioned them yet.”
“We’ll take care of that. They work for the
Company?”
“Two of them do. The third is just a kid, seventeen.
Juvenile Court can have him. We think they were selling the stuff
to Honest Hymie.”
“Uhuh. I’ll suspect anybody they all call Honest
Anybody or anything,” Eggers said, sitting down as he vacated
the chair.
He took off his coat, pulled his shoulder holster and pistol
from the bottom drawer and put it on, resuming the coat. He
gathered up his lighter and tobacco pouch, and then discovered that
his pipe was missing, and hunted the desk-top for it, unearthing it
from under some teleprinted photographs.
“What are these?” Eggers asked, looking at them.
“Herckerd and Novaes, false alarm number ’steen
thousand. A couple of woods-tramps who turned up on
Epsilon.”
Eggers made a sour face. “Those damn Fuzzies have made
more work for us,” he began. “And now, my kids are
after me to get them one. So’s my wife. You know what? Fuzzies are a status-symbol, now. If you
don’t have a Fuzzy, you might as well move to Junktown with
the rest of the bums.”
“I don’t have a Fuzzy, and I haven’t moved to
Junktown yet.”
“You don’t have kids in high school.”
“No, thank God!”
“Bet he doesn’t have finance-company trouble,
either,” one of the sergeants in the doorway said.
Bert was going to make some retort to that. Before he could,
another voice spoke up:
“Yeeek! “
“Speak of the devil,” somebody said.
“You have that Fuzzy in here, Fitz?” Eggers
demanded. “Where the hell . . . ?”
“There he is,” one of the men in the doorway said,
pointing.
The Fuzzy, who had been behind the desk-chair, came out into
view. He pulled the bottom of Eggers’s coat, yeeking again.
He looked like a hunchback Fuzzy.
“What’s he got on his back?” Eggers reached
down. “Whatta you got there, anyhow?”
It was a little rucksack, with leather shoulder-straps and a
drawstring top. As soon as Eggers displayed an interest in it, the
Fuzzy climbed out of it as though glad to be rid of it. Mortlake
picked it up and put it on the desk; over ten pounds, must weigh
almost as much as the Fuzzy. Eggers opened the drawstrings and put
his hand into it.
“It’s full of gravel,” he said, and brought
out a handful.
The gravel was glowing faintly. Eggers let go of it as though it
were as hot as it looked.
“Holy God!” It was the first time he ever heard
anybody screaming in baritone. “The damn things are
sunstones!”