HE STARTED AWAKE, rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Past
twenty-two hundred; now it really was time for a drink, and then to
bed. He rose stiffly and went out to the kitchen, pouring the
whisky and bringing it in to the table desk, where he sat down and
got out his diary. He was almost finished with the day’s
entry when the little door behind him opened and a small voice
said, “Yeeek.” He turned quickly.
“Little Fuzzy?”
The small sound was repeated, impatiently. Little Fuzzy was
holding the door open, and there was an answer from outside. Then
another Fuzzy came in, and another; four of them, one carrying a
tiny, squirming ball of white fur in her arms. They all had
prawn-killers like the one in the drawer, and they stopped just
inside the room and gaped about them in bewilderment. Then, laying
down his weapon, Little Fuzzy ran to him; stooping from the chair,
he caught him and then sat down on the floor with him.
“So that’s why you ran off and worried Pappy Jack?
You wanted your family here, too!”
The others piled the things they were carrying with Little
Fuzzy’s steel weapon and approached hesitantly. He talked to
them, and so did Little Fuzzy—at least it sounded like that and
finally one came over and fingered his shirt, and then reached up
and pulled his mustache. Soon all of them were climbing onto him,
even the female with the baby. It was small enough to sit on his
palm, but in a minute it had climbed to his shoulder, and then it
was sitting on his head.
“You people want dinner?” he asked.
Little Fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that was a word he recognized.
He took them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast
veldbeest and yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while they were
eating from a couple of big pans, he went back to the living room
to examine the things they had brought with them. Two of the
prawn-killers were wood, like the one Little Fuzzy had discarded in
the shed. A third was of horn, beautifully polished, and the fourth
looked as though it had been made from the shoulder bone of
something like a zebralope. Then there was a small coup de poing
ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the
shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight
edge. For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a
scraper. He puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was
serrated, and decided that it was a saw. And there were three very
good flake knives, and some shells, evidently drinking vessels.
Mamma Fuzzy came in while he was finishing the examination. She
seemed suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property
had been taken or damaged. Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with
one hand and holding a slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was
munching, with the other. He crammed what was left of the fruit
into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and sat down on his head again.
Have to do something to break him of that. One of these days,
he’d be getting too big for it.
In a few minutes, the rest of the family came in, chasing and
pummeling each other and yeeking happily. Mama jumped off his lap
and joined the free-for-all, and then Baby took off from his head
and landed on Mama’s back. And he thought he’d lost his
Little Fuzzy, and, gosh, here he had five Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy.
When they were tired of romping, he made beds for them in the
living room, and brought out Little Fuzzy’s bedding and his
treasures. One Little Fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine; five and
a Baby Fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing.
They were swarming over the bed, Baby and all, to waken him the
next morning.
THE NEXT MORNING he made a steel chopper-digger for each of
them, and half a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies
showed up. He also made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a
handsaw out of a piece of broken power-saw blade and half a dozen
little knives forged in one piece from quarter-inch coil-spring
material. He had less trouble trading the Fuzzies’ own things
away from them than he had expected. They had a very keen property
sense, but they knew a good deal when one was offered. He put the
wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the desk
drawer. Start of the Holloway Collection of Zarathustran Fuzzy
Weapons and Implements. Maybe he’d will it to the Federation
Institute of Xeno-Sciences.
Of course, the family had to try out the new chopper-diggers on
landprawns, and he followed them around with the movie camera. They
killed a dozen and a half that morning, and there was very little
interest in lunch, though they did sit around nibbling, just to be
doing what he was doing. As soon as they finished, they all went in
for a nap on his bed. He spent the afternoon pottering about camp
doing odd jobs that he had been postponing for months. The Fuzzies
all emerged in the late afternoon for a romp in the grass
outside.
He was in the kitchen, getting dinner, when they all came
pelting in through the little door into the living room, making an
excited outcry. Little Fuzzy and one of the other males came into
the kitchen. Little Fuzzy squatted, put one hand on his lower jaw,
with thumb and little finger extended, and the other on his
forehead, first finger upright. Then he thrust out his right arm
stiffly and made a barking noise of a sort he had never made
before. He had to do it a second time before Jack got it.
There was a large and unpleasant carnivore, called a
damnthing—another example of zoological nomenclature on uninhabited
planets—which had a single horn on its forehead and one on either
side of the lower jaw. It was something for Fuzzies, and even for
human-type people, to get excited about. He laid down the paring
knife and the yummiyam he had been peeling, wiped his hands and
went into the living room, taking a quick nose count and satisfying
himself that none of the family was missing as he crossed to the
gunrack.
This time, instead of the 6-mm he had used on the harpy, he
lifted down the big 12.7 double express, making sure that it was
loaded and pocketing a few spare rounds. Little Fuzzy followed him
outside, pointing around the living hut to the left. The rest of
the family stayed indoors.
Stepping out about twenty feet, he started around
counter-clockwise. There was no damnthing on the north side, and he
was about to go around to the east side when Little Fuzzy came
dashing past him, pointing to the rear. He whirled, to see the
damnthing charging him from behind, head down, and middle horn
lowered. He should have thought of that; damnthings would double
and hunt their hunters.
He lined the sights instinctively and squeezed. The big rifle
roared and banged his shoulder, and the bullet caught the damnthing
and hurled all half-ton of it backward. The second shot caught it
just below one of the fungoid-looking ears, and the beast gave a
spasmotic all-over twitch and was still. He reloaded mechanically,
but there was no need for a third shot. The damnthing was as dead
as he would have been except for Little Fuzzy’s warning.
He mentioned that to Little Fuzzy, who was calmly retrieving the
empty cartridges. Then, rubbing his shoulder where the big rifle
had pounded him, he went in and returned the weapon to the rack. He
used the manipulator to carry the damnthing away from the camp and
drop it into a treetop, where it would furnish a welcome, if
puzzling, treat for the harpies.
THERE WAS ANOTHER alarm in the evening after dinner. The family
had come in from their sunset romp and were gathered in the living
room, where Little Fuzzy was demonstrating the principle of
things-that-screwed-onto-things with the wide-mouthed bottle and
the bolt and nut, when something huge began hooting directly
overhead. They all froze, looking up at the ceiling, and then ran
over and got under the gunrack. This must be something far more
serious than a damnthing, and what Pappy Jack would do about it
would be nothing short of catastrophic. They were startled to see
Pappy Jack merely go to the door, open it and step outside. After
all, none of them had ever heard a Constabulary aircar klaxon
before.
The car settled onto the grass in front of the camp, gave a
slight lurch and went off contragravity. Two men in uniform got
out, and in the moonlight he recognized both of them: Lieutenant
George Lunt and his driver, Ahmed Khadra. He called a greeting to
them.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
“No; just thought we’d drop in and see how you were
making out,” Lunt told him. “We don’t get up this
way often. Haven’t had any trouble lately, have
you?”
“Not since the last time.” The last time had been a
couple of woods tramps, out-of-work veldbeest herders from the
south, who had heard about the little bag he carried around his
neck. All the Constabulary had needed to do was remove the bodies
and write up a report. “Come on in and hang up your guns
awhile. I have something I want to show you.”
Little Fuzzy had come out and was pulling at his trouser leg; he
stooped and picked him up, setting him on his shoulder. The rest of
the family, deciding that it must be safe, had come to the door and
were looking out.
“Hey! What the devil are those things?” Lunt asked,
stopping short halfway from the car.
“Fuzzies. Mean to tell me you’ve never seen Fuzzies
before?”
“No, I haven’t. What are they?”
The two Constabulary men came closer, and Jack stepped back into
the house, shooing the Fuzzies out of the way. Lunt and Khadra
stopped inside the door.
“I just told you. They’re Fuzzies. That’s all
the name I know for them.”
A couple of Fuzzies came over and looked up at Lieutenant Lunt;
one of them said, “Yeek?”
“They want to know what you are, so that makes it
mutual.”
Lunt hesitated for a moment, then took off his belt and holster
and hung it on one of the pegs inside the door, putting his beret
over it. Khadra followed his example promptly. That meant that they
considered themselves temporarily off duty and would accept a drink
if one were offered. A Fuzzy was pulling at Ahmed Khadra’s
trouser leg and asking to be noticed, and Mamma Fuzzy was holding
Baby up to show to Lunt. Khadra, rather hesitantly, picked up the
Fuzzy who was trying to attract his attention.
“Never saw anything like them before, Jack,” he
said. “Where did they come from?”
“Ahmed; you don’t know anything about those
things,” Lunt reproved.
“They won’t hurt me, Lieutenant; they haven’t
hurt Jack, have they?” He sat down on he floor, and a couple
more came to him. “Why don’t you get acquainted with
them? They’re cute.”
George Lunt wouldn’t let one of his men do anything he was
afraid to do; he sat down on the floor, too, and Mamma brought her
baby to him. Immediately, the baby jumped onto his shoulder and
tried to get onto his head.
“Relax, George,” Jack told him. “They’re
just Fuzzies; they want to make friends with you.”
“I’m always worried about strange life forms,”
Lunt said. “You’ve been around enough to know some of
the things that have happened—”
“They are not a strange life form; they are Zarathustran
mammals. The same life form you’ve had for dinner every day
since you came here. Their biochemistry’s identical with
ours. Think they’ll give you the Polka-Dot Plague, or
something?” He put Little Fuzzy down on the floor with the
others. “We’ve been exploring this planet for
twenty-five years, and nobody’s found anything like that
here.”
“You said it yourself, Lieutenant,” Khadra put in.
“Jack’s been around enough to know.”
“Well . . . They are cute little fellows.” Lunt lifted
Baby down off his head and gave him back to Mamma. Little Fuzzy had
gotten hold of the chain of his whistle and was trying to find out
what was on the other end. “Bet they’re a lot of
company for you.”
“You just get acquainted with them. Make yourselves at
home; I’ll go rustle up some refreshments.”
While he was in the kitchen, filling a soda siphon and getting
ice out of the refrigerator, a police whistle began shrilling in
the living room. He was opening a bottle of whisky when Little
Fuzzy came dashing out, blowing on it, a couple more of the family
pursuing him and trying to get it away from him. He opened a tin of
Extee Three for the Fuzzies; as he did, another whistle in the
living room began blowing.
“We have a whole shoebox full of them at the post,”
Lunt yelled to him above the din. “We’ll just write
these two off as expended in service.”
“Well, that’s real nice of you, George. I want to
tell you that the Fuzzies appreciate that. Ahmed, suppose you do
the bartending while I give the kids their candy.”
By the time Khadra had the drinks mixed and he had distributed
the Extee Three to the Fuzzies, Lunt had gotten into the easy
chair, and the Fuzzies were sitting on the floor in front of him,
still looking him over curiously. At least the Extee Three had
taken their minds off the whistles for a while.
“What I want to know, Jack, is where they came
from,” Lunt said, taking his drink. “I’ve been up
here for five years, and I never saw anything like them
before.”
“I’ve been here five years longer, and I never saw
them before, either. I think they came down from the north, from
the country between the Cordilleras and the West Coast Range.
Outside of an air survey at ten thousand feet and a few spot
landings here and there, none of that country has been explored.
For all anybody knows, it could be full of Fuzzies.”
He began with his first encounter with Little Fuzzy, and by the
time he had gotten as far as the wood chisel and the killing of the
land-prawn, Lunt and Khadra were looking at each other in
amazement.
“That’s it!” Khadra said. “I’ve
found prawn-shells cracked open and the meat picked out, just the
way you describe it. I always wondered what did that. But they
don’t all have wood chisels. What do you suppose they used
ordinarily?”
“Ah!” He pulled the drawer open and began getting
things out. “Here’s the one Little Fuzzy discarded when
he found my chisel. The rest of this stuff the others brought in
when they came.”
Lunt and Khadra rose and came over to look at the things. Lunt
tried to argue that the Fuzzies couldn’t have made that
stuff. He wasn’t even able to convince himself. Having
finished their Extee Three, the Fuzzies were looking expectantly at
the viewscreen, and it occurred to him that none of them except
Little Fuzzy had ever seen it on. Then Little Fuzzy jumped up on
the chair Lunt had vacated, reached over to the control-panel and
switched it on. What he got was an empty stretch of moonlit plain
to the south, from a pickup on one of the steel towers the
veldbeest herders used. That wasn’t very interesting; he
twiddled the selector and finally got a night soccer game at
Mallorysport. That was just fine; he jumped down and joined the
others in front of the screen.
“I’ve seen Terran monkeys and Freyan Kholphs that
liked to watch screens and could turn them on and work the
selector,” Lunt said. It sounded like the token last salvo
before the surrender.
“Kholphs are smart,” Khadra agreed. “They use
tools.”
“Do they make tools? Or tools to make tools with, like
that saw?” There was no argument on that. “No. Nobody
does that except people like us and the Fuzzies.”
It was the first time he had come right out and said that; the
first time he had even consciously thought it. He realized that he
had been convinced of it all along, though. It startled the
constabulary lieutenant and trooper.
“You mean you think—?” Lunt began.
“They don’t talk, and they don’t build
fires,” Ahmed Khadra said, as though that settled it.
“Ahmed, you know better than that. That
talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn’t any scientific test at
all.”
“It’s a legal test.” Lunt supported his
subordinate.
“It’s a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that
settlers on new planets couldn’t get away with murdering and
enslaving the natives by claiming they thought they were only
hunting and domesticating wild animals,” he said.
“Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being,
yes. That’s the law. But that doesn’t mean that
anything that doesn’t isn’t. I haven’t seen any
of this gang building fires, and as I don’t want to come home
sometime and find myself burned out, I’m not going to teach
them. But I’m sure they have some means of communication
among themselves.”
“Has Ben Rainsford seen them yet?” Lunt asked.
“Ben’s off on a trip somewhere. I called him as soon
as Little Fuzzy, over there, showed up here. He won’t be back
till Friday.”
“Yes, that’s right; I did know that.” Lunt was
still looking dubiously at the Fuzzies. “I’d like to
hear what he thinks about them.”
If Ben said they were safe, Lunt would accept that. Ben was an
expert, and Lunt respected expert testimony. Until then, he
wasn’t sure. He’d probably order a medical check-up for
himself and Khadra the first thing tomorrow, to make sure they
hadn’t picked up some kind of bug.
HE STARTED AWAKE, rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Past
twenty-two hundred; now it really was time for a drink, and then to
bed. He rose stiffly and went out to the kitchen, pouring the
whisky and bringing it in to the table desk, where he sat down and
got out his diary. He was almost finished with the day’s
entry when the little door behind him opened and a small voice
said, “Yeeek.” He turned quickly.
“Little Fuzzy?”
The small sound was repeated, impatiently. Little Fuzzy was
holding the door open, and there was an answer from outside. Then
another Fuzzy came in, and another; four of them, one carrying a
tiny, squirming ball of white fur in her arms. They all had
prawn-killers like the one in the drawer, and they stopped just
inside the room and gaped about them in bewilderment. Then, laying
down his weapon, Little Fuzzy ran to him; stooping from the chair,
he caught him and then sat down on the floor with him.
“So that’s why you ran off and worried Pappy Jack?
You wanted your family here, too!”
The others piled the things they were carrying with Little
Fuzzy’s steel weapon and approached hesitantly. He talked to
them, and so did Little Fuzzy—at least it sounded like that and
finally one came over and fingered his shirt, and then reached up
and pulled his mustache. Soon all of them were climbing onto him,
even the female with the baby. It was small enough to sit on his
palm, but in a minute it had climbed to his shoulder, and then it
was sitting on his head.
“You people want dinner?” he asked.
Little Fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that was a word he recognized.
He took them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast
veldbeest and yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while they were
eating from a couple of big pans, he went back to the living room
to examine the things they had brought with them. Two of the
prawn-killers were wood, like the one Little Fuzzy had discarded in
the shed. A third was of horn, beautifully polished, and the fourth
looked as though it had been made from the shoulder bone of
something like a zebralope. Then there was a small coup de poing
ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the
shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight
edge. For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a
scraper. He puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was
serrated, and decided that it was a saw. And there were three very
good flake knives, and some shells, evidently drinking vessels.
Mamma Fuzzy came in while he was finishing the examination. She
seemed suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property
had been taken or damaged. Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with
one hand and holding a slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was
munching, with the other. He crammed what was left of the fruit
into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and sat down on his head again.
Have to do something to break him of that. One of these days,
he’d be getting too big for it.
In a few minutes, the rest of the family came in, chasing and
pummeling each other and yeeking happily. Mama jumped off his lap
and joined the free-for-all, and then Baby took off from his head
and landed on Mama’s back. And he thought he’d lost his
Little Fuzzy, and, gosh, here he had five Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy.
When they were tired of romping, he made beds for them in the
living room, and brought out Little Fuzzy’s bedding and his
treasures. One Little Fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine; five and
a Baby Fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing.
They were swarming over the bed, Baby and all, to waken him the
next morning.
THE NEXT MORNING he made a steel chopper-digger for each of
them, and half a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies
showed up. He also made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a
handsaw out of a piece of broken power-saw blade and half a dozen
little knives forged in one piece from quarter-inch coil-spring
material. He had less trouble trading the Fuzzies’ own things
away from them than he had expected. They had a very keen property
sense, but they knew a good deal when one was offered. He put the
wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the desk
drawer. Start of the Holloway Collection of Zarathustran Fuzzy
Weapons and Implements. Maybe he’d will it to the Federation
Institute of Xeno-Sciences.
Of course, the family had to try out the new chopper-diggers on
landprawns, and he followed them around with the movie camera. They
killed a dozen and a half that morning, and there was very little
interest in lunch, though they did sit around nibbling, just to be
doing what he was doing. As soon as they finished, they all went in
for a nap on his bed. He spent the afternoon pottering about camp
doing odd jobs that he had been postponing for months. The Fuzzies
all emerged in the late afternoon for a romp in the grass
outside.
He was in the kitchen, getting dinner, when they all came
pelting in through the little door into the living room, making an
excited outcry. Little Fuzzy and one of the other males came into
the kitchen. Little Fuzzy squatted, put one hand on his lower jaw,
with thumb and little finger extended, and the other on his
forehead, first finger upright. Then he thrust out his right arm
stiffly and made a barking noise of a sort he had never made
before. He had to do it a second time before Jack got it.
There was a large and unpleasant carnivore, called a
damnthing—another example of zoological nomenclature on uninhabited
planets—which had a single horn on its forehead and one on either
side of the lower jaw. It was something for Fuzzies, and even for
human-type people, to get excited about. He laid down the paring
knife and the yummiyam he had been peeling, wiped his hands and
went into the living room, taking a quick nose count and satisfying
himself that none of the family was missing as he crossed to the
gunrack.
This time, instead of the 6-mm he had used on the harpy, he
lifted down the big 12.7 double express, making sure that it was
loaded and pocketing a few spare rounds. Little Fuzzy followed him
outside, pointing around the living hut to the left. The rest of
the family stayed indoors.
Stepping out about twenty feet, he started around
counter-clockwise. There was no damnthing on the north side, and he
was about to go around to the east side when Little Fuzzy came
dashing past him, pointing to the rear. He whirled, to see the
damnthing charging him from behind, head down, and middle horn
lowered. He should have thought of that; damnthings would double
and hunt their hunters.
He lined the sights instinctively and squeezed. The big rifle
roared and banged his shoulder, and the bullet caught the damnthing
and hurled all half-ton of it backward. The second shot caught it
just below one of the fungoid-looking ears, and the beast gave a
spasmotic all-over twitch and was still. He reloaded mechanically,
but there was no need for a third shot. The damnthing was as dead
as he would have been except for Little Fuzzy’s warning.
He mentioned that to Little Fuzzy, who was calmly retrieving the
empty cartridges. Then, rubbing his shoulder where the big rifle
had pounded him, he went in and returned the weapon to the rack. He
used the manipulator to carry the damnthing away from the camp and
drop it into a treetop, where it would furnish a welcome, if
puzzling, treat for the harpies.
THERE WAS ANOTHER alarm in the evening after dinner. The family
had come in from their sunset romp and were gathered in the living
room, where Little Fuzzy was demonstrating the principle of
things-that-screwed-onto-things with the wide-mouthed bottle and
the bolt and nut, when something huge began hooting directly
overhead. They all froze, looking up at the ceiling, and then ran
over and got under the gunrack. This must be something far more
serious than a damnthing, and what Pappy Jack would do about it
would be nothing short of catastrophic. They were startled to see
Pappy Jack merely go to the door, open it and step outside. After
all, none of them had ever heard a Constabulary aircar klaxon
before.
The car settled onto the grass in front of the camp, gave a
slight lurch and went off contragravity. Two men in uniform got
out, and in the moonlight he recognized both of them: Lieutenant
George Lunt and his driver, Ahmed Khadra. He called a greeting to
them.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
“No; just thought we’d drop in and see how you were
making out,” Lunt told him. “We don’t get up this
way often. Haven’t had any trouble lately, have
you?”
“Not since the last time.” The last time had been a
couple of woods tramps, out-of-work veldbeest herders from the
south, who had heard about the little bag he carried around his
neck. All the Constabulary had needed to do was remove the bodies
and write up a report. “Come on in and hang up your guns
awhile. I have something I want to show you.”
Little Fuzzy had come out and was pulling at his trouser leg; he
stooped and picked him up, setting him on his shoulder. The rest of
the family, deciding that it must be safe, had come to the door and
were looking out.
“Hey! What the devil are those things?” Lunt asked,
stopping short halfway from the car.
“Fuzzies. Mean to tell me you’ve never seen Fuzzies
before?”
“No, I haven’t. What are they?”
The two Constabulary men came closer, and Jack stepped back into
the house, shooing the Fuzzies out of the way. Lunt and Khadra
stopped inside the door.
“I just told you. They’re Fuzzies. That’s all
the name I know for them.”
A couple of Fuzzies came over and looked up at Lieutenant Lunt;
one of them said, “Yeek?”
“They want to know what you are, so that makes it
mutual.”
Lunt hesitated for a moment, then took off his belt and holster
and hung it on one of the pegs inside the door, putting his beret
over it. Khadra followed his example promptly. That meant that they
considered themselves temporarily off duty and would accept a drink
if one were offered. A Fuzzy was pulling at Ahmed Khadra’s
trouser leg and asking to be noticed, and Mamma Fuzzy was holding
Baby up to show to Lunt. Khadra, rather hesitantly, picked up the
Fuzzy who was trying to attract his attention.
“Never saw anything like them before, Jack,” he
said. “Where did they come from?”
“Ahmed; you don’t know anything about those
things,” Lunt reproved.
“They won’t hurt me, Lieutenant; they haven’t
hurt Jack, have they?” He sat down on he floor, and a couple
more came to him. “Why don’t you get acquainted with
them? They’re cute.”
George Lunt wouldn’t let one of his men do anything he was
afraid to do; he sat down on the floor, too, and Mamma brought her
baby to him. Immediately, the baby jumped onto his shoulder and
tried to get onto his head.
“Relax, George,” Jack told him. “They’re
just Fuzzies; they want to make friends with you.”
“I’m always worried about strange life forms,”
Lunt said. “You’ve been around enough to know some of
the things that have happened—”
“They are not a strange life form; they are Zarathustran
mammals. The same life form you’ve had for dinner every day
since you came here. Their biochemistry’s identical with
ours. Think they’ll give you the Polka-Dot Plague, or
something?” He put Little Fuzzy down on the floor with the
others. “We’ve been exploring this planet for
twenty-five years, and nobody’s found anything like that
here.”
“You said it yourself, Lieutenant,” Khadra put in.
“Jack’s been around enough to know.”
“Well . . . They are cute little fellows.” Lunt lifted
Baby down off his head and gave him back to Mamma. Little Fuzzy had
gotten hold of the chain of his whistle and was trying to find out
what was on the other end. “Bet they’re a lot of
company for you.”
“You just get acquainted with them. Make yourselves at
home; I’ll go rustle up some refreshments.”
While he was in the kitchen, filling a soda siphon and getting
ice out of the refrigerator, a police whistle began shrilling in
the living room. He was opening a bottle of whisky when Little
Fuzzy came dashing out, blowing on it, a couple more of the family
pursuing him and trying to get it away from him. He opened a tin of
Extee Three for the Fuzzies; as he did, another whistle in the
living room began blowing.
“We have a whole shoebox full of them at the post,”
Lunt yelled to him above the din. “We’ll just write
these two off as expended in service.”
“Well, that’s real nice of you, George. I want to
tell you that the Fuzzies appreciate that. Ahmed, suppose you do
the bartending while I give the kids their candy.”
By the time Khadra had the drinks mixed and he had distributed
the Extee Three to the Fuzzies, Lunt had gotten into the easy
chair, and the Fuzzies were sitting on the floor in front of him,
still looking him over curiously. At least the Extee Three had
taken their minds off the whistles for a while.
“What I want to know, Jack, is where they came
from,” Lunt said, taking his drink. “I’ve been up
here for five years, and I never saw anything like them
before.”
“I’ve been here five years longer, and I never saw
them before, either. I think they came down from the north, from
the country between the Cordilleras and the West Coast Range.
Outside of an air survey at ten thousand feet and a few spot
landings here and there, none of that country has been explored.
For all anybody knows, it could be full of Fuzzies.”
He began with his first encounter with Little Fuzzy, and by the
time he had gotten as far as the wood chisel and the killing of the
land-prawn, Lunt and Khadra were looking at each other in
amazement.
“That’s it!” Khadra said. “I’ve
found prawn-shells cracked open and the meat picked out, just the
way you describe it. I always wondered what did that. But they
don’t all have wood chisels. What do you suppose they used
ordinarily?”
“Ah!” He pulled the drawer open and began getting
things out. “Here’s the one Little Fuzzy discarded when
he found my chisel. The rest of this stuff the others brought in
when they came.”
Lunt and Khadra rose and came over to look at the things. Lunt
tried to argue that the Fuzzies couldn’t have made that
stuff. He wasn’t even able to convince himself. Having
finished their Extee Three, the Fuzzies were looking expectantly at
the viewscreen, and it occurred to him that none of them except
Little Fuzzy had ever seen it on. Then Little Fuzzy jumped up on
the chair Lunt had vacated, reached over to the control-panel and
switched it on. What he got was an empty stretch of moonlit plain
to the south, from a pickup on one of the steel towers the
veldbeest herders used. That wasn’t very interesting; he
twiddled the selector and finally got a night soccer game at
Mallorysport. That was just fine; he jumped down and joined the
others in front of the screen.
“I’ve seen Terran monkeys and Freyan Kholphs that
liked to watch screens and could turn them on and work the
selector,” Lunt said. It sounded like the token last salvo
before the surrender.
“Kholphs are smart,” Khadra agreed. “They use
tools.”
“Do they make tools? Or tools to make tools with, like
that saw?” There was no argument on that. “No. Nobody
does that except people like us and the Fuzzies.”
It was the first time he had come right out and said that; the
first time he had even consciously thought it. He realized that he
had been convinced of it all along, though. It startled the
constabulary lieutenant and trooper.
“You mean you think—?” Lunt began.
“They don’t talk, and they don’t build
fires,” Ahmed Khadra said, as though that settled it.
“Ahmed, you know better than that. That
talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn’t any scientific test at
all.”
“It’s a legal test.” Lunt supported his
subordinate.
“It’s a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that
settlers on new planets couldn’t get away with murdering and
enslaving the natives by claiming they thought they were only
hunting and domesticating wild animals,” he said.
“Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being,
yes. That’s the law. But that doesn’t mean that
anything that doesn’t isn’t. I haven’t seen any
of this gang building fires, and as I don’t want to come home
sometime and find myself burned out, I’m not going to teach
them. But I’m sure they have some means of communication
among themselves.”
“Has Ben Rainsford seen them yet?” Lunt asked.
“Ben’s off on a trip somewhere. I called him as soon
as Little Fuzzy, over there, showed up here. He won’t be back
till Friday.”
“Yes, that’s right; I did know that.” Lunt was
still looking dubiously at the Fuzzies. “I’d like to
hear what he thinks about them.”
If Ben said they were safe, Lunt would accept that. Ben was an
expert, and Lunt respected expert testimony. Until then, he
wasn’t sure. He’d probably order a medical check-up for
himself and Khadra the first thing tomorrow, to make sure they
hadn’t picked up some kind of bug.