JACK HOLLOWAY SIGNED the paper—authorization for promotion of
trooper Felix Krajewski, Zarathustra Native Protection Force, to
rank of corporal—and tossed it into the out tray. A small breeze,
pleasantly cool, came in at the open end of the prefab hut,
bringing with it from outside the noises of construction work to
compete with the whir and clatter of computers and roboclerks in
the main office beyond the partition. He laid down the pen, brushed
his mustache with the middle knuckle of his trigger finger, and
then picked up his pipe, relighting it. Then he took another paper
out of the in tray.
Authorization for payment of five hundred and fifty sols,
compensation for damage done to crops by Fuzzies; endorsed as
investigated and approved by George Lunt, Major Commanding, ZNPF. He
remembered the incident: a bunch of woods-Fuzzies who had slipped
through George’s chain of posts at the south edge of the
Piedmont and gotten onto a sugar plantation and into mischief.
Probably ruined one tenth as many sugar-plant seedlings as the
land-prawns which the Fuzzies killed there would have destroyed.
But the Government wasn’t responsible for land-prawns, and it
was responsible for Fuzzies, and any planter who wouldn’t
stick the Government for all the damages he could ought to be
stuffed and put in a museum as a unique specimen. He signed it and
reached for the next paper.
It was a big one, a lot of sheets stapled together. He pried out
the staple. Covering letter from Governor-General Bennett
Rainsford, attention Commissioner of Native Affairs; and then
another on the letterhead of the Charterless Zarathustra Company,
Ltd., of Zarathustra, signed by Victor Grego, Pres. He grinned.
That “Charterless” looked like typical Grego gallows
humor; it also made sense, since it kept the old initials for the
trademark. And for the cattle-brand. Anybody who’d ever tried
rebranding a full-grown veldbeest could see the advantage of
that.
Acknowledgment of eighteen sunstones, total weight 93.6 carats,
removed from Yellowsand Canyon for study prior to signing of lease
agreement. Copy of receipt signed by Grego and his chief geologist,
endorsed by Gerd van Riebeek, Chief of Scientific Branch,
Zarathustra Commission for Native Affairs, and by Lieutenant
Hirohito Bjornsen, ZNPF. Color photographs of each of the eighteen
stones: they were beautiful, but no photograph could do justice to
a warm sunstone, glowing with thermofluorescence. He looked at them
carefully. He was an old sunstone-digger himself, and knew what he
was looking at. One hundred seventeen thousand sols on the Terra
gem market; S-42,120 in royalties for the Government, in trust for
the Fuzzies. And this wasn’t even the front edge of the
beginning; these were just the prospect samples. This time next
year . . .
He initialed Ben Rainsford’s letter, stapled the stuff
together, and tossed it into the file tray. As he did, the
communication screen beside him buzzed. Turning in his chair, he
flipped the screen on and looked, through it, into the interior of
another prefab hut like this one, fifteen hundred miles to the
north on the Fuzzy Reservation. A young man, with light hair and a
pleasantly tough and weather-beaten face, looked out of it. He was
in woods clothes, the breast of his jacket loaded with clips of
rifle cartridges.
“Hi, Gerd. What’s new?”
Gerd van Riebeek shrugged. “Still sitting on top of
’steen billion sols’ worth of sunstones. Victor Grego
was up; you heard about that?”
“Yes. I was looking at the photos of those stones a moment
ago. How much flint did he have to crack to get them?”
“About seventy-five tons. He took them out from five
different locations, on both sides of the canyon. Took him about
eight hours, after he got the sandstone off.”
“That’s better than I ever did; I thought I’d
hit it rich when I got one good stone out of six tons of flint. We
can tell the Fuzzies they’re all rich now.”
“They’ll want to know if it’s good to
eat,” Gerd said.
They probably would. He asked if Gerd had been seeing many
Fuzzies.
“South of the Divide, yes, quite a few in small bands,
mostly headed south or southwest. We get more on the movie film
than we actually see. North of the Divide, hardly any. Oh, you
remember the band we saw the day we found the sunstone flint? The
ones who’d killed those goofers and were eating
them?”
Holloway laughed, remembering their consternation when the three
harpies had put in an appearance and been knocked down by his and
Gerd’s rifle fire.
“ ‘Thunder-noise kill gotza; maybe kill us
next’ ;” he quoted. “ ‘Bad place this, make
run fast.’ Man, were they a scared lot of Fuzzies.”
“They didn’t stay scared long; they were back as
soon as we were out of there,” Gerd told him. “I was up
that way this morning and recognized the place; I set down for a
look around. The dead harpies were pretty well cleaned up—other
harpies and what have you—just a few bones scattered around. I was
up on top, where we’d been. It was three weeks ago, and
it’d rained a few times since; so, no tracks. I could hardly
see where we’d set the aircar down. But I know the Fuzzies
were there from what I didn’t find.”
Gerd paused, grinning. Expecting Holloway to ask what.
“The empties, two from my 9.7 and one from your
Sterberg,” Holloway said. “Sure. Pretty things.”
He laughed again. Fuzzies always picked up empty brass. “You
find some Fuzzies with empty cartridges, you’ll know who they
are.”
“Oh, they won’t keep them. They’ve gotten
tired of them and dropped them long ago.”
They talked for a while, and finally Gerd broke the connection,
probably to call Ruth. Holloway went back to his paperwork. The
afternoon passed, and eventually he finished everything they had
piled up on him. He rose stiffly. Wasn’t used to this damned
sitting on a chair all day. He refilled and lighted his pipe, got
his hat, and looked for the pistol that should be hanging under it
before he remembered that he wasn’t bothering to wear it
around the camp anymore. Then, after a glance around to make sure
he hadn’t left anything a Fuzzy oughtn’t to get at, he
went out.
They’d built all the walls of the permanent office that
was to replace this hut, and they’d started on the roof. The
ZNPF barracks and headquarters were finished and occupied; in front
of the latter a number of contragravity vehicles were grounded:
patrol cars and combat cars. Some of the former were new, light
green with yellow trim, lettered ZNPF. Some of the latter were
olive green; they and the men who operated them had been borrowed
from the Space Marines. Across the little stream, he couldn’t
see his original camp buildings for the new construction that had
gone up in the past two and a half months; the whole place, marked
with a tiny dot on the larger maps as Holloway’s Camp, had
been changed beyond recognition.
Maybe the name ought to be changed, too. Call it
Hoksu-Mitto—that was what the Fuzzies called it—“Wonderful
Place.” Well, it was pretty wonderful, to a Fuzzy just out of
the big woods; and even those who went on to Mallorysport, a much
more wonderful place, to live with human families still called it
that, and looked back on it with the nostalgic affection of an old
grad for his alma mater. He’d talked to Ben Rainsford about
getting the name officially changed.
Half a dozen Fuzzies were playing on the bridge; they saw him
and ran to him, yeeking. They all wore zipper-closed shoulder bags,
with sheath-knives and little trowels attached, and silver identity
disks at their throats, and they carried the weapons that had been
issued to them to replace their wooden prawn-killers—six-inch steel
blades on twelve-inch steel shafts. They were newcomers,
hadn’t had their vocal training yet; he put in the earplug
and switched on the hearing aid he had to use less and less
frequently now, and they were all yelling:
“Pappy Jack! Heyo, Pappy Jack. You make play with
us?”
They’d been around long enough to learn that he was Pappy
Jack to every Fuzzy in the place, which as of the noon count stood
at three hundred sixty-two, and they all thought he had nothing to
do but “make play” with them. He squatted down, looking
at their ID-disks; all numbered in the twelve-twenties, which meant
they’d come in day before yesterday.
“Why aren’t you kids in school?” he asked,
grabbing one who was trying to work the zipper of his shirt.
“Skool? What is, skool?”
“School,” he told them, “is place where
Fuzzies learn new things. Learn to make talk like Big Ones, so Big
Ones not need put-in-ear things. Learn to make things, have fun.
Learn not get hurt by Big One things.” He pointed to a long
corrugated metal shed across the run. “School in that place.
Come; I show.”
He knew what had happened. This gang had met some Fuzzy in the
woods who had told them about Hoksu-Mitto, and they’d come to
get in on it. They’d been taken in tow by Little Fuzzy or
Ko-Ko or one of George Lunt’s or Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek’s Fuzzies, and brought to ZNPF headquarters to be
fingerprinted and given ID-disks and issued equipment, and then
told to go amuse themselves. He started across the bridge, the
Fuzzies running beside and ahead of him.
The interior of the long shed was cool and shady, but not quiet.
There were about two hundred Fuzzies, all talking at once; when he
switched off his hearing aid, most of it was the yeek-yeeking which
was the audible fringe sound of their ultrasonic voices. Two of
George Lunt’s family, named Dillinger and Ned Kelly, were
teaching a class—most of whom had already learned to pitch their
voices to human audibility—how to make bows and arrows. Considering
that they’d only become bowyers and fletchers themselves a
month ago, they were doing very well, and the class was picking it
up quickly and enthusiastically. His own Mike and Mitzi were giving
a class in fire-making, sawing a length of hard wood back and forth
across the grain of a softer log. They had a score or so of pupils,
all whooping excitedly as the wood-dust began to smoke: Another
crowd stood or squatted around a ZNPF corporal who was using a
jackknife to skin a small animal Terrans called a zarabunny. Like
any good cop, he was continuously aware of everything that went on
around him. He looked up.
“Hi, Jack. Soon as that crowd over there have a fire
going, I’ll show them how to broil this on a stick. Then
I’ll show them how to use the brains to cure the skin, the
way the Old Terran Indians did, and how to make a bowstring out of
the gut.”
And then, after they’d learned all this stuff,
they’d go in to Mallorysport to be adopted by some human
family and never use any of it. Well, maybe not. There were a lot
of Fuzzies—ten, maybe twenty thousand of them. In spite of what
Little Fuzzy was telling everybody about all the Fuzzies having Big
Ones of their own, it wouldn’t work out that way. There just
weren’t enough humans who wanted to adopt Fuzzies. So some of
this gang would go to the ZNPF posts to the south or along the edge
of Big Blackwater to the west, and teach other Fuzzies who’d
pass the instruction on. Bows and arrows, fire, cooked food, cured
hides. Basketry and pottery, too. Seeing this gang here, it was
hard to realize just how primitively woods-Fuzzies had lived.
Hadn’t even learned to make anything like these shoulder bags
to carry things in; had to keep moving all the time, too, hunting
and foraging.
Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra—he was glad they’d gotten
rid of the Fuzzy fuzzy holloway thing; people were beginning to
call him Fuzzy-Fuzzy—had made one hell of a cultural jump since the
evening he’d heard something say, “Yeek,” in his
shower stall.
Little Fuzzy, across the shed, saw him and waved, and he waved
back. Little Fuzzy had a class too, on how to behave among the Big
Ones. For a while, he talked with Corporal Carstairs and his
pupils. The crowd he’d brought in with him wanted to stay
there; he managed to get them away and over to where his own Ko-Ko
and Cinderella and the van Riebeeks’ Syndrome and Superego
were giving vocal lessons.
It had been the Navy people, temporarily sheltering his own
family on Xerxes before the Fuzzy trial, who had found out about
their ultrasonic voices and made special hearing aids. After the
trial, when Victor Grego, once the Fuzzies’ archenemy,
acquired a Fuzzy of his own and became one of their best friends,
he and Henry Stenson, the instrument maker, designed a small
self-powered hand-phone Fuzzies could use to transform their voices
to audible frequencies. Then Grego discovered that his own Fuzzy,
Diamond, was speaking audibly with the power-unit of his Fuzzyphone
dead; he had learned to imitate the sounds he had heard himself
making. Diamond was able to teach the trick; now his pupils were
teaching others.
This class had several of the Stenson-Grego Fuzzyphones, things
with Fuzzy-size pistol grips and grip switches. They were speaking
with them, and then releasing the switches and trying to make the
same sounds themselves. Ko-Ko seemed to be in charge of the
instruction.
“No, no!” he was saying. “Not like that. Make
talk away back in mouth, like this.”
“Yeek?”
“No. Do again with hold-in-hand thing. Hold tight, now;
make talk.”
The van Riebeeks’ Syndrome didn’t seem to be doing
anything in particular; Holloway spoke to her:
“You make talk to these. Tell about how learn to make talk
like Big Ones.” He turned to the Fuzzies who had come in with
him. “You stay here. Do what these tell you. Soon you make
talk like Big Ones too. Then you come to Pappy Jack, make talk;
Pappy Jack give something nice.”
He left them with Syndrome and went over to where Little Fuzzy
sat on a box, smoking his pipe just like Pappy Jack. A number of
the Fuzzies around him, one of the advanced classes, were also
smoking.
“Among Big Ones,” he was saying in a mixture of
Fuzzy language and Lingua Terra, “everything belong somebody.
Every place belong somebody. Nobody go on somebody-else place, take
things belong somebody else.”
“No place belong everybody, like woods?” a pupil
asked.
“Oh, yes. Some places. Big Ones have Gov’men’
to take care of places belong everybody. This place, Hoksu-Mitto,
Gov’men’ place. Once belong Pappy Jack; Pappy Jack give
to Gov’men’, for everybody, all Big Ones, all
Fuzzies.”
“But, Gov’men’; what is?”
“Big One thing. All Big Ones talk together, all pick some
for take care of things belong everybody. Gov’men’ not
let anybody take somebody-else things, not let anybody make anybody
dead, not let hurt anybody. Now, Gov’men’ say nobody
hurt Fuzzy, make Fuzzy dead, take Fuzzy things. Do this in Big-Room
Talk-Place. I saw. Bad Big One make Goldilocks dead; other Big Ones
take bad Big One away, make him dead. Then, all say, nobody hurt
Fuzzy anymore. Pappy Jack make them do this.”
That wasn’t exactly what had happened. For instance,
Leonard Kellogg had cut his throat in jail, but suicide while of
unsound mind was a little complicated to explain to a Fuzzy. Just
let it go at that. He strolled on, to where some of George
Lunt’s family, Dr. Crippen and Lizzie Borden and Calamity
Jane, were teaching carpentry, and stayed for a while, watching the
Fuzzies using scaled-down saws and augers and drawknives and
planes. This crowd was really interested; they’d go out for
food after a while and then come back and work far into the
evening. They were building a hand-wagon, even the wheels; nearby
was a small forge, now cold, and an anvil on which they had made
the ironwork.
Finally, he reached the end of the hut where Ruth van Riebeek
and Pancho Ybarra, the Navy psychologist on permanent loan to the
Colonial Government, sat respectively on a pile of cushions on the
floor and the edge of a table. They had a dozen Fuzzies around
them.
“Hi, Jack,” Ruth greeted him. “When’s
that husband of mine coming back?”
“Oh, as soon as the agreement’s signed and the CZC
takes over. How are the kids doing?”
“Oh, we aren’t kids anymore, Pappy Jack,”
Ybarra told him. “We are very grown up. We are graduates, and
next week we will be faculty members.”
Holloway sat down on the cushions with Ruth, and the Fuzzies
crowded around him, wanting puffs from his pipe, and telling him
what they had learned and what they were going to teach. Then, by
pairs and groups, they drifted away. There was a general
breaking-up. The vocal class was dispersing; Syndrome was going
away with her group. If she could get them back tomorrow . . . What
this school needed was a truant officer. The fire-making class had
gotten a blaze started on the earthen floor, and the
butchering-and-cooking class had joined them. The apprentice
bowyers and fletchers had already left. Carpentry was still going
strong.
“You know, this teaching program,” Ruth was saying,
“it seems to lack unity.”
“She thinks there is a teaching program,” Ybarra
laughed. “This is still in the trial-and-error, mostly
error-stage. After we learn what we have to teach, and how to do
it, we can start talking about programs.” He became more
serious. “Jack, I’m beginning to question the value of
a lot of this friction-fire-making, stone-arrowhead, bone-needle
stuff. I know they won’t all be adopted into human families
and most of them will have to live on their own in the woods or in
marginal land around settlements, but they’ll be in contact
with us and can get all the human-made tools and weapons and things
they need.”
“I don’t want that, Pancho. I don’t want them
made dependent on us. I don’t want them to live on human
handouts. You were on Loki, weren’t you? You know
what’s happened to the natives there; they’ve turned
into a lot of worthless Native Agency bums. I don’t want this
to happen to the Fuzzies.”
“That’s not quite the same, Jack,” Ybarra
said. “The Fuzzies are dependent on us, for hokfusine. They
can’t get enough of it for themselves.”
That was true, of course. The Fuzzies’ ancestors had
developed, by evolution, an endocrine gland secreting a hormone
nonexistent in any other Zarathustran mammal. Nobody was quite sure
why; an educated guess was that it had served to neutralize some
natural poison in something they had eaten in the distant past.
When discovered, a couple of months ago, this hormone had been
tagged with a polysyllabic biochemistry name that had been
shortened to NFMp.
But about the time Terran humans were starting civilizations in
the Nile and Euphrates valleys, the Fuzzies’ environment had
altered radically. The need for NFMp vanished and, unneeded, it
turned destructive. It caused premature and defective, nonviable,
births. As a race, the Fuzzies had started dying out. Today, there
was only this small remnant left, in the northern wilds of Beta
Continent.
The only thing that had saved them from complete extinction had
been another biochemical, a complicated long-molecule compound
containing, among other things, a few atoms of titanium, which they
still obtained by eating land-prawns—zatku, as they called them.
And, beginning with their first contacts with humans, they had also
gotten it from a gingerbread colored concoction officially
designated Terran Federation Armed Forces Emergency Ration,
Extraterrestrial Type Three. Like most synthetic rations, it was
loathed by the soldiers and spacemen to whom it was issued, but
after the first nibble Fuzzies doted on it. They called it
Hoksu-Fusso, “Wonderful Food.” The chemical discovered
in it, and in land-prawns, had been immediately named
hokfusine.
“It neutralizes NFMp, and it inhibits the glandular action
that produces it,” Ybarra was saying. “But we
can’t administer it environmentally; we have to supply it to
every individual Fuzzy, male and female. Viable births only occur
when both parents have gotten plenty of it prior to
conception.”
The Fuzzies who lived among humans would get plenty of it, but
the ones who tried to shift for themselves in the woods
wouldn’t. The very thing he wanted to avoid, dependence on
humans, would be selected for genetically, just as a taste for
land-prawns had been. The countdown for the Fuzzy race had been
going on for a thousand generations, ten little Fuzzies, nine
little Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies. He didn’t know how many
more generations until it would be no little Fuzzies if they
didn’t do something now.
“Don’t worry about the next generation, Jack,”
Ruth said. “Just be glad there’ll be one.”
JACK HOLLOWAY SIGNED the paper—authorization for promotion of
trooper Felix Krajewski, Zarathustra Native Protection Force, to
rank of corporal—and tossed it into the out tray. A small breeze,
pleasantly cool, came in at the open end of the prefab hut,
bringing with it from outside the noises of construction work to
compete with the whir and clatter of computers and roboclerks in
the main office beyond the partition. He laid down the pen, brushed
his mustache with the middle knuckle of his trigger finger, and
then picked up his pipe, relighting it. Then he took another paper
out of the in tray.
Authorization for payment of five hundred and fifty sols,
compensation for damage done to crops by Fuzzies; endorsed as
investigated and approved by George Lunt, Major Commanding, ZNPF. He
remembered the incident: a bunch of woods-Fuzzies who had slipped
through George’s chain of posts at the south edge of the
Piedmont and gotten onto a sugar plantation and into mischief.
Probably ruined one tenth as many sugar-plant seedlings as the
land-prawns which the Fuzzies killed there would have destroyed.
But the Government wasn’t responsible for land-prawns, and it
was responsible for Fuzzies, and any planter who wouldn’t
stick the Government for all the damages he could ought to be
stuffed and put in a museum as a unique specimen. He signed it and
reached for the next paper.
It was a big one, a lot of sheets stapled together. He pried out
the staple. Covering letter from Governor-General Bennett
Rainsford, attention Commissioner of Native Affairs; and then
another on the letterhead of the Charterless Zarathustra Company,
Ltd., of Zarathustra, signed by Victor Grego, Pres. He grinned.
That “Charterless” looked like typical Grego gallows
humor; it also made sense, since it kept the old initials for the
trademark. And for the cattle-brand. Anybody who’d ever tried
rebranding a full-grown veldbeest could see the advantage of
that.
Acknowledgment of eighteen sunstones, total weight 93.6 carats,
removed from Yellowsand Canyon for study prior to signing of lease
agreement. Copy of receipt signed by Grego and his chief geologist,
endorsed by Gerd van Riebeek, Chief of Scientific Branch,
Zarathustra Commission for Native Affairs, and by Lieutenant
Hirohito Bjornsen, ZNPF. Color photographs of each of the eighteen
stones: they were beautiful, but no photograph could do justice to
a warm sunstone, glowing with thermofluorescence. He looked at them
carefully. He was an old sunstone-digger himself, and knew what he
was looking at. One hundred seventeen thousand sols on the Terra
gem market; S-42,120 in royalties for the Government, in trust for
the Fuzzies. And this wasn’t even the front edge of the
beginning; these were just the prospect samples. This time next
year . . .
He initialed Ben Rainsford’s letter, stapled the stuff
together, and tossed it into the file tray. As he did, the
communication screen beside him buzzed. Turning in his chair, he
flipped the screen on and looked, through it, into the interior of
another prefab hut like this one, fifteen hundred miles to the
north on the Fuzzy Reservation. A young man, with light hair and a
pleasantly tough and weather-beaten face, looked out of it. He was
in woods clothes, the breast of his jacket loaded with clips of
rifle cartridges.
“Hi, Gerd. What’s new?”
Gerd van Riebeek shrugged. “Still sitting on top of
’steen billion sols’ worth of sunstones. Victor Grego
was up; you heard about that?”
“Yes. I was looking at the photos of those stones a moment
ago. How much flint did he have to crack to get them?”
“About seventy-five tons. He took them out from five
different locations, on both sides of the canyon. Took him about
eight hours, after he got the sandstone off.”
“That’s better than I ever did; I thought I’d
hit it rich when I got one good stone out of six tons of flint. We
can tell the Fuzzies they’re all rich now.”
“They’ll want to know if it’s good to
eat,” Gerd said.
They probably would. He asked if Gerd had been seeing many
Fuzzies.
“South of the Divide, yes, quite a few in small bands,
mostly headed south or southwest. We get more on the movie film
than we actually see. North of the Divide, hardly any. Oh, you
remember the band we saw the day we found the sunstone flint? The
ones who’d killed those goofers and were eating
them?”
Holloway laughed, remembering their consternation when the three
harpies had put in an appearance and been knocked down by his and
Gerd’s rifle fire.
“ ‘Thunder-noise kill gotza; maybe kill us
next’ ;” he quoted. “ ‘Bad place this, make
run fast.’ Man, were they a scared lot of Fuzzies.”
“They didn’t stay scared long; they were back as
soon as we were out of there,” Gerd told him. “I was up
that way this morning and recognized the place; I set down for a
look around. The dead harpies were pretty well cleaned up—other
harpies and what have you—just a few bones scattered around. I was
up on top, where we’d been. It was three weeks ago, and
it’d rained a few times since; so, no tracks. I could hardly
see where we’d set the aircar down. But I know the Fuzzies
were there from what I didn’t find.”
Gerd paused, grinning. Expecting Holloway to ask what.
“The empties, two from my 9.7 and one from your
Sterberg,” Holloway said. “Sure. Pretty things.”
He laughed again. Fuzzies always picked up empty brass. “You
find some Fuzzies with empty cartridges, you’ll know who they
are.”
“Oh, they won’t keep them. They’ve gotten
tired of them and dropped them long ago.”
They talked for a while, and finally Gerd broke the connection,
probably to call Ruth. Holloway went back to his paperwork. The
afternoon passed, and eventually he finished everything they had
piled up on him. He rose stiffly. Wasn’t used to this damned
sitting on a chair all day. He refilled and lighted his pipe, got
his hat, and looked for the pistol that should be hanging under it
before he remembered that he wasn’t bothering to wear it
around the camp anymore. Then, after a glance around to make sure
he hadn’t left anything a Fuzzy oughtn’t to get at, he
went out.
They’d built all the walls of the permanent office that
was to replace this hut, and they’d started on the roof. The
ZNPF barracks and headquarters were finished and occupied; in front
of the latter a number of contragravity vehicles were grounded:
patrol cars and combat cars. Some of the former were new, light
green with yellow trim, lettered ZNPF. Some of the latter were
olive green; they and the men who operated them had been borrowed
from the Space Marines. Across the little stream, he couldn’t
see his original camp buildings for the new construction that had
gone up in the past two and a half months; the whole place, marked
with a tiny dot on the larger maps as Holloway’s Camp, had
been changed beyond recognition.
Maybe the name ought to be changed, too. Call it
Hoksu-Mitto—that was what the Fuzzies called it—“Wonderful
Place.” Well, it was pretty wonderful, to a Fuzzy just out of
the big woods; and even those who went on to Mallorysport, a much
more wonderful place, to live with human families still called it
that, and looked back on it with the nostalgic affection of an old
grad for his alma mater. He’d talked to Ben Rainsford about
getting the name officially changed.
Half a dozen Fuzzies were playing on the bridge; they saw him
and ran to him, yeeking. They all wore zipper-closed shoulder bags,
with sheath-knives and little trowels attached, and silver identity
disks at their throats, and they carried the weapons that had been
issued to them to replace their wooden prawn-killers—six-inch steel
blades on twelve-inch steel shafts. They were newcomers,
hadn’t had their vocal training yet; he put in the earplug
and switched on the hearing aid he had to use less and less
frequently now, and they were all yelling:
“Pappy Jack! Heyo, Pappy Jack. You make play with
us?”
They’d been around long enough to learn that he was Pappy
Jack to every Fuzzy in the place, which as of the noon count stood
at three hundred sixty-two, and they all thought he had nothing to
do but “make play” with them. He squatted down, looking
at their ID-disks; all numbered in the twelve-twenties, which meant
they’d come in day before yesterday.
“Why aren’t you kids in school?” he asked,
grabbing one who was trying to work the zipper of his shirt.
“Skool? What is, skool?”
“School,” he told them, “is place where
Fuzzies learn new things. Learn to make talk like Big Ones, so Big
Ones not need put-in-ear things. Learn to make things, have fun.
Learn not get hurt by Big One things.” He pointed to a long
corrugated metal shed across the run. “School in that place.
Come; I show.”
He knew what had happened. This gang had met some Fuzzy in the
woods who had told them about Hoksu-Mitto, and they’d come to
get in on it. They’d been taken in tow by Little Fuzzy or
Ko-Ko or one of George Lunt’s or Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek’s Fuzzies, and brought to ZNPF headquarters to be
fingerprinted and given ID-disks and issued equipment, and then
told to go amuse themselves. He started across the bridge, the
Fuzzies running beside and ahead of him.
The interior of the long shed was cool and shady, but not quiet.
There were about two hundred Fuzzies, all talking at once; when he
switched off his hearing aid, most of it was the yeek-yeeking which
was the audible fringe sound of their ultrasonic voices. Two of
George Lunt’s family, named Dillinger and Ned Kelly, were
teaching a class—most of whom had already learned to pitch their
voices to human audibility—how to make bows and arrows. Considering
that they’d only become bowyers and fletchers themselves a
month ago, they were doing very well, and the class was picking it
up quickly and enthusiastically. His own Mike and Mitzi were giving
a class in fire-making, sawing a length of hard wood back and forth
across the grain of a softer log. They had a score or so of pupils,
all whooping excitedly as the wood-dust began to smoke: Another
crowd stood or squatted around a ZNPF corporal who was using a
jackknife to skin a small animal Terrans called a zarabunny. Like
any good cop, he was continuously aware of everything that went on
around him. He looked up.
“Hi, Jack. Soon as that crowd over there have a fire
going, I’ll show them how to broil this on a stick. Then
I’ll show them how to use the brains to cure the skin, the
way the Old Terran Indians did, and how to make a bowstring out of
the gut.”
And then, after they’d learned all this stuff,
they’d go in to Mallorysport to be adopted by some human
family and never use any of it. Well, maybe not. There were a lot
of Fuzzies—ten, maybe twenty thousand of them. In spite of what
Little Fuzzy was telling everybody about all the Fuzzies having Big
Ones of their own, it wouldn’t work out that way. There just
weren’t enough humans who wanted to adopt Fuzzies. So some of
this gang would go to the ZNPF posts to the south or along the edge
of Big Blackwater to the west, and teach other Fuzzies who’d
pass the instruction on. Bows and arrows, fire, cooked food, cured
hides. Basketry and pottery, too. Seeing this gang here, it was
hard to realize just how primitively woods-Fuzzies had lived.
Hadn’t even learned to make anything like these shoulder bags
to carry things in; had to keep moving all the time, too, hunting
and foraging.
Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra—he was glad they’d gotten
rid of the Fuzzy fuzzy holloway thing; people were beginning to
call him Fuzzy-Fuzzy—had made one hell of a cultural jump since the
evening he’d heard something say, “Yeek,” in his
shower stall.
Little Fuzzy, across the shed, saw him and waved, and he waved
back. Little Fuzzy had a class too, on how to behave among the Big
Ones. For a while, he talked with Corporal Carstairs and his
pupils. The crowd he’d brought in with him wanted to stay
there; he managed to get them away and over to where his own Ko-Ko
and Cinderella and the van Riebeeks’ Syndrome and Superego
were giving vocal lessons.
It had been the Navy people, temporarily sheltering his own
family on Xerxes before the Fuzzy trial, who had found out about
their ultrasonic voices and made special hearing aids. After the
trial, when Victor Grego, once the Fuzzies’ archenemy,
acquired a Fuzzy of his own and became one of their best friends,
he and Henry Stenson, the instrument maker, designed a small
self-powered hand-phone Fuzzies could use to transform their voices
to audible frequencies. Then Grego discovered that his own Fuzzy,
Diamond, was speaking audibly with the power-unit of his Fuzzyphone
dead; he had learned to imitate the sounds he had heard himself
making. Diamond was able to teach the trick; now his pupils were
teaching others.
This class had several of the Stenson-Grego Fuzzyphones, things
with Fuzzy-size pistol grips and grip switches. They were speaking
with them, and then releasing the switches and trying to make the
same sounds themselves. Ko-Ko seemed to be in charge of the
instruction.
“No, no!” he was saying. “Not like that. Make
talk away back in mouth, like this.”
“Yeek?”
“No. Do again with hold-in-hand thing. Hold tight, now;
make talk.”
The van Riebeeks’ Syndrome didn’t seem to be doing
anything in particular; Holloway spoke to her:
“You make talk to these. Tell about how learn to make talk
like Big Ones.” He turned to the Fuzzies who had come in with
him. “You stay here. Do what these tell you. Soon you make
talk like Big Ones too. Then you come to Pappy Jack, make talk;
Pappy Jack give something nice.”
He left them with Syndrome and went over to where Little Fuzzy
sat on a box, smoking his pipe just like Pappy Jack. A number of
the Fuzzies around him, one of the advanced classes, were also
smoking.
“Among Big Ones,” he was saying in a mixture of
Fuzzy language and Lingua Terra, “everything belong somebody.
Every place belong somebody. Nobody go on somebody-else place, take
things belong somebody else.”
“No place belong everybody, like woods?” a pupil
asked.
“Oh, yes. Some places. Big Ones have Gov’men’
to take care of places belong everybody. This place, Hoksu-Mitto,
Gov’men’ place. Once belong Pappy Jack; Pappy Jack give
to Gov’men’, for everybody, all Big Ones, all
Fuzzies.”
“But, Gov’men’; what is?”
“Big One thing. All Big Ones talk together, all pick some
for take care of things belong everybody. Gov’men’ not
let anybody take somebody-else things, not let anybody make anybody
dead, not let hurt anybody. Now, Gov’men’ say nobody
hurt Fuzzy, make Fuzzy dead, take Fuzzy things. Do this in Big-Room
Talk-Place. I saw. Bad Big One make Goldilocks dead; other Big Ones
take bad Big One away, make him dead. Then, all say, nobody hurt
Fuzzy anymore. Pappy Jack make them do this.”
That wasn’t exactly what had happened. For instance,
Leonard Kellogg had cut his throat in jail, but suicide while of
unsound mind was a little complicated to explain to a Fuzzy. Just
let it go at that. He strolled on, to where some of George
Lunt’s family, Dr. Crippen and Lizzie Borden and Calamity
Jane, were teaching carpentry, and stayed for a while, watching the
Fuzzies using scaled-down saws and augers and drawknives and
planes. This crowd was really interested; they’d go out for
food after a while and then come back and work far into the
evening. They were building a hand-wagon, even the wheels; nearby
was a small forge, now cold, and an anvil on which they had made
the ironwork.
Finally, he reached the end of the hut where Ruth van Riebeek
and Pancho Ybarra, the Navy psychologist on permanent loan to the
Colonial Government, sat respectively on a pile of cushions on the
floor and the edge of a table. They had a dozen Fuzzies around
them.
“Hi, Jack,” Ruth greeted him. “When’s
that husband of mine coming back?”
“Oh, as soon as the agreement’s signed and the CZC
takes over. How are the kids doing?”
“Oh, we aren’t kids anymore, Pappy Jack,”
Ybarra told him. “We are very grown up. We are graduates, and
next week we will be faculty members.”
Holloway sat down on the cushions with Ruth, and the Fuzzies
crowded around him, wanting puffs from his pipe, and telling him
what they had learned and what they were going to teach. Then, by
pairs and groups, they drifted away. There was a general
breaking-up. The vocal class was dispersing; Syndrome was going
away with her group. If she could get them back tomorrow . . . What
this school needed was a truant officer. The fire-making class had
gotten a blaze started on the earthen floor, and the
butchering-and-cooking class had joined them. The apprentice
bowyers and fletchers had already left. Carpentry was still going
strong.
“You know, this teaching program,” Ruth was saying,
“it seems to lack unity.”
“She thinks there is a teaching program,” Ybarra
laughed. “This is still in the trial-and-error, mostly
error-stage. After we learn what we have to teach, and how to do
it, we can start talking about programs.” He became more
serious. “Jack, I’m beginning to question the value of
a lot of this friction-fire-making, stone-arrowhead, bone-needle
stuff. I know they won’t all be adopted into human families
and most of them will have to live on their own in the woods or in
marginal land around settlements, but they’ll be in contact
with us and can get all the human-made tools and weapons and things
they need.”
“I don’t want that, Pancho. I don’t want them
made dependent on us. I don’t want them to live on human
handouts. You were on Loki, weren’t you? You know
what’s happened to the natives there; they’ve turned
into a lot of worthless Native Agency bums. I don’t want this
to happen to the Fuzzies.”
“That’s not quite the same, Jack,” Ybarra
said. “The Fuzzies are dependent on us, for hokfusine. They
can’t get enough of it for themselves.”
That was true, of course. The Fuzzies’ ancestors had
developed, by evolution, an endocrine gland secreting a hormone
nonexistent in any other Zarathustran mammal. Nobody was quite sure
why; an educated guess was that it had served to neutralize some
natural poison in something they had eaten in the distant past.
When discovered, a couple of months ago, this hormone had been
tagged with a polysyllabic biochemistry name that had been
shortened to NFMp.
But about the time Terran humans were starting civilizations in
the Nile and Euphrates valleys, the Fuzzies’ environment had
altered radically. The need for NFMp vanished and, unneeded, it
turned destructive. It caused premature and defective, nonviable,
births. As a race, the Fuzzies had started dying out. Today, there
was only this small remnant left, in the northern wilds of Beta
Continent.
The only thing that had saved them from complete extinction had
been another biochemical, a complicated long-molecule compound
containing, among other things, a few atoms of titanium, which they
still obtained by eating land-prawns—zatku, as they called them.
And, beginning with their first contacts with humans, they had also
gotten it from a gingerbread colored concoction officially
designated Terran Federation Armed Forces Emergency Ration,
Extraterrestrial Type Three. Like most synthetic rations, it was
loathed by the soldiers and spacemen to whom it was issued, but
after the first nibble Fuzzies doted on it. They called it
Hoksu-Fusso, “Wonderful Food.” The chemical discovered
in it, and in land-prawns, had been immediately named
hokfusine.
“It neutralizes NFMp, and it inhibits the glandular action
that produces it,” Ybarra was saying. “But we
can’t administer it environmentally; we have to supply it to
every individual Fuzzy, male and female. Viable births only occur
when both parents have gotten plenty of it prior to
conception.”
The Fuzzies who lived among humans would get plenty of it, but
the ones who tried to shift for themselves in the woods
wouldn’t. The very thing he wanted to avoid, dependence on
humans, would be selected for genetically, just as a taste for
land-prawns had been. The countdown for the Fuzzy race had been
going on for a thousand generations, ten little Fuzzies, nine
little Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies. He didn’t know how many
more generations until it would be no little Fuzzies if they
didn’t do something now.
“Don’t worry about the next generation, Jack,”
Ruth said. “Just be glad there’ll be one.”