THE FUZZIES TOOK the manipulator quite calmly the next morning.
That wasn’t any horrible monster, that was just something
Pappy Jack took rides in. He found one rather indifferent sunstone
in the morning and two good ones in the afternoon. He came home
early and found the family in the living room; they had dumped the
wastebasket and were putting things back into it. Another
land-prawn seemed to have gotten into the house; its picked shell
was with the other rubbish in the basket. They had dinner early,
and he loaded the lot of them into the airjeep and took them for a
long ride to the south and west.
The following day, he located the flint vein on the other side
of the gorge and spent most of the morning blasting away the
sandstone above it. The next time he went into Mallorysport, he
decided, he was going to shop around for a good power-shovel. He
had to blast a channel to keep the little stream from damming up on
him. He didn’t get any flint cracked at all that day. There
was another harpy circling around the camp when he got back; he
chased it with the manipulator and shot it down with his pistol.
Harpies probably found Fuzzies as tasty as Fuzzies found
land-prawns. The family was all sitting under the gunrack when he
entered the living room.
The next day he cracked flint, and found three more stones. It
really looked as though he had found the Dying Place of the
Jellyfish at that. He knocked off early that afternoon, and when he
came in sight of the camp, he saw an airjeep grounded on the lawn
and a small man with a red beard in a faded Khaki bush jacket
sitting on the bench by the kitchen door, surrounded by Fuzzies.
There was a camera and some other equipment laid up where the
Fuzzies couldn’t get at it. Baby Fuzzy, of course, was
sitting on his head. He looked up and waved, and then handed Baby
to his mother and rose to his feet.
“Well, what do you think of them, Ben?” Jack called
down, as he grounded the manipulator.
“My God, don’t start me on that now!” Ben
Rainsford replied, and then laughed. “I stopped at the
constabulary post on the way home. I thought George Lunt had turned
into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. Then I went home, and
found your call on the recorder, so I came over here.”
“Been waiting long?”
The Fuzzies had all abandoned Rainsford and come trooping over
as soon as the manipulator was off contragravity. He climbed down
among them, and they followed him across the grass, catching at his
trouser legs and yeeking happily.
“Not so long.” Rainsford looked at his watch.
“Good Lord, three and a half hours is all. Well, the time
passed quickly. You know, your little fellows have good ears. They
heard you coming a long time before I did.”
“Did you see them killing any prawns?”
“I should say! I got a lot of movies of it.” He
shook his head slowly. “Jack, this is almost
incredible.”
“You’re staying for dinner, of course.”
“You try and chase me away. I want to hear all about this.
Want you to make a tape about them, if you’re
willing.”
“Glad to. We’ll do that after we eat.” He sat
down on the bench, and the Fuzzies began climbing upon and beside
him. “This is the original, Little Fuzzy. He brought the rest
in a couple of days later. Mamma Fuzzy, and Baby Fuzzy. And these
are Mike and Mitzi. I call this one Ko-Ko, because of the
ceremonious way he beheads land-prawns.”
“George says you call them all Fuzzies. Want that for the
official designation?”
“Sure. That’s what they are, isn’t
it?”
“Well, let’s call the order Hollowayans,”
Rainsford said. “Family, Fuzzies; genus, Fuzzy. Species,
Holloway’s Fuzzy—Fuzzy fuzzy Holloway. How’ll that
be?”
That would be all right, he supposed. At least, they
didn’t try to Latinize things in extraterrestrial zoology
anymore.
“I suppose our bumper crop of land-prawns is what brought
them into this section?”
“Yes, of course. George was telling me you thought
they’d come down from the north; about the only place they
could have come from. This is probably just the advance guard;
we’ll be having Fuzzies all over the place before long. I
wonder how fast they breed.”
“Not very fast. Three males and two females in this crowd,
and only one young one.” He set Mike and Mitzi off his lap
and got to his feet. “I’ll go start dinner now. While
I’m doing that, you can look at the stuff they brought in
with them.”
When he had placed the dinner in the oven and taken a couple of
highballs into the living room, Rainsford was still sitting at the
desk, looking at the artifacts. He accepted his drink and sipped it
absently, then raised his head.
“Jack, this stuff is absolutely amazing,” he
said.
“It’s better than that. It’s unique. Only
collection of native weapons and implements on
Zarathustra.”
Ben Rainsford looked up sharply. “You mean what I think
you mean?” he asked. “Yes; you do.” He drank some
of his highball, set down the glass and picked up the polished-horn
prawn killer. “Anything—pardon, anybody—who does this kind of
work is good enough native for me.” He hesitated briefly.
“Why, Jack this tape you said you’d make. Can I
transmit a copy to Juan Jimenez? He’s chief mammalogist with
the Company science division; we exchange information. And
there’s another Company man I’d like to have hear it.
Gerd van Riebeek. He’s a general xeno-naturalist, like me,
but he’s especially interested in animal
evolution.”
“Why not? The Fuzzies are a scientific discovery.
Discoveries ought to be reported.”
Little Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi strolled in from the kitchen.
Little Fuzzy jumped up on the armchair and switched on the
viewscreen. Fiddling with the selector, he got the Big Blackwater
woods—burning. Mike and Mitzi shrieked delightedly, like a couple
of kids watching a horror show. They knew, by now, that nothing in
the screen could get out and hurt them.
“Would you mind if they came out here and saw the
Fuzzies?”
“Why, the Fuzzies would love that. They like
company.”
Mamma and Baby and Ko-Ko came in, seemed to approve what was on
the screen and sat down to watch it. When the bell on the stove
rang, they all got up, and Ko-Ko jumped onto the chair and snapped
the screen off. Ben Rainsford looked at him for a moment.
“You know, I have married friends with children who have a
hell of a time teaching eight-year olds to turn off screens when
they’re through watching them,” he commented.
IT TOOK AN hour, after dinner, to get the whole story, from the
first little yeek in the shower stall, on tape. When he had
finished, Ben Rainsford made a few remarks and shut off the
recorder, then looked at his watch.
“Twenty hundred; it’ll be seventeen hundred in
Mallorysport,” he said. “It could catch Jimenez at
Science Center if I called now. He usually works a little
late.”
“Go ahead. Want to show him some Fuzzies?” He moved
his pistol and some other impedimenta off the table and set Little
Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Baby upon it, then drew up a chair beside
it, in range of the communication screen, and sat down with Mike
and Mitzi and Ko-Ko. Rainsford punched out a wave-length
combination. Then he picked up Baby Fuzzy and set him on his
head.
In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man
looked out of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants
to make sure his public face is on straight. It was a bland,
tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face—the face
turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational
production lines on Terra.
“Why, Bennett, this is a pleasant surprise,” he
began. “I never expec—” Then he choked; at least,
he emitted a sound of surprise. “What in the name of
Dai-Butsu are those things on the table in front of you?” he
demanded. “I never saw anything—And what is that on your
head?”
“Family group of Fuzzies,” Rainsford said.
“Mature male, mature female, immature male.” He lifted
Baby Fuzzy down and put him in Mamma’s arms. “Species Fuzzy,
fuzzy Holloway Zarathustra. The gentleman on my left is Jack
Holloway, the sunstone operator, who is the original discoverer.
Jack, Juan Jimenez.”
They shook their own hands at one another in the ancient
Terran-Chinese gesture that was used on communication screens, and
assured each other, Jimenez rather absently, that it was a pleasure.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the Fuzzies.
“Where did they come from?” he wanted to know.
“Are you sure they’re indigenous?”
“They’re not quite up to spaceships, yet, Dr.
Jimenez. Fairly early Paleolithic, I’d say.”
Jimenez thought he was joking, and laughed. The sort of a laugh
that could be turned on and off, like a light. Rainsford assured
him that the Fuzzies were really indigenous.
“We have everything that’s known about them on
tape,” he said. “About an hour of it. Can you take
sixty-speed?” He was making adjustments on the recorder as he
spoke. “All right, set and we’ll transmit to you. And
can you get hold of Gerd van Riebeek? I’d like him to hear it
too; it’s as much up his alley as anybody’s.”
When Jimenez was ready, Rainsford pressed the play-off button,
and for a minute the recorder gave a high, wavering squeak. The
Fuzzies all looked startled. Then it ended.
“I think, when you hear this, that you and Gerd will both
want to come out and see these little people. If you can, bring
somebody who’s a qualified psychologist, somebody capable of
evaluating the Fuzzies’ mentation. Jack wasn’t kidding
about early Paleolithic. If they’re not sapient, they only
miss it by about one atomic diameter.”
Jimenez looked almost as startled as the Fuzzies had. “You
surely don’t mean that?” He looked from Rainsford to
Jack Holloway and back. “Well, I’ll call you back, when
we’ve both heard the tape. You’re three time zones west
of us, aren’t you? Then we’ll try to make it before
your midnight—that’ll be twenty-one hundred.”
He called back half an hour short of that. This time, it was
from the living room of an apartment instead of an office. There
was a portable record player in the foreground and a low table with
snacks and drinks, and two other people were with him. One was a
man of about Jimenez’s age with a good-humored,
non-life-adjusted, non-group-integrated and slightly weather-beaten
face. The other was a woman with glossy black hair and a Mona
Lisa-ish smile. The Fuzzies had gotten sleepy, and had been bribed
with Extee Three to stay up a little longer. Immediately, they
registered interest. This was more fun than the viewscreen.
Jimenez introduced his companions as Gerd van Riebeek and Ruth
Ortheris. “Ruth is with Dr. Mallin’s section;
she’s been working with the school department and the
juvenile court. She can probably do as well with your Fuzzies as a
regular xeno-psychologist.”
“Well, I have worked with extraterrestrials,” the
woman said. “I’ve been on Loki and Thor and
Shesha.”
Jack nodded. “Been on the same planets myself. Are you
people coming out here?”
“Oh, yes,” van Riebeek said. “We’ll be
out by noon tomorrow. We may stay a couple of days, but that
won’t put you to any trouble; I have a boat that’s big
enough for the three of us to camp on. Now, how do we get to your
place?”
Jack told him, and gave map coordinates. Van Riebeek noted them
down.
“There’s one thing, though, I’m going to have
to get firm about. I don’t want to have to speak about it
again. These little people are to be treated with consideration,
and not as laboratory animals. You will not hurt them, or annoy
them, or force them to do anything they don’t want to
do.”
“We understand that. We won’t do anything with the
Fuzzies without your approval. Is there anything you’d want
us to bring out?”
“Yes. A few things for the camp that I’m short of;
I’ll pay you for them when you get here. And about three
cases of Extee Three. And some toys. Dr. Ortheris, you heard the
tape, didn’t you? Well, just think what you’d like to
have if you were a Fuzzy, and bring it.”
THE FUZZIES TOOK the manipulator quite calmly the next morning.
That wasn’t any horrible monster, that was just something
Pappy Jack took rides in. He found one rather indifferent sunstone
in the morning and two good ones in the afternoon. He came home
early and found the family in the living room; they had dumped the
wastebasket and were putting things back into it. Another
land-prawn seemed to have gotten into the house; its picked shell
was with the other rubbish in the basket. They had dinner early,
and he loaded the lot of them into the airjeep and took them for a
long ride to the south and west.
The following day, he located the flint vein on the other side
of the gorge and spent most of the morning blasting away the
sandstone above it. The next time he went into Mallorysport, he
decided, he was going to shop around for a good power-shovel. He
had to blast a channel to keep the little stream from damming up on
him. He didn’t get any flint cracked at all that day. There
was another harpy circling around the camp when he got back; he
chased it with the manipulator and shot it down with his pistol.
Harpies probably found Fuzzies as tasty as Fuzzies found
land-prawns. The family was all sitting under the gunrack when he
entered the living room.
The next day he cracked flint, and found three more stones. It
really looked as though he had found the Dying Place of the
Jellyfish at that. He knocked off early that afternoon, and when he
came in sight of the camp, he saw an airjeep grounded on the lawn
and a small man with a red beard in a faded Khaki bush jacket
sitting on the bench by the kitchen door, surrounded by Fuzzies.
There was a camera and some other equipment laid up where the
Fuzzies couldn’t get at it. Baby Fuzzy, of course, was
sitting on his head. He looked up and waved, and then handed Baby
to his mother and rose to his feet.
“Well, what do you think of them, Ben?” Jack called
down, as he grounded the manipulator.
“My God, don’t start me on that now!” Ben
Rainsford replied, and then laughed. “I stopped at the
constabulary post on the way home. I thought George Lunt had turned
into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. Then I went home, and
found your call on the recorder, so I came over here.”
“Been waiting long?”
The Fuzzies had all abandoned Rainsford and come trooping over
as soon as the manipulator was off contragravity. He climbed down
among them, and they followed him across the grass, catching at his
trouser legs and yeeking happily.
“Not so long.” Rainsford looked at his watch.
“Good Lord, three and a half hours is all. Well, the time
passed quickly. You know, your little fellows have good ears. They
heard you coming a long time before I did.”
“Did you see them killing any prawns?”
“I should say! I got a lot of movies of it.” He
shook his head slowly. “Jack, this is almost
incredible.”
“You’re staying for dinner, of course.”
“You try and chase me away. I want to hear all about this.
Want you to make a tape about them, if you’re
willing.”
“Glad to. We’ll do that after we eat.” He sat
down on the bench, and the Fuzzies began climbing upon and beside
him. “This is the original, Little Fuzzy. He brought the rest
in a couple of days later. Mamma Fuzzy, and Baby Fuzzy. And these
are Mike and Mitzi. I call this one Ko-Ko, because of the
ceremonious way he beheads land-prawns.”
“George says you call them all Fuzzies. Want that for the
official designation?”
“Sure. That’s what they are, isn’t
it?”
“Well, let’s call the order Hollowayans,”
Rainsford said. “Family, Fuzzies; genus, Fuzzy. Species,
Holloway’s Fuzzy—Fuzzy fuzzy Holloway. How’ll that
be?”
That would be all right, he supposed. At least, they
didn’t try to Latinize things in extraterrestrial zoology
anymore.
“I suppose our bumper crop of land-prawns is what brought
them into this section?”
“Yes, of course. George was telling me you thought
they’d come down from the north; about the only place they
could have come from. This is probably just the advance guard;
we’ll be having Fuzzies all over the place before long. I
wonder how fast they breed.”
“Not very fast. Three males and two females in this crowd,
and only one young one.” He set Mike and Mitzi off his lap
and got to his feet. “I’ll go start dinner now. While
I’m doing that, you can look at the stuff they brought in
with them.”
When he had placed the dinner in the oven and taken a couple of
highballs into the living room, Rainsford was still sitting at the
desk, looking at the artifacts. He accepted his drink and sipped it
absently, then raised his head.
“Jack, this stuff is absolutely amazing,” he
said.
“It’s better than that. It’s unique. Only
collection of native weapons and implements on
Zarathustra.”
Ben Rainsford looked up sharply. “You mean what I think
you mean?” he asked. “Yes; you do.” He drank some
of his highball, set down the glass and picked up the polished-horn
prawn killer. “Anything—pardon, anybody—who does this kind of
work is good enough native for me.” He hesitated briefly.
“Why, Jack this tape you said you’d make. Can I
transmit a copy to Juan Jimenez? He’s chief mammalogist with
the Company science division; we exchange information. And
there’s another Company man I’d like to have hear it.
Gerd van Riebeek. He’s a general xeno-naturalist, like me,
but he’s especially interested in animal
evolution.”
“Why not? The Fuzzies are a scientific discovery.
Discoveries ought to be reported.”
Little Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi strolled in from the kitchen.
Little Fuzzy jumped up on the armchair and switched on the
viewscreen. Fiddling with the selector, he got the Big Blackwater
woods—burning. Mike and Mitzi shrieked delightedly, like a couple
of kids watching a horror show. They knew, by now, that nothing in
the screen could get out and hurt them.
“Would you mind if they came out here and saw the
Fuzzies?”
“Why, the Fuzzies would love that. They like
company.”
Mamma and Baby and Ko-Ko came in, seemed to approve what was on
the screen and sat down to watch it. When the bell on the stove
rang, they all got up, and Ko-Ko jumped onto the chair and snapped
the screen off. Ben Rainsford looked at him for a moment.
“You know, I have married friends with children who have a
hell of a time teaching eight-year olds to turn off screens when
they’re through watching them,” he commented.
IT TOOK AN hour, after dinner, to get the whole story, from the
first little yeek in the shower stall, on tape. When he had
finished, Ben Rainsford made a few remarks and shut off the
recorder, then looked at his watch.
“Twenty hundred; it’ll be seventeen hundred in
Mallorysport,” he said. “It could catch Jimenez at
Science Center if I called now. He usually works a little
late.”
“Go ahead. Want to show him some Fuzzies?” He moved
his pistol and some other impedimenta off the table and set Little
Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Baby upon it, then drew up a chair beside
it, in range of the communication screen, and sat down with Mike
and Mitzi and Ko-Ko. Rainsford punched out a wave-length
combination. Then he picked up Baby Fuzzy and set him on his
head.
In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man
looked out of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants
to make sure his public face is on straight. It was a bland,
tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face—the face
turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational
production lines on Terra.
“Why, Bennett, this is a pleasant surprise,” he
began. “I never expec—” Then he choked; at least,
he emitted a sound of surprise. “What in the name of
Dai-Butsu are those things on the table in front of you?” he
demanded. “I never saw anything—And what is that on your
head?”
“Family group of Fuzzies,” Rainsford said.
“Mature male, mature female, immature male.” He lifted
Baby Fuzzy down and put him in Mamma’s arms. “Species Fuzzy,
fuzzy Holloway Zarathustra. The gentleman on my left is Jack
Holloway, the sunstone operator, who is the original discoverer.
Jack, Juan Jimenez.”
They shook their own hands at one another in the ancient
Terran-Chinese gesture that was used on communication screens, and
assured each other, Jimenez rather absently, that it was a pleasure.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the Fuzzies.
“Where did they come from?” he wanted to know.
“Are you sure they’re indigenous?”
“They’re not quite up to spaceships, yet, Dr.
Jimenez. Fairly early Paleolithic, I’d say.”
Jimenez thought he was joking, and laughed. The sort of a laugh
that could be turned on and off, like a light. Rainsford assured
him that the Fuzzies were really indigenous.
“We have everything that’s known about them on
tape,” he said. “About an hour of it. Can you take
sixty-speed?” He was making adjustments on the recorder as he
spoke. “All right, set and we’ll transmit to you. And
can you get hold of Gerd van Riebeek? I’d like him to hear it
too; it’s as much up his alley as anybody’s.”
When Jimenez was ready, Rainsford pressed the play-off button,
and for a minute the recorder gave a high, wavering squeak. The
Fuzzies all looked startled. Then it ended.
“I think, when you hear this, that you and Gerd will both
want to come out and see these little people. If you can, bring
somebody who’s a qualified psychologist, somebody capable of
evaluating the Fuzzies’ mentation. Jack wasn’t kidding
about early Paleolithic. If they’re not sapient, they only
miss it by about one atomic diameter.”
Jimenez looked almost as startled as the Fuzzies had. “You
surely don’t mean that?” He looked from Rainsford to
Jack Holloway and back. “Well, I’ll call you back, when
we’ve both heard the tape. You’re three time zones west
of us, aren’t you? Then we’ll try to make it before
your midnight—that’ll be twenty-one hundred.”
He called back half an hour short of that. This time, it was
from the living room of an apartment instead of an office. There
was a portable record player in the foreground and a low table with
snacks and drinks, and two other people were with him. One was a
man of about Jimenez’s age with a good-humored,
non-life-adjusted, non-group-integrated and slightly weather-beaten
face. The other was a woman with glossy black hair and a Mona
Lisa-ish smile. The Fuzzies had gotten sleepy, and had been bribed
with Extee Three to stay up a little longer. Immediately, they
registered interest. This was more fun than the viewscreen.
Jimenez introduced his companions as Gerd van Riebeek and Ruth
Ortheris. “Ruth is with Dr. Mallin’s section;
she’s been working with the school department and the
juvenile court. She can probably do as well with your Fuzzies as a
regular xeno-psychologist.”
“Well, I have worked with extraterrestrials,” the
woman said. “I’ve been on Loki and Thor and
Shesha.”
Jack nodded. “Been on the same planets myself. Are you
people coming out here?”
“Oh, yes,” van Riebeek said. “We’ll be
out by noon tomorrow. We may stay a couple of days, but that
won’t put you to any trouble; I have a boat that’s big
enough for the three of us to camp on. Now, how do we get to your
place?”
Jack told him, and gave map coordinates. Van Riebeek noted them
down.
“There’s one thing, though, I’m going to have
to get firm about. I don’t want to have to speak about it
again. These little people are to be treated with consideration,
and not as laboratory animals. You will not hurt them, or annoy
them, or force them to do anything they don’t want to
do.”
“We understand that. We won’t do anything with the
Fuzzies without your approval. Is there anything you’d want
us to bring out?”
“Yes. A few things for the camp that I’m short of;
I’ll pay you for them when you get here. And about three
cases of Extee Three. And some toys. Dr. Ortheris, you heard the
tape, didn’t you? Well, just think what you’d like to
have if you were a Fuzzy, and bring it.”