IT WAS ELECTION day at Hoksu-Mitto. Not Fuzzy tribal election;
this was for Big Ones, for delegates to the Constitutional
Convention, and it had been going on all over the planet, starting
hours ago at Kellytown on Epsilon Continent.
Voting was a simple matter. Jack Holloway had exercised his
right of suffrage in his own living room after finishing breakfast
by screening the Constabulary post two hundred odd miles south of
him and transmitting his fingerprints there. Then he loaded his
pipe, and before he had it drawing properly the robot at
Constabulary Fifteen had sent his prints to Red Hill. The election
robot there had transmitted them to the planetary election office
in Central Courts Building in Mallorysport on Alpha Continent, then
reported back that Jack Holloway, of Hoksu-Mitto, formerly
Holloway’s Camp, was a properly registered voter, and the
machine gave a small cluck and ejected a photoprinted ballot. He
marked the ballot with an X after the name of the Hon. Horace
Stannery, an undistinguished and rather less-than-brilliant lawyer
in Red Hill but a loyal Company and Government man, and held it up
to the transmitting screen.
The whole thing was handled precisely and secretly by
incorruptible robots. At least, that was what all the school civics
books said. He carried the ballot original over and put it in the
drawer of his big table. Hang onto that, he thought; be a
museum-piece in half a century. Then he put on the telecast screen
while he drank another cup of coffee.
The Gamma Continent vote was all in, what there was of it. Ten
seats on the Convention, eight of them Government-CZC regulars. In
his own district on Beta, seventy-eight votes, his own included,
had given Stannery sixty-two, with the remaining sixteen divided
between the two wildcat candidates. It was rather like that all
over the continent. Alpha, where a hundred ten out of a hundred
fifty seats were being contested, hadn’t begun to vote yet;
it was only 0445 there.
He kept a telecast screen on in his office throughout the
morning. By noon, nine out of ten of the Rainsford-Grego slate were
well in the lead everywhere. The polls had closed on Epsilon
Continent: eighteen out of eighteen regulars elected. It went on
like that all afternoon, and by cocktail time the election looked
safe. They’d really have something to drink a toast to this
afternoon.
The Fuzzies didn’t seem to know that anything out of the
ordinary was happening.
GERD VAN RIEBEEK was bothered. Not seriously worried, just
nagged by a few small uncertainties and doubts. In the last three
weeks, the Protection Force patrol, working to a radius of five
hundred miles from Hoksu-Mitto, hadn’t reported seeing a
single harpy. In that time, there had been two shot in the Fuzzy
country south of the Divide, and another one in the Yellowsand
Valley to the north. But not one anywhere near Hoksu-Mitto in the
last week. It was looking like Zarathustran pseudopterodactyls were
becoming about as extinct as the Terran variety.
There hadn’t been many to start with, of course. Their
kills would have wiped out everything else long ago if there had
been. Say, one harpy to about a hundred or two hundred square
miles. And once Homo s. terra moved into the area, those
wouldn’t last long. People liked to be able to let the
children run around outdoors, for one thing, and nobody wanted all
the calves in a veldbeest herd eaten up before they could grow up.
The harpy might have been lord of the Zarathustran skies before the
Terrans came, but what chance had it against an aircar rated at
Mach 3, carrying a couple of machine guns?
Not that Gerd liked harpies any better than anybody else; not
even that he liked them, period. Along with everybody else on
Zarathustra, he was convinced that there were two kinds of
harpies—live ones and good ones. But he was a general naturalist;
ecology was a big part of his subject, and he knew that as soon as
you wipe out any single species, things that will affect a dozen
other species are going to start happening because every living
thing has a role in the general ecological drama.
Harpies were killers. All right, they kept something down;
remove them, and that something would have a sudden increase, and
that would deplete something they fed on. Or they would begin
competing with some other species. And there could be side effects.
There was that old story about how the cats killed the field mice
and the field mice destroyed the bumblebees’ nests. But the
bumblebees pollenated clover; so, when the bird-lovers started
shooting cats—just the way the Fuzzylovers were shooting
harpies—the clover crop started to fail. Wasn’t that
something Darwin wrote up, back about the beginning of the first
century Pre-Atomic?
The trouble was, he wasn’t keeping up with things.
He’d stopped being a general naturalist and become a
Fuzzyologist. Well, the Company’s Science Center tried to
keep up with everything. After lunch—well, say just before cocktail
time, which would be just after lunch in Mallorysport—he’d
screen Juan Jimenez and find out if anything unusual was
happening.
THE FUZZY NAMED Kraft—he was the male of the pair—wriggled
in the little chair. The globe above and behind him glowed clear
blue. Leslie Coombes sympathized with Kraft; he’d seen enough
witnesses wriggling like that in the same kind of chair.
“You want to help Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee,”
Ernst Mallin was pleading. “Maybe this is not so, but you
say. You not, Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee have bad trouble.
Other Big Ones be angry with them.”
“But, Unka Ernst,” Kraft insisted. “I not
break asht’ay, Unka Less’ee break.”
The woman in the white smock said, “You tell Auntie Anne
you break ashtray. Auntie Anne not be angry at you.”
“Go ahead, Kraft. Tell Miss Nelson you broke
ashtray,” he urged.
“Come on, Kraft,” Mallin’s assistant said.
“Who broke ashtray?”
The steady blue glow darkened and swirled, as though a bottle of
ink had been emptied into it. There were brief glints of violet.
Kraft gulped once or twice.
“Unka Less’ee broke asht’ay,” he
said.
The globe turned bright red.
Somebody said, “Oh, no!” and he realized that it was
himself. Mallin closed his eyes and shuddered. Miss Nelson said
something, and he hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was.
“Oh, God; if anything like that happens in court . . . ” he began. The red flush was fading from the veridicator
globe. “You’d better send that veridicator to the shop.
Or psychoanalyze it; it’s gone bughouse.”
“Unka Ernst,” the Fuzzy was pleading. “Plis,
not make do anymore. Kraft not know what to say.”
“No, I won’t, Kraft. Poor little fellow.”
Mallin released the Fuzzy from the veridicator, hugging him with a
tenderness Coombes had never thought him capable of. “And
Auntie Anne not angry with Unka Less’ee. Everybody
friends.” He handed Kraft to the girl. “Take him out,
Miss Nelson. Give him something nice, and talk to him for a
while.”
He waited till she carried the Fuzzy from the room.
“Well, do you know what happened?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. We’ll test the veridicator with
a normally mendacious human, but I doubt if there’s anything
wrong with it. You know, a veridicator does not actually detect
falsification. A veridicator is a machine, and knows nothing about
truth or falsehood. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the
experiment with the paranoid under veridication?”
“Got that in law-school psychology. Paranoid claimed he
was God, and the veridicator confirmed his claim. But why did this
veridicator red-light when Kraft was telling the truth?”
“The veridicator only detects the suppression of a
statement and the substitution of another. The veridicator here had
a subject with two conflicting statements, both of which he had to
regard as true. We were insisting that he confess to breaking that
ashtray, so, since we said so, it must be true. But he’d seen
you break it, so he knew that was also true. He had to suppress one
of these true-relative-to-him statements.”
“Well, maybe if he tries it again . . . ”
“No, Mr. Coombes.” Even Frederic Pendarvis ruling on
a point of law could not have been more inflexible. “I will
not subject this Fuzzy to any more of this. Nor Ebbing. They are
both beginning to develop psychoneurotic symptoms, the first I have
ever seen in any Fuzzy. We’ll have to get different subjects.
How about your defendants, Mr. Coombes?”
“Well, the test-witness isn’t supposed to be a
person giving actual testimony. Besides, I don’t want them
taught to lie and then have them do it on the stand. How about some
of the Fuzzies at Holloway’s?”
“I talked to Mr. Holloway. While he’s aware of the
gravity of the situation, he was most hostile to using any of his
own family, or Major Lunt’s, or Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek’s. He uses those Fuzzies as teachers, and lying
isn’t something he wants on the curriculum at Fuzzy
school.”
“No. I can see that.” Jack wasn’t the type to
win battles by losing the war. “Have you no other
Fuzzies?”
“Well, certainly Mrs. Hawkwood wouldn’t want the
ones I’ve loaned her for the schools trained in
prevarication. And the ones I have helping with mental patients at
the hospital have been successful mainly because of their complete
agreement with reality. I don’t know, Mr. Coombes.”
“Well, we only have three weeks till the trial opens, you
know.”
IT WAS ELECTION day at Hoksu-Mitto. Not Fuzzy tribal election;
this was for Big Ones, for delegates to the Constitutional
Convention, and it had been going on all over the planet, starting
hours ago at Kellytown on Epsilon Continent.
Voting was a simple matter. Jack Holloway had exercised his
right of suffrage in his own living room after finishing breakfast
by screening the Constabulary post two hundred odd miles south of
him and transmitting his fingerprints there. Then he loaded his
pipe, and before he had it drawing properly the robot at
Constabulary Fifteen had sent his prints to Red Hill. The election
robot there had transmitted them to the planetary election office
in Central Courts Building in Mallorysport on Alpha Continent, then
reported back that Jack Holloway, of Hoksu-Mitto, formerly
Holloway’s Camp, was a properly registered voter, and the
machine gave a small cluck and ejected a photoprinted ballot. He
marked the ballot with an X after the name of the Hon. Horace
Stannery, an undistinguished and rather less-than-brilliant lawyer
in Red Hill but a loyal Company and Government man, and held it up
to the transmitting screen.
The whole thing was handled precisely and secretly by
incorruptible robots. At least, that was what all the school civics
books said. He carried the ballot original over and put it in the
drawer of his big table. Hang onto that, he thought; be a
museum-piece in half a century. Then he put on the telecast screen
while he drank another cup of coffee.
The Gamma Continent vote was all in, what there was of it. Ten
seats on the Convention, eight of them Government-CZC regulars. In
his own district on Beta, seventy-eight votes, his own included,
had given Stannery sixty-two, with the remaining sixteen divided
between the two wildcat candidates. It was rather like that all
over the continent. Alpha, where a hundred ten out of a hundred
fifty seats were being contested, hadn’t begun to vote yet;
it was only 0445 there.
He kept a telecast screen on in his office throughout the
morning. By noon, nine out of ten of the Rainsford-Grego slate were
well in the lead everywhere. The polls had closed on Epsilon
Continent: eighteen out of eighteen regulars elected. It went on
like that all afternoon, and by cocktail time the election looked
safe. They’d really have something to drink a toast to this
afternoon.
The Fuzzies didn’t seem to know that anything out of the
ordinary was happening.
GERD VAN RIEBEEK was bothered. Not seriously worried, just
nagged by a few small uncertainties and doubts. In the last three
weeks, the Protection Force patrol, working to a radius of five
hundred miles from Hoksu-Mitto, hadn’t reported seeing a
single harpy. In that time, there had been two shot in the Fuzzy
country south of the Divide, and another one in the Yellowsand
Valley to the north. But not one anywhere near Hoksu-Mitto in the
last week. It was looking like Zarathustran pseudopterodactyls were
becoming about as extinct as the Terran variety.
There hadn’t been many to start with, of course. Their
kills would have wiped out everything else long ago if there had
been. Say, one harpy to about a hundred or two hundred square
miles. And once Homo s. terra moved into the area, those
wouldn’t last long. People liked to be able to let the
children run around outdoors, for one thing, and nobody wanted all
the calves in a veldbeest herd eaten up before they could grow up.
The harpy might have been lord of the Zarathustran skies before the
Terrans came, but what chance had it against an aircar rated at
Mach 3, carrying a couple of machine guns?
Not that Gerd liked harpies any better than anybody else; not
even that he liked them, period. Along with everybody else on
Zarathustra, he was convinced that there were two kinds of
harpies—live ones and good ones. But he was a general naturalist;
ecology was a big part of his subject, and he knew that as soon as
you wipe out any single species, things that will affect a dozen
other species are going to start happening because every living
thing has a role in the general ecological drama.
Harpies were killers. All right, they kept something down;
remove them, and that something would have a sudden increase, and
that would deplete something they fed on. Or they would begin
competing with some other species. And there could be side effects.
There was that old story about how the cats killed the field mice
and the field mice destroyed the bumblebees’ nests. But the
bumblebees pollenated clover; so, when the bird-lovers started
shooting cats—just the way the Fuzzylovers were shooting
harpies—the clover crop started to fail. Wasn’t that
something Darwin wrote up, back about the beginning of the first
century Pre-Atomic?
The trouble was, he wasn’t keeping up with things.
He’d stopped being a general naturalist and become a
Fuzzyologist. Well, the Company’s Science Center tried to
keep up with everything. After lunch—well, say just before cocktail
time, which would be just after lunch in Mallorysport—he’d
screen Juan Jimenez and find out if anything unusual was
happening.
THE FUZZY NAMED Kraft—he was the male of the pair—wriggled
in the little chair. The globe above and behind him glowed clear
blue. Leslie Coombes sympathized with Kraft; he’d seen enough
witnesses wriggling like that in the same kind of chair.
“You want to help Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee,”
Ernst Mallin was pleading. “Maybe this is not so, but you
say. You not, Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee have bad trouble.
Other Big Ones be angry with them.”
“But, Unka Ernst,” Kraft insisted. “I not
break asht’ay, Unka Less’ee break.”
The woman in the white smock said, “You tell Auntie Anne
you break ashtray. Auntie Anne not be angry at you.”
“Go ahead, Kraft. Tell Miss Nelson you broke
ashtray,” he urged.
“Come on, Kraft,” Mallin’s assistant said.
“Who broke ashtray?”
The steady blue glow darkened and swirled, as though a bottle of
ink had been emptied into it. There were brief glints of violet.
Kraft gulped once or twice.
“Unka Less’ee broke asht’ay,” he
said.
The globe turned bright red.
Somebody said, “Oh, no!” and he realized that it was
himself. Mallin closed his eyes and shuddered. Miss Nelson said
something, and he hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was.
“Oh, God; if anything like that happens in court . . . ” he began. The red flush was fading from the veridicator
globe. “You’d better send that veridicator to the shop.
Or psychoanalyze it; it’s gone bughouse.”
“Unka Ernst,” the Fuzzy was pleading. “Plis,
not make do anymore. Kraft not know what to say.”
“No, I won’t, Kraft. Poor little fellow.”
Mallin released the Fuzzy from the veridicator, hugging him with a
tenderness Coombes had never thought him capable of. “And
Auntie Anne not angry with Unka Less’ee. Everybody
friends.” He handed Kraft to the girl. “Take him out,
Miss Nelson. Give him something nice, and talk to him for a
while.”
He waited till she carried the Fuzzy from the room.
“Well, do you know what happened?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. We’ll test the veridicator with
a normally mendacious human, but I doubt if there’s anything
wrong with it. You know, a veridicator does not actually detect
falsification. A veridicator is a machine, and knows nothing about
truth or falsehood. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the
experiment with the paranoid under veridication?”
“Got that in law-school psychology. Paranoid claimed he
was God, and the veridicator confirmed his claim. But why did this
veridicator red-light when Kraft was telling the truth?”
“The veridicator only detects the suppression of a
statement and the substitution of another. The veridicator here had
a subject with two conflicting statements, both of which he had to
regard as true. We were insisting that he confess to breaking that
ashtray, so, since we said so, it must be true. But he’d seen
you break it, so he knew that was also true. He had to suppress one
of these true-relative-to-him statements.”
“Well, maybe if he tries it again . . . ”
“No, Mr. Coombes.” Even Frederic Pendarvis ruling on
a point of law could not have been more inflexible. “I will
not subject this Fuzzy to any more of this. Nor Ebbing. They are
both beginning to develop psychoneurotic symptoms, the first I have
ever seen in any Fuzzy. We’ll have to get different subjects.
How about your defendants, Mr. Coombes?”
“Well, the test-witness isn’t supposed to be a
person giving actual testimony. Besides, I don’t want them
taught to lie and then have them do it on the stand. How about some
of the Fuzzies at Holloway’s?”
“I talked to Mr. Holloway. While he’s aware of the
gravity of the situation, he was most hostile to using any of his
own family, or Major Lunt’s, or Gerd and Ruth van
Riebeek’s. He uses those Fuzzies as teachers, and lying
isn’t something he wants on the curriculum at Fuzzy
school.”
“No. I can see that.” Jack wasn’t the type to
win battles by losing the war. “Have you no other
Fuzzies?”
“Well, certainly Mrs. Hawkwood wouldn’t want the
ones I’ve loaned her for the schools trained in
prevarication. And the ones I have helping with mental patients at
the hospital have been successful mainly because of their complete
agreement with reality. I don’t know, Mr. Coombes.”
“Well, we only have three weeks till the trial opens, you
know.”