TWO DAYS LATER Gus Brannhard went back to Mallorysport, taking
Allan Quartermain and Natty Bumppo along, all three happy. The
other Fuzzies were all happy too; envy, like lying, was a vice
Fuzzies didn’t have. There was a big crowd of them to see
their friends off, and Jack watched them break into little groups
to return to play or lessons, all talking about how nice it was for
Natty and Allan, and how soon they’d all have Big Ones of
their own, too. He went back across the run to his office.
There was more topographic data and detail-maps of the country
north of the Divide sent down from Yellowsand Canyon. Everybody had
known, in general, what the country was like up there, mostly from
telescopic observations made on Xerxes Naval Base. What they were
getting now was low-level air-survey stuff, mostly of the
Yellowsand River and the Lake-Chain River which joined it from the
west. This, of course, didn’t show how many Fuzzies there
were up there, or where. Not many, he supposed, and it’d be a
Nifflheim of a job contacting them.
He got his hat and went out, crossing the run again. The
schoolhouse was relatively quiet. There was a small class in
progress, run by Syndrome and Calamity Jane and a couple of the new
teaching Fuzzies, on how to make talk in back of mouth like Big
Ones. Ruth van Riebeek and Mamma Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella
were running a class in Lingua Terra—“Big Ones not say zatka,
say lan’-p’awn.” Fuzzies, he noticed, had trouble
with r-sounds, and consonant sounds following other consonants.
Three more were doing blacksmith work. They had some photocopied
pictures from some book on ancient pre-gunpowder weapons, of Old
Terran English bills and Swiss halberds. They were making a halberd
now with a steel staff. Wooden staves were too flimsy for their
strength, or else too awkwardly thick. Outside, there was shouting
mixed with yeeks.
He went out the other end of the hut, trailing pipesmoke, and
found fifty or sixty of them at archery practice, waiting their
turns to shoot at a life-size and not implausible-looking padded
and burlap-covered figure of a zarabuck. Gerd van Riebeek was
acting as range officer, with Dillinger and Ned Kelly and Little
Fuzzy and Id coaching. One Fuzzy, his feet apart, drew his arrow to
his ear and loosed it, plunking it into where the zarabuck’s
ribs would have been. Before it landed, he had another arrow out of
his quiver and was nocking it.
“Anybody seen the High Sheriff of Nottingham around
anywhere?” Gerd asked. “He better get on the job, or
the king’ll be fresh out of deer.”
The second arrow went into the burlap zarabuck at the base of
the neck. More names for Fuzzies—Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little
John, Will Scarlet . . .
A zarabuck would feed the average Fuzzy band for two days, or a
double band for a day, and the woods were lousy with zarabuck. More
meat to a kill would mean that Fuzzies could operate in larger
bands. And a zarabuck-hide would make three or four shoulder bags,
not as good as the waterproof, zipper-closed, issue-type, but good
enough to carry things; and Fuzzies needed some way to carry
things. He remembered the pitifully few possessions Little
Fuzzy’s band had brought in with them; and by Fuzzy standards
they’d been rich. Usually, a band would have only their
clubs, and maybe a flake knife or a coup-de-poing axe. At bottom,
any culture was a matter of possessions—things to do things with.
Everything else—law, social organizations, philosophy, came
later.
Robin Hood, or Samkin Aylward, or whoever he was, had shot his
third arrow; he and all the others bolted down the hundred yards to
the target. It was a miracle, the way those kids had picked archery
up; less than a month, and it would take a couple of years to make
that kind of archers out of humans. A Fuzzy in the woods, with a
bow, could eat mighty well. Fifteen or twenty Fuzzies with bows
wouldn’t have any trouble at all keeping everybody well-fed,
all the time. They could make permanent homes, and wouldn’t
have to be on the move all the time. That might be the way to
handle it: a string of Fuzzy villages all through the Piedmont,
with patrol cars dropping in every couple of days to keep them
supplied with hokfusine. Maybe big villages, with a ZNPF trooper as
permanent resident.
And, what the hell, give them rifles and ammunition. An 8.5-mm
highspeed pistol cartridge would kill a zarabuck; Gus Brannhard had
potted quite a few with his Mars-Consolidated. Even kill a harpy;
and a couple of 8.5’s in the right places would make a
damnthing lose interest in Fuzzy for dinner. So, they’d need
ammunition. Well, they needed hokfusine anyhow, and a case of
cartridges now and then wouldn’t make much difference. One
thing, needing cartridges they’d stay around where
they’d get hokfusine too.
THE NEXT DAY, Victor Grego dropped in en route to Yellowsand,
accompanied by Diamond. After saying hello to all his human friends
in sight and asking Pappy Vic’s permission, Diamond went off
with Little Fuzzy to see the sights.
“How many Fuzzies do you have now?” Grego asked, as
he and Jack strolled toward the schoolhouse.
Jack told him, around five hundred. Like everybody else, Grego
thought that was a hell of a lot of Fuzzies in one place. Well,
damn it, it was, and there didn’t seem to be much that could
be done about it.
“Coming in, I saw a couple of hundred of them along Cold
Creek, below where the run comes in,” he added. “Had
some fires going, and there were a couple of lorries grounded with
them. More of your gang?”
“Oh, yes. That’s the shipyard and naval academy.
We’re teaching them how to build rafts and paddle and steer
them. Rivers give Fuzzies a lot of trouble; a river like the main
Snake or the Blackwater’s bigger to a Fuzzy than the Amazon
on Terra or the Fa’ansare on Loki is to us. That’s why
we get so many of them here; the river systems to the north funnel
a lot of them down Cold Creek.”
“This crowd doesn’t need to build rafts anymore.
They’ve made it on their own. They’ve joined the
Human-People now.”
And he couldn’t take them back and dump them in the woods;
he realized that now. The vilest cruelty anybody can commit is to
give somebody something wonderful and then snatch it away
again.
“I don’t know what the Nifflheim I’m going to
do with them,” he admitted. “It’ll depend on how
this minor-child status holds up, for one thing.”
“We can get that written into the Constitution,”
Grego said. “That’s if we can get it adopted after we
write it in.”
They had almost reached the schoolhouse. He stopped short.
“You think there’s any doubt?” he asked.
“Well, you know what kind of a goddamn rabble of delegates
we have; fifty or sixty we can depend on, and it takes a two-thirds
vote to adopt a constitution. The rest of that gang would sell us
out for a candy-bar.”
“Well, give them a candy-bar. Give them two candy-bars,
and a gold-plated eight-bladed Boy Scout knife.” He repeated
what Gus Brannhard had said about no opposition with money enough
to buy them away from the Company and the Government.
“That’s what I’m worried about. Hugo
Ingermann,” Grego said. “I know what he wants to do in
the long run. He wants to wreck the Company and Ben
Rainsford’s Government, both, and build himself up on the
ruins. That People’s Prosperity Party looks dead now, but
those things are as hard to kill as a Nidhog swampcrawler, and just
as poisonous. What he wants is to get an anti-Company Constitution
adopted, and then get an anti-Rainsford Legislature
elected.”
“How much money has he?” Jack started Grego away
from the schoolhouse and in the direction of his office across the
run. Whatever this was, he wanted to talk it over privately.
“And is he spending any?”
“He’s not spending any we know of, but he’s
borrowing all over the place. You know that North Mallorysport
section?”
That had been one of Grego’s few mistakes. About ten years
ago there had been a brief flurry in private industry, and the
Company had sold land north of the city. Now it was a ghost town,
abandoned factories and warehouses, and a ruinous airport. Hugo
Ingermann had managed to acquire title to most of it.
“He’s borrowing on that, every centisol he can.
Needless to say, we’re buying the mortgages from the bank. In
non-Company hands, that place could be made into a planetside
spaceport to compete with Terra-Baldur-Marduk on Darius, and we
don’t want that. He’s been getting the money in cash or
negotiable Banking Cartel certificates; none of it’s
deposited. The people at the bank say he’s all but cleaned
out his accounts there. I don’t know what he wants with all
that loose cash, and not knowing bothers me. He hasn’t been
spending any of it we can find out about.”
That meant not spending any, period; the Company’s
investigators found things out quickly. They went over to the
office and kicked it around from every angle they could think of,
and neither of them kicked any enlightenment out of, it. Hugo
Ingermann was up to something, and they didn’t know what, and
neither of them liked not knowing. They didn’t talk about it
with the others at cocktail-time; they talked about the Fuzzies and
what they could do with any more of them.
“Why don’t you plant Fuzzy colonies on the other
continents?” Grego asked. “We have a lot of good Fuzzy
country we’ll lease back to the Government at one sol for
value received, or something like that. If this hokfusine program
works the way everybody expects it to, we’ll have Fuzzies all
over everything.”
That was a good idea. Something else to think about tomorrow and
do something about after the Fuzzies’ legal status was
determined.
In the evening, just before Fuzzy bedtime, Little Fuzzy and
Diamond approached him and Grego.
“Pappy Jack,” Little Fuzzy began, “Diamond
want me to go visit with him, at Pappy Vic place, where Big Ones
dig. Say much fun there.”
“You want, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked. “Little
Fuzzy come with us, make visit. Then, we go home, bring Little
Fuzzy back here.”
“What do you think, Jack?” Grego asked.
“I’ll bring him back in a couple of days, and
it’ll be a lot of fun for both of them. Diamond’s never
had a friend with him at Yellowsand. I know, there’s a lot of
blasting and digging and so on, but he won’t get hurt.
I’ll look after him, and so’ll Diamond. Diamond knows
what’s dangerous and what isn’t.”
Diamond must have been telling him all about Yellowsand, and he
wanted to go see and come back and tell about; sure. And Grego was
always back and forth between Mallorysport and Yellowsand, and he
always took Diamond with him; he wouldn’t do that if there
were any real danger. Besides, there’d been enough digging
and bulldozing and construction-work around here for Little Fuzzy
to know what to watch out for.
“Yes; you go with Diamond; see Pappy Vic place; have
plenty fun,” he said. “But you be good Fuzzy; do what
Pappy Vic, Diamond say; not do anything they say not do. You listen
to Diamond; he know about digging-place.”
“Nobody get hurt if watch out,” Diamond said.
“Pappy Vic tell me all about things that hurt; I tell Little
Fuzzy. We have much fun.”
TWO DAYS LATER Gus Brannhard went back to Mallorysport, taking
Allan Quartermain and Natty Bumppo along, all three happy. The
other Fuzzies were all happy too; envy, like lying, was a vice
Fuzzies didn’t have. There was a big crowd of them to see
their friends off, and Jack watched them break into little groups
to return to play or lessons, all talking about how nice it was for
Natty and Allan, and how soon they’d all have Big Ones of
their own, too. He went back across the run to his office.
There was more topographic data and detail-maps of the country
north of the Divide sent down from Yellowsand Canyon. Everybody had
known, in general, what the country was like up there, mostly from
telescopic observations made on Xerxes Naval Base. What they were
getting now was low-level air-survey stuff, mostly of the
Yellowsand River and the Lake-Chain River which joined it from the
west. This, of course, didn’t show how many Fuzzies there
were up there, or where. Not many, he supposed, and it’d be a
Nifflheim of a job contacting them.
He got his hat and went out, crossing the run again. The
schoolhouse was relatively quiet. There was a small class in
progress, run by Syndrome and Calamity Jane and a couple of the new
teaching Fuzzies, on how to make talk in back of mouth like Big
Ones. Ruth van Riebeek and Mamma Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella
were running a class in Lingua Terra—“Big Ones not say zatka,
say lan’-p’awn.” Fuzzies, he noticed, had trouble
with r-sounds, and consonant sounds following other consonants.
Three more were doing blacksmith work. They had some photocopied
pictures from some book on ancient pre-gunpowder weapons, of Old
Terran English bills and Swiss halberds. They were making a halberd
now with a steel staff. Wooden staves were too flimsy for their
strength, or else too awkwardly thick. Outside, there was shouting
mixed with yeeks.
He went out the other end of the hut, trailing pipesmoke, and
found fifty or sixty of them at archery practice, waiting their
turns to shoot at a life-size and not implausible-looking padded
and burlap-covered figure of a zarabuck. Gerd van Riebeek was
acting as range officer, with Dillinger and Ned Kelly and Little
Fuzzy and Id coaching. One Fuzzy, his feet apart, drew his arrow to
his ear and loosed it, plunking it into where the zarabuck’s
ribs would have been. Before it landed, he had another arrow out of
his quiver and was nocking it.
“Anybody seen the High Sheriff of Nottingham around
anywhere?” Gerd asked. “He better get on the job, or
the king’ll be fresh out of deer.”
The second arrow went into the burlap zarabuck at the base of
the neck. More names for Fuzzies—Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little
John, Will Scarlet . . .
A zarabuck would feed the average Fuzzy band for two days, or a
double band for a day, and the woods were lousy with zarabuck. More
meat to a kill would mean that Fuzzies could operate in larger
bands. And a zarabuck-hide would make three or four shoulder bags,
not as good as the waterproof, zipper-closed, issue-type, but good
enough to carry things; and Fuzzies needed some way to carry
things. He remembered the pitifully few possessions Little
Fuzzy’s band had brought in with them; and by Fuzzy standards
they’d been rich. Usually, a band would have only their
clubs, and maybe a flake knife or a coup-de-poing axe. At bottom,
any culture was a matter of possessions—things to do things with.
Everything else—law, social organizations, philosophy, came
later.
Robin Hood, or Samkin Aylward, or whoever he was, had shot his
third arrow; he and all the others bolted down the hundred yards to
the target. It was a miracle, the way those kids had picked archery
up; less than a month, and it would take a couple of years to make
that kind of archers out of humans. A Fuzzy in the woods, with a
bow, could eat mighty well. Fifteen or twenty Fuzzies with bows
wouldn’t have any trouble at all keeping everybody well-fed,
all the time. They could make permanent homes, and wouldn’t
have to be on the move all the time. That might be the way to
handle it: a string of Fuzzy villages all through the Piedmont,
with patrol cars dropping in every couple of days to keep them
supplied with hokfusine. Maybe big villages, with a ZNPF trooper as
permanent resident.
And, what the hell, give them rifles and ammunition. An 8.5-mm
highspeed pistol cartridge would kill a zarabuck; Gus Brannhard had
potted quite a few with his Mars-Consolidated. Even kill a harpy;
and a couple of 8.5’s in the right places would make a
damnthing lose interest in Fuzzy for dinner. So, they’d need
ammunition. Well, they needed hokfusine anyhow, and a case of
cartridges now and then wouldn’t make much difference. One
thing, needing cartridges they’d stay around where
they’d get hokfusine too.
THE NEXT DAY, Victor Grego dropped in en route to Yellowsand,
accompanied by Diamond. After saying hello to all his human friends
in sight and asking Pappy Vic’s permission, Diamond went off
with Little Fuzzy to see the sights.
“How many Fuzzies do you have now?” Grego asked, as
he and Jack strolled toward the schoolhouse.
Jack told him, around five hundred. Like everybody else, Grego
thought that was a hell of a lot of Fuzzies in one place. Well,
damn it, it was, and there didn’t seem to be much that could
be done about it.
“Coming in, I saw a couple of hundred of them along Cold
Creek, below where the run comes in,” he added. “Had
some fires going, and there were a couple of lorries grounded with
them. More of your gang?”
“Oh, yes. That’s the shipyard and naval academy.
We’re teaching them how to build rafts and paddle and steer
them. Rivers give Fuzzies a lot of trouble; a river like the main
Snake or the Blackwater’s bigger to a Fuzzy than the Amazon
on Terra or the Fa’ansare on Loki is to us. That’s why
we get so many of them here; the river systems to the north funnel
a lot of them down Cold Creek.”
“This crowd doesn’t need to build rafts anymore.
They’ve made it on their own. They’ve joined the
Human-People now.”
And he couldn’t take them back and dump them in the woods;
he realized that now. The vilest cruelty anybody can commit is to
give somebody something wonderful and then snatch it away
again.
“I don’t know what the Nifflheim I’m going to
do with them,” he admitted. “It’ll depend on how
this minor-child status holds up, for one thing.”
“We can get that written into the Constitution,”
Grego said. “That’s if we can get it adopted after we
write it in.”
They had almost reached the schoolhouse. He stopped short.
“You think there’s any doubt?” he asked.
“Well, you know what kind of a goddamn rabble of delegates
we have; fifty or sixty we can depend on, and it takes a two-thirds
vote to adopt a constitution. The rest of that gang would sell us
out for a candy-bar.”
“Well, give them a candy-bar. Give them two candy-bars,
and a gold-plated eight-bladed Boy Scout knife.” He repeated
what Gus Brannhard had said about no opposition with money enough
to buy them away from the Company and the Government.
“That’s what I’m worried about. Hugo
Ingermann,” Grego said. “I know what he wants to do in
the long run. He wants to wreck the Company and Ben
Rainsford’s Government, both, and build himself up on the
ruins. That People’s Prosperity Party looks dead now, but
those things are as hard to kill as a Nidhog swampcrawler, and just
as poisonous. What he wants is to get an anti-Company Constitution
adopted, and then get an anti-Rainsford Legislature
elected.”
“How much money has he?” Jack started Grego away
from the schoolhouse and in the direction of his office across the
run. Whatever this was, he wanted to talk it over privately.
“And is he spending any?”
“He’s not spending any we know of, but he’s
borrowing all over the place. You know that North Mallorysport
section?”
That had been one of Grego’s few mistakes. About ten years
ago there had been a brief flurry in private industry, and the
Company had sold land north of the city. Now it was a ghost town,
abandoned factories and warehouses, and a ruinous airport. Hugo
Ingermann had managed to acquire title to most of it.
“He’s borrowing on that, every centisol he can.
Needless to say, we’re buying the mortgages from the bank. In
non-Company hands, that place could be made into a planetside
spaceport to compete with Terra-Baldur-Marduk on Darius, and we
don’t want that. He’s been getting the money in cash or
negotiable Banking Cartel certificates; none of it’s
deposited. The people at the bank say he’s all but cleaned
out his accounts there. I don’t know what he wants with all
that loose cash, and not knowing bothers me. He hasn’t been
spending any of it we can find out about.”
That meant not spending any, period; the Company’s
investigators found things out quickly. They went over to the
office and kicked it around from every angle they could think of,
and neither of them kicked any enlightenment out of, it. Hugo
Ingermann was up to something, and they didn’t know what, and
neither of them liked not knowing. They didn’t talk about it
with the others at cocktail-time; they talked about the Fuzzies and
what they could do with any more of them.
“Why don’t you plant Fuzzy colonies on the other
continents?” Grego asked. “We have a lot of good Fuzzy
country we’ll lease back to the Government at one sol for
value received, or something like that. If this hokfusine program
works the way everybody expects it to, we’ll have Fuzzies all
over everything.”
That was a good idea. Something else to think about tomorrow and
do something about after the Fuzzies’ legal status was
determined.
In the evening, just before Fuzzy bedtime, Little Fuzzy and
Diamond approached him and Grego.
“Pappy Jack,” Little Fuzzy began, “Diamond
want me to go visit with him, at Pappy Vic place, where Big Ones
dig. Say much fun there.”
“You want, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked. “Little
Fuzzy come with us, make visit. Then, we go home, bring Little
Fuzzy back here.”
“What do you think, Jack?” Grego asked.
“I’ll bring him back in a couple of days, and
it’ll be a lot of fun for both of them. Diamond’s never
had a friend with him at Yellowsand. I know, there’s a lot of
blasting and digging and so on, but he won’t get hurt.
I’ll look after him, and so’ll Diamond. Diamond knows
what’s dangerous and what isn’t.”
Diamond must have been telling him all about Yellowsand, and he
wanted to go see and come back and tell about; sure. And Grego was
always back and forth between Mallorysport and Yellowsand, and he
always took Diamond with him; he wouldn’t do that if there
were any real danger. Besides, there’d been enough digging
and bulldozing and construction-work around here for Little Fuzzy
to know what to watch out for.
“Yes; you go with Diamond; see Pappy Vic place; have
plenty fun,” he said. “But you be good Fuzzy; do what
Pappy Vic, Diamond say; not do anything they say not do. You listen
to Diamond; he know about digging-place.”
“Nobody get hurt if watch out,” Diamond said.
“Pappy Vic tell me all about things that hurt; I tell Little
Fuzzy. We have much fun.”