THE RECORDED VOICE ceased; for a moment the record player hummed
voicelessly. Loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a double
click, opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another
at the opposite side of the dome. Space Commodore Alex Napier
glanced up from his desk and out at the harshly angular landscape
of Xerxes and the blackness of airless space beyond the disquieting
close horizon. Then he picked up his pipe and knocked the heel out
into the ashtray. Nobody said anything. He began packing tobacco
into the bowl.
“Well, gentlemen?” He invited comment.
“Pancho?” Captain Conrad Greibenfeld, the Exec.,
turned to Lieutenant Ybarra, the chief psychologist.
“How reliable is this stuff?” Ybarra asked.
“Well, I knew Jack Holloway thirty years ago, on Fenris,
when I was just an ensign. He must be past seventy now,” he
parenthesized. “If he says he saw anything, I’ll
believe it. And Bennett Rainsford’s absolutely reliable, of
course.”
“How about the agent?” Ybarra insisted.
He and Stephen Aelborg, the Intelligence officer, exchanged
glances. He nodded, and Aelborg said:
“One of the best. One of our own, lieutenant j.g., Naval
Reserve. You don’t need to worry about credibility,
Pancho.”
“They sound sapient to me,” Ybarra said. “You
know, this is something I’ve always been half hoping and half
afraid would happen.”
“You mean an excuse to intervene in that mess down
there?” Greibenfeld asked.
Ybarra looked blankly at him for a moment. “No. No, I
meant a case of borderline sapience; something our sacred
talk-and-build-a-fire rule won’t cover. Just how did this
come to our attention, Stephen?”
“Well, it was transmitted to us from Contact Center in
Mallorysport late Friday night. There seem to be a number of copies
of this tape around; our agent got hold of one of them and
transmitted it to Contact Center, and it was relayed on to us, with
the agent’s comments,” Aelborg said. “Contact
Center ordered a routine surveillance inside Company House and, to
play safe, at the Residency. At the time, there seemed no reason to
give the thing any beat-to-quarters-and-man-guns treatment, but we
got a report on Saturday afternoon—Mallorysport time, that is—that
Leonard Kellogg had played off the copy of the tape that Juan
Jimenez had made for file, and had alerted Victor Grego
immediately.
“Of course, Grego saw the implications at once. He sent
Kellogg and the chief Company psychologist, Ernst Mallin, out to
Beta Continent with orders to brand Rainsford’s and
Holloway’s claims as a deliberate hoax. Then the Company
intends to encourage the trapping of Fuzzies for their fur, in
hopes that the whole species will be exterminated before anybody
can get out from Terra to check on Rainsford’s
story.”
“I hadn’t heard that last detail before.”
“Well, we can prove it,” Aelborg assured him.
It sounded like a Victor Grego idea. He lit his pipe slowly.
Damnit, he didn’t want to have to intervene. No Space Navy
C.O. did. Justifying intervention on a Colonial planet was too much
bother—always a board of inquiry, often a court-martial. And
supersession of civil authority was completely against Service
Doctrine. Of course, there were other and more important tenets of
Service Doctrine. The sovereignty of the Terran Federation for one,
and the inviolability of the Federation Constitution. And the
rights of extraterrestrials, too. Conrad Greibenfeld, too, seemed
to have been thinking about that.
“If those Fuzzies are sapient beings, that whole setup
down there is illegal, Company, Colonial administration and
all,” he said. “Zarathustra’s a Class-IV planet,
and that’s all you can make out of it.”
“We won’t intervene unless we’re forced to.
Pancho, I think the decision will be largely up to you.”
Pancho Ybarra was horrified.
“Good God, Alex! You can’t mean that. Who am I? A
nobody. All I have is an ordinary M.D., and a Psych. D. Why, the
best psychological brains in the Federation—”
“Aren’t on Zarathustra, Pancho. They’re on
Terra, five hundred light-years away, six months’ ship voyage
each way. Intervention, of course, is my responsibility, but the
sapience question is yours. I don’t envy you, but I
can’t relieve you of it.”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK’S suggestion that all three of the
visitors sleep aboard the airboat hadn’t been treated
seriously at all. Gerd himself was accommodated in the spare room
of the living hut. Juan Jimenez went with Ben Rainsford to his camp
for the night. Ruth Ortheris had the cabin of the boat to herself.
Rainsford was on the screen next morning, while Jack and Gerd and
Ruth and the Fuzzies were having breakfast; he and Jimenez had
decided to take his airjeep and work down from the head of Cold
Creek in the belief that there must be more Fuzzies around in the
woods.
Both Gerd and Ruth decided to spend the morning at the camp and
get acquainted with the Fuzzies on hand. The family had had enough
breakfast to leave them neutral on the subject of land-prawns, and
they were given another of the new toys, a big colored ball. They
rolled it around in the grass for a while, decided to save it for
their evening romp and took it into the house. Then they began
playing aimlessly among some junk in the shed outside the workshop.
Once in a while one of them would drift away to look for a prawn,
more for sport than food.
Ruth and Gerd and Jack were sitting at the breakfast table on
the grass, talking idly and trying to think of excuses for not
washing the dishes. Mamma Fuzzy and Baby were poking about in the
tall grass. Suddenly Mamma gave a shrill cry and started back for
the shed, chasing Baby ahead of her and slapping him on the bottom
with the flat of her chopper-digger to hurry him along.
Jack started for the house at a run. Gerd grabbed his camera and
jumped up on the table. It was Ruth who saw the cause of the
disturbance.
“Jack! Look, over there!” She pointed to the edge of
the clearing. “Two strange Fuzzies!”
He kept on running, but instead of the rifle he had been going
for, he collected his movie camera, two of the spare
chopper-diggers and some Extee Three. When he emerged again, the
two Fuzzies had come into the clearing and stood side by side,
looking around. Both were females, and they both carried wooden
prawn-killers.
“You have plenty of film?” he asked Gerd.
“Here, Ruth; take this.” He handed her his own camera.
“Keep far enough away from me to get what I’m doing and
what they’re doing. I’m going to try to trade with
them.”
He went forward, the steel weapons in his hip pocket and the
Extee Three in his hand, talking softly and soothingly to the
newcomers. When he was as close to them as he could get without
stampeding them, he stopped.
“Our gang’s coming up behind you,” Gerd told
him. “Regular skirmish line; choppers at high port. Now
they’ve stopped, about thirty feet behind you.”
He broke off a piece of Extee Three, put it in his mouth and ate
it. Then he broke off two more pieces and held them out. The two
Fuzzies were tempted, but not to the point of rashness. He threw
both pieces within a few feet of them. One darted forward, threw a
piece to her companion and then snatched the other piece and ran
back with it. They stood together, nibbling and making soft
delighted noises.
His own family seemed to disapprove strenuously of this
lavishing of delicacies upon outsiders. However, the two strangers
decided that it would be safe to come closer, and soon he had them
taking bits of field ration from his hand. Then he took the two
steel chopper-diggers out of his pocket, and managed to convey the
idea that he wanted to trade. The two strange Fuzzies were
incredulously delighted. This was too much for his own tribe; they
came up yeeking angrily.
The two strange females retreated a few steps, their new weapons
ready. Everybody seemed to expect a fight, and nobody wanted one.
From what he could remember of Old Terran history, this was a
situation which could develop into serious trouble. Then Ko-Ko
advanced, dragging his chopper-digger in an obviously pacific
manner, and approached the two females, yeeking softly and touching
the first one and then the other. Then he laid his weapon down and
put his foot on it. The two females began stroking and caressing
him.
Immediately the crisis evaporated. The others of the family came
forward, stuck their weapons in the ground and began fondling the
strangers. Then they all sat in circle, swaying their bodies
rhythmically and making soft noises. Finally Ko-Ko and the two
females rose, picked up their weapons and started for the
woods.
“Jack, stop them,” Ruth called out.
“They’re going away.”
“If they want to go, I have no right to stop
them.”
When they were almost at the edge of the woods, Ko-Ko stopped,
drove the point of his weapon into the ground and came running back
to Pappy Jack, throwing his arms around the human knees and
yeeking. Jack stooped and stroked him, but didn’t try to pick
him up. One of the two females pulled his chopper-digger out, and
they both came back slowly. At the same time, Little Fuzzy, Mamma
Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi came running back. For a while, all the
Fuzzies embraced one another, yeeking happily. Then they all
trooped across the grass and went into the house.
“Get that all, Gerd?” he asked.
“On film, yes. That’s the only way I did, though.
What happened?”
“You have just made the first film of intertribal social
and mating customs, Zarathustran Fuzzy. This is the family’s
home; they don’t want any strange Fuzzies hanging around.
They were going to run the girls off. Then Ko-Ko decided he liked
their looks, and he decided he’d team up with them. That made
everything different; the family sat down with them to tell them
what a fine husband they were getting and to tell Ko-Ko good-bye.
Then Ko-Ko remembered that he hadn’t told me good-bye, and he
came back. The family decided that two more Fuzzies wouldn’t
be in excess of the carrying capacity of this habitat, seeing what
a good provider Pappy Jack is, so now I should imagine
they’re showing the girls the family treasures. You know,
they married into a mighty well-to-do family.”
The girls were named Goldilocks and Cinderella. When lunch was
ready, they were all in the living room, with the viewscreen on;
after lunch, the whole gang went into the bedroom for a nap on
Pappy Jack’s bed. He spent the afternoon developing movie
film, while Gerd and Ruth wrote up the notes they had made the day
before and collaborated on an account of the adoption. By late
afternoon, when they were finished, the Fuzzies came out for a
frolic and prawn hunt.
They all heard the aircar before any of the human people did,
and they all ran over and climbed up on the bench beside the
kitchen door. It was a constabulary cruise car; it landed, and a
couple of troopers got out, saying that they’d stopped to see
the Fuzzies. They wanted to know where the extras had come from,
and when Jack told them, they looked at one another.
“Next gang that comes along, call us and keep them
entertained till we can get here,” one of them said.
“We want some at the post, for prawns if nothing
else.”
“What’s George’s attitude?” he asked.
“The other night, when he was here, he seemed half scared of
them.”
“Aah, he’s got over that,” one of the troopers
said. “He called Ben Rainsford; Ben said they were perfectly
safe. Hey, Ben says they’re not animals; they’re
people.”
He started to tell them about some of the things the Fuzzies
did. He was talking when the Fuzzies heard another aircar and
called attention to it. This time, it was Ben Rainsford and Juan
Jimenez. They piled out as soon as they were off contragravity,
dragging cameras after them.
“Jack, there were Fuzzies all over the place up
there,” Rainsford began, while he was getting out. “All
headed down this way; regular volkerwanderung. We saw over fifty of
them—four families, and individuals and pairs. I’m sure we
missed ten for every one we saw.”
“We better get up there with a car tomorrow,” one of
the troopers said. “Ben, just where were you?”
“I’ll show you on the map.” Then he saw
Goldilocks and Cinderella. “Hey! Where’d you two girls
come from? I never saw you around here before.”
There was another clearing across the stream, with a log
footbridge and path to the camp. Jack guided the big airboat down
onto it, and put his airjeep alongside with the canopy up. There
were two men on the forward deck of the boat, Kellogg and another
man who would be Ernst Mallin. A third man came out of the control
cabin after the boat was off contragravity. Jack didn’t like
Mallin. He had a tight, secretive face, with arrogance and bigotry
showing underneath. The third man was younger. His face
didn’t show anything much, but his coat showed a bulge under
the left arm. After being introduced by Kellogg, Mallin introduced
him as Kurt Borch, his assistant.
Mallin had to introduce Borch again at the camp, not only to Ben
Rainsford but also to van Riebeek, to Jimenez and even to Ruth
Ortheris, which seemed a little odd. Ruth seemed to think so, too,
and Mallin hastened to tell her that Borch was with Personnel,
giving some kind of tests. That appeared to puzzle her even more.
None of the three seemed happy about the presence of the
constabulary troopers, either; they were all relieved when the
cruise car lifted out.
Kellogg became interested in the Fuzzies immediately, squatting
to examine them. He said something to Mallin, who compressed his
lips and shook his head, saying:
“We simply cannot assume sapience until we find something
in their behavior which cannot be explained under any other
hypothesis. We would be much safer to assume nonsapience and
proceed to test that assumption.”
That seemed to establish the keynote. Kellogg straightened, and
he and Mallin started one of those “of course I agree,
doctor, but don’t you find, on the other hand, that you must
agree” sort of arguments, about the difference between
scientific evidence and scientific proof. Jimenez got into it to
the extent of agreeing with everything Kellogg said, and differing
politely with everything Mallin said that he thought Kellogg would
differ with. Borch said nothing; he just stood and looked at the
Fuzzies with ill-concealed hostility. Gerd and Ruth decided to help
getting dinner.
They ate outside on the picnic table, with the Fuzzies watching
them interestedly. Kellogg and Mallin carefully avoided discussing
them. It wasn’t until after dusk, when the Fuzzies brought
their ball inside and everybody was in the living room, that
Kellogg, adopting a presiding officer manner, got the conversation
onto the subject. For some time, without giving anyone else an
opportunity to say anything, he gushed about what an important
discovery the Fuzzies were. The Fuzzies themselves ignored him and
began dismantling the stick-and-ball construction. For a while
Goldilocks and Cinderella watched interestedly, and then they began
assisting.
“Unfortunately,” Kellogg continued, “so much of our
data is in the form of uncorroborated statements by Mr. Holloway.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t, myself,
doubt for a moment anything Mr. Holloway said on that tape, but you
must realize that professional scientists are most reluctant to
accept the unsubstantiated reports of what, if you’ll pardon
me, they think of as nonqualified observers.”
“Oh, rubbish, Leonard!” Rainsford broke in
impatiently. “I’m a professional scientist, of a good
many more years’ standing than you, and I accept Jack
Holloway’s statements. A frontiersman like Jack is a very
careful and exact observer. People who aren’t don’t
live long on frontier planets.”
“Now, please don’t misunderstand me,” Kellogg
reiterated. “ I don’t doubt Mr. Holloway’s
statements. I was just thinking of how they would be received on
Terra.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that, Leonard. The
Institute accepts my reports, and I’m vouching for
Jack’s reliability. I can substantiate most of what he told
me from personal observation.”
“Yes, and there’s more than just verbal
statements,” Gerd van Riebeek chimed in. “A camera is
not a nonqualified observer. We have quite a bit of film of the
Fuzzies.”
“Oh, yes; there was some mention of movies,” Mallin
said. “You don’t have any of them developed yet, do
you?”
“Quite a lot. Everything except what was taken out in the
woods this afternoon. We can run them off right now.”
He pulled down the screen in front of the gunrack, got the film
and loaded his projector. The Fuzzies, who had begun on a new
stick-and-ball construction, were irritated when the lights went
out, then wildly excited when Little Fuzzy, digging a toilet pit
with the wood chisel, appeared. Little Fuzzy in particular was
excited about that; if he didn’t recognize himself, he
recognized the chisel. Then there were pictures of Little Fuzzy
killing and eating land-prawns, Little Fuzzy taking the nut off the
bolt and putting it on again, and pictures of the others, after
they had come in, hunting and at play. Finally, there was the film
of the adoption of Goldilocks and Cinderella.
“What Juan and I got this afternoon, up in the woods,
isn’t so good, I’m afraid,” Rainsford said when
the show was over and the lights were on again. “Mostly
it’s rear views disappearing into the brush. It was very hard
to get close to them in the jeep. Their hearing is remarkably
acute. But I’m sure the pictures we took this afternoon will
show the things they were carrying—wooden prawn-killers like the
two that were traded from the new ones in that last
film.”
Mallin and Kellogg looked at one another in what seemed oddly
like consternation.
“You didn’t tell us there were more of them
around,” Mallin said, as though it were an accusation of
duplicity. He turned to Kellogg. “This alters the
situation.”
“Yes, indeed, Ernst,” Kellogg burbled delightedly.
“This is a wonderful opportunity. Mr. Holloway, I understand
that all this country up here is your property, by land-grant
purchase. That’s right, isn’t it? Well, would you allow
us to camp on that clearing across the run, where our boat is now?
We’ll get prefab huts—Red Hill’s the nearest town,
isn’t it?—and have a Company construction gang set them up
for us, and we won’t be any bother at all to you. We had only
intended staying tonight on our boat, and returning to Mallorysport
in the morning, but with all these Fuzzies swarming around in the
woods, we can’t think of leaving now. You don’t have
any objection, do you?”
He had lots of objections. The whole business was rapidly
developing into an acute pain in the neck for him. But if he
didn’t let Kellogg camp across the run, the three of them
could move seventy to eighty miles in any direction and be off his
land. He knew what they’d do then. They’d
live-trap or sleep-gas Fuzzies; they’d put them in
cages, and torment them with maze and electric shock experiments,
and kill a few for dissection, or maybe not bother killing them
first. On his own land, if they did anything like that, he could do
something about it.
“Not at all. I’ll have to remind you again, though,
that you’re to treat these little people with
consideration.”
“Oh, we won’t do anything to your Fuzzies,”
Mallin said.
“You won’t hurt any Fuzzies. Not more than once,
anyhow.”
THE NEXT MORNING, during breakfast, Kellogg and Kurt Borch put
in an appearance, Borch wearing old clothes and field boots and
carrying his pistol on his belt. They had a list of things they
thought they would need for their camp. Neither of them seemed to
have more than the foggiest notion of camp requirements. Jack made
some suggestions which they accepted. There was a lot of scientific
equipment on the list, including an X-ray machine. He promptly ran
a pencil line through that.
“We don’t know what these Fuzzies’ level of
radiation tolerance is. We’re not going to find out by
overdosing one of my Fuzzies.”
Somewhat to his surprise, neither of them gave him any argument.
Gerd and Ruth and Kellogg borrowed his airjeep and started north;
he and Borch went across the run to make measurements after
Rainsford and Jimenez arrived and picked up Mallin. Borch took off
soon after with the boat for Red Hill. Left alone, he loafed around
the camp, and developed the rest of the movie film, making three
copies of everything. Toward noon, Borch brought the boat back,
followed by a couple of scow-like farmboats. In a few hours, the
Company construction men from Red Hill had the new camp set up.
Among other things, they brought two more airjeeps.
The two jeeps returned late in the afternoon, everybody excited.
Between them, the parties had seen almost a hundred Fuzzies, and
had found three camps, two among rocks and one in a hollow
pool-ball tree. All three had been spotted by belts of filled-in
toilet pits around them; two had been abandoned and the third was
still occupied. Kellogg insisted on playing host to Jack and
Rainsford for dinner at the camp across the run. The meal, because
everything had been brought ready-cooked and only needed warming,
was excellent.
Returning to his own camp with Rainsford, Jack found the Fuzzies
finished with their evening meal and in the living room, starting a
new construction—he could think of no other name for it—with the
molecule-model balls and sticks. Goldilocks left the others and
came over to him with a couple of balls fastened together, holding
them up with one hand while she pulled his trouser leg with the
other.
“Yes, I see. It’s very beautiful,” he told
her.
She tugged harder and pointed at the thing the others were
making. Finally, he understood.
“She wants me to work on it, too,” he said.
“Ben, you know where the coffee is; fix us a pot. I’m
going to be busy here.”
He sat down on the floor, and was putting sticks and balls
together when Ben brought in the coffee. This was more fun than
he’d had in a couple of days. He said so while Ben was
distributing Extee Three to the Fuzzies.
“Yes, I ought to let you kick me all around the camp for
getting this started,” Rainsford said, pouring the coffee.
“I could make some excuses, but they’d all sound like
‘I didn’t know it was loaded.’ ”
“Hell, I didn’t know it was loaded, either.”
He rose and took his coffee cup, blowing on it to cool it.
“What do you think Kellogg’s up to, anyhow? That whole
act he’s been putting on since he came here is phony as a
nine-sol bill.”
“What I told you, evening before last,” Rainsford
said. “He doesn’t want non-Company people making
discoveries on Zarathustra. You notice how hard he and Mallin are
straining to talk me out of sending a report back to Terra before
he can investigate the Fuzzies? He wants to get his own report in
first. Well, the hell with him! You know what I’m going to
do? I’m going home, and I’m going to sit up all night
getting a report into shape. Tomorrow morning I’m going to
give it to George Lunt and let him send it to Mallorysport in the
constabulary mail pouch. It’ll be on a ship for Terra before
any of this gang knows it’s been sent. Do you have any copies
of those movies you can spare?”
“About a mile and a half. I made copies of everything,
even the stuff the others took.”
“Good. We’ll send that, too. Let Kellogg read about
it in the papers a year from now.” He thought for a moment,
then said: “Gerd and Ruth and Juan are bunking at the other
camp now; suppose I move in here with you tomorrow. I assume you
don’t want to leave the Fuzzies alone while that gang’s
here. I can help you keep an eye on them.”
“But, Ben you don’t want to drop whatever else
you’re doing—”
“What I’m doing, now, is learning to be a
Fuzzyologist, and this is the only place I can do it. I’ll
see you tomorrow, after I stop at the constabulary post.”
THE PEOPLE ACROSS the run—Kellogg, Mallin and Borch, and van
Riebeek, Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris—were still up when Rainsford
went out to his airjeep. After watching him lift out, Jack went
back into the house, played with his family in the living room for
a while and went to bed. The next morning he watched Kellogg, Ruth
and Jimenez leave in one jeep and, shortly after, Mallin and van
Riebeek in the other. Kellogg didn’t seem to be willing to
let the three who had come to the camp first wander around
unchaperoned. He wondered about that.
Ben Rainsford’s airjeep came over the mountains from the
south in the late morning and settled onto the grass. Jack helped
him inside with his luggage, and then they sat down under the big
featherleaf trees to smoke their pipes and watch the Fuzzies
playing in the grass. Occasionally they saw Kurt Borch pottering
around outside the other camp.
“I sent the report off,” Rainsford said, then looked
at his watch. “It ought to be on the mail boat for
Mallorysport by now; this time tomorrow it’ll be in
hyperspace for Terra. We won’t say anything about it; just
sit back and watch Len Kellogg and Ernst Mallin working up a sweat
trying to talk us out of sending it.” He chuckled. “I
made a definite claim of sapience; by the time I got the report in
shape to tape off, I couldn’t see any other
alternative.”
“Damned if I can. You hear that, kids?” he asked
Mike and Mitzi, who had come over in hope that there might be
goodies for them. “Uncle Ben says you’re
sapient.”
“Yeek?”
“They want to know if it’s good to eat.
What’ll happen now?”
“Nothing, for about a year. Six months from now, when the
ship gets in, the Institute will release it to the press, and then
they’ll send an investigation team here. So will any of the
other universities or scientific institutes that may be interested.
I suppose the government’ll send somebody, too. After all,
subcivilized natives on colonized planets are wards of the Terran
Federation.”
He didn’t know that he liked that. The less he had to do
with the government the better, and his Fuzzies were wards of Pappy
Jack Holloway. He said as much.
Rainsford picked up Mitzi and stroked her. “Nice
fur,” he said. “Fur like that would bring good prices.
It will, if we don’t get these people recognized as sapient
beings.”
He looked across the run at the new camp and wondered. Maybe
Leonard Kellogg saw that, too, and saw profits for the Company in
Fuzzy fur.
The airjeeps returned in the middle of the afternoon, first
Mallin’s, and then Kellogg’s. Everybody went inside. An
hour later, a constabulary car landed in front of the Kellogg camp.
George Lunt and Ahmed Khadra got out. Kellogg came outside, spoke
with them and then took them into the main living hut. Half an hour
later, the lieutenant and the trooper emerged, lifted their car
across the run and set it down on the lawn. The Fuzzies ran to meet
them, possibly expecting more whistles, and followed them into the
living room. Lunt and Khadra took off their berets, but made no
move to unbuckle their gun belts.
“We got your package off all right, Ben,” Lunt said.
He sat down and took Goldilocks on his lap; immediately Cinderella
jumped up, also. “Jack, what the hell’s that gang over
there up to anyhow?”
“You got that, too?”
“You can smell it on them for a mile, against the wind. In
the first place, that Borch. I wish I could get his prints;
I’ll bet we have them on file. And the whole gang’s
trying to hide something, and what they’re trying to hide is
something they’re scared of, like a body in a closet. When we
were over there, Kellogg did all the talking; anybody else who
tried to say anything got shut up fast. Kellogg doesn’t like
you, Jack, and he doesn’t like Ben, and he doesn’t like
the Fuzzies. Most of all he doesn’t like the
Fuzzies.”
“Well, I told you what I thought this morning,”
Rainsford said. “They don’t want outsiders discovering
things on this planet. It wouldn’t make them look good to the
home office on Terra. Remember, it was some non-Company people who
discovered the first sunstones, back in
’Forty-eight.”
George Lunt looked thoughtful. On him, it was a scowl.
“I don’t think that’s it, Ben. When we were
talking to him, he admitted very freely that you and Jack
discovered the Fuzzies. The way he talked, he didn’t seem to
think they were worth discovering at all. And he asked a lot of
funny questions about you, Jack. The kind of questions I’d
ask if I was checking up on somebody’s mental
competence.” The scowl became one of anger now. “By
God, I wish I had an excuse to question him—with a
veridicator!”
Kellogg didn’t want the Fuzzies to be sapient beings. If
they weren’t they’d be . . . fur-bearing animals. Jack
thought of some overfed society dowager on Terra or Baldur, wearing
the skins of Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Mike and Mitzi and
Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Goldilocks wrapped around her adipose
carcass. It made him feel sick.
THE RECORDED VOICE ceased; for a moment the record player hummed
voicelessly. Loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a double
click, opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another
at the opposite side of the dome. Space Commodore Alex Napier
glanced up from his desk and out at the harshly angular landscape
of Xerxes and the blackness of airless space beyond the disquieting
close horizon. Then he picked up his pipe and knocked the heel out
into the ashtray. Nobody said anything. He began packing tobacco
into the bowl.
“Well, gentlemen?” He invited comment.
“Pancho?” Captain Conrad Greibenfeld, the Exec.,
turned to Lieutenant Ybarra, the chief psychologist.
“How reliable is this stuff?” Ybarra asked.
“Well, I knew Jack Holloway thirty years ago, on Fenris,
when I was just an ensign. He must be past seventy now,” he
parenthesized. “If he says he saw anything, I’ll
believe it. And Bennett Rainsford’s absolutely reliable, of
course.”
“How about the agent?” Ybarra insisted.
He and Stephen Aelborg, the Intelligence officer, exchanged
glances. He nodded, and Aelborg said:
“One of the best. One of our own, lieutenant j.g., Naval
Reserve. You don’t need to worry about credibility,
Pancho.”
“They sound sapient to me,” Ybarra said. “You
know, this is something I’ve always been half hoping and half
afraid would happen.”
“You mean an excuse to intervene in that mess down
there?” Greibenfeld asked.
Ybarra looked blankly at him for a moment. “No. No, I
meant a case of borderline sapience; something our sacred
talk-and-build-a-fire rule won’t cover. Just how did this
come to our attention, Stephen?”
“Well, it was transmitted to us from Contact Center in
Mallorysport late Friday night. There seem to be a number of copies
of this tape around; our agent got hold of one of them and
transmitted it to Contact Center, and it was relayed on to us, with
the agent’s comments,” Aelborg said. “Contact
Center ordered a routine surveillance inside Company House and, to
play safe, at the Residency. At the time, there seemed no reason to
give the thing any beat-to-quarters-and-man-guns treatment, but we
got a report on Saturday afternoon—Mallorysport time, that is—that
Leonard Kellogg had played off the copy of the tape that Juan
Jimenez had made for file, and had alerted Victor Grego
immediately.
“Of course, Grego saw the implications at once. He sent
Kellogg and the chief Company psychologist, Ernst Mallin, out to
Beta Continent with orders to brand Rainsford’s and
Holloway’s claims as a deliberate hoax. Then the Company
intends to encourage the trapping of Fuzzies for their fur, in
hopes that the whole species will be exterminated before anybody
can get out from Terra to check on Rainsford’s
story.”
“I hadn’t heard that last detail before.”
“Well, we can prove it,” Aelborg assured him.
It sounded like a Victor Grego idea. He lit his pipe slowly.
Damnit, he didn’t want to have to intervene. No Space Navy
C.O. did. Justifying intervention on a Colonial planet was too much
bother—always a board of inquiry, often a court-martial. And
supersession of civil authority was completely against Service
Doctrine. Of course, there were other and more important tenets of
Service Doctrine. The sovereignty of the Terran Federation for one,
and the inviolability of the Federation Constitution. And the
rights of extraterrestrials, too. Conrad Greibenfeld, too, seemed
to have been thinking about that.
“If those Fuzzies are sapient beings, that whole setup
down there is illegal, Company, Colonial administration and
all,” he said. “Zarathustra’s a Class-IV planet,
and that’s all you can make out of it.”
“We won’t intervene unless we’re forced to.
Pancho, I think the decision will be largely up to you.”
Pancho Ybarra was horrified.
“Good God, Alex! You can’t mean that. Who am I? A
nobody. All I have is an ordinary M.D., and a Psych. D. Why, the
best psychological brains in the Federation—”
“Aren’t on Zarathustra, Pancho. They’re on
Terra, five hundred light-years away, six months’ ship voyage
each way. Intervention, of course, is my responsibility, but the
sapience question is yours. I don’t envy you, but I
can’t relieve you of it.”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK’S suggestion that all three of the
visitors sleep aboard the airboat hadn’t been treated
seriously at all. Gerd himself was accommodated in the spare room
of the living hut. Juan Jimenez went with Ben Rainsford to his camp
for the night. Ruth Ortheris had the cabin of the boat to herself.
Rainsford was on the screen next morning, while Jack and Gerd and
Ruth and the Fuzzies were having breakfast; he and Jimenez had
decided to take his airjeep and work down from the head of Cold
Creek in the belief that there must be more Fuzzies around in the
woods.
Both Gerd and Ruth decided to spend the morning at the camp and
get acquainted with the Fuzzies on hand. The family had had enough
breakfast to leave them neutral on the subject of land-prawns, and
they were given another of the new toys, a big colored ball. They
rolled it around in the grass for a while, decided to save it for
their evening romp and took it into the house. Then they began
playing aimlessly among some junk in the shed outside the workshop.
Once in a while one of them would drift away to look for a prawn,
more for sport than food.
Ruth and Gerd and Jack were sitting at the breakfast table on
the grass, talking idly and trying to think of excuses for not
washing the dishes. Mamma Fuzzy and Baby were poking about in the
tall grass. Suddenly Mamma gave a shrill cry and started back for
the shed, chasing Baby ahead of her and slapping him on the bottom
with the flat of her chopper-digger to hurry him along.
Jack started for the house at a run. Gerd grabbed his camera and
jumped up on the table. It was Ruth who saw the cause of the
disturbance.
“Jack! Look, over there!” She pointed to the edge of
the clearing. “Two strange Fuzzies!”
He kept on running, but instead of the rifle he had been going
for, he collected his movie camera, two of the spare
chopper-diggers and some Extee Three. When he emerged again, the
two Fuzzies had come into the clearing and stood side by side,
looking around. Both were females, and they both carried wooden
prawn-killers.
“You have plenty of film?” he asked Gerd.
“Here, Ruth; take this.” He handed her his own camera.
“Keep far enough away from me to get what I’m doing and
what they’re doing. I’m going to try to trade with
them.”
He went forward, the steel weapons in his hip pocket and the
Extee Three in his hand, talking softly and soothingly to the
newcomers. When he was as close to them as he could get without
stampeding them, he stopped.
“Our gang’s coming up behind you,” Gerd told
him. “Regular skirmish line; choppers at high port. Now
they’ve stopped, about thirty feet behind you.”
He broke off a piece of Extee Three, put it in his mouth and ate
it. Then he broke off two more pieces and held them out. The two
Fuzzies were tempted, but not to the point of rashness. He threw
both pieces within a few feet of them. One darted forward, threw a
piece to her companion and then snatched the other piece and ran
back with it. They stood together, nibbling and making soft
delighted noises.
His own family seemed to disapprove strenuously of this
lavishing of delicacies upon outsiders. However, the two strangers
decided that it would be safe to come closer, and soon he had them
taking bits of field ration from his hand. Then he took the two
steel chopper-diggers out of his pocket, and managed to convey the
idea that he wanted to trade. The two strange Fuzzies were
incredulously delighted. This was too much for his own tribe; they
came up yeeking angrily.
The two strange females retreated a few steps, their new weapons
ready. Everybody seemed to expect a fight, and nobody wanted one.
From what he could remember of Old Terran history, this was a
situation which could develop into serious trouble. Then Ko-Ko
advanced, dragging his chopper-digger in an obviously pacific
manner, and approached the two females, yeeking softly and touching
the first one and then the other. Then he laid his weapon down and
put his foot on it. The two females began stroking and caressing
him.
Immediately the crisis evaporated. The others of the family came
forward, stuck their weapons in the ground and began fondling the
strangers. Then they all sat in circle, swaying their bodies
rhythmically and making soft noises. Finally Ko-Ko and the two
females rose, picked up their weapons and started for the
woods.
“Jack, stop them,” Ruth called out.
“They’re going away.”
“If they want to go, I have no right to stop
them.”
When they were almost at the edge of the woods, Ko-Ko stopped,
drove the point of his weapon into the ground and came running back
to Pappy Jack, throwing his arms around the human knees and
yeeking. Jack stooped and stroked him, but didn’t try to pick
him up. One of the two females pulled his chopper-digger out, and
they both came back slowly. At the same time, Little Fuzzy, Mamma
Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi came running back. For a while, all the
Fuzzies embraced one another, yeeking happily. Then they all
trooped across the grass and went into the house.
“Get that all, Gerd?” he asked.
“On film, yes. That’s the only way I did, though.
What happened?”
“You have just made the first film of intertribal social
and mating customs, Zarathustran Fuzzy. This is the family’s
home; they don’t want any strange Fuzzies hanging around.
They were going to run the girls off. Then Ko-Ko decided he liked
their looks, and he decided he’d team up with them. That made
everything different; the family sat down with them to tell them
what a fine husband they were getting and to tell Ko-Ko good-bye.
Then Ko-Ko remembered that he hadn’t told me good-bye, and he
came back. The family decided that two more Fuzzies wouldn’t
be in excess of the carrying capacity of this habitat, seeing what
a good provider Pappy Jack is, so now I should imagine
they’re showing the girls the family treasures. You know,
they married into a mighty well-to-do family.”
The girls were named Goldilocks and Cinderella. When lunch was
ready, they were all in the living room, with the viewscreen on;
after lunch, the whole gang went into the bedroom for a nap on
Pappy Jack’s bed. He spent the afternoon developing movie
film, while Gerd and Ruth wrote up the notes they had made the day
before and collaborated on an account of the adoption. By late
afternoon, when they were finished, the Fuzzies came out for a
frolic and prawn hunt.
They all heard the aircar before any of the human people did,
and they all ran over and climbed up on the bench beside the
kitchen door. It was a constabulary cruise car; it landed, and a
couple of troopers got out, saying that they’d stopped to see
the Fuzzies. They wanted to know where the extras had come from,
and when Jack told them, they looked at one another.
“Next gang that comes along, call us and keep them
entertained till we can get here,” one of them said.
“We want some at the post, for prawns if nothing
else.”
“What’s George’s attitude?” he asked.
“The other night, when he was here, he seemed half scared of
them.”
“Aah, he’s got over that,” one of the troopers
said. “He called Ben Rainsford; Ben said they were perfectly
safe. Hey, Ben says they’re not animals; they’re
people.”
He started to tell them about some of the things the Fuzzies
did. He was talking when the Fuzzies heard another aircar and
called attention to it. This time, it was Ben Rainsford and Juan
Jimenez. They piled out as soon as they were off contragravity,
dragging cameras after them.
“Jack, there were Fuzzies all over the place up
there,” Rainsford began, while he was getting out. “All
headed down this way; regular volkerwanderung. We saw over fifty of
them—four families, and individuals and pairs. I’m sure we
missed ten for every one we saw.”
“We better get up there with a car tomorrow,” one of
the troopers said. “Ben, just where were you?”
“I’ll show you on the map.” Then he saw
Goldilocks and Cinderella. “Hey! Where’d you two girls
come from? I never saw you around here before.”
There was another clearing across the stream, with a log
footbridge and path to the camp. Jack guided the big airboat down
onto it, and put his airjeep alongside with the canopy up. There
were two men on the forward deck of the boat, Kellogg and another
man who would be Ernst Mallin. A third man came out of the control
cabin after the boat was off contragravity. Jack didn’t like
Mallin. He had a tight, secretive face, with arrogance and bigotry
showing underneath. The third man was younger. His face
didn’t show anything much, but his coat showed a bulge under
the left arm. After being introduced by Kellogg, Mallin introduced
him as Kurt Borch, his assistant.
Mallin had to introduce Borch again at the camp, not only to Ben
Rainsford but also to van Riebeek, to Jimenez and even to Ruth
Ortheris, which seemed a little odd. Ruth seemed to think so, too,
and Mallin hastened to tell her that Borch was with Personnel,
giving some kind of tests. That appeared to puzzle her even more.
None of the three seemed happy about the presence of the
constabulary troopers, either; they were all relieved when the
cruise car lifted out.
Kellogg became interested in the Fuzzies immediately, squatting
to examine them. He said something to Mallin, who compressed his
lips and shook his head, saying:
“We simply cannot assume sapience until we find something
in their behavior which cannot be explained under any other
hypothesis. We would be much safer to assume nonsapience and
proceed to test that assumption.”
That seemed to establish the keynote. Kellogg straightened, and
he and Mallin started one of those “of course I agree,
doctor, but don’t you find, on the other hand, that you must
agree” sort of arguments, about the difference between
scientific evidence and scientific proof. Jimenez got into it to
the extent of agreeing with everything Kellogg said, and differing
politely with everything Mallin said that he thought Kellogg would
differ with. Borch said nothing; he just stood and looked at the
Fuzzies with ill-concealed hostility. Gerd and Ruth decided to help
getting dinner.
They ate outside on the picnic table, with the Fuzzies watching
them interestedly. Kellogg and Mallin carefully avoided discussing
them. It wasn’t until after dusk, when the Fuzzies brought
their ball inside and everybody was in the living room, that
Kellogg, adopting a presiding officer manner, got the conversation
onto the subject. For some time, without giving anyone else an
opportunity to say anything, he gushed about what an important
discovery the Fuzzies were. The Fuzzies themselves ignored him and
began dismantling the stick-and-ball construction. For a while
Goldilocks and Cinderella watched interestedly, and then they began
assisting.
“Unfortunately,” Kellogg continued, “so much of our
data is in the form of uncorroborated statements by Mr. Holloway.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t, myself,
doubt for a moment anything Mr. Holloway said on that tape, but you
must realize that professional scientists are most reluctant to
accept the unsubstantiated reports of what, if you’ll pardon
me, they think of as nonqualified observers.”
“Oh, rubbish, Leonard!” Rainsford broke in
impatiently. “I’m a professional scientist, of a good
many more years’ standing than you, and I accept Jack
Holloway’s statements. A frontiersman like Jack is a very
careful and exact observer. People who aren’t don’t
live long on frontier planets.”
“Now, please don’t misunderstand me,” Kellogg
reiterated. “ I don’t doubt Mr. Holloway’s
statements. I was just thinking of how they would be received on
Terra.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that, Leonard. The
Institute accepts my reports, and I’m vouching for
Jack’s reliability. I can substantiate most of what he told
me from personal observation.”
“Yes, and there’s more than just verbal
statements,” Gerd van Riebeek chimed in. “A camera is
not a nonqualified observer. We have quite a bit of film of the
Fuzzies.”
“Oh, yes; there was some mention of movies,” Mallin
said. “You don’t have any of them developed yet, do
you?”
“Quite a lot. Everything except what was taken out in the
woods this afternoon. We can run them off right now.”
He pulled down the screen in front of the gunrack, got the film
and loaded his projector. The Fuzzies, who had begun on a new
stick-and-ball construction, were irritated when the lights went
out, then wildly excited when Little Fuzzy, digging a toilet pit
with the wood chisel, appeared. Little Fuzzy in particular was
excited about that; if he didn’t recognize himself, he
recognized the chisel. Then there were pictures of Little Fuzzy
killing and eating land-prawns, Little Fuzzy taking the nut off the
bolt and putting it on again, and pictures of the others, after
they had come in, hunting and at play. Finally, there was the film
of the adoption of Goldilocks and Cinderella.
“What Juan and I got this afternoon, up in the woods,
isn’t so good, I’m afraid,” Rainsford said when
the show was over and the lights were on again. “Mostly
it’s rear views disappearing into the brush. It was very hard
to get close to them in the jeep. Their hearing is remarkably
acute. But I’m sure the pictures we took this afternoon will
show the things they were carrying—wooden prawn-killers like the
two that were traded from the new ones in that last
film.”
Mallin and Kellogg looked at one another in what seemed oddly
like consternation.
“You didn’t tell us there were more of them
around,” Mallin said, as though it were an accusation of
duplicity. He turned to Kellogg. “This alters the
situation.”
“Yes, indeed, Ernst,” Kellogg burbled delightedly.
“This is a wonderful opportunity. Mr. Holloway, I understand
that all this country up here is your property, by land-grant
purchase. That’s right, isn’t it? Well, would you allow
us to camp on that clearing across the run, where our boat is now?
We’ll get prefab huts—Red Hill’s the nearest town,
isn’t it?—and have a Company construction gang set them up
for us, and we won’t be any bother at all to you. We had only
intended staying tonight on our boat, and returning to Mallorysport
in the morning, but with all these Fuzzies swarming around in the
woods, we can’t think of leaving now. You don’t have
any objection, do you?”
He had lots of objections. The whole business was rapidly
developing into an acute pain in the neck for him. But if he
didn’t let Kellogg camp across the run, the three of them
could move seventy to eighty miles in any direction and be off his
land. He knew what they’d do then. They’d
live-trap or sleep-gas Fuzzies; they’d put them in
cages, and torment them with maze and electric shock experiments,
and kill a few for dissection, or maybe not bother killing them
first. On his own land, if they did anything like that, he could do
something about it.
“Not at all. I’ll have to remind you again, though,
that you’re to treat these little people with
consideration.”
“Oh, we won’t do anything to your Fuzzies,”
Mallin said.
“You won’t hurt any Fuzzies. Not more than once,
anyhow.”
THE NEXT MORNING, during breakfast, Kellogg and Kurt Borch put
in an appearance, Borch wearing old clothes and field boots and
carrying his pistol on his belt. They had a list of things they
thought they would need for their camp. Neither of them seemed to
have more than the foggiest notion of camp requirements. Jack made
some suggestions which they accepted. There was a lot of scientific
equipment on the list, including an X-ray machine. He promptly ran
a pencil line through that.
“We don’t know what these Fuzzies’ level of
radiation tolerance is. We’re not going to find out by
overdosing one of my Fuzzies.”
Somewhat to his surprise, neither of them gave him any argument.
Gerd and Ruth and Kellogg borrowed his airjeep and started north;
he and Borch went across the run to make measurements after
Rainsford and Jimenez arrived and picked up Mallin. Borch took off
soon after with the boat for Red Hill. Left alone, he loafed around
the camp, and developed the rest of the movie film, making three
copies of everything. Toward noon, Borch brought the boat back,
followed by a couple of scow-like farmboats. In a few hours, the
Company construction men from Red Hill had the new camp set up.
Among other things, they brought two more airjeeps.
The two jeeps returned late in the afternoon, everybody excited.
Between them, the parties had seen almost a hundred Fuzzies, and
had found three camps, two among rocks and one in a hollow
pool-ball tree. All three had been spotted by belts of filled-in
toilet pits around them; two had been abandoned and the third was
still occupied. Kellogg insisted on playing host to Jack and
Rainsford for dinner at the camp across the run. The meal, because
everything had been brought ready-cooked and only needed warming,
was excellent.
Returning to his own camp with Rainsford, Jack found the Fuzzies
finished with their evening meal and in the living room, starting a
new construction—he could think of no other name for it—with the
molecule-model balls and sticks. Goldilocks left the others and
came over to him with a couple of balls fastened together, holding
them up with one hand while she pulled his trouser leg with the
other.
“Yes, I see. It’s very beautiful,” he told
her.
She tugged harder and pointed at the thing the others were
making. Finally, he understood.
“She wants me to work on it, too,” he said.
“Ben, you know where the coffee is; fix us a pot. I’m
going to be busy here.”
He sat down on the floor, and was putting sticks and balls
together when Ben brought in the coffee. This was more fun than
he’d had in a couple of days. He said so while Ben was
distributing Extee Three to the Fuzzies.
“Yes, I ought to let you kick me all around the camp for
getting this started,” Rainsford said, pouring the coffee.
“I could make some excuses, but they’d all sound like
‘I didn’t know it was loaded.’ ”
“Hell, I didn’t know it was loaded, either.”
He rose and took his coffee cup, blowing on it to cool it.
“What do you think Kellogg’s up to, anyhow? That whole
act he’s been putting on since he came here is phony as a
nine-sol bill.”
“What I told you, evening before last,” Rainsford
said. “He doesn’t want non-Company people making
discoveries on Zarathustra. You notice how hard he and Mallin are
straining to talk me out of sending a report back to Terra before
he can investigate the Fuzzies? He wants to get his own report in
first. Well, the hell with him! You know what I’m going to
do? I’m going home, and I’m going to sit up all night
getting a report into shape. Tomorrow morning I’m going to
give it to George Lunt and let him send it to Mallorysport in the
constabulary mail pouch. It’ll be on a ship for Terra before
any of this gang knows it’s been sent. Do you have any copies
of those movies you can spare?”
“About a mile and a half. I made copies of everything,
even the stuff the others took.”
“Good. We’ll send that, too. Let Kellogg read about
it in the papers a year from now.” He thought for a moment,
then said: “Gerd and Ruth and Juan are bunking at the other
camp now; suppose I move in here with you tomorrow. I assume you
don’t want to leave the Fuzzies alone while that gang’s
here. I can help you keep an eye on them.”
“But, Ben you don’t want to drop whatever else
you’re doing—”
“What I’m doing, now, is learning to be a
Fuzzyologist, and this is the only place I can do it. I’ll
see you tomorrow, after I stop at the constabulary post.”
THE PEOPLE ACROSS the run—Kellogg, Mallin and Borch, and van
Riebeek, Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris—were still up when Rainsford
went out to his airjeep. After watching him lift out, Jack went
back into the house, played with his family in the living room for
a while and went to bed. The next morning he watched Kellogg, Ruth
and Jimenez leave in one jeep and, shortly after, Mallin and van
Riebeek in the other. Kellogg didn’t seem to be willing to
let the three who had come to the camp first wander around
unchaperoned. He wondered about that.
Ben Rainsford’s airjeep came over the mountains from the
south in the late morning and settled onto the grass. Jack helped
him inside with his luggage, and then they sat down under the big
featherleaf trees to smoke their pipes and watch the Fuzzies
playing in the grass. Occasionally they saw Kurt Borch pottering
around outside the other camp.
“I sent the report off,” Rainsford said, then looked
at his watch. “It ought to be on the mail boat for
Mallorysport by now; this time tomorrow it’ll be in
hyperspace for Terra. We won’t say anything about it; just
sit back and watch Len Kellogg and Ernst Mallin working up a sweat
trying to talk us out of sending it.” He chuckled. “I
made a definite claim of sapience; by the time I got the report in
shape to tape off, I couldn’t see any other
alternative.”
“Damned if I can. You hear that, kids?” he asked
Mike and Mitzi, who had come over in hope that there might be
goodies for them. “Uncle Ben says you’re
sapient.”
“Yeek?”
“They want to know if it’s good to eat.
What’ll happen now?”
“Nothing, for about a year. Six months from now, when the
ship gets in, the Institute will release it to the press, and then
they’ll send an investigation team here. So will any of the
other universities or scientific institutes that may be interested.
I suppose the government’ll send somebody, too. After all,
subcivilized natives on colonized planets are wards of the Terran
Federation.”
He didn’t know that he liked that. The less he had to do
with the government the better, and his Fuzzies were wards of Pappy
Jack Holloway. He said as much.
Rainsford picked up Mitzi and stroked her. “Nice
fur,” he said. “Fur like that would bring good prices.
It will, if we don’t get these people recognized as sapient
beings.”
He looked across the run at the new camp and wondered. Maybe
Leonard Kellogg saw that, too, and saw profits for the Company in
Fuzzy fur.
The airjeeps returned in the middle of the afternoon, first
Mallin’s, and then Kellogg’s. Everybody went inside. An
hour later, a constabulary car landed in front of the Kellogg camp.
George Lunt and Ahmed Khadra got out. Kellogg came outside, spoke
with them and then took them into the main living hut. Half an hour
later, the lieutenant and the trooper emerged, lifted their car
across the run and set it down on the lawn. The Fuzzies ran to meet
them, possibly expecting more whistles, and followed them into the
living room. Lunt and Khadra took off their berets, but made no
move to unbuckle their gun belts.
“We got your package off all right, Ben,” Lunt said.
He sat down and took Goldilocks on his lap; immediately Cinderella
jumped up, also. “Jack, what the hell’s that gang over
there up to anyhow?”
“You got that, too?”
“You can smell it on them for a mile, against the wind. In
the first place, that Borch. I wish I could get his prints;
I’ll bet we have them on file. And the whole gang’s
trying to hide something, and what they’re trying to hide is
something they’re scared of, like a body in a closet. When we
were over there, Kellogg did all the talking; anybody else who
tried to say anything got shut up fast. Kellogg doesn’t like
you, Jack, and he doesn’t like Ben, and he doesn’t like
the Fuzzies. Most of all he doesn’t like the
Fuzzies.”
“Well, I told you what I thought this morning,”
Rainsford said. “They don’t want outsiders discovering
things on this planet. It wouldn’t make them look good to the
home office on Terra. Remember, it was some non-Company people who
discovered the first sunstones, back in
’Forty-eight.”
George Lunt looked thoughtful. On him, it was a scowl.
“I don’t think that’s it, Ben. When we were
talking to him, he admitted very freely that you and Jack
discovered the Fuzzies. The way he talked, he didn’t seem to
think they were worth discovering at all. And he asked a lot of
funny questions about you, Jack. The kind of questions I’d
ask if I was checking up on somebody’s mental
competence.” The scowl became one of anger now. “By
God, I wish I had an excuse to question him—with a
veridicator!”
Kellogg didn’t want the Fuzzies to be sapient beings. If
they weren’t they’d be . . . fur-bearing animals. Jack
thought of some overfed society dowager on Terra or Baldur, wearing
the skins of Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Mike and Mitzi and
Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Goldilocks wrapped around her adipose
carcass. It made him feel sick.