The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  Behind him, Gerd van Riebeek’s voice was saying, “Hold it, all of you; get your hands up. You, too, Kellogg.”

  Kellogg, who had fallen, pushed himself erect. Blood was gushing from his nose, and he tried to stanch it on the sleeve of his jacket. As he stumbled toward his companions, he blundered into Ruth Ortheris, who pushed him angrily away from her. Then she went to the little crushed body, dropping to her knees beside it and touching it. The silver charm bell on the neck chain jingled faintly. Ruth began to cry.

  Juan Jimenez had climbed down from the airboat; he was looking at the body of Kurt Borch in horror.

  “You killed him!” he accused. A moment later, he changed that to “murdered.” Then he started to run toward the living hut.

  Gerd van Riebeek fired a bullet into the ground ahead of him, bringing him up short.

  “You’ll stop the next one, Juan,” he said. “Go help Dr. Kellogg; he got himself hurt.”

  “Call the constabulary,” Mallin was saying. “Ruth, you go; they won’t shoot at you.”

  “Don’t bother. I called them. Remember?”

  Jimenez had gotten a wad of handkerchief tissue out of his pocket and was trying to stop his superior’s nosebleed. Through it, Kellogg was trying to tell Mallin that he hadn’t been able to help it.

  “The little beast attacked me; it cut me with that spear it was carrying.”

  Ruth Ortheris looked up. The other Fuzzies were with her by the body of Goldilocks; they must have come as soon as they had heard the screaming.

  “She came up to him and pulled at his trouser leg, the way they all do when they want to attract your attention,” she said. “She wanted him to look at her new jingle.” Her voice broke, and it was a moment before she could recover it. “And he kicked her, and then stamped her to death.”

  “Ruth, keep your mouth shut!” Mallin ordered. “The thing attacked Leonard; it might have given him a serious wound.”

  “It did!” Still holding the wad of tissue to his nose with one hand, Kellogg pulled up his trouser leg with the other and showed a scar on his shin. It looked like a briar scratch. “You saw it yourself.”

  “Yes, I saw it. I saw you kick her and jump on her. And all she wanted was to show you her new jingle.”

  Jack was beginning to regret that he hadn’t shot Kellogg as soon as he saw what was going on. The other Fuzzies had been trying to get Goldilocks onto her feet. When they realized that it was no use, they let the body down again and crouched in a circle around it, making soft, lamenting sounds.

  “Well, when the constabulary get here, you keep quiet,” Mallin was saying. “Let me do the talking.”

  “Intimidating witnesses, Mallin?” Gerd inquired. “Don’t you know everybody’ll have to testify at the constabulary post under veridication? And you’re drawing pay for being a psychologist, too.” Then he saw some of the Fuzzies raise their heads and look toward the southeastern horizon. “Here come the cops, now.”

  However, it was Ben Rainsford’s airjeep, with a zebralope carcass lashed along one side. It circled the Kellogg camp and then let down quickly; Rainsford jumped out as soon as it was grounded, his pistol drawn.

  “What happened, Jack?” he asked, then glanced around, from Goldilocks to Kellogg to Borch to the pistol beside Borch’s body. “I get it. Last time anybody pulled a gun on you, they called it suicide.”

  “That’s what this was, more or less. You have a movie camera in your jeep? Well, get some shots of Borch, and some of Goldilocks. Then stand by, and if the Fuzzies start doing anything different, get it all. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  Rainsford looked puzzled, but he holstered his pistol and went back to his jeep, returning with a camera. Mallin began insisting that, as a licensed M.D., he had a right to treat Kellogg’s injuries. Gerd van Riebeek followed him into the living hut for a first-aid kit. They were just emerging, van Riebeek’s automatic in the small of Mallin’s back, when a constabulary car grounded beside Rainsford’s airjeep. It wasn’t Car Three. George Lunt jumped out, unsnapping the flap of his holster, while Ahmed Khadra was talking into the radio.

  “What’s happened, Jack? Why didn’t you wait till we got here?”

  “This maniac assaulted me and murdered that man over there!” Kellogg began vociferating.

  “Is your name Jack too?” Lunt demanded.

  “My name’s Leonard Kellogg, and I’m a chief of division with the Company—”

  “Then keep quiet till I ask you something. Ahmed, call the post; get Knabber and Yorimitsu, with investigative equipment, and find out what’s tying up Car Three.”

  Mallin had opened the first-aid kit by now; Gerd, on seeing the constabulary, had holstered his pistol. Kellogg, still holding the sodden tissues to his nose, was wanting to know what there was to investigate.

  “There’s the murderer; you have him red-handed. Why don’t you arrest him?”

  “Jack, let’s get over where we can watch these people without having to listen to them,” Lunt said. He glanced toward the body of Goldilocks. “That happen first?”

  “Watch out, Lieutenant! He still has his pistol!” Mallin shouted warningly.

  They went over and sat down on the contragravity-field generator housing of one of the rented airjeeps. Jack started with Gerd van Riebeek’s visit immediately after noon.

  “Yes, I thought of that angle myself,” Lunt said disgustedly. “I didn’t think of it till this morning, though, and I didn’t think things would blow up as fast as this. Hell, I just didn’t think! Well, go on.”

  He interrupted a little later to ask: “Kellogg was stamping on the Fuzzy when you hit him. You were trying to stop him?”

  “That’s right. You can veridicate me on that if you want to.”

  “I will; I’ll veridicate this whole damn gang. And this guy Borch had his heater out when you turned around? Nothing to it, Jack. We’ll have to have some kind of a hearing, but it’s just plain self-defense. Think any of this gang will tell the truth here, without taking them in and putting them under veridication?”

  “Ruth Ortheris will, I think.”

  “Send her over here, will you.”

  She was still with the Fuzzies, and Ben Rainsford was standing beside her, his camera ready. The Fuzzies were still swaying and yeeking plaintively. She nodded and rose without speaking, going over to where Lunt waited.

  “Just what did happen, Jack?” Rainsford wanted to know. “And whose side is he on?” He nodded toward van Riebeek, standing guard over Kellogg and Mallin, his thumbs in his pistol belt.

  “Ours. He’s quit the Company.”

  Just as he was finishing, Car Three put in an appearance; he had to tell the same story over again. The area in front of the Kellogg camp was getting congested; he hoped Mike Hennen’s labor gang would stay away for a while. Lunt talked to van Riebeek when he had finished with Ruth, and then with Jimenez and Mallin and Kellogg. Then he and one of the men from Car Three came over to where Jack and Rainsford were standing. Gerd van Riebeek joined them just as Lunt was saying:

  “Jack, Kellogg’s made a murder complaint against you. I told him it was self-defense, but he wouldn’t listen. So, according to the book, I have to arrest you.”

  “All right.” He unbuckled his gun and handed it over. “Now, George, I herewith make complaint and accusation against Leonard Kellogg, charging him with the unlawful and unjustified killing of a sapient being, to wit, an aboriginal native of the planet of Zarathustra commonly known as Goldilocks.”

  Lunt looked at the small battered body and the six mourners around it.

  “But, Jack, they aren’t legally sapient beings.”

  “There is no such thing. A sapient being is a being on the mental level of sapience, not a being that has been declared sapient.”

  “Fuzzies are sapient beings,” Rainsford said. “That’s the opinion of a qualified xeno-naturalist.”

  “Two of them,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “That is the body of a sapient being. Th
ere’s the man who killed her. Go ahead, Lieutenant, make your pinch.”

  “Hey! Wait a minute!”

  The Fuzzies were rising, sliding their chopper-diggers under the body of Goldilocks and lifting it on the steel shafts. Ben Rainsford was aiming his camera as Cinderella picked up her sister’s weapon and followed, carrying it; the others carried the body toward the far corner of the clearing, away from the camp. Rainsford kept just behind them, pausing to photograph and then hurrying to keep up with them.

  They set the body down. Mike and Mitzi and Cinderella began digging; the others scattered to hunt for stones. Coming up behind them, George Lunt took off his beret and stood holding it in both hands; he bowed his head as the grass-wrapped body was placed in the little grave and covered.

  Then, when the cairn was finished, he replaced it, drew his pistol and checked the chamber.

  “That does it, Jack,” he said. “I am now going to arrest Leonard Kellogg for the murder of a sapient being.”

  VIII

  Jack Holloway had been out on bail before, but never for quite so much. It was almost worth it, though, to see Leslie Coombes’s eyes widen and Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones, blazing with the heat of the day and of his body, on George Lunt’s magisterial bench and invited George to pick out twenty-five thousand sols’ worth. Especially after the production Coombes had made of posting Kellogg’s bail with one of those precertified Company checks.

  He looked at the whisky bottle in his hand, and then reached into the cupboard for another one. One for Gus Brannhard, and one for the rest of them. There was a widespread belief that that was why Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out here in the boondocks of a boondock planet, defending gun fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It wasn’t. Nobody on Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn’t whisky. Whisky was only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory of the reason.

  He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had taken instantly to Gus. Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.

  “Aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were placed beside him. “Been staying alive for hours hoping for this.”

  “Well, don’t let any of the kids get at it. Little Fuzzy trying to smoke pipes is bad enough; I don’t want any dipsos in the family, too.”

  Gus filled the glass. To be on the safe side, he promptly emptied it into himself.

  “You got a nice family, Jack. Make a wonderful impression in court—as long as Baby doesn’t try to sit on the judge’s head. Any jury that sees them and hears that Ortheris girl’s story will acquit you from the box, with a vote of censure for not shooting Kellogg, too.”

  “I’m not worried about that. What I want is Kellogg convicted.”

  “You better worry, Jack,” Rainsford said. “You saw the combination against us at the hearing.”

  Leslie Coombes, the Company’s top attorney, had come out from Mallorysport in a yacht rated at Mach 6, and he must have crowded it to the limit all the way. With him, almost on a leash, had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General, who doubled as Chief Prosecutor. They had both tried to get the whole thing dismissed—self-defense for Holloway, and killing an unprotected wild animal for Kellogg. When that had failed, they had teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence about the Fuzzies. After all it was only a complaint court; Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited powers.

  “You saw how far they got, didn’t you?”

  “I hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,” Rainsford said gloomily.

  “What do you mean, Ben?” Brannhard asked. “What do you think they’ll do?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what worries me. We’re threatening the Zarathustra Company, and the Company’s too big to be threatened safely,” Rainsford replied. “They’ll try to frame something on Jack.”

  “With veridication? That’s ridiculous, Ben.”

  “Don’t you think we can prove sapience?” Gerd van Riebeek demanded.

  “Who’s going to define sapience? And how?” Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.”

  “Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case, woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does, Coombes will.” Brannhard poured another drink and gulped it before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “You know what? I will make a small wager, and I will even give odds, that the first thing Ham O’Brien does when he gets back to Mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges. What I’d like would be for him to nol. pros. Kellogg and let the charge against Jack go to court. He would be dumb enough to do that himself, but Leslie Coombes wouldn’t let him.”

  “But if he throws out the Kellogg case, that’s it,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “When Jack comes to trial, nobody’ll say a mumblin’ word about sapience.”

  “I will, and I will not mumble it. You all know colonial law on homicide. In the case of any person killed while in commission of a felony, no prosecution may be brought in any degree, against anybody. I’m going to contend that Leonard Kellogg was murdering a sapient being, that Jack Holloway acted lawfully in attempting to stop it and that when Kurt Borch attempted to come to Kellogg’s assistance he, himself, was guilty of felony, and consequently any prosecution against Jack Holloway is illegal. And to make that contention stick, I shall have to say a great many words, and produce a great deal of testimony, about the sapience of Fuzzies.”

  “It’ll have to be expert testimony,” Rainsford said. “The testimony of psychologists. I suppose you know that the only psychologists on this planet are employed by the chartered Zarathustra Company.” He drank what was left of his highball, looked at the bits of ice in the bottom of his glass and then rose to mix another one. “I’d have done the same as you did, Jack, but I still wish this hadn’t happened.”

  “Huh!” Mamma Fuzzy looked up, startled by the exclamation. “What do you think Victor Grego’s wishing, right now?”

  Victor Grego replaced the hand-phone. “Leslie, on the yacht,” he said. “They’re coming in now. They’ll stop at the hospital to drop Kellogg, and then they’re coming here.”

  Nick Emmert nibbled a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and a wide, bovine face.

  “Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he said.

  “I wish Holloway’d killed him!” He blurted it angrily, and saw the Resident General’s shocked expression.

  “You don’t really mean that, Victor?”

  “The devil I don’t!” He gestured at the recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing, transmitted from the yacht at sixty-speed. “That’s only a teaser to what’ll come out at the trial. You know what the Company’s epitaph will be? Kicked to death, along with a Fuzzy, by Leonard Kellogg.”

  Everything would have worked out perfectly if Kellogg had only kept his head and avoided collision with Holloway. Why, even the killing of the Fuzzy and the shooting of Borch, inexcusable as
that had been, wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for that asinine murder complaint. That was what had provoked Holloway’s counter-complaint, which was what had done the damage.

  And, now that he thought of it, it had been one of Kellogg’s people, van Riebeek, who had touched off the explosion in the first place. He didn’t know van Riebeek himself, but Kellogg should have, and he had handled him the wrong way. He should have known what van Riebeek would go along with and what he wouldn’t.

  “But, Victor, they won’t convict Leonard of murder,” Emmert was saying. “Not for killing one of those little things.”

  “‘Murder shall consist of the deliberate and unjustified killing of any sapient being, of any race,’” he quoted. “That’s the law. If they can prove in court that the Fuzzies are sapient beings….”

  Then, some morning, a couple of deputy marshals would take Leonard Kellogg out in the jail yard and put a bullet through the back of his head, which, in itself, would be no loss. The trouble was, they would also be shooting an irreparable hole in the Zarathustra Company’s charter. Maybe Kellogg could be kept out of court, at that. There wasn’t a ship blasted off from Darius without a couple of drunken spacemen being hustled aboard at the last moment; with the job Holloway must have done, Kellogg should look just right as a drunken spaceman. The twenty-five thousand sols’ bond could be written off; that was pennies to the Company. No, that would still leave them stuck with the Holloway trial.

  “You want me out of here when the others come, Victor?” Emmert asked, popping another canape into his mouth.

  “No, no; sit still. This will be the last chance we’ll have to get everybody together; after this, we’ll have to avoid anything that’ll look like collusion.”

  “Well, anything I can do to help; you know that, Victor,” Emmert said.