Caveat Fuzzy

by Wolfgang Diehr

Gerd started, then smiled. “Oh? So he talked you into the addition for more room?”

  Jack smiled. “Not just that, he’s footing most of the bill.” Gerd looked confused and Jack elaborated. “Remember that lawsuit Gus filed when the Fuzzies went missing after being seized and taken to Company House?”

  Gerd’s face brightened. “Yeah. Gus settled out of court for, what was it, two hundred thousand sols each?”

  “Plus ten thousand shares of common stock—each. I’ve been teaching the Fuzzies about finances with that. They each have a debit card in their names. I haven’t had to pay for extee-three since.”

  “Yeah, I remember you putting your foot down about the government paying for the extee-three for adopted Fuzzies. ‘If people adopt Fuzzies, it becomes their responsibility to feed and care for them, not the government’s. Ruth and I agreed with that, partly because the same was true of human orphans.”

  “Damn straight,” Jack said, nodding. “But if the Fuzzies have money of their own, there’s no reason they can’t pay their own way. Not all of them have money like my family, of course, but they can use barter; goofer skins, crafts, that sort of thing, or even an exchange of services: Fuzzies do a great job of cleaning out land-prawns and other vermin, you know. And they can be taught some economics. Little Fuzzy has a better grasp of finances than most teenagers I’ve known.”

  “Right, I’ve sat in on some of the classes he teaches the other Fuzzies. He uses fruit and land-prawns for the medium of exchange so that the others can grasp the concepts. What does that have to do with the addition to your home?”

  Jack pointed at the cabin. “Little Fuzzy realized that Fuzzies in the villages have their own rooms and everything, and decided he and his family should do the same. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to move out. So, he came to me and asked for permission to add some rooms. When I told him I would have to check my budget, he said,”—Jack raised his voice as high as it could go, which was around a middle tenor—“Pappy Jack not need budget. Little Fuzzy pay. And Mike and Mitzi and….’” Jack trailed off and let his voice return to normal. “Well, you get the idea. I decided to let him do it, provided he go through Pappy Vic. I didn’t want him being taken advantage of. I told Victor not to cut him any slack on the price, either. They have to understand the cost of things in the Federation.”

  Gerd eyed the framework of the addition. “It seems a bit large for just the Fuzzies.”

  Jack nodded. “It is. I kicked in for a couple more guest rooms and to have the living room expanded. When I built the cabin after I first acquired the land grant it was with an eye towards my personal comfort. I never expected to be swarmed with guests and live-ins. Gus or Ben would occasionally come out and crash in the spare room, which I had originally planned on making into a storage area, or some of the local cops and prospectors would get together for a floating card game here, but I’d never needed any more room than I already had. Now I have a whole tribe of Fuzzies living with me, Akira and Lolita staying here, and a lot more overnight guests than I ever expected. Time to upgrade the habitat. Besides, I’ll need a place to put the maid and cook for a while.”

  “Maid? And cook?”

  “Blame Morgan for that. He figures his Blood Oath requires somebody do the domestic chores while I recuperate. Once I get a clean bill of health, though, out they go.”

  Gerd shifted the topic back to the construction work. “Why are you going with dura-plas instead of wood?”

  “Actually, the frame and interior of the entire cabin is dura-plas. The wood exterior is just a façade. I expect this place to last long after I am gone.” Jack chuckled. “Maybe it’ll become the ancestral home of Little Fuzzy’s descendants.”

  Gerd nodded. Dura-plas was cheap as building materials went, but strong and long-lasting. The wood exterior would rot away and be replaced oomphty-dozen times before the D-P would start to deteriorate, and for insulation it had almost everything short of solid collapsium beat. The Company made Quonset huts out of the same material. “What are you going to do with the Quonset huts you just bought?”

  “Storage for one.” Jack jerked a thumb at his workshed. “I’ll finally be able to clear out the shed and use it for my other projects as it was intended for. The second is a permanent gym for the staff and the Fuzzies. I’ll use that to get myself back into shape, too. The other I’ll keep for emergencies, like guest overflow.” Jack shook his head. “I never expected to play host to so many people, though I don’t mind as much as I thought I would. I spent a lot of years living alone out here. It’s nice to be part of the human race, again. And the Fuzzy race, too, for that matter.”

  The two men fell silent for a moment as they looked over the construction. Gerd spoke first.

  “Wait…Morgan is building a castle?”

  “Commissioner!”

  Jack and Gerd turned to the sound of Akira O’Barre’s voice. She was running up to them with something in her hand.

  “Commissioner?” Gerd said. “I thought you hated titles.”

  “I think she’s an army brat,” Jack said. “She refuses to call me anything but ‘commissioner’ or ‘sir’ now that she works for me. Yes, Akira?”

  “You forgot your radio, sir,” Akira said as she tried to catch her breath. She had run all the way from the office building. “Major Lunt needs to speak with you. He said it’s urgent.”

  George Lunt was not prone to overstatement. Jack grabbed the radio. “George, what’s up?”

  “Hell’s come to breakfast, Jack. The Fuzzies are revolting,” George said from the radio. “They attacked the workers at the dig site.”

  Jack couldn’t believe his ears though he trusted the major implicitly. “Are there any casualties?”

  “Yes, sir.” George tended to get all regulation and formal in a crisis. “Twenty-three inmates dead, six wounded, two prison guards dead, one wounded. The civilians were all safe indoors doing whatever it is they were doing at the time of the attack.”

  “What about the attackers? The Fuzzies?”

  “Thirty dead,” George replied. “No way to count their wounded as they were hauled away by the other Fuzzies. No man left behind is their philosophy, I would guess. The guards only had their sono-stunners on them; regulations forbid lethal weaponry near the inmates in case one of them makes a grab for it. But the Fuzzies couldn’t survive a direct hit. It’s horrible, Jack. It looks like their brains were trying to escape through their ears.”

  “Good God,” Jack said, almost in a whisper. “Any idea what provoked the attack?”

  “None. I’ve never heard of any Fuzzy attacking a human outside of Goldilocks cutting Leonard Kellogg with her chopper-digger, and Kellogg kicked her first, I understand. For Fuzzies to attack a group of humans, well, you know much more than I do about Fuzzy behavior.”

  True, but not that much. Fuzzies typically ran away from threats if they could. Not much other choice given their small stature and limited defenses. These Northern Fuzzies were somehow different; they didn’t just run away. They fought back. Maybe the attack had something to do with the explosion in that area two months earlier.

  “What kind of weapons did they use?” Gerd asked. It was a damned good question. Jack relayed it to George.

  “According to the survivors, bows, arrows, atlatl spears and slings. All ranged weapons. These Fuzzies knew better than to get in close with a human. I think they’ve had unpleasant encounters with our kind before. Nothing else would explain this unprovoked hostility. As for the arrows and spears, they must have some sort of toxin on them. Several cons were hit in places not immediately fatal, but died anyway. These are some very smart, very dangerous Fuzzies. Bigger than our crowd, too.”

  “Bigger?” Gerd asked for elaboration.

  “Nothing outrageous like Gus Brannhard.” The weak attempt at a joke fell flat. “I’ve been looking over the dead ones. They run two to four inches taller than what we’ve seen up until now, and heavier, too. I haven’t weighed them, of course….”
<
br />   But a cop is good at estimating the height and weight of a suspect, Jack thought. “I’m coming up there, George. Expect me tomorrow around noon.”

  The Major made a halfhearted attempt to talk Jack out of it, but knew better. Nobody ever got anywhere trying to talk Jack Holloway out of doing something he thought he needed to do. George signed off and Jack headed straight for the workshed. Gerd and Akira followed.

  Jack rooted around in the shed until he found a six foot length of pipe. “Damn, I don’t have anything long enough.”

  “What do you need?” Gerd asked.

  Jack went back to looking around and said, “I need to make a human sized chopper-digger.”

  “What? What for…?”

  “Maybe I can get one for you,” Akira said.

  Jack turned to the woman. “Does Victor Grego keep those around, now?”

  “Oh, not that I know of, but I know a guy who dresses up as a giant Fuzzy for the Fuzzycons….”

  A year or so back Gus Brannhard had made an offhand remark that Zarathustra should host a Fuzzy Convention. While he may have meant it as a joke, Victor Grego ran with it. He invited non-company vendors and used an empty warehouse to throw it in. Jack and Little Fuzzy were paid to give speeches and show movies from the earliest days of the Fuzzy discovery. Many of the humans dressed up like giant Fuzzies, except for Gus who was pretty fuzzy already, and brought homemade chopper-diggers to scale. One enterprising young man made a contragravity surfboard into a giant mechanical land-prawn and stuffed it with various cooked meats. He made quite a show of killing and eating it. The real Fuzzies were very excited about the whole thing and only a little disappointed to learn that under all the fur was just another normal Big One.

  “Can you get him out here by tonight?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, sure, I think he’s a little sweet on me, but you’ll have to contact his boss and let him know that you need him. Terrence works in Fabrications on third level. Terrence Vlosopolos is his full name.”

  Jack started towards his cabin. “It’ll be quicker and easier to talk to his boss’s boss. That way there won’t be any arguments. I’ll call Victor from the cabin; you call your friend from the office.” Jack had a sudden inspiration. “In fact, tell Mr. Vloa—, Mr. Vlosa—, tell Terrence to bring his Fuzzy costume, too. More than one if he can.”

  Akira hotfooted it back to the office building as Jack trotted over to his cabin. Gerd was left standing scratching his head. Fuzzy costumes?

  XXIV

  “Mr. Grego, could I take a moment of your time?”

  Grego turned and found himself facing an empty hallway, until he adjusted his vision downward. There stood Dr. Ang Ling Geronimo. Dr. Geronimo stood a scant four feet six inches, making him rather easy to overlook, but his martial arts skills were near-legendary on Zarathustra. In competitions sponsored by the Company, Dr. Geronimo held the world championship five years running; defeating opponents almost three times his size. Current rumor had it that if Geronimo entered in the next competition, everybody else would just bow out. Fortunately, he was as good at his job as he was on the mat.

  “Dr. Geronimo.” Grego correctly pronounced the name with the ‘H’ sound rather than the ‘J’ sound most people used. He firmly believed that taking the time to learn an employee’s proper name showed he respected them as people and not just as corporate drones. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sir, I have found an anomaly with recent sunstone purchases,” the doctor explained. Dr. Geronimo was in charge of inspecting new sunstones from Yellowsand and independent prospectors as well as geological samples.

  “Counterfeits?” Fake sunstones were a common problem, though none had escaped detection, as yet. Some were duds coated in fluorescent dye or hollowed out with a mini-light inserted; the schemes were as varied as they were numerous.

  “If so, these are the best I have ever seen. I can’t be sure, yet.” Dr. Geronimo extracted a handful of glowing pebbles from his lab coat pocket. “See for yourself, sir.”

  Grego accepted the stones and inspected them closely. He shook one, sniffed another and even took out an old-fashioned Boy Scout knife from his pocket and tried to scratch it. As expected, the knife left no mark. Sunstones were at least as hard as Terran diamonds. It took a laser to cut, hollow out or remove rough edges from one.

  “I’m not the expert you are, Doctor,” Grego admitted. “What is wrong with these? They seem perfectly legitimate to me.”

  “To me, as well,” Geronimo admitted. “It wasn’t until I prepared to give them the gamma treatment that I noticed something was wrong.”

  “Gamma treatment?”

  Dr. Geronimo explained that all gems and goods marked for export to other planets were typically exposed to a brief gamma bath to destroy potentially harmful bacteria. Innocuous bacteria on one planet could become a lethal plague on another world. German measles, little more than an annoyance to humans from Terra, had killed hundreds on Freya with shocking ease. The gamma rays destroyed all bacteria and microbes and left no residual radiation in food and non-edibles. When Grego thought about it, he recalled that he signed off on the procedure over a decade earlier. “Right, now I recall. So what happened?”

  “Actually, these have not yet been exposed, which is even more curious given that they are mildly radioactive.”

  “What?” Grego almost dropped the stones, then checked himself. Dr. Geronimo would hardly have blithely toted them about in his pocket, and then handed them to his boss if the stones were dangerous. “Please elaborate in terms a simple businessman can understand.”

  “If I were to guess, I would say that these sunstones had been subjected to a previous radiation bath, likely dirty-gamma, before they were sold to the gem buyers.”

  “Dirty-gamma?”

  “A gamma bath with another radioactive impurity present. This crops up every so often in defective gamma ray emitters.” Geronimo noticed the blank look on his employer’s face and elaborated. “A gamma ray is a packet of electromagnetic energy, a photon in layman terms. Gamma photons are the most energetic photons in the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma photons, or gamma rays, if you prefer, are emitted from the nucleus of some unstable, that is to say radioactive, atoms. Gamma radiation emission occurs when the nucleus of a radioactive atom has too much energy. It often follows the emission of a beta particle. When a neutron transforms to a proton and a beta particle, as is the case in, say, Cesium-137, then over time the discharged protons change the atom to, in this example, Barium-137. Cobalt-60 or Technetium-99m could also be used, though Technetium-99m has a shorter half-life. It will first eject the beta particle, then the gamma photon to stabilize itself.

  “Gamma rays travel at the speed of light and exist only as long as they have energy. Once their energy is spent, whether in air or in solid materials, they cease to exist, which is why it is so strange that these stones are even mildly radioactive. Whatever machine was used to irradiate these stones failed to adequately filter out, um, beta particles from the radio stream or maybe the same machine is also being used for alpha rays or X-rays, in which case it also uses either bismuth-210 or boron-11. Then it is possible the shielding in the emitter has degraded, most likely from misuse, and that would contaminate the gamma emissions. I will have to run more tests to determine which scenario is more likely.”

  Victor Grego, a well-educated and intelligent man, failed to understand at least half of what Dr. Geronimo was saying. Rather than admit that, he switched tracks.

  “Okay, it sounds like you have a firm grasp of the potential ‘how’, now the question is ‘why?’ Say, how did you catch these anyway?”

  “I have a Geiger counter near my work station. I choose to generate offspring one day and take no chances with the equipment. As for the ‘why,’ I can’t think of any reason whatsoever to subject a perfectly good sunstone to gamma bombardment beyond killing any surface microbes,” Geronimo admitted.

  Grego leaned against a wall and thought about it. He couldn�
�t come up with anything, either, as he barely understood what the doctor had already elaborated on.

  Then Geronimo got an idea. “Mr. Grego, it occurs to me that somebody might have been trying to make them glow brighter.”

  “Brighter? What’s the point?” A three-karat sunstone was as bright as an old-style LED. Any brighter and it might seem overly gaudy.

  Dr. Geronimo sighed. “I can’t imagine. I could see somebody trying to make the non-thermofluorescent stones, that is, the duds, into sunstones, but not…”

  Geronimo stopped talking and stared into space. Grego began to worry that the doctor had a stroke or seizure when Geronimo turned to his boss with an expression that could only mean “Eureka!”

  “Sir, I need to do some experiments on non-thermofluorescent stones.”

  Grego, no scientist, still caught on. “You think these are gammaradiated duds?” He looked closer at the stones in his hand. They looked perfectly normal to his inexperienced eyes, which is why he hired people like Dr. Geronimo.

  “Yes. But I won’t be certain until I run some tests and, hopefully, duplicate the process.” Geronimo held out his hand and Grego returned the stones he was holding.

  Dr. Geronimo looked very excited at the possibility. Grego was considerably less so. The doctor ran off to his lab while Grego ran in the opposite direction to his office. Once there, he would call the chief gem buyer for the Company and instruct him to track down the source of every recent sunstone purchase. The possible glut on the market would be bad enough, but if any of the faux stones made it to the sales department, there would be Nifflheim to pay if, when, the fakes were discovered. There would be lawsuits, investigations, bad press and plummeting stock values. Even if the Company announced the discovery of the faux stones there would be finger pointing and witch hunts and a scapegoat if the actual culprits were never found. The CEO would make a prime patsy to the Home Office.

  Grego returned to his office and called the gem buyers and ordered them to compile a list of sunstone outlets and track down all purchases made in the last month. It shouldn’t take long to track all of the sellers; all legal purchases were rigorously logged and accounted for. Too many scams had been tried in the past for gem buyers and brokers to play fast and loose in the market.