“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Coombes agreed. “You know, among the many benefits of the Pendarvis Decisions, we now have a democratic government on Zarathustra. That means, we now have politics here. Ingermann controls all the other rackets, and politics is the biggest racket there is. Hugo Ingermann is running himself for political boss of Zarathustra.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE AIRCAR SETTLED to the ground; the Marine sergeant at the controls, who had been expecting to smash a dozen or so Fuzzies getting down, gave a whoosh of relief. Pancho Ybarra opened the door and motioned his companion, in Marine field-greens, to precede him, then stepped to the ground. George Lunt, still in his slightly altered Constabulary uniform, and Gerd van Riebeek, in bush-jacket and field-boots, advanced to meet them, accompanied by a swarm of Fuzzies. They all greeted him enthusiastically, and then wanted to know where Pappy Jack was.
“Pappy Jack in Big House Place; not come this place with Unka Panko. Pappy Jack come this place soon; two lights-and-darks,” he told them. “Pappy Jack have to make much talk with other Big Ones.”
“Make talk about Fuzzies?” Little Fuzzy wanted to know. “Find Big Ones for all Fuzzies?”
“That’s right. Find place for Fuzzies to go in Big House Place,” he said.
“He’s been on that ever since Jack went away,” Gerd said. “All the Fuzzies are going to have Big Ones of their own, now.”
“Well, Jack’s working on it,” he said. “You’ve both met Captain Casagra, haven’t you? Gerd van Riebeek; Major Lunt. The captain’s staying with us a couple of days; tomorrow Lieutenant Paine and some reinforcements are coming out; fifty men and fifteen combat-cars, to help out with the patrolling till we can get men and vehicles of our own.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Captain!” Lunt said. “We’re very short of both.”
“You have a lot of country to patrol, too,” Casagra said. “As Navy Lieutenant Ybarra says, I’ll only stay a few days, to get the feel of the situation. Marine-Lieutenant Paine will stay till you can get your own force recruited up and trained. That is, if things don’t blow up again in the veldbeest country.”
“Well, I hope they don’t,” Lunt said. “The vehicles are as welcome as the men; we have very few of our own.”
“The Company’s making some available,” he said. “And along with his other work, Ahmed Khadra’s starting a ZNPF recruiting drive.”
“Has Jack been able to get his hands on any more Extee-Three?” Gerd wanted to know.
He shook his head. “He hasn’t even been able to get any for the reception center, when the Fuzzies start coming in to town. The Company’s going to start producing it, but that’ll take time. After they get the plant set up, they’ll probably be running off test batches for a couple of weeks before they get one right.”
“The formula’s very simple,” Casagra said.
“Some of the processes aren’t; I was talking to Victor Grego. His synthetics people aren’t optimistic, but Grego’s whip-cracking at them to get it done yesterday morning.”
“Isn’t that something?” Gerd asked. “Victor Grego, Fuzzy-lover. And Jimenez, and Mallin; you ought to have heard the language my refined and delicate wife used when she heard about that.”
“Last war’s enemies, next war’s allies,” Casagra laughed. “I spent a couple of years on Thor; clans that’d be shooting us on sight one season would be our bosom friends the next, and planning to double-cross us the one after.”
An aircar rose from behind the ZNPF barracks across the run and started south; another, which had been circling the camp five miles out, was coming in.
“Harpy patrol,” Lunt was explaining to Casagra. “The Fuzzies cleaned out all the zatku, landprawns, around the camp, and they’ve been hunting farther out each day. Harpies like Fuzzies the way Fuzzies like zatku, so we have to give them air-cover. That’s been since you left, Pancho; we’ve shot about twenty harpies since then. Four up to noon today; I don’t know how many since.”
“Lost any Fuzzies yet?”
“Not to harpies, no. We almost had a lot of them massacred yesterday; two of these families or whatever they are got into a shoppo-diggo fight about some playthings. A couple got chopped up a little; there’s one.” He pointed to a Fuzzy with a white bandage turbaned about his head; he seemed quite proud of it. “One got a broken leg; Doc Andrews has him in the hospital with his leg in a cast. Before I could get to the fight, Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Mamma Fuzzy and a couple of my crowd had broken it up; just waded in with their flats as if they’d been doing riot-work all their lives. And you ought to have heard Little Fuzzy chewing them out afterward. Talked to them like an old sergeant in boot camp.”
“Oh, they fight among themselves?” Casagra asked.
“This is the first time it’s happened here. I suppose they do, now and then, in the woods, with their wooden zatku-hodda. They have a regular fencing system. Nothing up to Interstellar Olympic epee standards, but effective. That’s why half of them weren’t killed in the first five seconds.” Lunt looked at his watch. “Well, Captain, suppose you come with me; we’ll go to Protection Force headquarters and go over what we’ve been doing and how your Lieutenant Paine and his men can help out.”
Casagra went over to the car and spoke to the sergeant at the controls, then he and Lunt climbed in. Ybarra fell in with Gerd and they started in the direction of the lab-hut.
“One of the pregnancy cases lost her baby,” Gerd said. “It was born prematurely and dead. We have the baby, fetus rather, under refrigeration. It seems to be about equivalent to human six-month stage. It wouldn’t have survived in any case. Malformed, visibly and I suppose internally as well. We haven’t done anything with it, yet; Lynne wanted you to see it. The Fuzzies were all sore; they thought it rated a funeral. We managed to explain to Little Fuzzy and a couple of others what we wanted to do with it, and they tried to explain to the others. I don’t know how far any of it got.”
The Fuzzies with them ran ahead, shouting “Mummy Woof! Auntie Lynne! Unka Panko bizzo do-mitto!” They were all making a clamor inside the lab-hut when he and Gerd entered, and Ruth, who was working at one of the benches making some kind of a test, was trying to shush them.
“Heyo, Unka Panko,” she greeted him, hastening through with what she had at hand. “I’ll be loose in a jiffy.” She made a few notes, set a test-tube in a rack and made a grease-pencil number on it, and then pulled down the cover and locked it. “I hadn’t done this since med school. Lynne’s back in the dispensary with a couple of volunteer native nurses, looking after the combat casualty.” She got cigarettes out of her smock-pocket and lit one, then dropped into a chair. “Pancho, what is this about Ernst Mallin?” she asked. “Do you believe it?”
“Yes. He’s really interested, now that he doesn’t have to prove any predetermined Company policy points about them. And he really likes Fuzzies. I’ve seen him with that one of Grego’s, and with Ben’s Flora and Fauna, and Mrs. Pendarvis’s pair.”
“I wouldn’t believe it, even if I saw it. I saw what he did to Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome. It’s a wonder all four of them aren’t incurably psychotic.”
“But they aren’t; they’re just as sane as any other Fuzzies. Mallin’s sorry for doing what he did with them, but he isn’t sorry about what he learned from them. He says Fuzzies are the only people he’s ever seen who are absolutely sane and can’t be driven out of sanity. He says if humans could learn to think like Fuzzies, it would empty all the mental hospitals and throw all the psychiatrists out of work.”
“But they’re just like little children. Dear, smart little children, but…”
“Maybe children who are too smart to grow up. Maybe we’d be like Fuzzies, too, if we didn’t have a lot of adults around us from the moment we were born, infecting us with non-sanity. I hope we don’t begin infecting the Fuzzies, now. What was this fight all about, the other day?”
“Well, it was about some playthings, over i
n the big Fuzzy-shelter. This new crowd that came in that day saw them and wanted to take them. They were things that were intended for everybody to play with, but they didn’t know that. There was an argument, and the next thing the shoppo-diggo were going. The crowd who started it are all sorry, now, and everybody’s friends.”
Lynne came through the door from the dispensary at the end of the hut. A couple of Fuzzies were running along with her. Some of the Fuzzies who had come in from outside with them drifted in through the dispensary door, to visit their wounded friend. Lynne came over and joined them. Gerd asked about the patient; the patient was doing well, and being very good about staying in bed.
“How about the girl who lost her baby?” he asked.
“She’s running around as though nothing had happened. It was heartbreaking, Pancho. The thing — it was so malformed that I’m not sure it was male or female — was born dead. She looked at it, and touched it, and then she looked up at me and said, ‘Hudda. Shi-nozza.’ ”
“Dead. Like always,” Gerd said.
“She acted as though it were only what she’d expected. I don’t think more than ten percent of them live more than a few days. You want to see it, Pancho?”
He didn’t, particularly; it wasn’t his field. But then, Fuzzy embryology wasn’t anybody’s field, yet. They went over to one of the refrigerators, and Gerd got it out and unwrapped it. It was smaller than a mouse, and he had to use a magnifier to look at it. The arms and legs were short and underdeveloped; the head was malformed, too.
“I can’t say anything about it,” he said, “except that it’s a good thing it was born dead. What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t want to dissect it myself,” Lynne said. “I’m not competent. That’s too important to bungle with.”
“I’m no good at dissection. Take it in to Mallorysport Hospital; that’s what I’d do.” He rewrapped the tiny thing and put it back. “The more of you work on it, the less you’ll miss. You want to find everything out you can.”
“That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll call them now, and see who all can help, and when.”
Half a dozen Fuzzies came in from outside; they were carrying a dead land-prawn. Some of the Fuzzies already in the hut ran ahead of them, into the dispensary.
“Come on, Pancho; let’s watch,” Gerd said. “They’re bringing a present for their sick friend. They must have dragged that thing three or four miles.”
THERE WERE FIVE Fuzzies and two other people in the west lower garden of Government House, as the aircar came in. The other people were Captain Ahmed Khadra, ZNPF, and Sandra Glenn, so the five Fuzzies would be the host and hostess, Fauna and Flora, and Pierrot and Columbine Pendarvis and Diamond Grego. They had a red and gold ball, two feet, or one Fuzzy-height, in diameter, and they were pushing and chasing it about the lawn. Every once in a while, they would push it to where Khadra was standing, and then he would give it a kick and send it bounding. Jack Holloway chuckled; it looked like the kind of romping he and his Fuzzies had done on the lawn beside his camp, when there had been a lawn there and when there had just been his own Fuzzies.
“Ben, drop me down there, will you?” he said. “I feel like a good Fuzzy-romp, right now.”
“So do I,” Rainsford said. “Will, set us down, if you please.”
The pilot circled downward, holding the car a few inches above the grass while they climbed out. The Fuzzies had seen the car descend and came pelting over. At first, he thought they were carrying pistols; at least, they wore belts and small holsters. The things in the holsters had pistol-grips, but when they drew them, he saw that they were three-inch black discs, which the Fuzzies held to their mouths.
“Pappy Ben; Pappy Jack!” they were all yelling. “Listen; we talk like Big Ones, now!”
He snapped off his hearing-aid. It was true; they were all speaking audibly.
“Pappy Vic make,” Diamond said proudly.
“Actually, Henry Stenson made them,” the girl said. “At least, he invented them. All Mr. Grego did was tell him what he wanted. They are Fuzzyphones.”
“Heeta, Pappy Jack.” Diamond held his up. “Yeek-yeek. Yeeek!” He was exasperated, and then remembered he’d taken it away from his mouth. “Fuzzy-talk go in here, this side. Inside, grow big. Come out this side, big like Hagga-talk,” he said, holding the device to his mouth.
“That good, Diamond. Good-good,” he commended. “What do you think of this, Ben?”
Rainsford squatted in front of his own Fuzzies, holding out a hand. “So-pokko-aki, Flora,” he said, and the Fuzzy handed him hers, first saying, “Keffu, Pappy Ben; do’ brek. “
“I won’t.” Rainsford looked at it curiously, and handed it back. “That thing’s good. Little switch on the grip, and it looks as though the frequency transformer’s in the middle and they can talk into either side of it.”
It would have to work that way; Fuzzies were ambidextrous. Gerd had a theory about that. Fuzzies weren’t anatomists, mainly because they didn’t produce fire and didn’t cut up the small animals they killed for cooking, and only races who had learned the location and importance of the heart fought with their hearts turned away from the enemy. Homo sapiens terra’s ancestors in the same culture-stage were probably ambidextrous too. Like most of Gerd’s theories, it made sense.
“Who makes these things?” he asked. “Stenson?”
“He made these, in his shop. The CZC electronics equipment plant is going to manufacture them,” the girl said, adding: “Advertisement.”
“You tell Mr. Grego to tell his electronics plant to get cracking on them. The Native Affairs Commission wants a lot of them.”
“You staying for dinner with us, Miss Glenn?” Rainsford asked.
“Thank you, Governor, but I have to take Diamond home.”
“I have to take Pierrot and Columbine home, too,” Khadra said. “What are you doing this evening?”
“I have my homework to do. Fuzzy language lessons.”
“Well, why can’t I help you with your homework?” Khadra wanted to know. “I speak Fuzzy like a native, myself.”
“Well, if it won’t be too much trouble…” she began.
Holloway laughed. “Who are you trying to kid, Miss Glenn? Look in the mirror if you think teaching you Fuzzy would be too much trouble for anybody Ahmed’s age. If I was about ten years younger, I’d pull rank on him and leave him with the Fuzzies.”
Pierrot and Columbine thought all this conversation boring and irrelevant. They trundled the ball over in front of Khadra and commanded: “Mek kikko!”
Khadra kicked the ball, lifting it from the ground and sending it soaring away. The Fuzzies ran after it.
“Dr. Mallin says you were looking at the sanatorium,” Sandra said.
“Yes. That’s going to be a good place. You know about it?” he asked Khadra.
“Well, it’s a big place,” Khadra said. “I’ve seen it from the air, of course. They only use about ten percent of it, now.”
“Yes. We’re taking a building, intended for a mental ward; about a half square mile of park around it, with a good fence, so the Fuzzies won’t stray off and get lost. We could put five-six hundred Fuzzies in there, and they wouldn’t be crowded a bit. And it’ll be some time before we get that many there at one time. I expect there’ll be about a hundred to a hundred and fifty this time next week.”
“There were precisely eight hundred and seventy-two applications in when the office closed this evening,” Khadra said. “When are you going back, Jack?”
“Day after tomorrow. I want to make sure the work’s started on the reception center, and I’m still trying to locate some Extee-Three. I think a bunch of damn speculators have cornered the market and are holding it for high prices.”
The Fuzzies had pushed the ball into some shrubbery and were having trouble dislodging it. Sandra Glenn started off to help them, Ben Rainsford walking along with her. Khadra said:
“That’ll probably be some of Hugo Ing
ermann’s crowd, too.”
“Speaking about Ingermann; how are you making out about Herckerd and Novaes?” he asked. “And the five Fuzzies.”
“Jack, I swear. I’m beginning to think Herckerd and Novaes and those Fuzzies all walked into a mass-energy converter together. That’s how completely all of them have vanished.”
“They hadn’t sold them before Ben’s telecast, evening before last. After that, with the Adoption Bureau opening all that talk about kidnapping and enslavement and so on, nobody would buy a bootleg Fuzzy. So they couldn’t sell them, so they got rid of them.” How? That was what bothered him. If they’d used sense, they’d have flown them back to Beta and turned them loose. He was afraid, though, that they’d killed them. By this time everybody knew that live Fuzzies could tell tales. “I think those Fuzzies are dead.”
“I don’t know. Eight hundred and seventy-two applications, and a hundred and fifty Fuzzies at most,” Khadra said. “There’ll be a market for bootleg Fuzzies. Jack, you know what I think? I think those Fuzzies weren’t brought in for sale. I think this gang — Herckerd and Novaes and whoever else is in with them — are training those Fuzzies to help catch other Fuzzies. Do you think a Fuzzy could be trained to do that?”
“Sure. To all intents and purposes, that’s what our Fuzzies are doing out at the camp. You know how Fuzzies think? Big Ones are a Good Thing. Any Fuzzy who has a Big One doesn’t need to worry about anything. All Fuzzies ought to have Big Ones. That’s what Little Fuzzy has been telling the ones from the woods, out at camp. Ahmed, I think you have something.”
“I thought of something else, too. If this gang can make a deal with some tramp freighter captain, they could ship Fuzzies off-planet and make terrific profits on it. You wait till the news about the Fuzzies gets around. There’ll be a sale for them everywhere — Terra, Odin, Freya, Marduk, Aton, Baldur, planets like that. Anybody can bring a ship into orbit on this planet, now, if he has his own landing-craft and doesn’t use the CZC spaceport. In a month, word will have gotten to Gimli, that’s the nearest planet, and in two more months a ship can get here from there.”
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