“Hi, Jack. Anything new?” he asked.
Gerd and Ruth had been away for a little over a week, in the country to the south. It must have been fun, just the two of them and Complex and Superego and Dr. Crippen and Calamity Jane, camping in Gerd’s airboat and visiting the posts Lunt had strung out along the edge of the big woods.
“I was going to ask you that. Where’s Ruth?”
“She’s staying another week, at the Kirtland plantation, with Superego and Complex; there must be fifty to seventy-five Fuzzies there; she’s helping the Kirtland people with them, teaching them not to destroy young sugarplant shoots. Kirtland’s been taking a lot of damage to his shoots from zatku. What’s the latest from Mallorysport?”
“Well, nowhere on the NFM p , but they seem to have found something interesting about the land-prawns.”
“More on that?” Gerd had heard about the alleged hokfusine. “Have they found out what it is?”
“It isn’t hokfusine, it’s just a rather complicated titanium salt. The land-prawns eat titanium, mostly in moss and fungus and stuff like that. It probably grades about ten atoms to the ton on what they eat. But they fix it, apparently in that middle intestine that they have. I have a big long write-up on what it does there. The Fuzzies seem to convert it to something else in their own digestive system. Whatever it does, hokfusine seems to do it a lot better. They’re still working on it.”
“They ate land-prawns all along, but it was only since this new generation hatched, this Spring, that they really got all they wanted of them. I wonder what they ate before, up north.”
“Well, we know what all they eat beside zatku and the stuff we give them. Animals small enough to kill with those little sticks, fruit, bird eggs, those little yellow lizards, grubs.”
“What are Paine’s Marines doing up north now, beside looking for nonexistent Fuzzy catchers?”
“That’s about all. Flying patrol, taking photos, mapping. They say there are lots of Fuzzies north of the Divide that haven’t started south yet, probably haven’t heard about the big zatku bonanza yet.”
“I’m going up there, Jack. I want to look at them, see what they live on.”
“Don’t go right away; wait a week, and I’ll go along with you. I still have a lot of this damn stuff to clear up, and I have to go in to Mallorysport tomorrow. Casagra’s talking about recalling Paine and his men and vehicles. You know where that would put us.”
Gerd nodded. “We’d have to double the ZNPF. It’s all George can do to maintain those posts along the edge of the big woods and fly inspections in the farm country, without having to patrol in the north too.”
“I don’t know how we could pay or equip them, even if we could recruit them. We’re operating on next year’s budget now. That’s another thing I’ll have to talk to Ben about. He’ll have to allocate us more money.”
“GOD DAMN IT, there’s no money to give him!”
Ben Rainsford spoke aloud and bitterly, and then caught himself and puffed furiously on his pipe, the smoke reddening in the sunset afterglow. Have to watch that; people hear him talking to himself, it would be all over Government House, and all over Mallorysport in the next day, that Governor Rainsford was going crazy. Not that it would be any wonder if he were.
The three Fuzzies, Flora and Fauna and their friend Diamond, who had gotten hold of a lot of wooden strips of the sort the gardeners used for trelliswork and were building a little arbor of their own, looked up quickly and then realized that he wasn’t speaking to them and went on with what they were doing. The sun had gone to bed already, and the sky-light was fading, and they wanted to get whatever it was they were making finished before it got dark. Fuzzies, like Colonial Governors, found time running out on them occasionally.
Time was running out fast for him. The ninety days the CZC had allowed him to take over all the public services they were no longer obliged to maintain were more than half gone now, and nothing had been done. The election for delegates to a constitutional convention was still a month in the future, and he had no idea how long it would take the elected delegates, whoever they’d be, to argue out a constitution, and how long thereafter it would take to get a Colonial Legislature set up, and how long after tax laws were enacted it would be before the Government would begin collecting money.
He wished he’d been able to borrow that half billion sols from the Banking Cartel that Hugo Ingermann had been yakking about. Ingermann had later been forced to back down to something closer to the actual figure of fifty million, just as he had been forced to retreat from some of his exaggerated statements about the Adoption Bureau, but it seemed that the public still believed his original statements and were disregarding the hedging and weasel-worded retractions. Fifty million sounded like a lot of money, too — till you had to run a planetary government on it, and everything was going to cost so much more than he had expected.
The Native Affairs Commission, for instance. He and Jack had both believed that a hundred and fifty men would be ample for the Native Protection Force; now they were finding that three times that number wouldn’t be enough. They had thought that Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek and Lynne Andrews, and Pancho Ybarra, on loan from the Navy, would be able to do all the study and research work; now that was spread out to Mallorysport Hospital and Science Center, for which the CZC was paying and would expect compensation. And the Adoption Bureau was costing as much, now, as the whole original Native Affairs Commission estimate.
At least, he’d been able to do one thing for Jack. Alex Napier had agreed that protection and/or policing of natives on Class-IV planets was a proper function of the Armed Forces, and instead of recalling his fifty men, Casagra had been ordered to reinforce them with twenty more.
The Fuzzies suddenly stopped what they were doing and turned. Diamond drew his Fuzzyphone. “Pappy Vic!” he called, in delighted surprise. “Come; look what we make!” Flora and Fauna were whooping greetings, too.
He rose, and saw behind him the short, compactly-built man, familiar from news-screen views, whom he had so far avoided meeting personally. Victor Grego greeted the Fuzzies, and then said, “Good evening, Governor. Sorry to intrude, but Miss Glenn has a dinner-and-dancing date, and I told her I’d get Diamond myself.”
“Good evening, Mr. Grego.” Somehow, he didn’t feel the hostility to the man that he had expected. “Could you wait a little while? They have an important project, here, and they want to finish it while there’s still daylight.”
“Well, so I see.” Grego spoke to the Fuzzies in their own language, and listened while they explained what they were doing. “Of course; we can’t interfere with that.”
The Fuzzies went back to their trellis-building. He and Grego sat down in lawn-chairs; Grego lit a cigarette. He watched the CZC manager-in-chief as the latter sat watching the Fuzzies. This couldn’t be Victor Grego; “Victor Grego” was a label for a personification of black-hearted villainy and ruthless selfishness; this was a pleasant-spoken, courteous gentleman who loved Fuzzies, and was considerate of his employees.
“Miss Glenn’s date was with Captain Ahmed Khadra,” Grego was saying, to make conversation. “The fifth in the last two weeks. I’m afraid I’m just before losing a good Fuzzy sitter by marriage.”
“I’m afraid so; they seem quite serious about each other. If so, she’ll be getting a good husband. I’ve known Ahmed for some time; he was at the Constabulary post near my camp, on Beta. It’s too bad,” he added, “that he seems to be getting nowhere on this Herckerd-Novaes investigation. It’s certainly not from lack of trying.”
“My police chief, Harry Steefer, is getting nowhere just as rapidly,” Grego said. “He’s ready to give the whole thing up, and when Harry Steefer gives up, it’s hopeless.”
“Do you think there is anything to this theory that somebody is training those Fuzzies to help catch other Fuzzies?”
Grego shook his head. “You know Fuzzies at least as well as I do, Governor. Almost two months; anything you can train
a Fuzzy to do, you can train him to do it in less than that,” he said. “And I don’t see why anybody would try to catch wild Fuzzies, not with the bloodthirsty laws you’ve enacted. Criminals only take chances in proportion to profits, and almost anybody who wants a Fuzzy can get one free.”
That was true. And there was no indication of any black market in Fuzzies here, and Jack’s patrols over northern Beta Continent hadn’t found any evidence that anybody was live trapping Fuzzies there.
“Ahmed had an idea, for a while, that they were going into the export business; catching Fuzzies to smuggle out for sale off-planet.”
“He mentioned that to Harry Steefer. Jack Holloway was talking to me about that, too; wanted to know what could be done to prevent it. I told him it would be impossible to get Fuzzies onto a ship from Darius, or onto Darius from Mallorysport Space Terminal. As long as we keep our ‘flagrant and heinous space-traffic monopoly,’ you can be sure no Fuzzies are going to be shipped off-planet.”
“You think Ingermann really has anything to do with it?” he asked hopefully, recognizing the source of the quotation.
“If there is a black market in Fuzzies, Ingermann’s back of it,” Grego said, as though stating a natural law. “In the six or so years he’s infected this planet, I’ve learned a lot about the soi-disant Honorable Hugo Ingermann, and none of it’s been good.”
“Ahmed Khadra thinks his attacks on the CZC space-monopoly may stem from a desire to get some way around your controls at the ground terminal here and on Darius. Of course, he’s talking about a Government spaceport, and that would be just as tightly controlled…”
Grego hesitated for a moment, then dropped his cigarette to the ground and heeled it out. He leaned toward Rainsford in his chair.
“Governor, you know, yourself, that as things stand you can’t build a second spaceport here,” he said. “Ingermann knows that, too. He’s making that issue to embarrass you and to attack the CZC at the same time. He has no expectation that your Government would build any spaceport facilities here. He certainly hopes not; he wants to do that himself.”
“Where the devil would he get the money?”
“He could get it. Unless I miss my guess, he’s getting it now, or as soon as a ship can get in, on Marduk. There are a number of shipping companies who would like to get in here in competition with Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines, and there are quite a few import-export houses there who would like to trade on Zarathustra in competition with CZC. Inside six months somebody will be trying to put in a spaceport here. If they can get land to set it on. And due to a great error in my judgment eight years ago, the land’s available.”
“Where?”
“Right here on Alpha Continent, less than a hundred miles from where we’re sitting. A wonderful place for a spaceport. You weren’t here, then, were you, Governor?”
“No. I came here, I blush to say, on the same ship that brought Ingermann, six and a half years ago.”
“Well, you got here, and so did he, after it was over, but just before that we had a big immigration boom. At that time, the company wasn’t interested in local business, just offplanet trade in veldbeest meat. A lot of independent concerns started, manufacturing, food production, that sort of thing that we didn’t want to bother with. We sold land north of the city, in mile and two-mile square blocks, about two thousand square miles of it. Then the immigrants stopped coming, and a lot of them moved away. There simply wasn’t employment for them. Most of the companies that had been organized went broke. Some of the factories that were finished operated for a while; most of them were left unfinished. The banks took over some of the land; most of it got into the hands of the shylocks; and since the Fuzzy Trial Ingermann has been acquiring title to a lot of it. Since the Fuzzy Trial, nobody else has been spending money for real-estate; everybody expects to get all the free land they want.”
“Well, he’ll probably make some money out of that, but the people who come in here with the capital will be the ones to control it, won’t they?”
“Of course they will, but that’s honest business; Ingermann isn’t interested. He’s expecting an increase of about two to three hundred percent in the planetary population in the next five years. With eighty percent of the land-surface in public domain, that’s probably an underestimate. Most of them will be voters; Ingermann’s going to try to control that vote.”
And if he did… His own position was secure; Colonial Governors were appointed, and it took something like the military intervention which had put him into office to unseat one. But a Colonial Governor had to govern through and with the consent of a Legislature. He wasn’t looking forward happily to a Legislature controlled by Hugo Ingermann. Neither, he knew, was Grego.
He’d have to be careful, though. Grego wanted to put the company back in its old pre-Fuzzy position of planetary dominance. He was still violently opposed to that.
It was almost dark, now. The Fuzzies had put the final touches to the lacy trellis they had built, and came crowding over, wanting Pappy Ben and Pappy Vic to come look. They went and examined it, and spoke commendation. Grego picked up Diamond; Flora and Fauna were wanting him to go and sit down and furnish them a lap to sit on.
“I’ve been worrying about just that,” he said, when he was back in his chair, with the Fuzzies climbing up onto him. “A lot of the older planets are beginning to overpopulate, and there’s never room enough for everybody on Terra. There’ll be a rush here in about a year. If I can only get things stabilized before then…”
Grego was silent for a moment. “If you’re worried about all those public-health and welfare and service functions, forget about them for a while,” he said. “I know, I said the company would discontinue them in ninety days, but that was right after the Pendarvis Decisions, and nobody knew what the situation was going to be. We can keep them going for a year, at least.”
“The Government won’t have any more money a year from now,” he said. “And you’ll expect compensation.”
“Of course we will, but we won’t demand gold or Federation notes. Tax-script, bonds, land script…”
Land-script, of course; the law required a Colonial Government to make land available to Federation citizens, but it did not require such land to be given free. That might be one way to finance the Government.
It could also be a way for the Zarathustra Company, having gotten the Government deeply into debt, to regain what had been lost in the aftermath of the Fuzzy Trial.
“Suppose you have Gus Brannhard talk it over with Leslie Coombes,” Grego was suggesting. “You can trust Gus not to stick the Government’s foot into any bear trap, can’t you?”
“Why, of course, Mr. Grego. I want to thank you, very much, for this. That public services takeover was worrying me more than anything else.”
Yet he couldn’t feel relieved, and he couldn’t feel grateful at all. He felt discomfited, and angry at himself more than at Grego.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GERD VAN RIEBEEK crouched at the edge of the low cliff, slowly twisting the selector-knob of a small screen in front of him. The view changed; this time he was looking through the eye of a pickup fifty feet below and five hundred yards to the left. Nothing in it moved except a wind-stirred branch that jiggled a spray of ragged leaves in the foreground. The only thing from the sound-outlet was a soft drone of insects, and the tweet-twonk, tweet-twonk of a presumably love-hungry banjo-bird. Then something just out of sight scuffled softly among the dead leaves. He turned up the sound-volume slightly.
“What do you think it is?”
Jack Holloway, beside him, rose to one knee, raising his binoculars.
“I can’t see anything. Try the next one.”
Gerd twisted the knob again. This pickup was closer the ground; it showed a vista of woods lit by shafts of sunlight falling between trees. Now he could hear rustling and scampering, and with ultrasonic earphone, Fuzzy voices:
“This way. Not far. Find hatta-zosa.”
Ja
ck was looking down at the open slope below the cliff.
“If that’s what they call goofers, I see six of them from here,” he said. “Probably a dozen more I can’t see.” He watched, listening. “Here they come, now.”
The Fuzzies had stopped talking and were making very little noise; then they came into view; eight of them, in single file. The weapons they carried were longer and heavier than the prawn killers of the southern Fuzzies, knobbed instead of paddle-shaped, and sharp-pointed on the other end. All of them had picked up stones which they carried in their free hands. They all stopped, then three of them backed away into the brush again. The other five spread out in a skirmish line and waited. He shut off the screen and crawled over beside Jack to peep over the edge of the cliff.
There were seven goofers, now; rodent-looking things with dark gray fur, a foot and a half long and six inches high at the shoulder, all industriously tearing off bark and digging at the roots of young trees. No wonder the woods were so thin, around here; if there were any number of them it was a wonder there were any trees at all. He picked up a camera and aimed it, getting some shots of them.
“Something else figuring on getting some lunch here,” Jack said, sweeping the sky with his glasses. “Harpy, a couple of miles off. Ah, another one. We’ll stick around a while; we may have to help our friends out.”
The five Fuzzies at the edge of the brush stood waiting. The goofers hadn’t heard them, and were still tearing and chewing at the bark and digging at the roots. Then, having circled around, the other three burst out suddenly, hurling their stones and running forward with their clubs. One stone hit a goofer and knocked it down; instantly, one of the Fuzzies ran forward and brained it with his club. The other two rushed a second goofer, felling and dispatching it with their clubs. The other fleds, into the skirmish line on the other side. Two were hit with stones, and finished off on the ground. The others got away. The eight Fuzzies gathered in a clump, seemed to debate pursuit for a moment, and then abandoned the idea. They had four goofers, a half-goofer apiece. That was a good meal for them.
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