Sandra snorted derisively.
“However,” Grego continued, “my philosophy is that in every disaster is the seed of its resolution and improvement.”
The strawberry blonde frowned and pursed her lips. “I don’t think I’m following you, Mr. Grego.”
Grego pulled his chin back so it almost touched his collarbone. “Why, I’m appointing you new Fuzzy-Sitter-in-Chief. Ten percent raise in salary, effective this morning.”
Sandra laughed. “Very scientific,” she said.
Grego remained unruffled. “See Myra in the morning,” he said. “She’ll without doubt have a bunch of papers for you to fill out. Then, come straight up here. Mrs. Khadra will brief you on the job for a couple of days.” He looked at Sandra. “Will 1030 tomorrow morning be all right to start?” he asked.
Sandra rolled her eyes heavenward. “Anything. Yes, that will be just fine. Now, will you let me get on with my wedding night?”
“Oh, of course,” Grego said irritably. “By the way, in all the excitement I never did get your name.”
“Stone,” she said. “Christiana Stone.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was hot for that time of the morning, windless, and the Zarathustran sun hung motionless in a hard, brassy sky. Ahmed Khadra stepped down from the airjeep and kicked at the dry, barren earth with the toe of his boot. He squinted up at the sky. “Going to be another dry year, George,” he said.
“Not the first for this valley, either,” George Lunt replied. He pointed off into the middle distance. “Y’see over there—where there used to be a creek winding down from that saddle, and then spreading out into a marshy area on the valley floor? See all those little hummocks? They used to be tiny islands a few meters across, covered with lush vegetation.”
“Yes,” Ahmed said, “you still see stalks and scorched plants, but nothing has grown down here for at least three years. What of it?”
“Why d’you suppose that is?” George asked.
Ahmed thought for a moment. “Why, I guess it’s the dry weather we’ve been having on this part of Beta. Yes, that would be about right. The CZC started the Big Blackwater Project—drained half a million acres of swamp for farming. It cut off the moist air that caused rainfall on the Piedmont. That was about three years ago. Again, so what?”
“Well,” George said, “those dry years let an abnormally high crop of land-prawns hatch out each spring. It was too dry in the uplands for them to find enough food, so they moved over the divide and down into the big woods where there was plenty of that forest moss they’re fond of.”
“And the Fuzzies followed the migration,” Ahmed added. “What’s with the guessing game, George?”
“Take it easy,” George said. “I’m just giving you the data a piece at a time—the way I got it—to see if you come to the same conclusions I did.”
“Sort of air-checking your own reasoning?”
“Yes.”
Ahmed put his hands on his hips and looked out over the valley floor. “Nothing wrong with that. What’s next? By the way, George, how did you get interested in this place to begin with?”
“Survey readouts,” George said. “The data kept showing up that there’s a lot of titanium in the ground up here—in several different compound forms. Didn’t make sense. At first, I thought the equipment was out of whack, so I had it reflown with different, vehicles. Kept getting the same answers. Still didn’t make sense. Titanium’s scarce all over Zarathustra. Why should there be a concentration of it up here?”
Ahmed pointed across the valley. “Maybe it belched out of that big mountain over there. It looks like a dead volcano.”
“I wondered about that at first,” George said. “The way this valley’s topography is laid out, the whole thing could be what’s left of a very large, very old caldera. But, geology isn’t my long suit, so I decided to go ahead and do all the snooping any good cop would do before I started jabbering a lot of brilliant deductions at anyone.”
“So you came up here and poked around on your own,” Ahmed said.
“That’s why I wasn’t at the wedding,” George said. “Sorry about that, but it couldn’t be helped. You’ll see why in a few minutes.”
“You’re already forgiven,” Ahmed said. “Lead on.”
“This is about the same place where I first landed my jeep,” George said, pointing to pad-marks in the loose soil, “when I first came up here.”
“So you’re reconstructing your movements for me,” Ahmed said.
“Very good.” George’s square, muscular face broke into a grin. “I knew what I was doing when I appointed you Chief of Detectives for the ZNPF.”
“Okay,” Ahmed said. “What came next?”
“I wanted a closer look at the dried-up marsh, there, and around that big patch of weirthorn that spreads back against the bench, there, below the saddle.” George hitched up his pistol belt and started walking, the arid soil crunching under his boots. “Let me show you what I found.”
Harry Steefer looked at the communication screen as he spoke, trying to read the reactions in Victor Grego’s face. “Mr. Grego,” he said, “I have the papers right here in front of me.” He held up a thin folder, as though to prove he was telling the truth. “The fact of the matter is that we just don’t know anything about the girl. She came in on the City of Asgard a little less than a month ago and went to work for the CZC on the twenty-first. Beyond that, there’s nothing I can check unless I send her packet back to Company headquarters on Terra—and that would take a year. I can’t issue a Restricted-Areas pass on this kind of information.”
Victor Grego was becoming annoyed. He always became annoyed when he didn’t get his own way. He compressed his mouth into a hard line. “Well, Harry,” he said, “why in hell does my personal Fuzzy-Sitter have to have a Restricted-Areas pass, anyway?”
Steefer sighed. “Because anyone who has free access to your private residence has to have one. Mr. Grego, we decided on this almost a year ago—after we found that Herckerd and Novaes had hidden a bunch of kidnapped Fuzzies on an unfinished floor right here in Company House. To say nothing of every other Tom, Dick, and Harry in Mallorysport coming and going through the landing stages in the unused levels. I don’t even like to talk about it. I’m still embarrassed by how slack I’d let things get.” Chief Steefer took a deep breath and waited to see if he had sold his point to Grego. He had a hunch that he hadn’t.
Grego scratched his head and lit a cigarette. “I’m certain that she’s all right, Harry. Diamond is crazy about her. Fuzzies have an instinct for that sort of thing, you know. They just don’t take to people who aren’t on the square.” He paused, waiting for Steefer to suggest a way around the regulation.
Steefer wasn’t going to do it. “It’s an Executive Ops Order—S.O.P.—you signed it yourself, sir. If I make an exception for you, I’ll have technicians in Computer Center wanting the same thing so Aunt Minnie can bring them their lunch, and statisticians in the Sensitive Records Section who want their girl friends to pick them up from work, and Ghu knows where it will all end.”
Grego thought for a moment. Damn it all to Nifflheim! Who’s running this company—me or the damned Operations Manual? “Here’s what you do, Harry,” he said. “Issue the pass. Stamp it ‘temporary,’ with an expiration date that will let you get the packet to Terra and back. Attach a memo inside the packet to the effect that this personnel action is done on my personal authority, and put out a supplement to that Ops Order to the effect that exceptions will be authorized only on my personal, signed approval. When that’s done, send a man up to my office with the pass and the memo for my signature. Will that serve everyone’s best interests?”
“Yes, sir. That will be fine. No one is apt to ask for an exception if they have to personally justify it to you.”
“Excellent,” Grego said. “I can’t keep escorting her to the landing stage and meeting her there every time she comes and goes, just to get her past one of your cops. Th
ank you.”
Grego blanked the screen. That should get the job done, while at the same time tacitly explaining to Harry Steefer an object lesson about why people don’t ordinarily resist the decisions of the Manager-in-Chief. The Company was not a god, after all. It was a machine, and there could only be room for one person in the driver’s seat.
It had been Tuesday morning about 0830 when Ahmed and Sandra arrived at Holloway Station, as promised with a metric ton of luggage and gear. George Lunt had whisked Ahmed away immediately. Ruth and Lynne had dropped everything to help Sandra get situated. They had borrowed Jack’s manipulator to re-arrange some logs and boulders left around the bungalow into “something more attractive.” Jack didn’t understand that, but he had said, “Sure. Go ahead.” That left him without a vehicle, but he and Little Fuzzy walked across the footbridge over the creek and borrowed Gerd’s airboat.
Jack wanted to get up into the Cordilleras Range right away. The patrols had reported a big mob of Fuzzies up there, so he wanted to get right up there with an armload of shodda-bags and steel shoppo-diggos, do a little trading with the natives, and persuade them to come on in to Holloway Station. Speed was indicated because in that part of Beta the hills were alive with the sound of prospectors—all trying to find enough sunstones to get rich quick. They wouldn’t, of course, because they didn’t know how to look for sunstones, or how to get them out of the enclosing matrix of flint if they found a vein.
A lot of these birds were pretty unsavory characters. Some of them were bound to be runaway veldbeest herders with stolen Company air cars. That kind of person would be apt to vent his frustration on a Fuzzy. A little preventive work by the Native Affairs Commissioner was indicated. The ZNPF patrol would go up there on the regular surveillance post and check them all out and jug the ones who had an aircar they couldn’t prove they owned, explain the boundaries of the Fuzzy Reservation to the rest, and generally get the idea across that this was not exactly the wild frontier.
In the meantime, Jack did not want any ugly incidents involving Fuzzies. For all he cared, these guys could shoot each other up all they wanted, but Fuzzies were his responsibility.
Ahmed leaned down to get a better look. “I’ll be damned, George. You’re right. It is the remnants of a little irrigation ditch.” He pointed along the line of the dry creek. “And it branches into three channels over there. Somebody was cultivating these plants before the creek dried up. But, nobody’s ever settled up here. If they had we’d have found out about Fuzzies sooner than—” He stopped short. “You mean Fuzzies had truck gardens up here?”
George nodded.
“But, Fuzzies are hunter-gatherers. They’re nowhere near the agricultural level.” Ahmed frowned and stroked his nose.
“Umm-hmm.” George nodded, again. “I don’t know much about anthropology, but I know hunter-gatherer societies at low Paleolithic development come a hell of a lot earlier than farmers.”
“How can you be certain it was Fuzzy-farmers?” Ahmed asked.
George pointed to the ground, turning a full circle as he did so. “Why, look all around you at the dried-up tracks. Fuzzy footprints if I ever saw them.”
Ahmed chuckled. “That doesn’t prove anything. Fuzzies could have tramped through here by the battalion when this ground was damp—hunting prawns or something.”
“Good reasoning, Captain,” George said. “You’re getting to be a better detective every day. And, you’re right; it doesn’t prove a thing. Now come over here and look at this.”
He led Ahmed over to the extensive weirthorn thicket that spread along the base of the cliff. It wasn’t a surprising place to find it. Wierthorn was a kind of chaparral, with long, sharp spikes every few inches along its branches. It flourished everywhere on Zarathustra. With good water, it developed a thin layer of green leaves. Without water, it went barren, dry, and brown, but it still grew—to a height of nearly two meters. When a plant died, it was simply pushed upward by the growth of a new plant under it, so that an old stand of weirthorn several layers deep might rise as much as six or eight yards, canopied over with hard, dry thorn bushes that made a little more shade to give the growing plants a little better chance. A fire would go through the stuff like a box of matches—that’s how plantation operators cleared it away and kept it out of cultivated land.
George had hacked his way several meters into the thicket with a machete. He invited Ahmed to go in and have a look.
After a few moments of peering around in the dim interior of the bramble patch, Ahmed whistled softly. “Well, I’ll be damned to Nifflheim!” he exclaimed.
The inside of the thicket was laced with pathways and runs that had been made by clearing off the random lower branches which were in the way. There were little huts and lean-tos, fabricated by wattle-weaving sticks and vines among the growing weirthorn trunks, then “shingling” them with broad, rubbery leaves from the base of the butterpaddle plant so they would shed rainwater. The runs and structures were all quite small—just about Fuzzy-size.
Ahmed emerged, blinking against the brighter light outside. “Well, that tears it,” he said simply. “The scientific types will go off their spool trying to make this fit in with what they already ‘know’ about Fuzzies.”
“It’s also ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt,’ as we say in the trade,” George said. “Why, this would have proved the case for Fuzzy sapience without the thing ever getting into a court room.”
“But no one had ever landed up here—or even mapped the place thoroughly—until we began patrolling it as the Fuzzy Reservation. At that, it couldn’t be seen from the air.”
“It came at just the right time,” George said. “I overflew the valley several times. When the sun is just right, you can see regular shapes down in the thicket—but only if you look closely and hover while you’re doing it.”
It was a dream of a defense against Fuzzies’ natural enemies. A Fuzzy made just about a mouthful for a harpy—a flying predator about the size and general design of a Terran Jurassic pterodactyl. There wasn’t any way for a harpy to make a swoop for Fuzzies who were inside the thicket. Same for damnthings and bush-goblins. They wouldn’t even try to get at dinner if it was in a weirthorn patch.
“Okay,” Ahmed said. “There’s Fuzzy-signs all over the place. Even though the creek is dried up, this place is still in use.” He pointed around the gentle slope between the thicket and the dry creek. “See? There’s several freshly-filled toilet pits spotted around. The question is: where are the Fuzzies? How come there are no Fuzzies?”
“Oh, there are plenty of Fuzzies,” George said, “but they’re probably all hiding in the woods down at the lower end of the valley.”
Ahmed nodded. “Makes sense. They’d all be out foraging at this time of day. They’ve probably never seen a Big One before, and they probably think our vehicles are some new kind of flying appetite—like a harpy.”
“Generalizing and forming abstract concepts is what they’re doing there,” George said.
“And, if they were too far away to make it back here when they spotted our jeep, they’d take the nearest cover.”
They both stood for a moment, looking down the valley toward the woods, knowing there were pairs of wide Fuzzy-eyes looking back at them.
As they walked back toward the jeep, Ahmed asked, “Why in blazes would they stay up here, instead of going along with the migration after the land-prawns? This looks like one helluva tough place for a Fuzzy to make a living. It’s a cinch the little perishers aren’t getting enough to eat since the Big Blackwater Project shut off the sprinkler system.”
“That,” George said, jumping a shallow ravine that had once fed Fuzzy Creek, “is a question we’ll let the scientist types mutter about. What is your suggestion for immediate action, seein’ as how you’re wearing the same beret badge with the crossed shoppo-diggos and the ‘ZNPF’ on it that I am?”
Ahmed ticked off his points on the fingers of his left hand as they walked. “First, we tell
Jack what we’ve found. Then, we come back up here with some Fuzzy interpreters and a big stock of Extee-Three so we can get this gang to come out and have a square meal while they’re learning that we’re their friends. Then, we do the usual trading of tools and stuff and try to persuade them to move on south, where the living is a little easier. Then, we find out what’s what with the titanium concentration in Fuzzy Valley.”
“My idea, exactly,” George said, “except for one thing.”
“Yes?”
“While all this is going on, we keep a security lid on this place that is airtight, leakproof, and lightproof. I’ve already drawn up a new area assignment for all the patrols, arranged so there’s none of Paine’s Marines covering this sector and so that only our own most trusted men will be overflying Fuzzy Valley—men who will come to us first if they see anything unusual and keep their mouths shut if we tell them to.”
“We’d better talk to Jack tonight,” Ahmed said.
“That can be handled at your welcoming party,” George said as he pressed the release stud on the side hatch of the jeep. “Did Gerd tell you about it? I’m tossing a little beer and pretzels fest for you and Sandra tonight. Nothing elaborate, you understand. I’m not getting rich off this job, and I imagine you’re both just about champagned-out by now.”
Ahmed belched affirmatively.
Chapter Fifteen
It was comfortable and quiet in the office where the young man sat dictating a report into his VRR-augmented voco-writer. He was glad he had saved that big featherleaf tree outside the window when they assembled the Medical Center, then chose his office space from the shaded corner of the building. On a hot day—like this particular Tuesday afternoon—it made a difference. The heat pump held the temperature in the labs and other offices to an adequate level—in his office it was cool.
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