“Anybody seen the High Sheriff of Nottingham around anywhere?” Gerd asked. “He better get on the job, or the king’ll be fresh out of deer.”
The second arrow went into the burlap zarabuck at the base of the neck. More names for Fuzzies — Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little John, Will Scarlet…
A zarabuck would feed the average Fuzzy band for two days, or a double band for a day, and the woods were lousy with zarabuck. More meat to a kill would mean that Fuzzies could operate in larger bands. And a zarabuck-hide would make three or four shoulder bags, not as good as the waterproof, zipper-closed, issue-type, but good enough to carry things; and Fuzzies needed some way to carry things. He remembered the pitifully few possessions Little Fuzzy’s band had brought in with them; and by Fuzzy standards they’d been rich. Usually, a band would have only their clubs, and maybe a flake knife or a coup-de-poing axe. At bottom, any culture was a matter of possessions — things to do things with. Everything else — law, social organizations, philosophy, came later.
Robin Hood, or Samkin Aylward, or whoever he was, had shot his third arrow; he and all the others bolted down the hundred yards to the target. It was a miracle, the way those kids had picked archery up; less than a month, and it would take a couple of years to make that kind of archers out of humans. A Fuzzy in the woods, with a bow, could eat mighty well. Fifteen or twenty Fuzzies with bows wouldn’t have any trouble at all keeping everybody well-fed, all the time. They could make permanent homes, and wouldn’t have to be on the move all the time. That might be the way to handle it: a string of Fuzzy villages all through the Piedmont, with patrol cars dropping in every couple of days to keep them supplied with hokfusine. Maybe big villages, with a ZNPF trooper as permanent resident.
And, what the hell, give them rifles and ammunition. An 8.5-mm highspeed pistol cartridge would kill a zarabuck; Gus Brannhard had potted quite a few with his Mars-Consolidated. Even kill a harpy; and a couple of 8.5’s in the right places would make a damnthing lose interest in Fuzzy for dinner. So, they’d need ammunition. Well, they needed hokfusine anyhow, and a case of cartridges now and then wouldn’t make much difference. One thing, needing cartridges they’d stay around where they’d get hokfusine too.
THE NEXT DAY, Victor Grego dropped in en route to Yellowsand, accompanied by Diamond. After saying hello to all his human friends in sight and asking Pappy Vic’s permission, Diamond went off with Little Fuzzy to see the sights.
“How many Fuzzies do you have now?” Grego asked, as he and Jack strolled toward the schoolhouse.
Jack told him, around five hundred. Like everybody else, Grego thought that was a hell of a lot of Fuzzies in one place. Well, damn it, it was, and there didn’t seem to be much that could be done about it.
“Coming in, I saw a couple of hundred of them along Cold Creek, below where the run comes in,” he added. “Had some fires going, and there were a couple of lorries grounded with them. More of your gang?”
“Oh, yes. That’s the shipyard and naval academy. We’re teaching them how to build rafts and paddle and steer them. Rivers give Fuzzies a lot of trouble; a river like the main Snake or the Blackwater’s bigger to a Fuzzy than the Amazon on Terra or the Fa’ansare on Loki is to us. That’s why we get so many of them here; the river systems to the north funnel a lot of them down Cold Creek.”
“This crowd doesn’t need to build rafts anymore. They’ve made it on their own. They’ve joined the Human-People now.”
And he couldn’t take them back and dump them in the woods; he realized that now. The vilest cruelty anybody can commit is to give somebody something wonderful and then snatch it away again.
“I don’t know what the Nifflheim I’m going to do with them,” he admitted. “It’ll depend on how this minor-child status holds up, for one thing.”
“We can get that written into the Constitution,” Grego said. “That’s if we can get it adopted after we write it in.”
They had almost reached the schoolhouse. He stopped short.
“You think there’s any doubt?” he asked.
“Well, you know what kind of a goddamn rabble of delegates we have; fifty or sixty we can depend on, and it takes a two-thirds vote to adopt a constitution. The rest of that gang would sell us out for a candy-bar.”
“Well, give them a candy-bar. Give them two candy-bars, and a gold-plated eight-bladed Boy Scout knife.” He repeated what Gus Brannhard had said about no opposition with money enough to buy them away from the Company and the Government.
“That’s what I’m worried about. Hugo Ingermann,” Grego said. “I know what he wants to do in the long run. He wants to wreck the Company and Ben Rainsford’s Government, both, and build himself up on the ruins. That People’s Prosperity Party looks dead now, but those things are as hard to kill as a Nidhog swampcrawler, and just as poisonous. What he wants is to get an anti-Company Constitution adopted, and then get an anti-Rainsford Legislature elected.”
“How much money has he?” Jack started Grego away from the schoolhouse and in the direction of his office across the run. Whatever this was, he wanted to talk it over privately. “And is he spending any?”
“He’s not spending any we know of, but he’s borrowing all over the place. You know that North Mallorysport section?”
That had been one of Grego’s few mistakes. About ten years ago there had been a brief flurry in private industry, and the Company had sold land north of the city. Now it was a ghost town, abandoned factories and warehouses, and a ruinous airport. Hugo Ingermann had managed to acquire title to most of it.
“He’s borrowing on that, every centisol he can. Needless to say, we’re buying the mortgages from the bank. In non-Company hands, that place could be made into a planetside spaceport to compete with Terra-Baldur-Marduk on Darius, and we don’t want that. He’s been getting the money in cash or negotiable Banking Cartel certificates; none of it’s deposited. The people at the bank say he’s all but cleaned out his accounts there. I don’t know what he wants with all that loose cash, and not knowing bothers me. He hasn’t been spending any of it we can find out about.”
That meant not spending any, period; the Company’s investigators found things out quickly. They went over to the office and kicked it around from every angle they could think of, and neither of them kicked any enlightenment out of, it. Hugo Ingermann was up to something, and they didn’t know what, and neither of them liked not knowing. They didn’t talk about it with the others at cocktail-time; they talked about the Fuzzies and what they could do with any more of them.
“Why don’t you plant Fuzzy colonies on the other continents?” Grego asked. “We have a lot of good Fuzzy country we’ll lease back to the Government at one sol for value received, or something like that. If this hokfusine program works the way everybody expects it to, we’ll have Fuzzies all over everything.”
That was a good idea. Something else to think about tomorrow and do something about after the Fuzzies’ legal status was determined.
In the evening, just before Fuzzy bedtime, Little Fuzzy and Diamond approached him and Grego.
“Pappy Jack,” Little Fuzzy began, “Diamond want me to go visit with him, at Pappy Vic place, where Big Ones dig. Say much fun there.”
“You want, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked. “Little Fuzzy come with us, make visit. Then, we go home, bring Little Fuzzy back here.”
“What do you think, Jack?” Grego asked. “I’ll bring him back in a couple of days, and it’ll be a lot of fun for both of them. Diamond’s never had a friend with him at Yellowsand. I know, there’s a lot of blasting and digging and so on, but he won’t get hurt. I’ll look after him, and so’ll Diamond. Diamond knows what’s dangerous and what isn’t.”
Diamond must have been telling him all about Yellowsand, and he wanted to go see and come back and tell about; sure. And Grego was always back and forth between Mallorysport and Yellowsand, and he always took Diamond with him; he wouldn’t do that if there were any real danger. Besides, there’d been
enough digging and bulldozing and construction-work around here for Little Fuzzy to know what to watch out for.
“Yes; you go with Diamond; see Pappy Vic place; have plenty fun,” he said. “But you be good Fuzzy; do what Pappy Vic, Diamond say; not do anything they say not do. You listen to Diamond; he know about digging-place.”
“Nobody get hurt if watch out,” Diamond said. “Pappy Vic tell me all about things that hurt; I tell Little Fuzzy. We have much fun.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LITTLE FUZZY WAS excited and happy. He always liked to go for trips, and this was a trip to a new place he had never seen before, a place called Yellowsand. That meant Rohd-Nasig; it would be a sandy place, like beside a river. At this place, Pappy Vic and other Big Ones were digging the top off a mountain and throwing it down in a deep-place, to get bright-stones out of black hard-rock. All Big Ones wanted bright-stones because they were pretty, and Pappy Vic traded them with other Big Ones, and part of what he traded for was nice things to give to the Fuzzies. Pappy Jack and Pappy Gerd had found this place, and now it belonged to Gov’men’; that was why all the Big Ones made their name-marks on the papers that time at Pappy Ben Place.
Pappy Vic sat in front, making the aircar fly; Little Fuzzy and Diamond were on the back seat, looking out the windows. They were high up; they could see everything spread out below, just like the make-like-country things Pappy Jack had, the maps. He could see where he and the others of his band had come down from the sun’s right hand, the north, hunting land-prawns, for many-many days, between new-leaf time and groundberry-time, before he found Wonderful Place and got into it and made friends with Pappy Jack. He saw the river that had been too big to cross, and remembered how they had gone to sun-downward, west, along it for many days before it was small enough to go over.
If only they had known how to build the rafts the way Pappy Jack and Pappy Gerd and Unka Pancho showed them! But now they didn’t need rafts. The Big Ones would take them in aircars, high over all the rivers and mountains; why, it had taken more days than he could count to come south to Wonderful Place, and now they were flying over it before one could make talk about it.
“Look far-far ahead,” Diamond told him. “See mountains go from west to east?” Diamond knew the Big One words; Pappy Vic had taught him. “Yellowsand there. Soon see everything, then go down, go on ground.”
There was an aircar ahead, a green one; it was one that Pappy George’s blue-clothes police went about in. Maybe they were hunting harpies; they killed many harpies with big shootfast guns. Pappy Vic made talk with whoever was in it, with the talk-far things, the radio. They passed over a mountain; it was not steep as they approached, but it dropped sharply on the other side. Then he knew they were far-far to the north. He remembered this kind of mountain. There was a river on the other side, and another mountain, rising gradually and dropping sharply on the other side, and another mountain beyond that. Beyond the far mountain was a yellow haze. Diamond saw it and pointed excitedly.
“Is Yellowsand, Pappy Vic digging-place!” he said. “Is dust. Much dust where Big Ones dig.”
“You kids, look out right window,” Pappy Vic said. “I go around, so you see from high-up. Then go out over mountain, come up deep-down place.”
Pappy Vic made the aircar come down a little and go slowly. They passed over the mountain, with Diamond beside him pointing. There were two rivers back of this mountain; they ran together, and where they made one was a split place in the mountain beyond, and they ran into it. And there was Yellowsand, Pappy Vic’s place; it was much bigger than Wonderful Place. There were at least a hand of hands of houses… what was the Big One word for that many? Twenty-five. The Big Ones had names for how many anything was, even the leaves on a big tree. And he could see the deep place where the two rivers made one and ran out through the mountain, and beside this the Big Ones were working, many-many of them, with many-many machines; digging machines and picking-up machines and ground-pushing machines and big carry-things aircars.
Pappy Vic must have many-many friends, to come and help him dig like this, and more were coming, because they were building more houses. Everybody must like Pappy Vic.
Pappy Vic took the car out over the top of the mountain, and Little Fuzzy was surprised. He had thought that there would be a valley and another mountain sloping up beyond, but there was not. The mountain went almost straight down, very-very far, and beyond it was flat country, with little hills, and then bigger hills until he could see no farther. Pappy Vic made the car go down beside the face of the mountain till they were almost at the bottom, and then turned and went to where the mountain was split and the river came out of it. He looked up through the hard see-through stuff on the top of the car, amazed at how far it was up to the top. If he saw nothing else, this alone was worth coming to see.
The river came out so fast that it was foaming white; on either side were beaches of sand, and he could see why the Big Ones called this place Yellowsand; beyond the beaches trees grew back to where the mountain started to go up. Nobody could cross this river, not even Big Ones, not even with rafts.
“Bad place,” Diamond told him. “Not go near. Get in river, make dead right away.”
“That’s right, Little Fuzzy. Don’t go near that river at all,” Pappy Vic said. “And look ahead, there.”
There was a falling-water. He had seen falling-waters before, but never one so high as this. Even inside the car he could hear it; it was loud like thunder all the time. And far above, big carry-things aircars were coming out over the deep place and dumping loads of rock and ground and even whole trees that had been dug up by the roots. Pappy Vic made the aircar go straight up so that they could watch the falling-water until they were up above the top.
Then they went over the place where all Pappy Vic’s friends were digging for him, and he looked down, watching all the work that was going on, until the car came down among the bright metal houses, in front of one big one, and there was a hand or so of Big Ones waiting for them. They all wore clothes like Pappy Jack wore when he was at home at Wonderful Place, except two, whose names were Chief and Captain, who wore blue police clothes, and all carried one-hand guns, like the Big Ones at Wonderful Place. They were all nice.
Pappy Vic showed him where he and Diamond would sleep, and he left his chopper-digger there, though he kept his shoulder bag. Then Pappy Vic took him and Diamond out to look at the digging-place. Diamond had seen it many times before; he explained all about it, how they had to take the soft yellow rock off the top of the black hard-rock, and then crack up the hard-rock to find the shining stones inside. It was interesting to watch how they did it, and he saw a wonderful thing, a wide moving-strip, like the moving-strips and the moving steps inside buildings in Big House Place, only much bigger, which carried the black hard-rock into a place with strong wire fence all around.
Pappy Vic took him and Diamond into this place. Here the hard-rock was cracked, and the shining stones gotten out. There were many-many Big Ones working at this. Also, there were many police-clothes Big Ones, with one-hand guns on their belts, and little two-hand shootfast guns, all standing around watching. They must be afraid that bad Big Ones would come and try to take the shining stones. And he saw the place where the shining stones were sorted out. They were very pretty, all bright like fire. No wonder they had to be careful nobody would take pretty-things like that.
Then they went back to the big metal house, and it was lunchtime. They gave him and Diamond estee-fee to eat. For a long time after lunch Pappy Vic and the others made talk. It was Big One talk, and Little Fuzzy understood very little of it, but it seemed to be about the work that was being done here. He and Diamond played on the floor, and he smoked his pipe. Diamond didn’t smoke; he didn’t like it.
In the afternoon, Pappy Vic took them up in an aircar to watch his friends making blast. He knew all about that. The Big Ones put something in the ground and got far away from it, and it went off like a gun only much-much louder, and there
was smoke and dust and big rocks flew high up. It made digging easier, but it was dangerous to be close to it; and, while Big Ones didn’t mind it, it made bumps in the ground that hurt Fuzzies’ feet. That was why Pappy Vic took him and Diamond up in the aircar while it was happening. As soon as the blasts were done, the Big Ones all moved in again with their machines and started digging.
Pappy Vic took him and Diamond back to the big metal house, and they ate more estee-fee, and played with Diamond’s things. And then it was Diamond’s nap-time, and he lay down on his blankets and went to sleep.
Little Fuzzy lay down beside Diamond and tried to sleep too, but he couldn’t. He was too excited about all the things he had seen. He thought about all Pappy Vic’s friends helping him dig, and all the machines they had to work with, and then he thought about all the pretty shining-stones he had seen, all the colors there were, and bright like hot coals in a fire. He wanted a shining-stone himself, to take back to Wonderful Place and show to the others there.
He knew that Pappy Vic would give him one if he asked for it, but Pappy Jack had told him that he must never ask people for things when he was away from home. Well, maybe he could find one for himself. Of course, all the shining-stones here belonged to Pappy Vic, but if he found one himself and asked if he could keep it, that would be different from asking for one Pappy Vic had found. He thought of asking Diamond about this, but Diamond was asleep, and it was never right to bother people who were sleeping unless something was wrong or there was danger.
So he decided to go out by himself and look for one. He put on his shoulder bag and picked up his chopper-digger, because he might find a land-prawn, and went out, going in the direction of the edge of the deep-place, away from where the Big Ones were working. He found much black-rock in a place where they had been digging a little once and had stopped, and looked all around, but he found no shining-stones. Maybe they had found all the shining-stones that were here. He went to the edge of the deep place and looked down, and away down at the bottom he saw more black-rock.
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