Fuzzy Ergo Sum

by Diehr Wolfgang

  “We’re still gonna pay him?”

  “We said we would, didn’t we? The money was the carrot, his daughter the stick.” Dane saw the disgust on Murdock’s face and elaborated. “Brandon, if we want to get anywhere on this planet, we need to build our reputation. If word gets out that we don’t keep our word, nobody will be willing to work with us, no matter which side of the law they operate on. In fact, breaking a promise can get you challenged to a duel.

  “While nothing can force you to accept the challenge, the additional damage to your reputation pretty much guarantees that you are through on this world. So, yes, we pay off Clancy, we don’t kill people unnecessarily, and we don’t give people any reasons to want to shoot us. At least until we have them under our thumb. Understand?”

  A bald ebony-skinned man entered what used to be Ivan Bowlby’s office. He spoke breathlessly through a big smile. “Dane, the last shipment just came in. I would estimate we have fifty million sols worth of sunstones, total. The advance crew did well. They’ve more than earned that thirty percent bonus.”

  “Excellent. Did they send the extra items we requested?”

  “Indeed. One complete skeleton—more or less—about one hundred kilos of non-fluorescent stones, blood and tissue samples from a Fuzzy, and full scan data on the buried artifact. Joe did a top-notch job. I can’t wait to tell him when he returns.”

  “What? Quigley, haven’t you seen the news?” The geologist shook his head. Murdock turned on one of the screens above Dane’s desk and surfed through the channels until he hit a news show.

  “—ent the police and scientists on the scene have yet to give a comment on what may have caused the explosion at the far northeast of the Fuzzy Reservation, saying only that the situation is under control and under investigation. It has been speculated that another Fuzzy Slaver cell or illegal prospectors were trespassing on the Rez using high explosives. At this time it is believed that there are no survivors. Governor Rainsford has been si—”

  Murdock flipped off the viewscreen. “That’s been running almost nonstop on the news channels. The boys out there weren’t using explosives, high or any other kind, since they where trying to avoid detection. The only thing that could have happened was a core-breach of the M/E converter.”

  “No! No…” Quigley, shaken, plodded out of the office and down the hall.

  “Very nice, Murdock,” Dane said in a condescending tone. “Would you like some kittens to strangle for dessert? You do recall that his son was supervising that job, right?”

  “Oh, hell. I did forget. I never even met the kid.” Murdock turned to go. “I’ll go talk with him. Apologize….”

  “No. Better to let him work through his feelings,” Dane cautioned. “You’ll just make things worse if you bother him now. We need him too much to antagonize him.”

  Murdock actually managed to look sorry for Quigley. “Yeah. Okay. Hey, he said you wanted those sunstone duds. What are those for?”

  Dane smiled slightly. “Dr. Quigley will explain when he’s feeling better. I think it is almost time to start our own broadcast. Is everything ready?”

  “Yeah. I expected the news staff to give us more guff, but they accepted the script without comment.”

  “You can thank their former employer for that. Mr. Bowlby tended to play fast and loose with the facts…and his personnel.”

  Murdock was about to say more when Lundgren entered whistling. He was holding a notepad, which he held up high for all to see. “You’ll never guess what I have here.”

  Murdock wasn’t in the mood for guessing games and said so. “Who put a tunnel worm in your bed? Anyway, one of the surveillance cameras survived the explosion.”

  Murdock grunted dismissively while Dane sat up and leaned forward. “Anything interesting?”

  “You betcha.”

  Lundgren held out the notepad and Dane took it. After a few seconds of scrolling through the images, he looked up with an amused look. “Can you disable the camera remotely?”

  “Sure. I can send a command to overload the power cell and it will just overheat and melt into a plastic blob.”

  “Do it. But first get as many images as you can before Beta sundown,” Dane ordered. “If it looks like somebody is walking toward it, don’t hesitate. Destroy it immediately. As for these images, get them to the news crew. They can use the pictures for the backdrop of the lead story.”

  Murdock took the notepad and scrolled through the images. “What’s the big deal? They dug up an old missile.”

  Dane shook his head. “Brandon, you need to get a new imagination installed. The dirt they just dug off of that missile will bury the Colonial Government and the CZC.”

  * * * * * * * * *

  “It’s definitely a cockpit, Dr. Jimenez. Over here is the helm…or rather what’s left of it.” Jim Stabenow from Science Division took Juan, Gerd and George through the artifact sections that had been cleaned out and made accessible. “This is where the pilot, or pilots, would have sat.”

  “There’s no seats, here,” George remarked. “What did they sit on? Did they even sit?”

  “Oh, there must have been some kind of seating here. Look at the floor,” Stabenow kneeled down and pointed at the crusted indentations in the metal deck plating. “They’re corroded, and the seats rotted or rusted away, but these have to be where the support brackets would have been. It’s not much different from what we use in aircars.”

  Gerd looked at the instrument panel, which was canted like a draftsman table instead of flat like Terran designed hyperships. It was covered in rust and corrosion. “What did they use for a power source?”

  “No way to tell, yet. We haven’t cleaned out the back sections, yet. Plus, if any hatches, doors or whatever were sealed at the time of the crash, they’ll likely have to be cut open with laser torches.” Stabenow waved a sweeping hand at his surroundings. “If this, oh, hell, call it a rocket, used anything like atomic power there’s a good chance the radioactive elements would have completely decayed by now. This rocket has been here for a very long time, after all.”

  Juan Jimenez asked the question that was on everybody’s mind. “Any idea who, or what, the pilots really were?”

  “You mean: ‘Did Fuzzies fly this thing here?’ I don’t know. There are no bodies inside any of the sections we’ve accessed. Everything organic has long since rotted and turned to dust. Paper, cloth, even plastics, if they had them, are all long gone. I would hazard to say this section was exposed to the open air for centuries before it was buried by time. That’s plenty of opportunity for the local wildlife and bacteria to destroy anything organic inside.”

  Jimenez pointed at a corroded metal plate on a wall.

  “My guess,” Stabenow said, “is that this is some sort of sign or placard, possibly even the ship’s registry, like what we put up on hyperships. It’ll take a lot of careful cleaning before we can tell what it says, assuming it’s even in a language we can decipher. I haven’t seen any Rosetta Stones lying around.”

  “Do you think it was flown by giant Fuzzies?” asked George Lunt, half joking.

  Jim Stabenow started to laugh, then stopped and gave it some hard thought. “Major, I have no way of even making an educated guess on that. Fuzzies, Thorans, Martians or even super-Khooghra could have flown it for all I can tell at this stage. Whatever they made the seats out of are long gone. Without the seats we can’t get a clear idea of how they sat.”

  Gerd looked over at the instrument panel. “What about the height of the control panel?”

  “That panel could be used by anything over three and a half feet, I would guess, but without the seats we can’t get a clear idea of the leg length. Every sapient species we’ve ever come across designs his furniture so that his feet are close to the floor when sitting…well, those species that are developed enough to make furniture, anyway.”

  “With the exception of the Ullerians, sapient races tend to be built along humanoid design, more or less,” Jimenez
said. “It would be a safe starting point to assume the same for who, or what, crashed this thing. Keep me up on any developments, Jim.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Juan, Gerd and George walked out through the hull rupture and wandered down to the end of the craft. Gerd observed that the exhaust system was clearly designed for solid fuel thrust technology, making any form of hyperdrive unlikely. George looked closer at the hull and noticed a series of fine lines in the metal. He pointed it out to Jimenez.

  “This is way outside of my field, but I would guess that those are stress fractures, Major.” Jimenez started to say more when his radio beeped. “Yes? Good. I’ll be right down. Good news. The Marines are here.”

  * * * * * * * * *

  A quarter mile away from the excavation site, a camera disguised as a rock took in and transmitted images of the artifact and the men working around it. The images were immediately transmitted to Mallorysport.

  XXX

  The yacht hovered at two meters above the thick grass well away from the excavation crew. Victor Grego, Leslie Coombes, Max Fane, Harry Steefer, Ernst Mallin and numerous Fuzzies; Diamond, and Leslie Coombes’ Fuzzies, Lane Fleming, Gladys Fleming, Jeff Rand, David Rand, Kathie O’Grady, Carter Tipton, Humphrey Goode, Nelda Fleming, and Philip Cabot, all named for characters from a first century Pre-Atomic mystery novel.

  The hatch opened from the side and a contragravity platform floated out holding most of the passengers, Big Ones and Fuzzies.

  Not far from Victor Grego’s yacht hovered a military transport carrying Commodore Alex Napier, fresh off the ship from Uller, Lieutenant Commander Pancho Ybarra and Captain Conrad Greibenfeld. In military fashion, the officers exited the transport on an extended ramp, the accepted wisdom being that contragravity platforms were theoretically vulnerable to extreme electro-magnetic disruption. The fact that the transports themselves used contragravity technology was pointedly ignored.

  The two parties gathered around the rocket ship where Gerd and Juan Jimenez met them.

  “Word came down from Metallurgy; this thing is seventy-five thousand T-years old if it’s a minute.” Jimenez led the party into the craft through the hull rupture. “The alloy is unlike anything ever used on Terra. Lots of titanium and iron in it, though, so we know it isn’t of local manufacture.” There were a few polite chuckles from the crowd. “The stress fracture pattern throughout the hull is very unusual. Rigby over in Astrophysics thinks it may be from entering and/or leaving hyperspace without adequate protection. He said there are records of early hyperspace probes with the same damage. That was before collapsium was widely available.”

  “Wormhole, maybe?” Commodore Napier suggested. “I’ve heard stories about ships disappearing in space without any evidence of wreckage…”

  “Wormhole?” Victor Grego asked.

  “A theoretical shortcut through space, Victor,” Jimenez explained. “A breach in space that opens into hyperspace and connects to another point in space. It’s not my field so I don’t know if it has ever been proven.”

  “We might be looking at the proof,” Gerd put in. “I don’t know any more about hyperspace ships than Juan, here, but I’ll swear that this rocket used solid fuel propulsion technology. The exhaust ports on the back-end of this thing are very similar to what we used back during the exploration of Mars.”

  “So an accidental shortcut through hyperspace is how this craft got here?” Grego asked. He looked around the cabin and tried to imagine making such a trip without a hyperdrive engine and lots of collapsium for protection.

  “It’s too early to say, Victor,” Juan replied.

  “What about those skeletons? I saw the pictures.”

  “What about them, Pancho?” Gerd escorted the mob back out of the ship to three coffin-like containers and opened the first one. “This is the most complete of the three we found so far. He stands four feet high, or would if he were still alive….”

  “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” Grego asked.

  “We can’t be completely certain, of course,” Juan Jimenez said, “But the thick brow ridge and relatively narrow pelvis are typical of male bipedal mammals. These fossils are very similar to that of the typical Fuzzy skeletal structure, with a few deviations normally associated with greater size; thicker femur in proportion to the body, more pronounced ribcage to allow for greater lung capacity and to support more muscle mass. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.”

  Captain Greibenfeld looked over the bones, then said, “Could these be the pilots?”

  And there it was: the question everybody dreaded.

  “The brain case seems a bit small for anything with higher cognitive abilities,” Pancho Ybarra offered.

  “Don’t be too sure, Pancho,” Gerd said, “Neanderthal man had a larger brain case than Cro-Magnon man, and we know who the winner was, there. Fuzzies have a smaller brain than the Yggdrasil Khooghra, and we all know which one is smarter.”

  “Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant men of the 20th Century, that’s Pre- and Post-Atomic era, had a smaller than average brain,” Jimenez added. “How the brain is arranged is more telling than the size of the organ.”

  “So these could be the pilots?” Commodore Napier went a little pale.

  “It’s much too early to say, Commodore,” Gerd said. “We’ll be burning a lot of midnight oil on this one.”

  “For my money, I think these are simply a form of giant Fuzzy, not space travelers,” Jimenez said. “The carbon-dating hasn’t even come back on these, yet, so it’s possible these bones pre-date the rocket.”

  “I hope they do. Mr. Van Riebeek, Mr. Grego, I need to speak with you privately for a moment. Lt. Commander Ybarra, please join us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The four men moved out of earshot, then Napier laid it out plain. “We need to keep a lid on this until we know what we’ve got. Mr. Grego, can I count on your discretion?”

  “Absolutely, Commodore,” Grego nodded. “Word of something like this gets out and there’s no telling what could happen. Gerd, what about you?"

  “I’m in as long as Jack doesn’t countermand me,” Gerd agreed. “Provided I still have access to the dig, artifact and fossils. I also have an investigation to run on the cause of the explosion and who was involved.”

  “You do and I’ll send all the help I can. So do you, Mr. Grego. Just both of you keep your people quiet, if you can.”

  “My people are all professionals, Commodore.” Grego smiled and added, “Besides, no scientist worth his microscope wants to release his findings until he can nail down his share of the credit.”

  “And the NPF know’s how to keep a secret,” Gerd added.

  “Excellent. I’ll call the governor and bring him aboard with this.”

  XXXI

  The Jin-f’ke were coming together. The word was out that strange, almost hairless giants had killed a Jin-f’ke female. While most of the Big Ones who did the killing had made dead, new Big Ones had come and were doing incomprehensible things at the place of the old Big Ones. Many, many tribes had already arrived and more were coming.

  Red Fur stood on top of a log and called for everybody’s attention. It took several heartbeats before the Fuzzies were able to focus on Red Fur; there had never been so many Jin-f’ke in one place before.

  “Jin-f’ke! The Koo-wen over the hill are dangerous. They use noisy made-things that made dead a shimo-kato and hurt our ears. They made dead Sun Fur. Big Ones worse than gouru, worse even than shimo-kato. Must drive away!”

  “What Big Ones look like?” shouted a voice from the crowd. “Is people like us?”

  “Not people like us!” Red Fur yelled back. “Here a Big One.” The Fuzzy pointed to the side where Climber and Stonebreaker were removing leafy branches and brush to reveal the Koo-wen, Joe Quigley. Vines bound Quigley though otherwise he was unhurt. “See? Not people like us. Big big! Very strong! Very wise! Very dangerous!”

  There was a stir among the gath
ered Fuzzies. They stared at the strange Koo-wen much like an exhibit in a zoo. They were all frightened and fascinated at the same time. Much like the object of their attention.

  Joe Quigley could only catch a few words with his hypersonic hearing aid. The aid worked fine, but his knowledge of the language was limited. For as far as he could see, there was nothing but Fuzzies. Joe remembered a documentary on Thoran culture. There was one segment where the Thorans of one tribe gathered together to prepare for war on another tribe. It looked a lot like what he was seeing now, only there were a helluva lot more Fuzzies.

  Before coming to Zarathustra, Joe had read up on Fuzzies. They were typically gregarious, friendly, and curious. Fuzzies were nomadic and tended to travel in groups of four to eight. Physically, pound for pound, a Fuzzy was three times as strong as a human, able to carry twice their weight when needed. On average a Fuzzy was two feet tall and weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds. They operated at a low Paleolithic level in the wild.

  In short, nothing like what he was seeing before him. These Fuzzies were taller, heavier, and angrier than any Fuzzy he had ever read about. Some carried atlatl for throwing short spears farther. There were the chopper-diggers as well as stone axes, stone knives and, in one case, a particularly robust Fuzzy that Joe privately named ‘Thor’ wielded a heavy stone hammer.

  Granted, against a single human with a machine gun the Fuzzies would be massacred, but in a sneak attack they could do a lot of damage. Thor could kill a man with that hammer of his, Joe thought. But no species was a match for Terran technology. Pistols, rifles, cannons, bombs…weapons of stone and wood were useless against them.

  These Fuzzies are planning on making war against the humans. They’re as good as dead already. And it’s all my fault.