“But there isn’t any Orzu!” he panted.
’’There is an Orzu,” I said, feeling the way a child must on Star-Festival Night, when someone says, “There isn’t a Galactic Spirit.”
I gave him a photo-copy of the report from the Journal of Galactic Exploration. He read it carefully, and rolled over onto the floor again. I quieted him down, and got him back onto his chair.
“According to this…” I began.
“I know,” he said. “I wrote that myself for the Journal. But they left out some of it. They left out the part that said the creature’s extinct!”
He sat there, tears running down his face and laughter choking him, and there wasn’t anything that I could say. Not a thing.
“I named it after myself,” he said finally. “I discovered it —discovered some skeletal remains, that is—and I’ve always wanted something like that named after me. The Bureau of Explorations has to approve it before it becomes official, but that’s a routine matter.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You’re quite a few thousand years too late to capture Orzu alive.”
“You don’t say,” I said.
“I can show you some lovely bones.”
“No, thank you. I never was very interested in bones.”
He cut short another spasm of laughter, and said thoughtfully, “You know, I wonder if this could be my fault. I wrote that letter in a hurry, and just might have neglected to mention that Orzu is extinct. I’ll have it corrected in the next issue of the Journal.”
“I wish you would,” I said. “Otherwise, some naive clerk might get sent Orzu-hunting.” Eventually Scientist Orzu recovered sufficiently to show us the specimens he’d collected. There was life on Arnicus—lots of it, in fact. But it was small, and in our search for a nine-foot-high Orzu, we’d overlooked it altogether.
He showed, us some nasty-looking reptiles, some odd insects, and an assortment of other small creatures. And a prize specimen.
“This should interest you,” he said. “This is Orzu’s ninth cousin on his stepfather’s side.” It was Orzu, all right, in the miniature. Tiny reptiles three inches long, but with all the tentacles, and the three eyes, and probably the evil disposition that old Orzu had. I tried to pick one up, and it bit me.
“I based my description of old Orzu on these,” Scientist Orzu told us. They could be direct descendents, but more likely they’re another branch of the family. We’ll probably never know, because fossil remains are hard to come by on this planet. Cute little fellows, aren’t they?”
They looked repulsive to me, but I had an inspiration. “Let’s call these things Orzu,” I said, “and ship a couple off to the Galaxia Zoological Gardens.” I wanted to salvage some measure of success from my three weeks in the Anicus jungle.
“Oh, no!” Scientist Orzu bellowed, rearing back indignantly. “I want my name on the big fellow. You wouldn’t understand, of course, but it’s a life-long ambition with me to have a giant fossil named after me. This may be my last chance. You have to discover one of those things to have the privilege of naming it, and Space knows when I’ll get away on another field trip.”
He ducked into a tent, and came out with an armful of bones. “Look at him!” he purred.
I know a fanatic when I see one, and I didn’t press the point. “Then how about Morzu?” I said.
He beamed at me. “I have a better idea. Let’s name it after you!”
“No, thank you,” I said, when I had my shuddering under control.
“Well, Morzu sounds good.” He chuckled. “I guess it will see more zoo than Orzu, at that!”
I wasn’t carrying a blaster, and probably it was just as well for Orzu that I wasn’t.
The scientist had already solved the problem of atmosphere and diet for his specimens, so we sent the ship a mission accomplished message, and started packing. Everyone was happy except Jan Garish, who went around mumbling because he wouldn’t be able to set foot on the southern continent. We ferried our own equipment, and Orzu’s, up to the cruiser, along with two extra pairs of Morzus for the zoo, and in the words of the Captain we got the hell out of there.
* * *
When we reached Base, I left the space port on the run to look for my little redhead. She’d moved, and when I located her new address her husband came to the door. She’d married her man from the Supply Department, and he gave me a brief description of what would happen to me if I tried to bother her, and slammed the door in my face.
At that point I was boiling hotter than the ocean on Arnicus. I tore back to the space port and got the Morzus shipped to Galaxia by slow freighter, hoping they’d die before they got there. I spent two hours composing a message for the Director of the Zoological Gardens. I told him that Orzu was rare and almost never seen alive, but I was shipping him not one pair, but two, of practically the same thing—a first cousin we were calling Morzu. I added some details about diet and atmosphere that Scientist Orzu had supplied, and a few precautions on the care of Morzus that I made up on the spot. I also told him that the creatures were extremely active, and he would have to provide an unusually large amount of space per animal if they were to thrive. I sent the message off, and hoped for the worst.
I was still steaming mad the next morning, when Scientist Orzu called at my office. Why not? I’d lost my girl, and spent three weeks in that jungle hell, and all for nothing.
It was nearly a year later that I learned the fate of the Director of the Galaxia Zoological Gardens. As I’d hoped, he assumed that Morzus were roughly the same site as Orzus, and he worked day and night to have a sealed cage ready for them when they arrived. It was an enormous cage, some thirty feet high and covering four acres, with a transparent ceiling so that the visitors could walk around on top and look down on the giant reptiles. Of course he invested a lot of money in expensive heating and atmospheric equipment, the total bill running into the hundreds of thousands of credits.
Along with the Morzus we’d sent him specimens of Arnicus soil and jungle vegetation, and when he’d gotten a roaring jungle going in his cage, someone turned the Morzus loose there, maybe thinking they would grow up to the size of old Orzu. Those microscopic reptiles disappeared into that four-acre jungle, and the last I heard the zoo personnel were still looking for them. The Director was fired for squandering the tax payers’ money.
I expected a reprimand, and it wasn’t long in coming. Two weeks after I saw the news release about the director, I was knocked from Grade 1 down to Grade 10, fined two years of seniority, and confined to Base for eighteen months.
It was all done without a hearing, as I said, but I knew I deserved it, I didn’t even file an appeal. I considered it worth it, at that price, and when I think of the zoo personnel beating through that Arnicus jungle looking for Morzus, I still get laughing fits.
Then the trial brief arrived, and you could have warped me twice around a comet. It wasn’t the Galaxia Zoo that filed the complaint—it was Scientist Orzu! A balder concoction of lies I have never seen. My party, he said, kept him starving in the jungle for two weeks without bothering to rescue him. We caused irreparable damage to valuable scientific specimens by forcing him to pack his belongings with undue and unnecessary haste. We appropriated to our own use four valuable specimens as the price of getting him off Arnicus at all. We made no effort to salvage his thoroughly smashed space yacht, which was government property. And so it went, through four and a half pages.
My screams of protest could have been heard as far away as Sirius, but it was too late for counteraction. Why, I asked myself. Why? What did I ever do to him, except save his life?
But it proved to be very simple. Orzu had suffered a crushing defeat. He had to take it out on someone, and I’d insulted him. It turned out that another scientist had done some browsing on Arnicus fifty years before, and he found skeletal remains of the same reptile that Orzu wanted to name Orzu. He also had the same idea about getting the big fellow named after himself, and he got his cl
aim in first, by forty-nine years and six months.
So I got demoted and fined for something I didn’t do, and still maintain that I’m innocent. It certainly isn’t my fault that the official name for Orzu’s pet fossil is Smith.
THE END
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Document creation date: 10.09.2011
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The Orzu Problem Page 2