Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER ONE

VICTOR GREGO FINISHED the chilled fruit juice and pushed the glass aside, then lit a cigarette and poured hot coffee into the half-filled cup that had been cooling. This was going to be another Nifflheim of a day, and the night’s sleep had barely rested him from the last one and the ones before that. He sipped the coffee, and began to feel himself rejoining the human race.

Staff conferences, all day, of course, with everybody bickering and recriminating. He hoped, not too optimistically, that this would be the end of it. By this evening all the division chiefs ought to know what had to be done. If only they wouldn’t come running back to him for decisions they ought to make themselves, or bother him with a lot of nit-picking details. Great God, wasn’t a staff supposed to handle staff work?

The trouble was that for the last fifteen years, twelve at least, all the decisions had been made in advance, and the staff work had all been routine, but that had been when Zarathustra had been a Class-III planet and the Company had owned it outright. In the Chartered Zarathustra Company, emergencies had simply not been permitted to arise. Not, that was, until old Jack Holloway had met a small person whom he had named Little Fuzzy.

Then everybody had lost their heads. He’d lost his own a few times, and done some things he now wished he hadn’t done. Most of his subordinates hadn’t recovered theirs, yet, and the Charterless Zarathustra Company was operating, if that was the word for it, in a state of total and permanent emergency.

The cup was half empty, again; he filled it to the top and lit a fresh cigarette from the old one before crushing it out. Might as well get it started. He reached to the switch and flicked on the communication screen across the breakfast table.

In a moment, Myra Fallada appeared in it. She had elaborately curled white hair, faintly yellowish, a round face, protuberant blue eyes, and a lower lip of the sort associated with the ancient Hapsburg family. She had been his secretary ever since he had come to Zarathustra, and she thought that what had happened a week ago in Judge Pendarvis’s court had been the end of the world.

“Good morning, Mr. Grego.” She was eyeing his dressing gown and counting the cigarette butts in the ashtray, trying to estimate how soon he’d be down at his desk. “An awful lot of business has come in this morning.”

“Good morning, Myra. What kind of business?”

“Well, things are getting much worse in the cattle country. The veldbeest herders are all quitting their jobs; just flying off and leaving the herds…”

“Are they flying off in company aircars? If they are, have Harry Steefer put out wants for them on stolen-vehicle charges.”

“And the City of Malverton; she’s spacing out from Darius today.” She went on to tell him about that.

“I know. That was all decided yesterday. Just tell them to carry on with it. Now, is there anything I really have to attend to personally? If there is, bundle it up and send it to the staff conference room; I’ll handle it there with the people concerned. Rubber-stamp the rest and send it back where it belongs, which is not on my desk. I won’t be in; I’m going straight to the conference room. That will be in half an hour. Tell the houseboy he can come in to clean up then, and tell the chef I won’t be eating here at all. I’ll have lunch off a tray somewhere, and dinner with Mr. Coombes in the Executive Room.”

Then he waited, mentally counting to a hundred. As he had expected, before he reached fifty Myra was getting into a flutter.

“Mr. Grego, I almost forgot!” She usually did. “Mr. Evins wants inside the gem-reserve vault; he’s down there now.”

“Yes, I told him to make inventory and appraisal today. I’d forgotten about that myself. Well, we can’t keep him waiting. I’ll go down directly.”

He blanked the screen, gulped what was left of the coffee and rose, leaving the kitchenette-breakfast room and crossing the short hall to his bedroom, taking off his dressing gown as he went. That he should not have forgotten: the problem represented by the contents of the gem reserve vault was of greater importance, though of less immediacy, than what was going on in the cattle country.

Up to a week ago, when Chief Justice Pendarvis had smashed the company’s charter with a few taps of his gavel, sunstones had been a company monopoly. It had been illegal for anybody but the company to buy sunstones, or for anybody to sell one except to a company gem buyer, but that had been company law, and the Pendarvis decisions had wiped out the company’s law-making powers. Sunstone deposits were always too scattered for profitable large-scale mining. They were found by free-lance prospectors, who sold them to the company at the company’s prices. Jack Holloway, who had started the whole trouble, had been one of the most successful of prospectors.

Now sunstones were in the open competitive market on Zarathustra, and something would have to be done about establishing a new gem-buying policy. Before he could do that, he wanted to know just how many of them the company had in reserve.

So he had to go down and open the vault, before Conrad Evins, the chief gem buyer, could get in to find out. He knew the combination. So — in case anything happened to him — did Leslie Coombes, the head of the legal division, and, against the possibility that both he and Coombes were killed or incapacitated, there was a copy of it neatly typed on a slip of paper in a special security box at the Bank of Mallorysport, which could only be gotten out by the Colonial Marshal with a court order. It was a bother, but too many people couldn’t be trusted with that combination.

The gem rooms were on the fifteenth level down; they were surrounded by the company police headquarters, and there was only one way in, through a door barred by a heavy steel portcullis. The guard who controlled this sat in a small cubicle fronted by two inches of armor glass; several other guards, with submachine guns, sat or stood behind a low counter in front of it. Harry Steefer, the chief of company police, was there, and so was Conrad Evins, the gem buyer, a small man with graying hair and a bulging brow and narrow chin. With them were two gray-smocked assistants.

“Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting,” he greeted them. “Ready, Mr. Evins?”

Evins was. Steefer nodded to the men inside the armor-glass cubicle; the portcullis rose silently. They entered a bare hallway, covered by viewscreen pickups at either end and with sleep-gas release nozzles on the ceiling. The door at the other end opened, and in the small anteroom beyond they all showed their identity cards to a guard: Evins and his two assistants, the sergeant and the two guards accompanying them, Grego, even Chief Steefer. The guard spoke into a phone; somebody completely out of sight and reach pressed a button or flipped a switch and the door beyond opened. Grego went through alone, and down a short flight of steps to another door, brightly iridescent with a plating of collapsium, like a spaceship’s hull or a nuclear reactor.

There was a keyboard, like the keyboard of a linotype machine. He went to it, punching out the letters of a short sentence, then waited ten seconds. The huge door receded slowly, then slid aside.

“All right, gentlemen,” he called out. “The vault’s open.”

Then he walked through, into a circular room beyond. In the middle of it was a round table, its top covered with black velvet, with a wide circular light-shade above it. The wall was lined by a steel cabinet with many shallow drawers. The Chief, a sergeant with a submachine gun, Evins, and his two assistants followed him in. He lit a cigarette, watching the smoke draw up around the light-shade and vanish out the ventilator above. Evins’s two assistants began getting out paraphernalia and putting things on the table; the gem buyer felt the black velvet and nodded. Grego put his hand on it, too. It was warm, almost hot.

One of the assistants brought a drawer from the cabinet and emptied it on the table — several hundred smooth, translucent pebbles. For a moment they looked like so much gravel. Then, slowly, they began to glow, until they were blazing like burning coals.

Some fifty million years ago, when Zarathustra had been almost completely covered by seas, there had been a marine life-form, not unlike a big jellyfish, and for a million or so years the seas had abounded with them, and as they died they had sunk into the ooze and been covered by sand. Ages of pressure had reduced them to hard little beans of stone, and the ooze to gray flint. Most of them were just pebbles, but by some ancient biochemical quirk, a few were intensely thermofluorescent. Worn as gems, they would glow from the body heat of the wearer, as they were glowing now on the electrically heated tabletop. They were found nowhere in the galaxy but on Zarathustra, and even a modest one was worth a small fortune.

“Just for a quick estimate, in round figures, how much money have we in this room?” he asked Evins.

Evins looked pained. He had the sort of mind which detested expressions like “quick estimate,” and “round figures.”

“Well, of course, the Terra market quotation, as of six months ago, was eleven hundred and twenty-five sols a carat, but that’s just the average price. There are premium-value stones…”

He saw one of those, and picked it up; an almost perfect sphere, an inch in diameter, deep blood-red. It lay burning in his palm; it was beautiful. He wished he owned it himself, but none of this belonged to him. It belonged to an abstraction called the Chartered — no, Charterless Zarathustra Company, which represented thousands of stockholders, including a number of other abstractions called Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines, and Interstellar Explorations, Ltd., and the Banking Cartel. He wondered how Conrad Evins felt, working with these beautiful things, knowing how much each of them was worth, and not owning any of them.

“But I can tell you how little they are worth,” Evins was saying, at the end of a lecture on the Terra gem market. “The stones in this vault are worth not one millisol less than one hundred million sols.”

That sounded like a lot of money, if you said it quickly and didn’t think. The Chartered, even the Charterless, Zarathustra Company was a lot of company, too, and all its operations were fantastically expensive. That wouldn’t be six months’ gross business for the company. They couldn’t let the sunstone business live on its reserve.

“This is new, isn’t it?” he asked, laying the red globe of light back on the heated tabletop.

“Yes, Mr. Grego. We bought that less than two months ago. Shortly before the Trial.” He captitalized the word; the day Pendarvis beat the company down with his gavel would be First Day, Year Zero, on Zarathustra from now on. “It was bought,” he added, “from Jack Holloway.”