Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER NINETEEN

GERD VAN RIEBEEK crouched at the edge of the low cliff, slowly twisting the selector-knob of a small screen in front of him. The view changed; this time he was looking through the eye of a pickup fifty feet below and five hundred yards to the left. Nothing in it moved except a wind-stirred branch that jiggled a spray of ragged leaves in the foreground. The only thing from the sound-outlet was a soft drone of insects, and the tweet-twonk, tweet-twonk of a presumably love-hungry banjo-bird. Then something just out of sight scuffled softly among the dead leaves. He turned up the sound-volume slightly.

“What do you think it is?”

Jack Holloway, beside him, rose to one knee, raising his binoculars.

“I can’t see anything. Try the next one.”

Gerd twisted the knob again. This pickup was closer the ground; it showed a vista of woods lit by shafts of sunlight falling between trees. Now he could hear rustling and scampering, and with ultrasonic earphone, Fuzzy voices:

“This way. Not far. Find hatta-zosa.”

Jack was looking down at the open slope below the cliff.

“If that’s what they call goofers, I see six of them from here,” he said. “Probably a dozen more I can’t see.” He watched, listening. “Here they come, now.”

The Fuzzies had stopped talking and were making very little noise; then they came into view; eight of them, in single file. The weapons they carried were longer and heavier than the prawn killers of the southern Fuzzies, knobbed instead of paddle-shaped, and sharp-pointed on the other end. All of them had picked up stones which they carried in their free hands. They all stopped, then three of them backed away into the brush again. The other five spread out in a skirmish line and waited. He shut off the screen and crawled over beside Jack to peep over the edge of the cliff.

There were seven goofers, now; rodent-looking things with dark gray fur, a foot and a half long and six inches high at the shoulder, all industriously tearing off bark and digging at the roots of young trees. No wonder the woods were so thin, around here; if there were any number of them it was a wonder there were any trees at all. He picked up a camera and aimed it, getting some shots of them.

“Something else figuring on getting some lunch here,” Jack said, sweeping the sky with his glasses. “Harpy, a couple of miles off. Ah, another one. We’ll stick around a while; we may have to help our friends out.”

The five Fuzzies at the edge of the brush stood waiting. The goofers hadn’t heard them, and were still tearing and chewing at the bark and digging at the roots. Then, having circled around, the other three burst out suddenly, hurling their stones and running forward with their clubs. One stone hit a goofer and knocked it down; instantly, one of the Fuzzies ran forward and brained it with his club. The other two rushed a second goofer, felling and dispatching it with their clubs. The other fleds, into the skirmish line on the other side. Two were hit with stones, and finished off on the ground. The others got away. The eight Fuzzies gathered in a clump, seemed to debate pursuit for a moment, and then abandoned the idea. They had four goofers, a half-goofer apiece. That was a good meal for them.

They dragged their game together and began tearing the carcasses apart, using teeth and fingers, helping one another dismember them, tearing off skin and pulling meat loose, using stones to break bones. Gerd kept his camera going, filming the feast.

“Our gang’s got better table manners,” he commented.

“Our gang have the knives we make for them. Beside, our gang mostly eats zatku, and they break off the manibles and make little lobster-picks out of them. They’re ahead of our gang in one way, though. The Fuzzies south of the Divide don’t hunt cooperatively,” Jack said.

The two dots in the sky were larger and closer; a third had appeared.

“We better do something about that,” he advised, reaching for his rifle.

“Yes.” Jack put down the binoculars and secured his own rifle, checking it. “Let them eat as long as they can; they’ll get a big surprise in a minute or so.”

The Fuzzies seemed to be aware of the presence of the harpies. Maybe there were ultrasonic wing-vibration sounds they could hear; he couldn’t be sure, even with the hearing aid. There was so much ultrasonic noise in the woods, and he hadn’t learned, yet, to distinguish. The Fuzzies were eating more rapidly. Finally, one pointed and cried, “Gotza bizzo!” Gotza was another native zoological name he had learned, though the Fuzzies at Holloway’s Camp mostly said, “Hah’py,” now. The diners grabbed their weapons and what meat they could carry and dashed into the woods. One of the big pterodactyl-things was almost overhead, another was within a few hundred yards, and the third was coming in behind him. Jack sat up, put his left arm through his rifle-sling, cuddled the butt to his cheek and propped his elbows on his knees. The nearest harpy must have caught a movement in the brush below; it banked and started to dive. Jack’s 9.7 magnum bellowed. The harpy made a graceless flop-over in the air and dropped. The one behind banked quickly and tried to gain altitude; Gerd shot it. Jack’s rifle thundered again, and the third harpy thrashed leathery wings and dropped.

From below, there was silence, and then a clamor of Fuzzy voices:

“Harpies dead; what make do?”

“Thunder; maybe kill harpies! Maybe kill us next!”

“Bad place, this! Bizzo, fazzu!”

Roughly, fazzu meant, “Scram.”

Jack was laughing. “Little Fuzzy took it a lot calmer the first time he saw me shoot a harpy,” he said. “By that time, though, he’d seen so much he wasn’t surprised at anything.” He replaced the two fired rounds in the magazine of his rifle. “Well, bizzo, fazzu; we won’t get any more movies around here.”

They went around with the car, collecting the pickups they had planted, then lifted out, turning south toward the horizon-line of the Divide, the mountain range that stretched like the cross-stroke of an H between the West Coast Range and the Eastern Cordilleras. Evidently the Fuzzies never crossed it much; the language of the northern Fuzzies, while comprehensible, differed distinguishably from that spoken by the ones who had come in to the camp. Apparently the news of the bumper crop of zatku hadn’t gotten up here at all.

They talked about that, cruising south at five thousand feet, with the foothills of the Divide sliding away under them and the line of sheer mountains drawing closer. They’d have to establish a permanent camp up here; contact these Fuzzies and make friends with them, give them tools and weapons, learn about them.

That was, if the Native Commission budget would permit. They talked about that, too.

Then they argued about whether to stay up here for another few days, or start back to the camp.

“I think we’d better go back,” Jack said, somewhat regretfully. “We’ve been away for a week. I want to see what’s going on, now.”

“They’d screen us if anything was wrong.”

“I know. I still think we’d better go back. Let’s cross the Divide and camp somewhere on the other side, and go on in tomorrow morning.”

“Hokay; bizzo.” He swung the aircar left a trifle. “We’ll follow that river to the source and cross over there.”

The river came down through a wide valley, narrowing and growing more rapid as they ascended it. Finally, they came to where it emerged, a white mountain torrent, from the mouth of a canyon that cut into the main range of the Divide. He took the car down to within a few hundred feet and cut speed, entering the canyon. At first, it was wide, with a sandy beach on either side of the stream and trees back to the mountain face and up the steep talus at the foot of it. Granite at the bottom, and then weathered sandstone, and then, for a couple of hundred feet, gray, almost unweathered flint.

“Gerd,” Jack said, at length, “take her up a little, and get a little closer to the side of the canyon.” He shifted in his seat, and got his binoculars. “I want a close look at that.”

He wondered why, briefly. Then it struck him.

“You think that’s what I think it is?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sunstone-flint.” Jack didn’t seem particularly happy about it. “See that little bench, about halfway up? Set her down there. I’m going to take a look at that.”

The bench, little more than a wide ledge, was covered with thin soil; a few small trees and sparse brush grew on it. A sheer face of gray flint rose for a hundred feet above it. They had no blasting explosives, but there was a microray scanner and a small vibrohammer in the toolkit. They set the aircar down and went to work, cracking and scanning flint, and after two hours they had a couple of sunstones. They were nothing spectacular — an irregular globe seven or eight millimeters in diameter and a small elipsoid not quite twice as big. However, when Jack held them against the hot bowl of his pipe, they began to glow.

“What are they worth, Jack?”

“I don’t know. Some of these freelance gem-buyers would probably give as much as six or eight hundred for the big one. When the Company still had the monopoly, they’d have paid about four-fifty. Be worth twenty-five hundred on Terra. But look around. This layer’s three hundred feet thick; it runs all the way up the canyon, and probably for ten or fifteen miles along the mountain on either side.” He knocked out his pipe, blew through the stem, and pocketed it. “And it all belongs to the Fuzzies.”

He started to laugh at that, and then remembered. This was, by executive decree, the Fuzzy Reservation. The Fuzzies owned it and everything on it, and the Government and the Native Commission were only trustees. Then he began laughing again.

“But, Jack! The Fuzzies can’t mine sunstones, and they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they could.”

“No. But this is their country. They were born here, and they have a right to live here, and beside that, we gave it to them, didn’t we? It belongs to them, sunstones and all.”

“But Jack…” He looked up and down the canyon at the gray flint on either side; as Jack said, it would extend for miles back into the mountain on either side. Even allowing one sunstone to ten cubic feet of flint, and even allowing for the enormous labor of digging them out… “You mean, just let a few Fuzzies scamper around over it and chase goofers, and not do anything with it?” The idea horrified him. “Why, they don’t even know this is the Fuzzy Reservation.”

“They know it’s their home. Gerd, this has happened on other Class-IV planets we’ve moved in on. We give the natives a reservation; we tell them it’ll be theirs forever, Terran’s word of honor. Then we find something valuable on it — gold on Loki, platinum on Thor, vanadium and wolfram on Hathor, nitrates on Yggdrasil, uranium on Gimli. So the natives get shoved off onto another reservation, where there isn’t anything anybody wants, and finally they just get shoved off, period. We aren’t going to do that here, to the Fuzzies.”

“What are you going to do? Try to keep it a secret?” he asked. “If that’s what you want, we’ll just throw those two sunstones in the river and forget about it,” he agreed. “But how long do you think it’ll be before somebody else finds out about it?”

“We can keep other people out of here. That’s what the Fuzzy Reservation’s for, isn’t it?”

“We need people to keep people out; Paine’s Marines, George Lunt’s Protection Force. I think we can trust George. I wouldn’t know about Paine. Anybody below them I wouldn’t trust at all. Sooner or later somebody’ll fly up this canyon and see this, and their it’ll be out. And you know what’ll happen then.” He thought for a moment. “Are you going to tell Ben Rainsford?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Gerd.” Jack fumbled his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket. “I suppose I’ll have to. Have to give him these stones; they’re Government property. Well, bizzo; we’ll go straight to camp.” He looked up at the sun. “Make it in about three hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to Mallorysport.”

“I’M AFRAID To believe it, Dr. Jimenez,” Ernst Mallin said. “It would be so wonderful if it were true. Can you be certain?”

“We’re all certain, now, that this hormone, NFM _p , is what prevents normal embryonic development,” Juan Jimenez, in the screen, replied. “We’re certain, now, that hokfusine combines destructively with NFM _p ; even Chris Hoenveld, he’s seen it happen in a test tube, and he has to believe it whether he wants to or not. It appears that hokfusine also has an inhibitory effect on the glands secreting NFM _p . But to be certain, we’ll have to wait four more months, until the infants conceived after the mothers began eating Extee-Three are born. Ideally, we should wait until the females we have begun giving daily doses of pure hokfusine conceive and bear children. But if I’m not certain now, I’m confident.”

“What put your people onto this, Dr. Jimenez?”

“A hunch,” the younger man smiled. “A hunch by the girl in Dr. Hoenveld’s lab, Charlotte Tresca.” The smile became an audible laugh. “Hoenveld is simply furious about it. No sound theoretical basis, just a lot of unsupported surmises. You know how he talks. He did have to grant her results; they’ve been duplicated. But he rejects her whole line of reasoning.”

He would; Jan Christiaan Hoenveld’s mind plodded obstinately along, step by step, from A to B to C to D; it wasn’t fair for somebody suddenly to leap to W or X and run from there to Z. For his own part, Ernst Mallin respected hunches; he knew how much mental activity went on below the level of consciousness and with what seemingly irrationality fragments of it rose to the conscious mind. His only regret was that he had so few good hunches, himself.

“Well, what was her reasoning?” he asked. “Or was it pure intuition?”

“Well, she just got the idea that hokfusine would neutralize the NFM _p hormone, and worked from there,” Jimenez said. “As she rationalizes it, all Fuzzies have a craving for land-prawn meat, without exception. This is a racial constant with them. Right?”

“Yes, as far as we can tell. I hate to use the word loosely, but I’d say, instinctual.”

“And all Fuzzies, for which read, all studied individuals, have a craving for Extee-Three. Once they taste the stuff, they eat it at every opportunity. This isn’t a learned taste, like our taste for, say, coffee or tobacco or alcohol; every human has to learn to like all three. The Fuzzy’s response to Extee-Three is immediate and automatic. Still with it, Doctor?”

“Oh, yes; I’ve seen quite a few Fuzzies taking their first taste of Extee-Three. It’s just what you call it; a physical response.” He gave that a moment’s thought, adding: “If it’s an instinct, it’s the result of natural selection.”

“Yes. She reasoned that a taste for the titanium-molecule compound present both in land-prawns and Extee-Three contributed to racial survival; that Fuzzies lacking it died out, and Fuzzies having it to a pronounced degree survived and transmitted it. So she went to work over Hoenveld’s vehement objections that she was wasting her time — and showed the effect of hokfusine on the NFM _p hormone. Now, the physiologists who had that theory about cyclic production of NFM _p getting out of phase with the menstrual cycle and permitting an occasional viable birth are finding that the NFM _p fluctuations aren’t cyclic at all but related to hokfusine consumption.”

“Well, you have a fine circumstantial case there. Everything seems to fit together with everything else. As you say, you’ll have to wait about a year before you can really prove a one-to-one relationship between hokfusine and viable births, but if I were inclined to gamble I’d risk a small wager on it.”

Jimenez grinned. “I have, already, with Dr. Hoenveld. I think it’s money in the bank now.”

BENNETT RAINSFORD WARMED the two sunstones between his palms, then rolled them, like a pair of dice, on the desk in front of him. He had been so happy, ever since Victor Grego had called him to tell him what had been discovered at Science Center about the hokfusine and the NFM _p hormone. They were on the right track, he was sure of it, and in a few years all the Fuzzy children would be born alive and normal.

And then, just after lunch, Jack Holloway had come dropping out of the sky from Beta Continent with this.

“You can’t keep it a secret, Jack. You can’t keep any discovery a secret, because anything anybody discovers, somebody else can, and will, discover later. Look how the power interests tried to suppress the discovery of direct conversion of nuclear energy to electric current, back in the First Century. Look how they tried to suppress the Abbot Drive.”

“This is different,” Jack Holloway argued, bullheadedly. “This isn’t a scientific principle anybody, anywhere, can discover. This is something at a certain place, and if we can keep people away from it…”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Then, realizing that Latin was terra incognita to Jack, he translated: “Who’ll watch the watchmen?”

Jack nodded. “That’s what Gerd said. A thing like that would be an awful strain on anybody’s moral fiber. And you know what’ll happen as soon as it gets out.

“There’d be pressure on me to open the Fuzzy Reservation. Hugo Ingermann’s John Doe and Richard Roe and all. I suppose I could stall it off till a legislature was elected, but after that…”

“I wasn’t talking about political pressure. I was talking about a sunstone rush. There’d be twenty thousand men stampeding up there, with everything they could put onto contragravity. And everything they could find to shoot with, too. And the longer it’s stalled off, the worse it’ll be, because in six months the off-planet immigrants’ll start coming in.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He should have; he’d been on other frontier planets where rich deposits of mineral wealth had been discovered. And there was nothing in the Galaxy that concentrated more value in less bulk than sunstones.

“Ben, I’ve been thinking,” Jack continued. “I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only idea I have. Those sunstones are in a little section about fifty miles square on the north side of the Divide. Suppose the Government makes that a sort of reservation-inside-the-reservation, and operates the sunstone mines. You do it before anything leaks out — announce that the Government has discovered sunstones on the Fuzzy Reservation, that the Government claims all the sunstones on Fuzzy land in the name of the Fuzzies, and that the Government is operating all sunstone mines, and it’ll head off the rush, or the worst of it. And the Fuzzies’ll get out of that immediate area; they won’t stay around where there’s underground blasting. And the money the Government gets out of it can go to the Fuzzies in protection and welfare and medical aid and shoppo-diggo and shodda-bag and Estee-fee.”

“Have you any idea what it would cost to start an operation like that, before we could even begin getting out sunstones in paying quantities?”

“Yes. I’ve been digging sunstones as long as anybody knew there were sunstones. But this is a good thing, Ben, and if you have a good thing you can always finance it.”

“It would protect the Fuzzies’ rights, and they’d benefit enormously. But the initial expense…”

“Well, lease the mineral rights to somebody who could finance it. The Government would get a royalty, the Fuzzies would benefit, the Reservation would be kept intact.”

“But who? Who would be able to lease it?”

He knew, even as he asked the question. The Charterless Zarathustra Company; they could operate that mine. Why, that mine would be something on the odd-jobs level, compared to what they’d done on the Big Blackwater Swamp. Lease them the entire mineral rights for the Reservation; that would keep everybody else out.

But it would put the Company back where they’d been before the Pendarvis Decisions; it would give them back their sunstone monopoly; it would… Why, it was unthinkable!

Unthinkable, hell. He was thinking about it now, wasn’t he?

VICTOR GREGO CRUSHED out his cigarette and leaned back in his relaxer-chair, closing his eyes. From the Fuzzy-room, he could hear muted voices, and the frequent popping of shots. Diamond was enjoying a screen-play. He was very good about keeping the volume turned down, so as not to bother Pappy Vic, but he’d get some weird ideas about life among the Hagga from some of those shows. Well, the good Hagga always licked the bad Hagga in the end, that was one thing.

He went back to thinking about bad Hagga, four of them in particular. Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan, Raul Laporte, Leo Thaxter.

Mallorysport was full of bad Hagga, on the lower echelons, but those four were the General Staff. Bowlby was the entertainment business. Beside the telecast show which Diamond was watching at the moment, that included prize-fights, nightclubs, prostitution and, without doubt, dope. Maybe he’d like to get Fuzzies as attractions at his night-spots, and through that part of his business he could make contacts with well to do people who wanted Fuzzies, couldn’t adopt them, and would pay fancy prices for them. If there really were a black market, he’d be in it.

Spike Hennan was gambling; crap-games, numbers racket, bookmaking. On sport-betting, his lines and Bowlby’s would cross with mutual profit. Laporte was racketeering, extortion, plain old-fashioned country-style crime. And stolen goods, of course, and, while there’d been money in it, illicit gem-buying.

Leo Thaxter was the biggest, and the most respectably fronted, of the four. L. Thaxter, Loan Broker Private Financier. He loaned money publicly at a righteously legal seven percent; he also loaned, at much higher rates, to all the shylocks in town, who, in turn, loaned it at six-for-five to people who could not borrow elsewhere, including suckers who went broke in Spike Hennan’s crap-games, and he used Raul Laporte’s hoodlums to do his collecting.

And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo Ingermann, Mallorysport’s unconvicted underworld generalissimo.

Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie Coombes’s investigators had established that all four of them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy owners behind whom Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had unwisely sold eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it was pretty well established that those four had been the John Doe, Richard Roe, et alii, who had been represented in court by Ingermann just after the Pendarvis Decisions.

Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the melodrama was evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another cigarette, and began going over what he knew about Ingermann’s four chief henchmen. Thaxter; he’d come to Zarathustra a few years before Ingermann. Small-time racketeer, at first, and then he’d tried to organize labor unions, but labor unions organized by outsiders had been frowned upon by the company, and he’d been shown the wisdom of stopping that. Then he’d organized an independent planters’ marketing cooperative, and from that he’d gotten into shylocking. There’d been some woman with him, at first, wife or reasonable facsimile. Maybe she was still around; have Coombes look into that. She might be willing to talk.

Diamond strolled in from the Fuzzy-room.

“Pappy Vic! Make talk with Diamond, plis. “

LIEUTENANT FITZ MORTLAKE, acting-in-charge of company detective bureau for the 1800-2400 shift, yawned. Twenty more minutes; less than that if Bert Eggers got in early to relieve him. He riffled through the stack of complaint sheet copies on the desk and put a paperweight on them. In the squadroom outside the mechanical noises of card-machines and teleprinters and the occasional howl of a sixty-speed audiovisual transmission were being replaced by human sounds, voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs, as the midnight-to-six shift began filtering in. He was wondering whether to go home and read till he became sleepy, or drift around the bars to see if he could pick up a girl, when Bert Eggers pushed past a couple of sergeants at the door and entered.

“Hi, Fitz; how’s it going?”

“Oh, quiet. We found out where Jayser hid that stuff; we have all of it, now. And Millman and Nogahara caught those kids who were stealing engine parts out of Warehouse Ten. We have them in detention; we haven’t questioned them yet.”

“We’ll take care of that. They work for the Company?”

“Two of them do. The third is just a kid, seventeen. Juvenile Court can have him. We think they were selling the stuff to Honest Hymie.”

“Uhuh. I’ll suspect anybody they all call Honest Anybody or anything,” Eggers said, sitting down as he vacated the chair.

He took off his coat, pulled his shoulder holster and pistol from the bottom drawer and put it on, resuming the coat. He gathered up his lighter and tobacco pouch, and then discovered that his pipe was missing, and hunted the desk-top for it, unearthing it from under some teleprinted photographs.

“What are these?” Eggers asked, looking at them.

“Herckerd and Novaes, false alarm number ’steen thousand. A couple of woods-tramps who turned up on Epsilon.”

Eggers made a sour face. “Those damn Fuzzies have made more work for us,” he began. “And now, my kids are after me to get them one. So’s my wife. You know what? Fuzzies are a status-symbol, now. If you don’t have a Fuzzy, you might as well move to Junktown with the rest of the bums.”

“I don’t have a Fuzzy, and I haven’t moved to Junktown yet.”

“You don’t have kids in high school.”

“No, thank God!”

“Bet he doesn’t have finance-company trouble, either,” one of the sergeants in the doorway said.

Bert was going to make some retort to that. Before he could, another voice spoke up:

“Yeeek! “

“Speak of the devil,” somebody said.

“You have that Fuzzy in here, Fitz?” Eggers demanded. “Where the hell… ?”

“There he is,” one of the men in the doorway said, pointing.

The Fuzzy, who had been behind the desk-chair, came out into view. He pulled the bottom of Eggers’s coat, yeeking again. He looked like a hunchback Fuzzy.

“What’s he got on his back?” Eggers reached down. “Whatta you got there, anyhow?”

It was a little rucksack, with leather shoulder-straps and a drawstring top. As soon as Eggers displayed an interest in it, the Fuzzy climbed out of it as though glad to be rid of it. Mortlake picked it up and put it on the desk; over ten pounds, must weigh almost as much as the Fuzzy. Eggers opened the drawstrings and put his hand into it.

“It’s full of gravel,” he said, and brought out a handful.

The gravel was glowing faintly. Eggers let go of it as though it were as hot as it looked.

“Holy God!” It was the first time he ever heard anybody screaming in baritone. “The damn things are sunstones!”