Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men, policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort. Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system; sewage disposal.

And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes, named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes were seeking to neutralize.

He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty, patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would close in on them.

In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and his three friends.

Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.

“Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure so far, though.”

“Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”

“I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept that.”

“We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”

“I hope we can till we catch these people.”

“Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”

“No. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show you.”

Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens. When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow chinned face looked out of it.

“This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking. Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen flickered, and the recording began again.

“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and we don’t want to alarm them.”

“No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here. That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them. And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”

Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting. Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having met her. He’d heard something or other about her… He shoved that aside.

“Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.

“Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we don’t want to scare them, do we?”

“No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten them.”

He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen, Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table, listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.

For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.

Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:

“We got them both! We’re bringing them up.”

Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd was talking about his educational background and former job experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.

“Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes. They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we have here all say so.”

“They’re still in here,” Steefer said. “That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder…”

“I think I know who they are, Chief.”

It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.

When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker Private Financier, first came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief company gem-buyer.

“What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra. “When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize him.”

Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to fit, though.”

“Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose Thaxter.”

“Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together, too.”

For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece; the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.

Of course it hung together. Somebody in the gang had to have exact knowledge of the layout of the gem-vault, which Evins, and very few others, could provide. The arrangement of the ventilation-ducts wasn’t classified top-secret; anybody in Evins’s position could have gotten that. They had to have a place to keep the Fuzzies, big enough to build a replica of the gem vault and of the ventilation system. Well, there were all those vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody called Mortgageville. The ones Hugo Ingermann had been acquiring title to, with Thaxter as dummy buyer. How Herckerd and Novaes had been roped in wasn’t immediately important; catch them and question them and that would emerge. Ten to one, Rose Thaxter, Mrs. Conrad Evins, was the connecting link and mainspring.

The Fuzzies in Steefer’s office were having a reunion. Khadra and Mallin and Sandra were trying to get them to look at the communication screen. He turned to Steefer.

“Get some men to Conrad Evins’s place; make a thorough search, for anything that might look like evidence of anything.”

“They won’t be there.”

“No. They’ll be in one of those buildings over in Mortgageville, and we don’t know which one. I’m going to call Ian Ferguson.”

He told Ferguson quickly what he suspected. The Constabulary commandant nodded.

“Reasonable,” he agreed. “I’ll call the city police for help; we’ll close the place off so nobody can get in or out and then we’ll start making a search. It’s only about two thousand square miles, and there are only about three hundred buildings on it,” he added. “I think I’ll call Casagra, too, and see how many Marines he can give me.”

“Well, take your time searching; just make sure anybody who’s there now stays there. We’ll give you what help we can as soon as we can.”

He looked up at the screen from Steefer’s office. Khadra had called Evins’s home, now, and he could hear Evins’s recorded voice stating that he wouldn’t be home before midnight. The Fuzzies evidently recognized him. It was also evident that they didn’t like him.

“And put out a general alert to pick up Evins, Mrs. Evins, and Leo Thaxter, and I don’t think you need to worry about how much noise you make doing it.”

“And Ivan Bowlby, and Raul Laporte, and Spike Heenan,” Ferguson added. “And any or all of their hoods.” He thought for a moment. “And Hugo Ingermann. We may finally have grounds for interrogating him as a suspect. I’ll call Gus Brannhard, too.”

“And Leslie Coombes; he’ll be a help.”

“All right, everybody!” Steefer was calling out with his loudspeaker. “We have all the Fuzzies out; now let’s get the show started!” Then he rose and went around the desk.

Khadra was on the communication screen from the Chief’s desk:

“They made that fellow Evins, all right. He was one of the gang. Who is he?”

“Well, he used to be the Company’s chief gem-buyer, up to fifteen minutes ago, but now he has been discharged, without notice, severance pay or recommendation.” He thought for a moment. “Captain, are those Fuzzies’ feet dirty?” he asked.

“Huh?” Khadra stared at him for an instant, then nodded. “Yes, they are; gray-brown dust. Same kind of dust on their fur.”

“Uhuh; that’s good.” He rose and went to the big table and the solidigraph, where Steefer was already talking to a dozen or so men. He saw Niles Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, and pulled him aside.

“Niles, the insides of those ducts are dusty?” he asked.

“The ones that carry stale air to the reconditioners,” Guerrin replied. “Dust from the air in the rooms…”

“They’re the ones we’re interested in. Now, these snoopers, robo-inspectors; could they pick up tracks the Fuzzies make, or traces where they’ve brushed against the sides of the ducts?”

“Yes, sure. They have a full optical reception and transmission system for visible light and infra-red light, and controllable magnifying vision…”

“How soon can you get them started, from the gem-vault and from the captain’s office in detective headquarters?”

“Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for them in here; did that right at the start.”

“Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”

PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it. Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at it last.

“Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been an hour since the last two went in.”

“Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.

“Well, it’s been over an hour since the other three went in. Something’s gone wrong; we’ll wait here till hell freezes over…”

“We’ll wait here a little longer, Phil. We still have fifty million in sunstones to wait for, and we want to get those Fuzzies and shut them up for good.”

“We have better than fifty million already. All we’ll get’ll be a hole in the head if we stay around here any longer. I know what’s happened, those Fuzzies have gone out some other way; they’re running around loose, packing sunstones…”

“Be quiet, Phil.” Herckerd reached to his shirt pocket to turn on his hearing aid and put his head to the ventilation duct opening. “I hear something in there.” He snapped off the hearing aid, listened, and snapped it on again. “It’s ultrasonic, whatever it is. Probably vibration in the walls of the duct. Now just take it easy, Phil. Nobody knows there’s anything happening at all. Grego’s the only man in Company House that can open that vault, and he won’t open it for a couple of weeks, at least. All the stones from Evins’s office were put away yesterday. It’ll take that long before anybody knows they’re gone.”

“Suppose those Fuzzies got out somewhere else. My God, they could have come out right in the police area.” That could have happened; he wished he hadn’t thought of it, but now that he had, he was sure that was what had happened. “If they did, everybody in the building’s looking for us.”

Herckerd wasn’t listening to him. He’d turned off his hearing aid, and was squatting by the intake port, peeling the wrapper from a chewing-gum stick and putting the wrapper carefully in his pocket. Another piece of foolishness; no reason at all why they couldn’t smoke here. He listened with his hearing aid again. The noise, whatever it was, was louder.

“There’s something in there.” He pulled the goggles down from his cap and took out his infrared flashlight.

“Don’t do that,” Herckerd said sharply.

He disregarded the warning and turned the invisible light into the duct. There was something moving forward toward the opening; it wasn’t a Fuzzy. It was a bulbous-nosed metallic thing, floating slowly toward him.

“It’s a snooper! Look, Herk; somebody’s wise to us. They have a snooper in the duct…”

“Get the stones in the box! Right away!” Herckerd ordered.

“Ah, so there was something went wrong!”

He snapped the suitcase shut, shoved it into the box on the contragravity lifter, and fastened the lid, then snapped the hook of his safety-belt onto one of the rings on the lifter. There was a crash behind him, and when he turned, Herckerd was holstering his pistol. Then he, too, snapped his safety-strap to the lifter, and pulled loose the two poles with hooked and spiked tips, passing one over and slipping the thong of the other over his wrist.

“Full lift,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He fumbled for a second or so at the switch, then turned it on. The whole thing, lifter, box, and he and Herckerd, were pulled up from the ledge and swung out into the shaft.

“What did you have to shoot for?” he demanded, pushing with his boathook-like pole. “Everybody in the place heard you.”

“You want that thing following us?” Herckerd asked. “Watch out; watermain right above!”

Maybe the snooper was just making a routine inspection; maybe Herckerd had finally panicked, after all his pretense of calmness. No. Something had gone wrong. Those damned Fuzzies had gone out the wrong way, somebody’d found them… There were more pipes and conduits and things in the way; he remembered the trouble they’d had getting past them on the way down. He and Herckerd had to push and pull with their poles and for a moment he thought they were inextricably stuck, they’d never get loose, they were wedged in here… Then the lifter was rising again, and he could see the network of obstructions receding below, and the white XV’s on the sides of the shaft had become XIV’s, so they were off the fifteenth level. Only five more levels and a couple of floors to go.

But he could hear voices, from loudspeakers, all around:

“Cars P-18, P-19, P-20; fourteenth level, fourth floor, location DA-231.”

“Riot-car 12, up to thirteen, sixth floor…”

He swore at Herckerd. “Sure, it’ll be a month before they find out what’s happened!”

“Shut up. We get out of the shaft two floors up, to the left. They have the shaft plugged at the top.”

“Yes, and walk right into them,” he argued.

“We’ll lift into them if we keep on here; we’ll have a chance if we get out of this.”

They worked the lifter around the central clump of water and sewer and ventilation mains, pushing away from it and then hooking onto handholds and drawing the lifter into a lateral passage, floating along it for a hundred feet before Herckerd could get at the lifter controls and set it down. Then he unsnapped his safety-strap and staggered for a moment before he found his footing.

It was a service-passage, wide enough for one of the little hall-cars, or for a jeep; maintenance workers used it to get at air-fans and water-pumps. They started along it, towing the lifter after them, looking to right and left for some means of egress. There should be other vertical shafts, but they would be covered, too.

“How are we going to get out of this?”

“How the hell do I know?” Herckerd retorted. “How do I know we’re going to get out at all?” He stopped for a moment and then pointed to an open doorway on the left. “Stairway; we’ll go up there.”

They crossed to it. From somewhere down the bare, dimly-lighted passage, an amplified voice was shouting indistinguishable words. The passage connected with another, or a hallway. They couldn’t go ahead; that was sure.

“We can’t get the lifter through.” He knew it, and still tried; the lifter wouldn’t go through the narrow door. “We’ll have to carry the suitcase.”

“Get the box off the lifter,” Herckerd said. “We can’t carry that suitcase ourselves; they’d catch us in no time. Get the suitcase out of it.”

The box, four feet by four by three, with airholes at the top, had been necessary when they had the Fuzzies to carry; they didn’t have to bother with them now. He opened it and lifted out the suitcase. No; they couldn’t carry that, not and do any running. It was fastened with screws to the contragravity-lifter. Herckerd had his pocket-knife out, with the screwdriver blade open, and was working to remove the brackets.

“Well, where’ll we go… ?”

“Don’t argue, goddamit; get to work. Is there any extra rope ladder in that box? If there is, we’ll use it to tie the suitcase on…”

Over Herckerd’s shoulder, he saw the jeep enter the passage from the intersecting hall a hundred feet away. For an instant, he was frozen with fright. Then he screamed, “Behind you!” and threw himself through the open doorway, stumbling to the foot of a flight of narrow steel steps and then running up them. A pistol roared twice just outside the door, and then a submachine gun let go, a ripping two-second burst, a second of silence, and then another. Then voices shouted.

They got Herckerd. They got the sunstones, too. Then he forgot about both. Just get away, get far away, get away fast.

There was a steel door at the head of the stairs. Oh, God, please don’t let it be locked! He flung himself at it, gripping the latch-handle.

It wasn’t. The door swung open, and he stumbled through and closed it behind him, hearing, as he did, voices coming up from below. Then he turned, in the lighted hallway beyond.

There was a policeman standing not fifteen feet away, holding a short carbine with a thick, flaring muzzle, a stunner. He crouched, grabbing for his pistol. Then the blunderbuss muzzle of the stunner swung toward him at the policeman’s hip. He had the pistol half drawn when the lights all went out and a crushing shock hit him, shaking and jarring him into oblivion.

THE OPERATION-COMMAND ROOM was silent. When the voice from the screen speaker ceased, there was not a sound for an instant. Then there was a soft susurration; everybody in the place was exhaling at once. Grego found that he had been holding his own breath. So had Harry Steefer; he was exhaling noisily.

“Well, that’s it,” the Chief said. “I’m glad they took Novaes alive, anyhow. It’ll be a couple of hours before he’s able to talk.” He picked up his cigarette pack, shook one out for himself and offered it.

Moses Herckerd wouldn’t do any talking; he’d taken a dozen submachine gun bullets.

“What’ll we do with the sunstones?” the voice from the screen asked.

“Take them to the gem-vault; we’ll sort them over tomorrow or when we have time.” He turned to the open screens to city police and Colonial Constabulary. The non-coms who had been on them were replaced by Ralph Earlie and Ian Ferguson, respectively. “You hear what was going on?” he asked.

“We got most of it,” Ferguson said, and Earlie said, “You got them, and you got the stones back, but just what did happen?”

“They had a contragravity-lifter; they used it to get up one of the main conduit shafts, and then they got into a maintenance passage on the fourteenth level down. One of our jeeps caught them; Herckerd tried to put up a fight and got shot to hamburger; Novaes ran up a flight of stairs and came out in a hall right in front of a cop with a sono-stunner. When he comes to, we’ll question him and check his story with the Fuzzies,” he said. “How are you doing at Mortgageville?”

“We have the place surrounded,” Ferguson said. “They might get out on foot; they won’t in a vehicle. We have three Navy landing-craft loaded with detection equipment circling overhead, and Casagra has a hundred Marines along with my men.”

“I can’t help on that, at all,” the Mallorysport police chief said. “I have all my men out making raids, and if you don’t need that blockade around Company House any more, I want the men who are there. We have Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte, and we’re pulling in everybody that’s ever had anything to do with any of them, or Leo Thaxter. We don’t have Thaxter, yet. I suppose he’s at Mortgageville, along with the Evinses, waiting for Herckerd and Novaes to bring in the loot. And we have Hugo Ingermann, and this time he can’t talk himself out. We got Judge Pendarvis out of bed, and he signed warrants for all of them; reasonable grounds for suspicion and authority to veridicate. We’re saving him for last; we’ve just started on the small-fry.”

There wasn’t any question in his mind that Leo Thaxter was involved in the attempt on the gem-vault. Whether Bowlby or Heenan or Laporte had anything to do with it was more or less immaterial. They could be questioned, not only about that but about anything else, and anything they admitted under veridication was admissible as evidence against them, self incriminatory or not.

“Well, I’m going over and see what they’ve been getting from the Fuzzies,” he said. “There ought to be quite a little, by now.” He glanced up at the screen from Steefer’s office; half a dozen people were there now, and he was surprised to see Jack Holloway among them. He couldn’t have flown in from Beta Continent since this had started. “I’ll call back, or have somebody call, later.”

Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there, so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met him as he entered, and they shook hands.

“I thought there might be something I could do to help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are you?”

“Good Lord, no!”

“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the law,” Holloway said.

“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”

“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”

“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all; she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said. “She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them when they made mistakes.”

“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well, listen to this.”

Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he gave it to any of the others, all they produced was, “Yeek.”

“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone to Mallin.

“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say something.”

Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly. Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or words to that effect.

“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time. You make talk like Big One now.”

“Like this?” Diamond asked.

“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded. “Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”

“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.

“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly for weeks, and we never knew it.”

“Bet he didn’t know it, either,” Jack Holloway said. “Mr. Grego, do you think he could teach other Fuzzies to do that?”

“That would be kind of hard, wouldn’t it?” Mallin asked. “Does he really know, himself, how he does it?”

“Mr. Grego!” the police sergeant, who was still keeping half an eye on the communication screen, broke in. The Chief wants to know if you want to go to the gem-vault and check the contents of that suitcase.”

“Has anybody else checked it?”

“Well, Captain Lansky has, but…”

“Then lock it up in the vault; I don’t have to do that. The Nifflheim with it. I’ll check it tomorrow. I’m busy, now.”