Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“YOU THINK FOUR-FIFTY a carat would be all right?” Victor Grego was asking.

Bennett Rainsford picked up the lighter from the table in front of him and carefully relit a pipe that didn’t need relighting. Now that he’d come to know him, he found that he liked Victor Grego. But he still had to watch him. Grego was the Charterless Zarathustra Company, and the company was definitely not a philanthropic institution.

“Sounds all right to me,” Jack Holloway agreed. “You didn’t pay me any more than that when I was prospecting, and I had to dig them myself.”

“But four-fifty, Jack. The Terra market price is over a thousand sols a carat.”

“This isn’t Terra, Ben. Terra’s five hundred light-years, six months ship-time, away. I think Mr. Grego’s making us a good offer. All we need to do is bank the money; the company’ll do the rest.”

“Well, how much do you think the Fuzzies will get out of it, a month?”

Grego shrugged. “I haven’t seen it, myself. I’ll take Jack’s word for it. What do you think?”

“Well, it depends on how much equipment you use, and what kind. If it’s anything like the diggings I used to work, you’ll get about a sunstone to the ton.”

“We can move and process an awful lot of tons of flint in a month, and from Jack’s description I’d say we’ll be working that deposit for longer than any of us’ll be around. You know, Governor, instead of the Fuzzies getting handouts from the Government, they’ll be paying the Government’s bills before long.”

And that would have to be watched, too; it mustn’t be allowed to become a source of political graft. Inside a month, now, the elections for delegates to the Constitutional Convention would be held. Make sure the right men were elected, men who would write a Constitution which would safeguard the Fuzzies’ rights for all time.

Victor Grego, he was beginning to think, could be counted on to help in that.

LESLIE COOMBES HELD his glass while Gus Brannhard poured from the bottle, and said, quickly, “That’s enough, please,” when about fifty or sixty cc of whisky had been added to the ice. He filled the glass the rest of the way with soda, himself.

“And Hugo Ingermann,” he said, disgustedly, “is completely innocent.”

“Well, innocent of the Fuzzy business and the attempt on the company gem-vault,” Brannhard conceded, pouring into his own glass. When Gus mixed a highball, he always left out both the ice and the soda. “It’s probably the only thing he ever was innocent of, in his whole life. But he isn’t getting away scot-free.” Brannhard took a drink from his glass, and Coombes shuddered inwardly; the man must have a collapsium-plated digestive tract. “While we were interrogating this one and that one about the Fuzzy-sunstone business, we got a lot of evidence, all veridicated, to connect him with Thaxter’s shylocking and Bowlby’s call-girl agency and Heenan’s prize-fight fixing and Laporte’s strong-arm mob. I’m after him with a shotgun; I’m just filling the air all around him with indictments, and some of them are sure to hit. And even if I can’t get him convicted of anything, he’ll be disbarred, that’s for sure. And this Planetary Prosperity Party of his is catching fire, leaking radiation, blowing up and falling apart all around. Everybody’s calling it the Fuzzy-Fagin Party, and everybody who had anything to do with it is getting out as fast as he can.”

“If we work together, we’ll get a good Constitution adopted and a good Legislature elected. Or can we expect Governor Rainsford to agree with Victor Grego on what a ‘good’ Constitution and a ‘good’ Legislature are?”

“We can,” Brannhard said. “We only have a few months before the off-planet land-grabbers begin coming in, and Ben Rainsford’s as much worried about that as Victor Grego. Leslie, if you go into court and make claim to all the unseated land the company has mapped and surveyed, I am instructed by the Governor not to oppose you. What does that sound like?”

“That sounds like getting back about everything we lost, with the sunstone lease on top of it. I am going to propose the election of Little Fuzzy as an honorary member of the board of directors, with the title of Company Benefactor Number One.”

LITTLE FUZZY CLIMBED up on Pappy Jack’s lap, squirmed a little, and cuddled himself comfortably. He was happy to be back. He had had so much fun in the Big House Place, he and Mamma Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Syndrome and Id and Ned Kelly and Dr. Crippen and Calamity Jane. They had met so many Fuzzies who had been here and gone away to live with Big Ones of their own, and they had a place where they all met and played together. And he had met the two lovers, now they had names of their own, Pierrot and Columbine, and he had met Diamond, about whom Unka Panko had told him, and Diamond’s Pappy Vic.

It had been to meet Diamond that Unka Panko and Auntie Lynne had taken them all in the sky-thing to the Big House Place, because Diamond had found out how to talk like a Big One without using one of the talk-things, and Diamond had taught all of them how to do it. It had been hard, very hard; Diamond was very smart to have found it out for himself, but after a while they had all found that they could do it, too. And now Mike and Mitzi and Complex and Superego and Dillinger and Lizzie Borden had gone to the Big House Place with Pappy Gerd and Mummy Woof, and they would learn to talk so that the Big Ones could hear them. And Baby Fuzzy was learning from Mamma Fuzzy, and tomorrow they would all start teaching the others here at Hoksu-Mitto.

“Pretty soon, all Fuzzy learn to talk like Big Ones,” he said. “Not need talk-thing, Big One not need ear-thing; just talk, like I do now.”

“That’s right,” Pappy Jack said. “Big Ones, Fuzzies, all make talk together. All be good friends.”

“And Fuzzy learn how to help Big Ones? Many things Fuzzy can do to help, if Big Ones tell what.”

“Best thing Fuzzy do to help Big Ones is just be Fuzzies,” Pappy Jack told him.

But what else could they be? Fuzzies were what they were, just as Big Ones were Big Ones.

“And beside,” Pappy Jack went on talking, “the Fuzzies are all rich, now.”

“Rich? What is? Something good?”

“Well, most people think it is. When you’re rich, you have money.”

“Is something good to eat?” he asked. “Like Estee-fee?”

He wondered why Pappy Jack laughed. Maybe he was just laughing because he was happy. Or maybe Pappy Jack thought it was funny that he didn’t know what money was.

There were still so many things Fuzzies had to learn.