Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER FOUR

WITH A SIGH of relief, Victor Grego entered the living room of his penthouse apartment. His hand rose to the switch beside the door, then dropped; the faint indirect glow from around the edge of the ceiling was enough. He’d just pour himself a drink and sit here in the crepuscular silence, resting. His body was tired, more so than it should be, at his age, but his brain was still racing at top speed. No use trying to go to sleep now.

He took off his jacket and neckcloth and dropped them on a chair, opening his shirt collar as he went to the cellaret; he poured a big inhaler-glass half full of brandy and started for his favorite chair, then returned to get the bottle. It would take more than one glass to brake the speeding wheels inside his head. He placed the bottle on a low table, beside the fluted glass bowl, and sat down, wondering what he had noticed that had disturbed him. Nothing important; he sipped from the glass and leaned back, closing his eyes.

They had the trouble in the veldbeest country on Beta and Delta Continents worked out, at least to where they knew what to do about it. Close down all the engineering jobs, the Big Blackwater drainage project on Beta, and the various construction jobs, and shift men to the cattle ranges; issue them combat equipment and put them on fighting pay, to deal with these gangs of rustlers that were springing up. Maybe if they started a couple of range-wars, Ian Ferguson and his Colonial Constabulary would have to take a hand. But the main thing was to keep the herds together. And the wild veldbeest; Ben Rainsford was a conservationist, he ought to be interested in protecting them.

And he still hadn’t decided on a sunstone buying policy. Not enough information on the present situation. He’d have to do something about that.

Oh, Nifflheim with it; think about it tomorrow.

He drank more brandy, and reached to the glass bowl on the low table, and found that it was empty. That was what had bothered him. It had been half full of the sort of tidbits he privately called nibblements — salted nuts, wafers, things like that — when he and Leslie Coombes had gone through the room on their way down for dinner.

Or had it? Maybe he just thought it had been. He began worrying about that, too. And the way he’d forgotten, this morning, about the sunstone inventory. Better call in Ernst Mallin to give him a checkup.

Then he laughed mirthlessly. If anybody needed a checkup, it was the company psychologist himself. Poor Ernst; he’d had a pretty shattering time of it, and now he probably thought he was being blamed for everything.

He wasn’t, of course. Mallin had done the best anybody could have done, in an impossible situation. The Fuzzies had been sapient beings, and that was all there’d been to it, and that wasn’t Mallin’s fault. That Mallin had been forced so to testify in court had been the fault of his immediate subordinate, Dr. Ruth Ortheris, who had also, it developed, been Lieutenant j.g. Ortheris, TFN Intelligence. She’d been the one who’d tipped Navy Intelligence about the Fuzzies in the first place. She’d been the one who’d smuggled Jack Holloway’s Fuzzy family out of Science Center after Leslie Coombes had gotten hold of them on a bogus court order. And she’d been the one who’d insisted on live-trapping that other Fuzzy family and exposing Mallin to them.

That had been a beautiful piece of work. He’d watched the trial by screen; he could still see poor Mallin on the stand, trying to insist that Fuzzies were just silly little animals, with the red-blazing globe of the veridicator calling him a liar every time he opened his mouth. Why, she’d made the company defeat itself with its own witness.

He ought to hate her for that. He didn’t; he admired her for it, as he admired anybody who had a job to do and did it competently. He had too damned few people like that in his own organization.

Have to do something nice for Ernst, though. He couldn’t stay in charge at Science Center, but he’d have to be promoted out of it. Probably have to invent a job for him.

Finally, he decided that he could go to sleep, now. He took the brandy bottle back to the cellaret, gathered up the garments he had thrown down, and went into the bedroom, putting on the lights.

Then he looked at the bed and saw the golden-furred shape snuggled against the pillows. He swore. One of those life-size Fuzzy dolls that had been on sale ever since the Fuzzies had gotten into the news. If this was somebody’s idea of a joke…

Then the thing he had taken for a doll sat up, blinked, and said, “Yeek?”

“Why, the damn thing’s alive!” he yelled. “It’s a real Fuzzy!” The Fuzzy was afraid; watching him and at the same time seeking an avenue of escape. “Don’t be scared, kid,” he soothed. “I won’t hurt you. How’d you get in here, anyhow?”

One thing, the puzzle of the empty bowl was solved; the contents were now inside the Fuzzy. This, however, posed the question of how the Fuzzy got there. When he had thought this was a joke, he had been angry. Now he doubted that it was a joke, and he was on the edge of being worried.

The Fuzzy, who had been regarding him warily, had evidently decided that he was not hostile and might even be friendly. He got to his feet, tried to walk on the yielding pneumatic mattress, and tumbled heels-over-head. Instantly he was on his feet again, leaping twice his height into the air, bouncing, and yeeking happily. He caught him on the second bounce and sat down on the bed with him.

“Are you hungry, kid?” That bowl of nibblements wasn’t much of a meal, even for a Fuzzy. The stuff was all heavily salted, too. “Bet you’re thirsty.” What was it Jack Holloway’s Fuzzies called him? Pappy Jack. “Well, Pappy Vic’ll get you something.”

In the kitchenette-breakfast room, the uninvited guest drank two small aperitif-glasses of water and part of a third, while his host wondered about what he’d like to eat. Jack Holloway gave his Fuzzies Extee-Three, but he didn’t have… Oh, yes; maybe he did.

He went into the bedroom and opened one of the closets, where his field equipment was kept, rifles, sleeping-bag, cameras and binoculars, and a couple of rectangular steel cases to be carried in an aircar, full of camping paraphernalia. He opened one, which contained mess-gear he’d brought with him from Terra and used on field trips ever since, and sure enough, there were a couple of tins of Extee-Three.

The Fuzzy, who had been watching beside him, yeeked excitedly when he saw the blue labels, and ran ahead of him to the kitchenette. He could hardly wait till the tin was open. Somebody had given him Extee-Three before.

He made a sandwich for himself and sat down at the table while the Fuzzy ate, and he was still worried. There were only four doors into Company House from the ground, and all of them were constantly guarded. There were no windows less than sixty feet from the ground. While no bet on what Fuzzies couldn’t do was really safe, he doubted that they had learned to pilot aircars just yet. So somebody had brought this Fuzzy here, and beside How, which would be by aircar, the question branched out into When and Who and Why.

Why was what worried him most. Fuzzies, as he didn’t need to remind himself, were people, and wards of the Terran Federation, and all sort of crimes could be committed against them. Leonard Kellogg would have been executed for killing one of them, if he hadn’t done the job for himself in his cell at the jail. And beside murder, there was abduction, and illegal restraint. Maybe somebody was trying to frame him.

He put on the communication screen and punched the call combination of the Chief’s office at company police headquarters. He got Captain Morgan Lansky, who held down Chief Steefer’s desk from midnight to six. As soon as Lansky saw who was calling, he got rid of his cigar, zipped up his tunic, and tried to look alert, wide awake and busy.

“Why, Mr. Grego! Is anything wrong?”

“That’s what I want to know, Captain. I have a Fuzzy up here in my apartment. I want to know how he got here.”

“A Fuzzy? Are you sure, Mr. Grego?”

He stooped and picked up his visitor, setting him on the table. The Fuzzy was clutching half a cake of Extee-Three. He saw Lansky looking out of the wall at him and yeeked in astonishment.

“What is your opinion, Captain?”

Captain Lansky’s opinion was that he’d be damned. “How did he get in, Mr. Grego?”

Grego prayed silently for patience. “That is precisely what I want to know. To begin with, have you any idea how he got in the building?”

“Somebody,” the captain decided, after deliberation, “must have brought him in. In an aircar,” he added, after more cogitation.

“I had gotten that far, myself. Would you have any idea when?”

Lansky began to shake his head. Then he was smitten with an idea.

“Hey, Mr. Grego! The pilfering!”

“What pilfering?”

“Why, the pilfering. Pilfering, and ransacking; in offices and like that. And somebody’s been getting into supply rooms at some of the cafeterias, and where they keep the candy and stuff for the vending robots. The first musta been the night of the sixteenth.” That would be three days ago. “The first report came in day before yesterday morning, after the 0600-1200 shift came on. It’s been like that ever since; every morning, places being ransacked and candy and stuff like that taken. You think that Fuzzy’s been doing all of it?”

He could see no reason why not. Fuzzies were small people, able to make themselves very inconspicuous when they wanted to. Hadn’t they survived for oomphty-thousand years in the woods, dodging harpies and bush-goblins? And Company House was full of hiding places. It had been built twelve years ago, three years after he came to Zarathustra, and it had been built big. It wasn’t going to be like the buildings they ran up on Terra, to be torn down in a couple of decades; it was meant to be the headquarters of the Chartered Zarathustra Company for a couple of centuries. Eighteen levels, six to eight floors to a level; more than half of them were empty and many unfinished, waiting for the CZC to grow into them.

“The ones Dr. Jimenez trapped for Dr. Mallin,” Lansky said. “Maybe this is one of them.”

He winced, mentally, at the thought of those Fuzzies. Catching them and letting Mallin study them had been the worst error of the whole business, and the way they had gotten rid of them had been a close runner-up.

It had been a Mallorysport police lieutenant, on his own lame-brained responsibility, who had started the story about a ten-year-old girl, Lolita Lurkin, being attacked by Fuzzies, and it had been Resident-General Nick Emmert, now bound for Terra aboard a destroyer from Xerxes to face malfeasance charges, who had posted a reward of five thousand sols apiece on Jack Holloway’s Fuzzies, supposed to be at large in the city. Dead or alive; that had touched off a hysterical Fuzzy-hunt.

That had been when he and Leslie Coombes had perpetrated their own masterpiece of imbecility, by turning loose the Fuzzies Mallin had been studying, whom everybody was now passionately eager to see the last of, in the hope that they would be shot for Emmert’s reward money. Instead, Jack Holloway, hunting for his own Fuzzies in ignorance of the fact that they were safe on Xerxes Naval Base, had found them, and now he was very glad of it. Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek had them now.

“No, Captain. Those Fuzzies are all accounted for. And Dr. Jimenez didn’t bring any others to Mallorysport.”

That put Lansky back where he had started. He went off on another tangent:

“Well, I’ll send somebody up right away to get him, Mr. Grego.”

“You will do nothing of the sort, Captain. The Fuzzy’s quite all right here; I’m taking care of him. All I want to know is how he got into Company House. And I want the investigation made discreetly. Tell the Chief when he comes in.” He thought of something else. “Get hold of a case of Extee-Three; do it before you go off duty. And have it put on my delivery lift, where I’ll find it the first thing tomorrow.”

The Fuzzy was disappointed when he blanked the screen; he wondered where the funny man in the wall had gone. He finished his Extee-Three, and didn’t seem to want anything else. Well, no wonder; one of those cakes would keep a man going for twenty-four hours.

He’d have to fix up some place for the Fuzzy to sleep. And some way for him to get water; the sink in the kitchenette was too high to be convenient. There was a low sink outside, which the gardener used; he turned the faucet on slightly, set a bowl under it, and put a little metal cup beside it. The Fuzzy understood about that, and yeeked appreciatively. He’d have to get one of those earphones the Navy people had developed, and learn the Fuzzy language.

Then he remembered that Fuzzies were most meticulous about their sanitary habits. Going back inside, he entered the big room behind the kitchenette which served the chef as a pantry, the houseboy for equipment storage, the gardener as a seed house and tool shed, and all of them as a general junkroom. He hadn’t been inside the place, himself, for some time. He swore disgustedly when he saw it, then began rummaging for something the Fuzzy could use as a digging tool.

Selecting a stout-handled basting spoon, he took it out into the garden and dug a hole in a flower bed, sticking the spoon in the ground beside it. The Fuzzy knew what the hole was for, and used it, and then filled it in and stuck the spoon back where he found it. He made some ultrasonic remarks, audible as yeeks, in gratification at finding that human-type people had civilized notions about sanitation too.

Find him something better tomorrow, a miniature spade. And fix up a real place for him to sleep, and put in a little fountain, and…

It suddenly occurred to him that he was assuming that the Fuzzy would want to stay with him permanently, and also to wonder whether he wanted a Fuzzy living with him. Of course he did. A Fuzzy was fun, and fun was something he ought to have more of. And a Fuzzy would be a friend. A Fuzzy wouldn’t care whether he was manager-in-chief of the Charterless Zarathustra Company or not, and friends like that were hard to come by, once you’d gotten to the top.

Except for Leslie Coombes, he didn’t have any friends like that.

Some time during the night, he was awakened by something soft and warm squirming against his shoulder.

“Hey; I thought I fixed you a bed of your own.”

“Yeek?”

“Oh, you want to bunk with Pappy Vic. All right.”

They both went back to sleep.