A gleam began to creep into Leslie Coombes’s eyes. He’d like nothing better than a chance at a return bout with Gus Brannhard, with a not-completely-hopeless case.
“I believe I could…” Then he banished temptation. “No; we have too much on our hands now, without another Fuzzy trial. Get rid of him, Victor.” He held up a hand to forestall a protest. “I’ll be around for cocktails, about 1730-ish,” he said, “You think it over till then.”
Well, maybe Leslie was right. He agreed, and for a while they talked about the political situation. The Fuzzy became bored and jumped down from the table. After they blanked their screens he looked around and couldn’t see him.
The door to the pantry-storeroom-toolroom-junkroom was open; maybe he was in there investigating things. That was all right; he couldn’t make the existing mess any worse. Grego poured more coffee and lit another cigarette.
There was a loud crash from beyond the open door, and an alarmed yeek, followed by more crashing and thumping and Fuzzy cries of distress. Jumping to his feet, he ran to the door and looked inside.
The Fuzzy was in the middle of a puddle of brownish gunk that had spilled from an open five gallon can which seemed to have fallen from a shelf. Sniffing, he recognized it — a glaze for baked meats, mostly molasses, that the chef had mixed from a recipe of his own. It took about a pint to glaze a whole ham, so the damned fool had mixed five gallons of it. Most of it had gone on the Fuzzy, and in attempting to get away from the deluge he had upset a lot of jars of spices and herbs, samples of which were sticking to his fur. Then he had put his foot on a sheet of paper, and it had stuck; trying to pull it loose, it had stuck to his hands, too. As soon as he saw Pappy Vic, he gave a desperate yeek of appeal.
“Yes, yeek yourself.” He caught the Fuzzy, who flung both adhesive arms around his neck. “Come on, here; let’s get you cleaned up.”
Carrying the Fuzzy into the bathroom, he dumped him into the tub, then tore off the hopelessly ruined shirt. Trousers all spotted with the stuff, too; change them when he finished the job. He brought a jar of shampoo soap from the closet and turned on the hot water, tempering it to what he estimated the Fuzzy could stand.
Now, wasn’t this a Nifflheim of a business? As if he hadn’t anything to do but wash Fuzzies.
He rubbed the soap into the Fuzzy’s fur; the Fuzzy first resented and then decided he liked it, shrieked in pleasure, and grabbed a handful of the soap and tried to shampoo Grego. Finally, they got finished with it. The Fuzzy liked the hot-air dryer, too. He’d never had a shampoo before.
His fur clean and dry and fluffy, he sat on the bed and watched Pappy Vic change clothes. It was amazing the way the Big Ones could change their outer skins; must be very convenient. He made remarks, from time to time, and Grego carried on a conversation with him.
After he had dressed, Grego recorded a message for the houseboy, to be passed on to the chef and the gardener, to get everything to Nifflheim out of that back room that didn’t belong there, and to keep what little did in some kind of decent order. If that place could be kept in order, now, the Fuzzy had one positive accomplishment to his credit.
They took the lift down to the top executive level — lifts appeared to be a new experience for the Fuzzy, too — and into his private office. The Fuzzy looked around in wonder, especially at the big globe of Zarathustra, floating six feet off the floor on its own built-in contragravity unit, spotlighted from above to simulate Zarathustra’s KO-class sun, its two satellites circling around it. Finally, for a better view, he jumped up on a chair.
“If I had any idea you’d stay there…” He flipped the screen switch and got Myra on it. “I had a few things to clean up before I could come down,” he told her, with literal truthfulness. “How many girls have we in the front office, this morning?”
There were eight, and they were all busy. Myra started to tell him what with; maybe four could handle it at a pinch, and six without undue strain. That was another thing the Charterless Zarathustra Company would have to economize on.
“Well, they can look after the Fuzzy, too,” he said. “Take turns with him. He’s in here, trying to make up his mind what kind of deviltry to get into next. Come get him, and take him out and tell the girls to keep him innocently amused.”
“But, Mr. Grego; they have work…”
“This is more work. We’ll find out which one gets along best with him, and promote her to chief Fuzzy-sitter. Are we going to let one Fuzzy disrupt our whole organization?”
Myra started to remind him of what the Fuzzies had done to the company already, then said, “Yes, Mr. Grego,” and blanked the screen. A moment later she entered.
She and the Fuzzy looked at one another in mutual hostility and suspicion. She took a hesitant step forward; the Fuzzy yeeked angrily, dodged when she reached for him, and ran to Grego, jumping onto his lap.
“She won’t hurt you,” he soothed. “This is Myra; she likes Fuzzies. Don’t you, Myra?” “He stroked the Fuzzy. “I’m afraid he doesn’t like you.”
“Well, that makes it mutual,” Myra said. “Mr. Grego, I am your secretary. I am not an animal keeper.”
“Fuzzies are not animals. They are sapient beings. The Chief Justice himself said so. Have you never heard of the Pendarvis Decisions?”
“Have I heard of anything else, lately? Mr. Grego, how you can make a pet of that little demon, after all that’s happened…”
“All right, Myra. I’ll take him.”
He went through Myra’s office and into the big room they called executive operations center, through which reports from all over the Company’s shrunken but still extensive empire reached him and his decisions and directives and orders and instructions were handed down to his subjects. There were eight girls there, none particularly busy. One was reading alternately from several sets of clipboarded papers and talking into a vocowriter. Another was making a subdued clatter with a teleprint machine. A third was at a drawing board, constructing one of those multicolored zigzag graphs so dear to the organizational heart. The rest sat smoking and chatting; they all made hasty pretense of busying themselves as he entered. Then one of them saw the Fuzzy in his arms.
“Look! Mr. Grego has a Fuzzy!”
“Why, it’s a real live Fuzzy!”
Then they were all on their feet and crowding forward in a swirl of colored dresses and perfumes and eager, laughing voices and pretty, smiling faces.
“Where did you get him, Mr. Grego?”
“Oh, can we see him?”
“Yes, girls.” He set the Fuzzy down on the floor. “I don’t know where he came from, but I think he wants to stay with us. I’m going to leave him here for a while. Don’t let him interfere too much with your work, but keep an eye on him and don’t let him get into any trouble. It’ll be at least an hour before I have anything ready to go out. You can give him anything you’d eat yourselves; if he doesn’t want, he won’t take it. I don’t think he’s very hungry right now. And don’t kill him with affection.”
When he went out, they were all sitting on the floor in a circle around the Fuzzy, who was having a wonderful time. He told Myra to leave the doors of her office open so he could go through when he wanted to. Then he went through another door, into the computer room.
It was quarter-circular; two straight walls twenty feet long at right angles and the curved wall between, the latter occupied by the input board for the situation-analysis and operation-guidance computers. This was a band of pale green plastic, three feet wide, divided into foot squares by horizontal and vertical red lines, each square perforated with thousands of tiny holes, in some of them little plug-in lights twinkled in every color of the spectrum. Three levels down, a whole floor was occupied with the computers this board serviced. From it, new information was added in the quasi-mathematical symbology computers understood.
He stood for a moment, looking at the Christmas-tree lights. Nothing in the world would have tempted him to touch it; he knew far too little about it. He
wondered if they had started the computers working on the sunstone-buying policy problem, then went out into his own office, closing the door behind him, and sat down at his desk.
In the old, pre-Fuzzy days, he would have spent a leisurely couple of hours here, drinking more coffee and going over reports. Once in a while he would have made some comment, or asked a question, or made a suggestion, to show that he was keeping up with what was going on. Only rarely would any situation arise requiring his personal action.
Now everybody was having situations; things he had thought settled at the marathon staff conference of the past four days were coming unstuck; conflicts were developing. He had to make screen-calls to people he would never have bothered talking to under ordinary circumstances — the superintendent of the meat-packing plant on Delta Continent, the chief engineer on the now-idle Big Blackwater drainage project, the master mechanic at the nuclear-electric power-unit plant. He welcomed one such necessity, the master mechanic at the electronics-equipment factory; they were starting production of ultrasonic hearing-aids for the Government, and he ordered half a dozen sent around to his office. When he got one of them, he could hear what his new friend was saying.
Myra Fallada came in, dithering in the doorway till he had finished talking to the chief of chemical industries about a bottleneck in blasting-explosive production. As soon as he blanked the screen, she began.
“Mr. Grego, you will simply have to get that horrid creature out of operations center. The girls aren’t doing a bit of work, and the noise is driving me simply mad!”
He could hear shrieks of laughter, and the running scamper of Fuzzy feet. Now that he thought of it, he had been hearing that for some time.
“And I positively can’t work… Aaaaaa!”
Something bright red hit her on the back of the head and bounced into the room. A red plastic bag, a sponge bag or swimsuit bag or something like that, stuffed with tissue paper. The Fuzzy ran into the room, dodging past Myra, and hurled it back, within inches of her face, then ran after it.
“Well, yes, Myra. I’m afraid this is being carried a bit far.” He rose and went past her into her office, in time to see the improvised softball come whizzing at him from the big office beyond. He caught it and went on through; the Fuzzy ran ahead of him to a tall girl with red hair who stooped and caught him up.
“Look, girls,” he said, “I said keep the Fuzzy amused; I didn’t say turn this into a kindergarten with the teacher gone AWOL. It’s bad enough to have the Fuzzies tear up our charter, without letting them stop work on what we have left.”
“Well, it did get a little out of hand,” the tall redhead understated.
“Yes. Slightly.” Nobody was going to under-understate him. What was her name? Sandra Glenn. “Sandra, he seems to like you. You take care of him. Just keep him quiet and keep him from bothering everybody else.”
He hoped she wouldn’t ask him how. She didn’t; she just said, “I’ll try, Mr. Grego.” He decided to settle for that; that was all anybody could do.
By the time he got back to his desk, there was a call from the head of Public Services, wanting to know what he was going to tell the school teachers about their job futures. When he got rid of that, he called Dr. Ernst Mallin at Science Center.
The acting head of Science Center was fussily neat in an uncompromisingly black and white costume which matched his uncompromisingly black and white mind. He had a narrow face and a small, tight mouth; it had been an arrogantly positive face once. Now it was the face of a man who expects the chair he is sitting on to collapse under him at any moment.
“Good morning, Mr. Grego.” Apprehensive, and trying not to show it.
“Good morning, Doctor. Those Fuzzies you were working with before the trial; the ones Dr. and Mrs. van Riebeek have now. Were they the only ones you had?”
The question took Mallin by surprise. They were, he stated positively. And to the best of his knowledge Juan Jimenez, who had secured them for him, had caught no others.
“Have you talked to Dr. Jimenez yet?” he asked, after hearing about the Fuzzy in Company House. “I don’t believe he brought any when he came in from Beta Continent.”
“No, not yet. I wanted to talk to you, first, about the Fuzzy and about something else. Dr. Mallin, I gather you’re not exactly happy in charge of Science Center.”
“No, Mr. Grego. I took it over because it was the only thing to do at the time, but now that the trial is over, I’d much rather go back to my own work.”
“Well, so you shall, and your salary definitely won’t suffer because of it. And I want to assure you again of my complete confidence in you, Doctor. During the Fuzzy trouble you did the best any man could have, in a thoroughly impossible situation…”
He watched the anxiety ebb out of Mallin’s face; before he was finished, the psychologist was smiling one of his tight little smiles.
“Now, there’s the matter of your successor. What would you think of Juan Jimenez?”
Mallin frowned. Have to make a show of thinking it over, and he was one of these people who thought with his face.
“He’s rather young, but I believe it would be a good choice, Mr. Grego. I won’t presume to speak of his ability as a scientist, his field is rather far from mine. But he has executive ability, capacity for decisions and for supervision, and gets along well with people. Yes; I should recommend him.” He paused, then asked, “Do you think he’ll accept it?”
“What do you think, Doctor?”
Mallin chuckled. “That was a foolish question,” he admitted. “Mr. Grego; this Fuzzy. You still have him at Company House? What are you going to do with him?”
“Well, I had hoped to keep him, but I’m afraid I can’t. He is a little too enterprising. He made my apartment look like a slightly used battlefield this morning, and now he’s turning the office into a three-ring circus. And Leslie Coombes advises me to get rid of him; he thinks it may start Rainsford after us again. I think I’ll have him taken back to Beta and liberated there.”
“I’d like to have him, myself, Mr. Grego. Just keep him at my home and play with him and talk to him and try to find how he thinks about things. Mr. Grego, those Fuzzies are the sanest people I have ever seen. I know; I tried to drive the ones I had psychotic with frustration-situation experiments, and I simply couldn’t. If we could learn their basic psychological patterns, it would be the greatest advance in psychology and psychiatry since Freud.”
He meant it. He was a different Ernst Mallin now; ready to learn, to conquer his own ignorance instead of denying it. But what he wanted was out of the question.
“I’m sorry, believe me I am. But if I gave you the Fuzzy, Leslie Coombes would have a fit, and that’s nothing to what Ben Rainsford would have; he’d bring prosecutions against the lot of us. If I do keep him, you’ll have opportunity to study him, but I’m afraid I can’t.”
He brought the conversation to a close, and blanked the screen. The noise had stopped in operation center; the work probably had, too. He didn’t want to get rid of the Fuzzy. He was a nice little fellow. But…
CHAPTER SIX
HE WASN’T ABLE to get Juan Jimenez immediately. Juan was doing something at the zoo, and the zoo was spread over too much area to track him down. He left word to call him as soon as possible, and went back to his own work, and finally had his lunch brought in and ate it at the desk. The outside office got noisy again, for a while. The girls seemed to be feeding the Fuzzy, and he wondered apprehensively on what. Some of the things those girls ate would give a billygoat indigestion. About an hour afterward, Jimenez was on the screen.
The chief mammalogist was a young man, with one of those cheerful, alert, agreeable, sincere and accommodating faces you saw everywhere on the upper echelons of big corporations or institutions. He might or might not be a good scientist, but he was a real two-hundred-proof Company man.
“Hello, Juan; calling from Science Center?”
“Yes, Mr. Grego. I was at the zoo; they have
some new panzer pigs from Gamma. When I got back, they told me you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. When you came back, just before the trial, from Beta, did you bring any Fuzzies along with you?”
“Good Lord, no!” Jimenez was startled. “I got the impression that we needed Fuzzies like we needed a hole in the head. I got the impression that the one was about equal to the other.”
“Just like Ernst Mallin: the more you saw of them, the more sapient they looked. Well, dammit, what else were they? What were you doing on Beta?”
“Well, as I told you, Mr. Grego, we had a camp and we’d attracted about a dozen of them around it with Extee-Three, and we were photographing them and studying behavior, but we never made any attempt to capture any, after the first four.”
“Beside yourself, who were ‘we’?”
“The two men helping me, a couple of rangers from Survey Division; their names were Herckerd and Novaes. They helped me live-trap the four I gave to Dr. Mallin, and they helped with the camp work, and with photographing and so on.”
“Well, here’s the situation.” He went into it again, realizing why witnesses in court who have been taken a dozen times over their stories by the police and the prosecuting attorney’s people always sounded so glib. “So, you see, I want to find out what this is. It may be something quite innocent, but I want to be sure.”
“Well, I didn’t bring him in, and Herckerd and Novaes came in along with me; they didn’t.”
“I wish you, or they, had brought him; then I’d know what this is all about. Oh, another thing, Juan. As you know, Dr. Mallin was only in temporary charge at Science Center after Kellogg was arrested. He’s going back to what’s left of his original job, most happily, I might add. Do you think you could handle it? If you do, you can have it.”
One thing you had to give Jimenez, he wasn’t a hypocrite. He didn’t pretend to be overcome with the honor, and he didn’t question his own fitness. “Why, thank you, Mr. Grego!” Then he went into a little speech of acceptance which sounded suspiciously premeditated. Yes; he would definitely accept. So Grego made a little speech of his own, ending:
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