That would probably be one of the five Herckerd and Novaes had brought in. He could see what had happened. The two former Company employees had sold them all to somebody here in Mallorysport, some racketeer who was selling them individually. There was somebody who really did need shooting. And by this time, Herckerd and Novaes would be back on Beta Continent, trapping more. Get the people who had bought this Fuzzy under veridication, the police had plenty of ways to make people want to talk, and work back from there.
“I’ll go see what it is,” Khadra was saying. “I’ll call in as soon as I can. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. In case I don’t get back, thanks for a nice evening, Judge, Mrs. Pendarvis.”
He hurried out, and for a moment nobody said anything. Then Jimenez suggested that if this were one of the Herckerd-Novaes lot, Diamond ought to see him as soon as possible; he’d be able to identify him. Khadra would think of that. Mrs. Pendarvis hoped there wouldn’t be any shooting. Mallorysport city police were notoriously trigger-happy. The conversation continued by jerks and starts; the two Fuzzies seemed to be the only ones unconcerned.
After about an hour, Khadra returned; he had left his belt and beret in the hall.
“What was it?” Brannhard asked. Jack was wanting to know if the Fuzzy was all right.
“It wasn’t a Fuzzy,” Khadra said disgustedly. “It was a Terran marmoset; these people have had it for a couple of years; brought it from Terra. The people who own it have had a wire screen around their terrace to keep it, ever since they moved in. Somebody in an aircar saw it outside and thought it was a Fuzzy. I wonder how much more of this we’re going to get.”
It was a wonder he hadn’t gotten that, himself, when his own family was lost and he was hunting for them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE AIR TRAFFIC around Central Courts Building the next morning seemed normal to Jack Holloway. There were quite a few cars on the landing stage above the sixth level down when he came in, but no more than he remembered from the time of the Fuzzy Trial. It was not until he left the escalator on the fourth floor below, where the Adoption Bureau offices were, that he began to suspect that there was a Fuzzy rush on.
The corridor leading back from the main hall to the suite that had been taken over yesterday was jammed. It was a well behaved, well dressed crowd, mostly couples clinging to each other to avoid being jostled apart. Everybody seemed to be happy and excited; it was more like a Year-End Holidays shopping crowd than anything else.
A uniformed deputy-marshal saw him and approached, touching his cap-brim in a half salute.
“Mr. Holloway; are you trying to get in to your offices? You’d better come this way, sir; there’s a queue down at the other end.”
There must be five or six hundred of them. Cut that in half; most of them were couples.
“How long’s this been going on?” he asked, noticing that several more couples and individuals were coming behind him.
“Since about 0700. There were a few here before then; the big rush didn’t start till 0830.”
Some of the people in the rear of the jam saw and recognized him. “Holloway.” “Jack Holloway; he’s the Commissioner.” “Mr. Holloway; are there Fuzzies here now?”
The deputy took him down the hall and unlocked the door of an office; it was empty, and the desks and chairs and things shrouded in dust-covers. They went through and out into a back hall, where another deputy-marshal was arguing with some people who were trying to get in that way.
“Well, why are they letting him in; who’s he?” a woman demanded.
“He works here. That’s Jack Holloway.”
“Oh! Mr. Holloway! Can you tell us how soon we can get Fuzzies?”
His guide rushed him, almost as though he were under arrest, along the hall, and opened another door.
“In here, Mr. Holloway; Mrs. Pendarvis’s office. I’ll have to get back and keep that mob in front straightened out.” He touched his cap-brim again and hastened away.
Mrs. Pendarvis sat at a desk, her back to the door, going over a stack of forms in front of her. Beside her, at a smaller desk, a girl was taking them as she finished with them, and talking into the whisper-mouthpiece of a vocowriter. Two more girls sat at another desk, one talking to somebody in a communication screen. Mrs. Pendarvis said, “Who is it?” and turned her head, then rose, extending her hand. “Oh; Mr. Holloway. Good morning. What’s it like out in the hall, now?”
“Well, you see how I had to come in. I’d say about five hundred, now. How are you handling them?”
She gestured toward the door to the front office, and he opened it and looked through. Five girls sat at five desks; each was interviewing applicants. Another girl was gathering up application-forms and carrying them to a desk where they were being sorted to be passed on to the back office.
“I arrived at 0830,” Mrs. Pendarvis said. “Just after I dropped Pierrot and Columbine off at Government House. There was a crowd then, and it’s been going on ever since. How many Fuzzies have you, Mr. Holloway?”
“Available for adoption? I don’t know. Beside mine and Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s and the Constabulary Fuzzies, there were forty day before yesterday. That had gotten up to a hundred and three by last evening.”
“We have, to date, three hundred and eleven applications; there are possibly twenty more that haven’t been sent back to me yet. By the time we close, it’ll be five or six hundred. How are we going to handle this, anyhow? Some of these people want just one Fuzzy, some of them want two, some of them will take a whole family. And we can’t separate Fuzzies who want to stay together. If you’d separate Pierrot and Columbine, they’d both grieve themselves to death. And there are families of five or six who want to stay together, aren’t there?”
“Well, not permanently. These groups aren’t really families; they’re sort of temporary gangs for mutual assistance. Five or six are about as many as can make a living together in the woods. They’re hunters and food-gatherers, low Paleolithic economy, and individual small-game hunters at that. When a gang gets too big to live together, they split up; when one couple meets another, they team up to hunt together. That’s why they have such a well-developed and uniform language, and I imagine that’s how the news about the zatku spread all over the Fuzzy country as fast as it did. They don’t even mate permanently. Your pair are just young, first mating for both of them. They think each other are the most wonderful ever. But you will have others that won’t want to be separated; you’ll have to let them be adopted together.” He thought for a moment. “You can’t begin to furnish Fuzzies for everybody; why don’t you give them out by lot? Each of those applications is numbered, isn’t it? Draw numbers.”
“Like a jury-drawing, of course. Let the jury-commissioners handle that,” the Chief Justice’s wife said.
“Fair enough. You’ll have to investigate each of these applicants, of course; that’ll take a little time, won’t it?”
“Well, Captain Khadra’s taking charge of them. He’s borrowed some people from the schools, and some from the city police juvenile squad and some from the company personnel division. I’ve been getting my staff together the same way — parent-teacher groups, Juvenile Welfare. I’m going to get a paid staff together, as soon as I can. I think they’ll come from the Company’s public service division; I’m told that Mr. Grego’s going to suspend all those activities in ninety days.”
“That’s right. That includes the schools, and the hospitals. Why don’t you talk to Ernst Mallin? He’ll find you all the people you want. He’s joined the Friends of Little Fuzzy, too, now.”
“Well, after we’ve allocated Fuzzies to these people, what then? Do they come out to your camp and pick their own?”
“Good Lord, no! We have enough trouble, without having the place overrun with human people.” He hadn’t given that thought until now. “What we’ll need will be a place here in Mallorysport where a couple of hundred Fuzzies can stay and where the people who have been endorsed for foster
-parents can come and select the ones they want.”
That would have to be a big place, with a park all around it, that could be fenced in to keep them from wandering off and getting lost. A nice place, where they could all have fun together. He didn’t know of any such place, and asked her about it.
“I’ll talk to Mr. Urswick, he’s the Company Chief of Public Services. He’ll know about something. You know, Mr. Holloway, I didn’t have any idea, when I took this job, that it was going to be so complicated.”
“Mrs. Pendarvis, I’ve been saying that every hour on the hour since I let Ben Rainsford talk me into taking the job I have. You’re going to have to do something about information, too — Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies, psychology of; language. We’ll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and language-learning tapes. And hearing aids.”
The door at the side of the room was marked investigation. He found Ahmed Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a city police uniform by screen.
“Well, have you gotten anything from any of them?” he was asking.
“Damn little,” the city policeman told him. “We’ve been pulling them in all day, everybody in town who has a record. And Hugo Ingermann’s been pulling them away from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his legmen and assistants here with portable radios, and as fast as we bring some punk in, they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ; order to show grounds for suspicion. Most of them we can’t question at all; it takes an hour to an hour and a half from the time they’re brought in before we can veridicate those we can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do.”
“Well, how about known associates? Didn’t either of them have any friends?”
“Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they’ve been cooperating, but none of them knows anything.”
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they blanked screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a cigarette.
“Well, you heard it, Jack,” he said. “They just vanished, and the Fuzzies with them. I’m not surprised we’re not getting anything out of their friends in the Company. They wouldn’t know. We searched their rooms; they seem to have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared. And we can’t get anything from underworld sources. None of the city police stool-pigeons knows anything.”
“You know, Ahmed, I’m worried about that. I wonder what’s happened to those Fuzzies…” He sat down on the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and tobacco. “How soon will you be able to start investigating these people who want Fuzzies?”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across the table to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they both ought to. Work was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away. and Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.
“Eighty-seven,” Lunt said. “That’s not counting yours and mine and Jack’s.”
“The Extee-Three’s getting low.” They’d had to start rationing it; tomorrow, they’d not be able to issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The Fuzzies wouldn’t like that. “Jack says he thinks speculators are buying it and holding it off the market. They’ll get big prices for it when the Fuzzies start coming in to Mallorysport.”
There wasn’t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept a tin or so in their aircars, in case of forced landings in the wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet’s land surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on, but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet. And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.
“Personally, I wish there were eighty-seven hundred of them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But wait till they get down in the real farm country, and among the sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round too.”
“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them for that. But they just don’t understand about what they mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any idea at all of property in the absence of a visible owner.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they won’t understand that somebody’s planted them, they’ll think they’re just there. And I never saw a farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to protect his crops.”
“Education,” Gerd said.
“Recipe for roast turkey — first catch a turkey,” Lunt said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are we going to catch all the other ones?”
“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside Extee-Three?”
“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patrolling a couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”
“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while. I don’t. That’s what I mean by educating the farmers. A Fuzzy does X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen land-prawns a day, and among them they do about X-times-ten damage.”
“Write up a script about it, and we’ll put it on the air this evening. ‘Be good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the farmer’s best friend.’ Maybe that’ll help some.”
Gerd nodded. “Eighty-seven, we have now. How many little ones?”
“Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?”
“And we think we have five pregnancies. That’s all Lynne Andrews is sure of; the only way she can tell is listening with a stethoscope for fetal movements. They seem to be too small to make any conspicuous visible difference. This is out of eighty seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call that, George?”
George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it automatically. Somewhere, maybe Constabulary School, the coffee had always been too hot to drink right away. Across the messhall, half a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it clear the tables.
“It sure to Nifflheim isn’t any population explosion,” he said.
“Race extinction, George. I don’t know what the normal life expectancy is in the woods, but I’d say four out of five of them die by violence. When the birthrate curve drops below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out.”
“A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you said five of the girls were pregnant, didn’t you? And you admit that’s not complete, if Doc Andrews has to use a stethoscope for a pregnancy test.”
“I wondered if you’d notice that. That’s not a bad ratio, for females who have a monthly cycle instead of an annual mating season. And these four children; we don’t know anything about the maturation period, but in the three months we’ve been checking on him, Baby Fuzzy’s only gained six ounces and an inch. I’d make it about fifteen years, ten at very least.”
“Then,” Lunt said, “it isn’t birthrate at all. It’s infant mortality. They just don’t live.”
“That’s it, George. That’s what I’m worried about. And Ruth and Lynne, too. If we don’t find out what causes it, and how to stop it, there won’t be any Fuzzies after a while.”
“THIS IS LIKE old times, Victor,” Coombes said, stretching in one of the chairs. “Nobody here but us humans.”
“That’s right.” He brought the jug and the two glasses over and put them on the low table, careful not to disturb a pattern of colored tiles laid on one end of it. “That thing there is a Fuzzy work of art. It is unf
inished, but just see the deep symbolic significance.”
“You see it. I can’t.” Coombes accepted his glass with mechanical thanks and sipped. “Where is everybody?”
“Diamond is a guest, at a place where I’m not welcome. Government House. He and Flora and Fauna are meeting Pierrot and Columbine, Judge and Mrs. Pendarvis’s Fuzzies. Sandra is chaperoning the affair, and Ernst is conferring with Mrs. Pendarvis about quarters for a couple of hundred Fuzzies who are coming to town in about a week to be adopted.”
“I’ll say this: your Fuzzy and Fuzzyologists are getting in with the right people. Did you hear Hugo Ingermann’s telecast this afternoon?”
“I did not. I pay people to do that kind of work for me. I went over a semantically correct summary, with a symbolic-logic study. As nearly as I can interpret it, it reduces to the propositions that, A) Ben Rainsford is a bigger crook than Victor Grego, and, B) Victor Grego is a bigger crook than Ben Rainsford, and, C) between them, they are conspiring to rob and enslave everybody on the planet, Fuzzies included.”
“I listened to it very carefully, and recorded it, in the hope that he might forget himself and say something actionable. He didn’t; he’s lawyer enough to know what’s libel and what isn’t. Sometimes I dream of being able to sue that bastard for something, so that I can get him in the stand under veridication, but…” He shrugged.
“I noticed one thing. He’s attacking the Company, and he’s attacking Rainsford, but at the same time he’s trying to drive wedges between us, so we don’t gang up on him.”
“Yes. That spaceport proposition. ‘Why doesn’t our honest and upright Governor do something to end this infamous space-transport monopoly of the Company’s, which is strangling the economy of the planet?’ ”
“Well, why doesn’t he? Because it would cost about fifty million sols, and ships using it would have to load and unload from orbit. But that sounds like a real live issue to the people who don’t think and have nothing to think with, which means a large majority of the voters. You know what I’m worried about, Leslie? Ingermann attacking Rainsford for collusion with the Company. He hammers at that point long enough, and Rainsford’s going to do something to prove he isn’t, and whatever it is, it’ll hurt us.”
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