“And there isn’t anything we can do about it, at all?” Lynne was asking.
“No. There isn’t anything anybody can do. The people in Mallorysport have given up trying. They’re still investigating, but that’s only to be able to write a scientifically accurate epitaph for the Fuzzy race.”
“Can’t they do something to reverse it?”
“It’s irreversible,” Ruth told her. “It isn’t a matter of diet or environment or anything external. It’s this hormone, NFM p , that they produce in their own bodies, that inhibits normal development of the embryo. And we can’t even correct it in individual cases by surgery; excising the glands that secrete it would result in sterility.”
“Well, it doesn’t always work,” Jack said, lifting Baby Fuzzy from his shoulder. “It didn’t work in Baby’s case.”
“It works in about nine cases out of ten, apparently. We’ve had ten births so far; one normal and healthy, and the rest premature and defective, stillbirths, or live births that die within hours.”
“But there are exceptions, Baby here, and the one over at the Fuzzy-shelter,” Lynne said. “Can’t we figure out how the exceptions can be encouraged?”
“They’re working on that, in a half-hearted way,” he told her. “Fuzzies have a menstrual cycle and fertility rhythm, the same as Homo s. terra, and apparently the NFM p output is also cyclic, and when the two are out of phase there is a normal viable birth, and not otherwise. And this doesn’t happen often enough, and any correction of it would have to be done individually in the case of each female Fuzzy, and nobody even knows how to find out how it could be done.”
“But, Gerd, the whole thing doesn’t make sense to me,” Pancho objected. “I know, ‘sense’ is nothing but ignorance rationalized, and this isn’t my subject, but if this NFM p thing is a racial characteristic, it must be hereditary, and a hereditary tendency to miscarriages, premature and defective births, and infant mortality, now what kind of sense does that make?”
“Well, on the face of it, not much. But we know nothing at all about the racial history of the Fuzzies, and very little about the history of this planet. Say that fifty thousand years ago there were millions of Fuzzies, and say that fifty thousand years ago environmental conditions were radically different. This NFM p hormone was evolved to meet some environmental survival demand, and something in the environment, some article of diet that has now vanished, kept it from injuriously affecting the unborn Fuzzies. Then the environment changed — glaciation, glacial recession, sea-level fluctuation, I can think of dozens of reasons — and after having adapted to original conditions, they couldn’t re-adapt to the change. We’ve seen it on every planet we’ve ever studied; hundreds of cases on Terra alone. The Fuzzies are just caught in a genetic trap they can’t get out of, and we can’t get them out of it.”
He looked at them; six happy little people, busily fitting many-colored jointed blocks together to make a useless and delightful pretty-thing. Happy in ignorance of their racial doom.
“If we knew how many children the average female has in her lifetime, and how many child bearers there are, we could figure it out mathematically, I suppose. Ten little Fuzzies, nine little Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies, and finally no little Fuzzies.”
Little Fuzzy thought he was being talked about; he looked up inquiringly.
“Well, they won’t all just vanish in the next minute,” Jack said. “I expect this gang’ll attend my funeral, and there’ll be Fuzzies as long as any of you live, and longer. In a couple of million years, there won’t be any more humans, I suppose. Let’s just be as good to the Fuzzies we have as we can, and make them as happy as possible… Yes, Baby; you can sit on Pappy’s head if you want to.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE BEST TIME for telecast political speeches was between 2000 and 2100, when people were relaxing after dinner and before they started going out or before guests began to arrive. That was a little late for Beta Continent and impossibly so for Gamma, but Delta and Epsilon, to the west, could be reached with late night repeats and about eighty percent of the planetary population was concentrated here on Alpha Continent. Of late, Hugo Ingermann had been having trouble getting on the air at that time. The 2000-2100 spot, he was always told, was already booked, and it would usually turn out to be by the Citizen’s Government League which everybody knew but nobody could prove was masterminded by Leslie Coombes and Victor Grego, or it would be Ben Rainsford trying to alibi his Government, or by a lecture on the care and feeding of Fuzzies. But this time, somebody had goofed. This time, he’d been able to get the 2000-2100 spot himself. The voice of the announcer at the telecast station came out of the sound-outlet:
“… an important message, to all the citizens of the Colony, now, by virtue of the Pendarvis Decisions, enjoying, for the first time, the right of democratic self-government. The next voice you will hear will be that of the Honorable Hugo Ingermann, organizer and leader of the Planetary Prosperity Party. Mr. Ingermann.”
The green light came on, and the showback lightened; he lifted his hand in greeting.
“My… friends!” he began.
FREDERIC PENDARVIS WAS growing coldly angry. It wasn’t an organizational abstraction, the Native Adoption Bureau, that was being attacked; it was his wife, Claudette, and he was taking it personally, and a judge should never take anything personally. Why, he had actually been looking at the plump, bland faced man in the screen, his blue eyes wide with counterfeit sincerity, and wondering whom to send to him with a challenge. Dueling wasn’t illegal on Zarathustra, it wasn’t on most of the newer planets, but judges did not duel.
And the worst of it, he thought, was that the next time he had to rule against Ingermann in court, Ingermann would be sure, by some innuendo which couldn’t be established as overt contempt, to create an impression that it was due to personal vindictiveness.
“It is a disgraceful record,” Ingermann was declaring. “A record reeking with favoritism, inequity, class prejudice. In all, twelve hundred applications have been received. Over two hundred have been rejected outright, often on the most frivolous and insulting grounds…”
“Mental or emotional instability, inability to support or care for a Fuzzy, irresponsibility, bad character, undesirable home conditions,” Claudette, who was beginning to become angry herself, mentioned.
Pierrot and Columbine, on the floor, with a big Mobius strip somebody had made from a length of tape, looked up quickly and then, deciding that it was the man in the wall Mummy was mad at, went back to trying to figure out where the other side always went.
“And of the thousand applications, only three hundred and forty-five have been filled, although five hundred and sixty-six Fuzzies have been brought to this city since the Adoption Bureau was opened. One hundred and seventy-two of these applicants have received a Fuzzy each. One hundred and fifty-five have received two Fuzzies each. And eighteen especially favored ones have received a total of eighty-four Fuzzies.
“And almost without exception, all these Fuzzies have gone to socially or politically prominent persons, persons of wealth. You might as well make up your mind to it, a poor man has no chance whatever. Look who all have gotten Fuzzies under the Fuzzy laws, if one may so term the edicts of a bayonet imposed Governor. The first papers of adoption were issued to — guess who now? — Victor Grego, the manager-in-chief of the now Charterless Zarathustra Company. And the next pair went to Mrs. Frederic Pendarvis, and beside being the Chief Justice’s wife, who is she? Why, the head of the Adoption Bureau, of course. And look at the rest of these names! Nine tenths of them are Zarathustra Company executives.” He held up his hands, as though to hush an outburst of righteous indignation. “Now I won’t claim, I won’t even suppose, that there is any actual corruption or any bribery about this…”
“You damned well better hadn’t! If you do, I won’t sue you, I’ll shoot you,” Pendarvis barked.
“I won’t do either,” his wife told him calmly. “But I will answer him.
Under veridication, and that’s something Hugo Ingermann would never dare do.”
“Claudette!” He was shocked. “You wouldn’t do that? Not on telecast?”
“On telecast. You can’t ignore this sort of thing. If you do, you just admit it by default. There’s only one answer to slander, and that’s to prove the truth.”
“AND WHO’S PAYING for all this?” Ingermann demanded out of the screen. “The Government? When Space Commodore Napier presented us with this Government, and this Governor, at pistol point, there was exactly half a million sols to the account of the Colony in the Bank of Mallorysport. Since then, Governor Rainsford has borrowed approximately half a billion sols from the Banking Cartel. And how is Ben Rainsford going to repay them? By taking it out of you and me and all of us, as soon as he can get a Colonial Legislature to rubber-stamp his demands for him. And now, do you know what he is spending millions of your money on? On a project to increase the Fuzzy birthrate, so that you’ll have more and more Fuzzies for his friends to make pets of and for you to pay the bills for…”
“He is a God damned unmitigated liar!” Victor Grego said. “Except for a little work Ruth Ortheris and her husband and Pancho Ybarra and Lynne Andrews are doing out at Holloway’s, the Company’s paying for all that infant mortality research, and I’ll have to justify it to the stockholders.”
“How about some publicity on that?” Coombes asked.
“You’re the political expert; what do you think?”
“I think it would help. I think it would help us, and I think it would help Rainsford. Let’s not do it ourselves, though. Suppose I talk to Gus Brannhard, and have him advise Jack Holloway to leak it to the press?”
“Press is going to be after Mrs. Pendarvis for a statement. She knows what the facts are. Let her tell it.”
“He make talk about Fuzzies?” Diamond, who had been watching Hugo Ingermann fascinatedly, inquired.
“Yes. Not like Fuzzies. Bad Big One; tosh-ki Hagga. Pappy Vic not like him.”
“Neither,” Coombes said, “does Unka Leslie.”
Ahmed Khadra blew cigarette smoke insultingly at the face in the screen. Hugo Ingermann was saying:
“Well, if few politicians and Company executives are getting all the Fuzzies, why not make them pay for it, instead of the common people of the planet? Why not charge a fee for adoption papers, say five hundred to a thousand sols? Everybody who’s gotten Fuzzies so far could easily pay that. It wouldn’t begin to meet the cost of maintaining the Native Affairs Commission, but it would be something…”
So that was what the whole thing had been pointed toward. Make it expensive to adopt Fuzzies legally. A black market couldn’t compete with free Fuzzies, but let the Adoption Bureau charge five hundred sols apiece for them…
“So that’s what you’re after, you son of a Khooghra? A competitive market.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“YOU GOT THIS from one of my laboratory workers,” Jan Christiaan Hoenveld accused. “Charlotte Tresca, wasn’t it?”
He was calling from his private cubical in the corner of the biochemistry lab; through the glass partition behind him Juan Jimenez could see people working at benches, including, he thought, his informant. For the moment, he disregarded the older man’s tone and manner.
“That’s correct, Dr. Hoenveld. I met Miss Tresca at a cocktail party last evening. She and some other Science Center people were discussing the different phases of the Fuzzy research, and she mentioned having found hokfusine, or something very similar to it, in the digestive tracts of land-prawns. That had been a week ago; she had reported her findings to you immediately, and assumed that you had reported them to me. Now, I want to know why you didn’t.”
“Because it wasn’t worth reporting,” Hoenveld snapped. “In the first place, she wasn’t supposed to be working on land-prawns, or hokfusine” — he almost spat the word in contempt — “at all. She was supposed to be looking for NFM p in this mess of guts and tripes you’ve been dumping into my laboratory from all over the planet. And in the second place, it was merely a trace-presence of titanium, with which she had probably contaminated the test herself. The girl is an incurably careless and untidy worker. And finally,” Hoenveld raged, “I want to know by what right you question my laboratory workers behind my back…”
“Oh, you do? Well, they are not your laboratory workers, Dr. Hoenveld; they are employees of the Zarathustra Company, the same as you. Or I. And the biochemistry laboratory is not your private empire. It is a part of Science Center, of which I am division chief, and from where I sit the difference between you and Charlotte Tresca is barely perceptible to the naked eye. Is that clear, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld was looking at him as though a pistol had blown up in his hand. He was, in fact, mildly surprised at himself. A month ago, he wouldn’t have dreamed of talking so to anybody, least of all a man as much older than himself as Hoenveld, and one with Hoenveld’s imposing reputation.
But as division chief, he had to get things done, and there could be only one chief in the division.
“I am quite well aware of your recent and sudden promotion, Dr. Jimenez,” Hoenveld retorted acidly. “Over the heads of a dozen of your seniors.”
“Including yourself; well, you’ve just demonstrated the reason why you were passed over. Now, I want some work done, and if you can’t or won’t do it, I can promote somebody to replace you very easily.”
“What do you think we’ve been doing? Every ranger and hunter on the company payroll has been shooting everything from damnthings and wild veldbeest to ground-mice and dumping the digestive and reproductive tracts in my — I beg your pardon, I mean the Charterless Zarathustra Company’s — laboratory.”
“Have you found any trace of NFMP in any of them?”
“Negative. They don’t have the glands to secrete it; I have that on the authority of the comparative mammalian anatomists.”
“Then stop looking for it; I’ll order the specimen collecting stopped at once. Now, I want analyses of land-prawns made, and I want to know just what Miss Tresca found in them; whether it was really hokfusine, or anything similar to it, or just trace-presences of titanium, and I want to know how it gets into the land-prawns’ systems and where it concentrates there. I would suggest — correction, I direct — that Miss Tresca be put to work on that herself, and that she report directly to me.”
“WHAT’S YOUR OPINION of Chris Hoenveld, Ernst?” Victor Grego asked.
Mallin frowned — his standard think-seriously-and-weigh-every-word frown.
“Dr. Hoenveld is a most distinguished scientist. He has an encyclopedic grasp on his subject, an infallible memory, and an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No. A computer has all that, to a much higher degree, and a computer couldn’t make an original scientific discovery in a hundred million years. A computer has no imagination, and neither has Hoenveld.”
“Well, he has very little, I’ll admit. Why do you ask about him?”
“Juan Jimenez is having trouble with him.”
“I can believe it,” Mallin said. “Hoenveld has one characteristic a computer lacks. Egotism. Has Jimenez complained to you?”
“Nifflheim, no; he’s running Science Center without yelling to Big Brother for help. I got this off the powder-room and coffee-stand telegraph, to which I have excellent taps. Juan cut him down to size; he’s doing all right.”
“Well, how about the NFM p problem?”
“Nowhere, on hyperdrive. The Fuzzies just manufacture it inside themselves, and nobody knows why. It seems mainly to be associated with the digestive system, and gets from there into the blood-stream, and into the gonads, in both sexes, from there. Thirty-six births, so far; three viable.”
From the terrace outside came the happy babble of Fuzzy voices. They were using their Fuzzyphones to talk to one another; wanted to talk like the Hagga. Poor little tail-enders of
a doomed race.
THE WHOLE DAMNED thing was getting too big for comfort, Jack Holloway thought. A month ago, there’d only been Gerd and Ruth and Lynne Andrews and Pancho Ybarra, and George Lunt, and the men George had brought when he’d transferred from the Constabulary. They all had cocktails together before dinner, and ate at one table, and had bull-sessions in the evenings, and everybody had known what everybody else was doing. And there had only been forty or fifty Fuzzies, beside his and George’s and Gerd’s and Ruth’s.
Now Gerd had three assistants, and Ruth had dropped work on Fuzzy psychology and was helping him with whatever he was doing, and what that was he wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t quite sure what anybody was doing, anymore. And Pancho was practically commuting to and from Mallorysport, and Ernst Mallin was out at least once a week. Funny, too; he used to think Mallin was a solid, three-dimensional bastard, and now he found he rather liked him. Even Victor Grego was out, one weekend, and everybody liked him.
Lynne had a couple of helpers, too, and a hospital and clinic, and there was a Fuzzy school, where they were taught Lingua Terra and how to use Fuzzyphones and about the strange customs of the Hagga. Some old hen Ruth had kidnapped from the Mallorysport schools was in charge of it, or thought she was; actually Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Lizzie Borden and Dillinger were running it.
And he and George Lunt couldn’t yell back and forth to each other any more, because their offices, at opposite ends of the long hut, were partitioned off and separated by a hundred and twenty feet of middle office, full of desks and business machines and roboclerks, and humans working with them. And he had a secretary, now, and she had a secretary, or at least a stenographer, of her own.
Gerd van Riebeek came in from the outside, tossing his hat on top of a microbook-case and unbuckling his pistol.
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