Land-prawns were very important to Fuzzies and a great nuisance to Terrans. They got into gardens; they got into machinery; they got into campsites; they got into bedding— painfully pinching the owner of the bedding when he tried to get into it. They got into wiring and ate the insulation; they got into dirty laundry and ate holes in your socks. What the Terrans called a land-prawn the Fuzzies called a zatku; a big pseudo-crustacean, about a foot long, twelve-legged and possessed of two pairs of clawed mandibles. Fuzzies hunted zatku avidly and preferred them to any other food—until they tasted EMERGENCY FIELD RATION. EXTRATERRESTRIAL SERVICE TYPE THREE. Fuzzies liked zatku, but they loved Extee-Three. If it hadn’t been for the land-prawns starting to move south into the big woods to get away from a drought, the Fuzzies would have stayed in the unexplored country of northern Beta Continent and it would have been years longer before any Terran made contact with them.
At first, it was a mystery why Fuzzies were crazy about Extee-Three, until the greater mystery developed of why they loved some Extee-Three and spit out other Extee-Three when both had been prepared identically.
Actually, almost identically.
A Company Science Center chemist named Charlotte Tresca had proceeded along completely unscientific lines and found that Fuzzies were nuts about only Extee-Three that had been prepared in titanium cookers. It contained a molecule, mostly carbon-oxygen-hydrogen, with five atoms of titanium hooked onto it. Sixty-four atoms in the long-chain organic molecule; five of them titanium. The molecule amounted to about one part per ten million of the Extee-Three.
Fuzzies could tell the difference by taste.
Pretty keen tasting.
Ms. Tresca had named the molecule hokfusine, from the name for Extee-Three in Lingua Fuzzy—hoksu-fusso, wonderful food. That had annoyed the lab chief no end; Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld had planned to name the substance hoenveldine, thus assuring his niche in scientific history, but the term hokfusine was already in widespread usage before he could make up his mind that Charlotte Tresca’s research was valid.
Outside Jack Holloway’s bungalow, the Zarathustran sunset was blazing orange and red in the western sky. The slanting, ferruginous sunlight cast a coppery glow on the stocky man with a square face who was walking across the footbridge over the creek toward Holloway’s house; and silhouetted the five little figures who followed behind him, tinting the soft, golden fur which covered their bodies to a russet red in the falling twilight.
They were erect bipeds, about two feet tall, with round, humanoid faces, little snub noses, big ears, and wide eyes that were very large and appealing. They all wore green canvas pouches made of TFMC ammunition pouches— ”’shodda-bags”—on a shoulder-strap, two-inch silver I.D. discs on a chain about their necks, and nothing else. Each of them had a weapon in one hand—a six-inch, leaf-shaped blade on a foot-long steel shaft, with a steel ball welded to the butt end for balance. They were the Fuzzies adopted by George and his men at Constabulary Station Beta Fifteen. The silver discs around their necks were each engraved with the name of the bearer Dillinger, Dr. Crippen, Ned Kelley, Lizzie Borden, and Calamity Jane.
Just like a bunch of cops, to hang names like that on innocent Fuzzies. But Fuzzies didn’t care much what names the Terrans gave them. Fuzzies were glad to be with the Big Ones—the Hagga—and have fun with them, and be protected, and be loved, and to love the Hagga and make them happy. Plenty of time later to find out what all those names meant. There was still a lot for Fuzzies to learn—so many things to learn from the Big Ones.
Jack’s Fuzzies heard George Lunt and his family of Fuzzies approaching the house before the Terran humans did, as always. They all jumped up and ran out through the little spring-loaded doorway Jack had built for them.
The Fuzzies went pelting across the open space in front of the house to greet the visitors. They lapsed into their own ultrasonic speaking range, which was inaudible to Terrans except as an occasional “Yeek.” There were a lot of “yeeks,” with different inflections, as all eleven adult Fuzzies frolicked and pushed and rolled on the ground with their friends.
After the Fuzzy-romp had spent itself, the whole spectacle was repeated, at a lesser intensity, as the Fuzzies greeted their Terran friends: “Heyo Unka Jack. Heyo, Unka Gerd, Auntie Woof, Auntie Win,” all garbled together in a brief, delightful jumble of controlled bedlam.
When that was all over, George Lunt said anticlimactically, “I thought the kids might like to have a visit.” He took off his pistol and beret and hung them on a peg near the door, signifying that he considered himself off duty. He laid a slender sheaf of papers on Jack’s desk-table.
George’s Fuzzies were looking over the complex multiple design on the floor, walking respectfully around it, squatting down to view it from different angles, and asking questions of Jack’s Fuzzies about the composition.
That had been one of the first things to tip off Jack Holloway and Ben Rainsford that Fuzzies might be sapient; they had color perception and artistic sense, and made useless things just because they were pretty to look at.
Jack bent down and spoke to the group. “Aki-josso-so’t’heet? How about esteefee?” Yes, they would love a treat, especially Extee-Three.
“What about you, George?” Jack asked. “Aki-josso-so whiskey?”
“Hokay,” George said. “Hoksu. Do-bizzo.” He flopped down in a chair and exchanged greetings with the others in the room, all of whom he knew quite well by now.
Jack went into the kitchen and got two of the blue labeled tins down from a cabinet. He divided the Extee-Three into twelve equal portions, cutting up the moist, gingerbread-colored cake with a knife, then laid out the pieces on a plate. With the plate in one hand and George’s drink in the other, he returned to the living room, handed the glass to George, and set the plate down on the floor among the Fuzzies.
Each Fuzzy picked up a piece and began to munch on it appreciatively—although Baby Fuzzy was making rather more crumbs than was necessary as he maneuvered his small mouth around a chunk. Mamma Fuzzy gave him a smack and reminded him of good manners.
“What I still can’t figure out,” George was saying, “is, if Fuzzies are so smart—maybe smarter than we are, like Gerd says—why is it they never discovered fire?”
Lynne Andrews smiled. “Still stuck on applying the priorities of Homo s. terra as a criterion for sapience, George?” she said, almost tauntingly.
George looked annoyed. “Well how else can you measure things except by a universal body of rules?”
“Oh, George,” Gerd said, “that talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn’t a real test for sapience at all. It’s something they cooked up to slow down colonists on frontier planets who would exploit hell out of the natives and then claim afterward that they didn’t know the natives were really sapient.”
“Came out of the Loki enslavements, didn’t it?” Jack asked. He squinted at the ceiling. “Fourth century. Thereabouts, anyway.”
Lynne Andrews nodded. “What you have to understand,” she said to George, “is that Fuzzies don’t think the same way we do. What’s important to us isn’t necessarily important to them. Counting and numbers, for instance.”
“Records, for another,” Ruth said. “Even after a year or so of intense study, what we know about Fuzzies is just a tiny spot of light, surrounded by a dim twilight area of what we think we know—and most of that is probably wrong. Beyond that there is still a vast darkness, filled with things that will surprise us when we stumble up against them.”
“I suppose you’re right,” George said. “I have a cop’s mind; it likes there to be square holes for all the square pegs.”
Gerd chuckled. “Well, Fuzzies certainly don’t do that; they’re more like a jigsaw puzzle. This is the ninth sapient race we’ve found in about five centuries of star travel. I’ve had direct experience with seven of them; and Fuzzies are like no primitive people I’ve ever seen.” He motioned toward the group in the center of the floor, who were just now polishing up all the cr
umbs from their esteefee treat. “You’ll never hear any gobbledygook from this gang about a demon eating the sun during an eclipse.”
“You know, maybe, that Victor Grego has models of the planet and the moons in his office that are suspended in the air and revolve on their own individual Abbott lift-and-drive contra-gravs. Well, the sun is represented by a fixed spotlight. When there was an eclipse of the sun, Diamond watched the umbra shadow move across the planet model for a while. Then he went over and felt it. Then he looked back over his shoulder and took a few sample sightings of the alignments and started to laugh.”
“He laughed?” Lynne said.
“Sure,” Gerd replied. “He knew what it was right away. ‘Just like in the big woods,’ he said, ‘when moon mix up light and dark.’”
“Any of you ever run across low paleolithic people who understand the mechanics of a solar eclipse?”
No one had.
Chapter Ten
“So when the goddamn dog looked like it was going to jump me,” the First Marine said, “I whipped out my nine-millimeter and shot a big hole in him.”
The second Marine shook his head. “You should’ve called in the E.O.D., Ev—laid the old ‘danger to life and property’ on him, and then shot the damned dog.”
“I didn’t have time to think, Jim,” the first Marine said.
“So what happened?” Jim asked.
Ev made a sour face. “Well, the guy what owned the dog made a big stink about it—said he paid a fortune to bring it out from Terra—and the Old Man suspended me to quarters for thirty days.”
Everett Diehl was a corporal and James Spelvin was a junior sergeant. Apparently neither one of them ever had “time to think,” because they both had more hash marks than chevrons. That made sense, for otherwise they would not now be sitting in a Junktown dive called ‘The Bitter End,’ waiting for Raul Laporte to collect the regular vigorish on the money they owed him—money borrowed from Laporte and lost back to him at his own gaming tables.
Though technically illegal, Laporte’s gambling operations were no particular secret. If one went past the end of the bar, down the wide corridor, and through the double doors, one would be admitted to almost every game of chance ever invented—from electronic probability betting to cards and dice; and on all of them a seven percent guaranteed profit for the house built in.
All the gambling equipment was leased from Spike Heenan—honorable thieves never infringed on each other’s specialties. By the same token, the entertainment in the front portion was booked through one of Ivan Bowlby’s entertainment agencies; musicians and female vocalists, mostly, like the group that now occupied the low stage at one end of the main lounge.
Four instrumentalists were backing a fragile-looking blonde who was singing in a reedy voice that sounded as delicate as she looked.
“Well, it could have been worse,” Jim Spelvin said. “The Major, you know—he could have cut a stripe off you, too.”
Diehl nodded without enthusiasm. He wanted to change the subject. “Who’s the new singer down there?” he asked.
“Why, that’s Gwen,” Spelvin said. “You remember Gwennie.”
“Yeah?” Diehl said, squinting through the cloudy air, “I thought she was at ‘Pandora’s Box’.”
“She’s been over here for two-three weeks, now,” Spelvin said with some surprise.
“I’ve been in barracks for a month,” Diehl growled.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot,” Spelvin said. “Y’know, now that she’s working over here, do you suppose she’s Laporte’s private stock?”
Diehl started to answer, but Spelvin tugged at his sleeve and nodded toward the man moving in their direction through the smoky, crowded beer hall.
Raul Laporte was a tall, swarthy man, with a black handlebar mustache. His black hair was worn long on one side in a single braid that lay close to his scalp and ran down behind his left ear, then fell loose onto his shoulder and was tied off with a dirty ribbon. The braid was rumored to cover a large, ugly scar, but no one ever asked Laporte if this was true. He had the look of a man who would cut your throat just for the fun of it.
Laporte spun a chair around backwards and sat down facing the two Marines. He took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and looked at them. He said nothing.
Diehl and Spelvin each produced some folded currency and pushed the bills across the table, smiling nervously. “Good afternoon, Mr. Laporte,” Spelvin said. “Business sure looks good today. Nice crowd.”
Laporte’s mouth smiled at them. His eyes did not. He leafed through the notebook, then fingered the two sheaves of bills. “You’re ten sols short,” he said to Spelvin, then turned to Diehl. “You’re five short.”
The Marines both squirmed slightly in their seats. “I sure am sorry about that, Mr. Laporte,” Diehl said. “But, y’see I was on restriction to barracks and I didn’t get to rotate to Xerxes this month. Y ‘see there’s a guy on Xerxes what owes me some money, and just as soon as I get up there to get it, I’ll get it to you.”
“Not my problem,” Laporte said. “Suppose you was to win some money from me playing Double-O, or Gombjuli, or something, and I said, ‘Gosh, Corporal, I just can’t pay off right now. How about next week?’ You wouldn’t like that much, would you?”
Diehl looked uncomfortable, then took a sudden and great interest in a raveling on his jacket cuff.
“Well?” Laporte said in a slightly louder voice. “Would you?”
“No, sir,” Diehl mumbled.
“What?” Laporte said. “I can’t hear you.”
Diehl gave him a pained look. “I don’t guess I’d like it. No, sir.” Then, he quickly added, “But I’m sure I can get it to you by next week.”
Laporte said nothing. He stared at Diehl for a moment with expressionless, cold eyes, then turned toward Spelvin, swiveling the chair slightly as he reached into his hip pocket. He brought out a large clasp knife, opened it up, and began cleaning his nails. “What about you?” he said to Spelvin without looking up.
“I can get it to you by then, too,” Spelvin said. “I’m sure of it. See, they been workin’ us pretty hard and nobody’s had much chance to get around and—”
“I don’t like bein’ short-changed,” Laporte said in a quiet voice.
“I ain’t trying to short-change you, Mr. Laporte. I just don’t have all the money,” Spelvin said.
Diehl tugged at his buddy’s elbow. “Jim,” he said, “maybe Mr. Laporte would like to hear what we saw in the valley up there.”
Laporte looked up, mildly interested. “What valley?”
“Up on north Beta,” Spelvin said. “See, we been flying patrol up there and doin’ survey mapping at the same time.”
“Our platoon is attached to the Native Protection outfit,” Diehl chimed in, “an’ they got this reservation on north Beta for the Fuzzies—”
“I’m well aware of that.” Laporte cut him off in mid-sentence. “What did you see? I can’t know whether I care a damn about the information until you tell me what you saw.”
“Why, in this big valley up there,” Diehl said. “There’s some hutments up there—little lean-tos, like—and what looks like fields—not really regular, but like they’d been— uh—cultivated. There ain’t nothing growin’ in them right now, but you can see where there used to be.”
Laporte laughed—genuinely this time. “Why you dumb jarheads,” he said. “You tryin’ to tell me there’s tilled ground on north Beta?”
“Well, that’s what we saw,” Spelvin protested.
“Nobody but Fuzzies live on north Beta,” Laporte said. “And everybody knows Fuzzies ain’t farmers.”
Spelvin looked scared, but he answered. “Well, we seen it,” he said, “plain as anything.”
Diehl shook his head. “We wouldn’ lie to you, Mr. Laporte. We know what we saw.”
Laporte relaxed. “All right,” he said, “I can’t call you liars because I haven’t been there myself, but this wouldn’t be the first
time you’ve lied to me. Now, get this straight, your ‘information’ isn’t worth a pinch of snot. But I’m going to tell my bartender to give you a beer apiece—just because I wanna meet you more than halfway. And you let me hear about you buying a beer anywhere else in this town,”—he waved the clasp knife, presumably to include all of Mallorysport—“before you square up accounts with me, and I’ll take enough skin off your backs—with this—to get my money back from the tannery. You hear me good?”
“Yessir,” Diehl said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Laporte,” Spelvin chimed in.
After Laporte had given the high sign to the bartender to lavish two large beers on the Marines, he shook his head and put away the knife. Blunderers, he thought. Can’t do anything for themselves—not without somebody leaning on them all the time. Well, if I keep them on the hook, they’ll sooner—or—later come up with some information that’s worth a couple of sols.
The Right Reverend Father Thomas Aquinas Gordon snorted in disgust. “Mr. O’Gorman,” he said, “this place is a damned disgrace. I don’t know why I’m bothering to waste my time looking at it.”
The object of his displeasure raised both hands heavenward in a placating gesture. Mr. O’Gorman was an incongruous Mr. O’Gorman. His little black shoe-button eyes were closely set above a magnificent nose which flourished over much of his olive-skinned face. His full name was Hiram Mustaphah O’Gorman, and he was a rental agent and real-estate broker in Junktown.
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