Fuzzy Sapiens

by H. Beam Piper

  WHEN MALCOLM DUNBAR lighted his screen, Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld appeared in it. He didn’t waste time on greetings or other superfluities.

  “I think we have something, Mr. Dunbar. There is a component in both the Odin Dietetics and the Argentine Syntho-Foods products that is absent from our own product. It is not one of the synthetic nutrient or vitamin or hormone compounds which are part of the field-ration formula; it is not a compound regularly synthesized, either commercially or experimentally in any laboratory I know of. It’s a rather complicated long-chain organic molecule; most of it seems to be oxygen-hydrogen-carbon, but there are a few atoms of titanium in it. If that’s what the Fuzzies find lacking in our products, all I can say is that they have the keenest taste perception of any creature, sapient or nonsapient, that I have ever heard of.”

  “All right, then; they have. I saw them reject our Extee-Three in disgust, and then Mr. Grego gave them a little of the Argentine stuff, and they ate it with the greatest pleasure. How much of this unknown compound is there in Extee-Three?”

  “About one part in ten thousand,” Hoenveld said.

  “And the titanium?”

  “Five atoms out of sixty-four in the molecule.”

  “That’s pretty keen tasting.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose it’s in the wheat; the rest of that stuff is synthesized.”

  “Well, naturally, Mr. Dunbar. That would seem to be the inescapable conclusion,” Hoenveld said, patronizingly.

  “We have quite a bit of metallic titanium, imported in fabricated form before we got our own steel-mills working. Do you think you could synthesize that molecule, Dr. Hoenveld?”

  Hoenveld gave him a look of undisguised contempt. “Certainly, Mr. Dunbar. In about a year and a half to two years. As I understand, the object of manufacturing the stuff here is to supply a temporary shortage which will be relieved in about six months, when imported Extee-Three begins coming in from Marduk. Unless I am directly and specifically ordered to do so by Mr. Grego, I will not waste my time on trying.”

  OF COURSE, IT was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or introduced something that would ferment to produce C2H5OH and around 1730-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller thought it was a religious observance.

  Maybe it was, at that.

  Sipping his own cocktail, Gerd van Riebeek ignored, for a moment, the conversation in which he had become involved and eavesdropped on his wife and Claudette Pendarvis and Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn.

  “Well, we want to keep them here for at least a week before we let people take them away,” the Chief Justice’s wife was saying. “You’ll have to stay with us for a day or so, Ruth, and help us teach them what to expect in their new homes.”

  “You’re going to have to educate the people who adopt them,” Sandra Glenn said. “What to expect and what not to expect from Fuzzies. I think, evening classes. Language, for one thing.”

  “You know,” Mallin said, “I’d like to take a few Fuzzies around through the other units of the sanatorium, to visit the patients. The patients here would like it. They don’t have an awful lot of fun, you know.”

  That was new for Ernst Mallin. He never seemed to recall that Mallin had thought having fun was important, before. Maybe the Fuzzies had taught him that it was.

  The group he was drinking with were Science Center and Public Health people. One of them, a woman gynecologist, was wondering what Chris Hoenveld had found out, so far.

  “What can he find out?” Raynier, the pathologist, asked. “He only has the one specimen, and it probably isn’t there at all, it’s probably something in the mother’s metabolism. It might be radioactivity, but that would only produce an occasional isolated case, and from what you’ve seen, it seems to be a racial characteristic. I think you’ll find it in the racial dietary habits.”

  “Land-prawns,” somebody suggested. “As far as I know, nothing else eats them but Fuzzies; that right, Gerd?”

  “Yes. We always thought they had no natural enemies at all, till we found out about the Fuzzies. But it’s been our observation that Fuzzies won’t take anything that’ll hurt them.”

  “They won’t take anything that gives them a bellyache or a hangover, no. They can establish a direct relationship there. But whatever caused this defective birth we were investigating, and I agree that that’s probably a common thing with Fuzzies, was something that acted on a level the Fuzzies couldn’t be aware of. I think there’s a good chance that eating land-prawns may be responsible.”

  “Well, let’s find out. Put Chris Hoenveld to work on that.”

  “You put him to work on it. Or get Victor Grego to; he won’t throw Grego out of his lab. Chris is sore enough about this Fuzzy business as it is.”

  “Well, we’ll have to study more than one fetus. We have a hundred and fifty Fuzzies here, we ought to find something out... ”

  “Isolate all the pregnant females; get Mrs. Pendarvis to withhold them from adoption... ”

  “... may have to perform a few abortions... ”

  “... microsurgery; fertilized ova... ”

  That wasn’t what he and Ruth and Jack Holloway had had in mind, when they’d brought this lot to Mallorysport. But they had to find out; if they didn’t, in a few more generations there might be no more Fuzzies at all. If a few of them suffered, now...

  Well, hadn’t poor Goldilocks had to be killed before the Fuzzies were recognized for the people they were?

  “TITANIUM,” VICTOR GREGO said. “Now that’s interesting.”

  “Is that all you can call it, Mr. Grego?” Dunbar, in the screen, demanded. “I call it impossible. I was checking up. Titanium, on this planet, is damn near as rare as calcium on Uller. It’s present, and that’s all; I’ll bet most of the titanium on Zarathustra was brought here in fabricated form between the time the planet was discovered and seven years ago when we got our steel-mill going.”

  That was a big exaggeration, of course. It existed, but it was a fact that they’d never been able to extract it by any commercially profitable process, and on Zarathustra they used light-alloy steel for everything for which titanium was used elsewhere. So a little of it got picked up, as a trace-element, in wheat grown on Terra or on Odin, but it was useless to hope for it in Zarathustran wheat.

  “It looks,” he said, “as though we’re stuck, Mal. Do you think Chris Hoenveld could synthesize that molecule? We could add it to the other ingredients... ”

  “He says he could—in six months to a year. He refuses to try unless you order him categorically to.”

  “And by that time, we’ll have all the Extee-Three we want. Well, a lot of Fuzzies, including mine, are going to have to do without, then.”

  He blanked the screen and lit a cigarette and looked at the globe of Zarathustra, which Henry Stenson had running on time again and which he could interpret like a clock. Be another hour till Sandra got back from the new Adoption Center; she’d have to pick up Diamond at Government House. And Leslie wouldn’t be in for cocktails this evening; he was over on Epsilon Continent, talking to people about things he didn’t want to discuss by screen. Ben Rainsford had finally gotten around to calling for an election for delegates to a constitutional convention, and they wanted to line up candidates of their own. It looked as though Mr. Victor Grego would have cocktails with the manager-in-chief of the Charterless Zarathustra Company, this evening. Might as well have them here.

  Titanium, he thought disgustedly. It would be something like that. What was it they called the stuff? Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything. An idea suddenly danced just out of reach. He stopped, halfway from the desk to the cabinet, his eyes closed. Then he caught it, and dashed for the communication screen, punching Malcolm Dunbar’s call combination.

  It was
a few minutes before Dunbar answered; he had his hat and coat on.

  “I was just going out, Mr. Grego.”

  “So I see. That man Vespi, the one who worked for Odin Dietetics; is he still around?”

  “Why, no. He left twenty minutes ago, and I don’t know how to reach him right away.”

  “No matter; get him in the morning. Listen, the pressure cookers, the ones you use to cook the farina for bulk-matter. What are they made of?”

  “Why, light nonox-steel; our manufacture. Why?”

  “Ask Vespi what they used for that purpose on Odin. Don’t suggest the answer, but see if it wasn’t titanium.”

  Dunbar’s eyes widened. He’d heard about the chemical nymphomania of titanium, too.

  “Sure; that’s what they’d use, there. And at Argentine Syntho-Foods, too. Listen, suppose I give the police an emergency-call request; they could find Joe in half an hour.”

  “Don’t bother; tomorrow morning’s good enough. I want to try something first.”

  He blanked the screen, and called Myra Fallada. She never left the office before he did.

  “Myra; call out and get me five pounds of pure wheat farina, and be sure it’s made from Zarathustran wheat. Have it sent up to my apartment, fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Fifteen minutes from now do?” she asked. “What’s it for; the Little Monster? All right, Mr. Grego.”

  He forgot about the drink he was going to have with Mr. Victor Grego. You had a drink when the work was done, and there was still work to do.

  THERE WAS CLATTERING in the kitchenette when Sandra Glenn brought Diamond into the Fuzzy-room. She opened the door between and looked through, and Diamond crowded past her knees for a look, too. Mr. Grego was cooking something, in a battered old stew pan she had never seen around the place before. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Hi, Sandra. Heyo, Diamond; use Fuzzyphone, Pappy Vic no get ear-thing.”

  “What make do, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked.

  “That’s what I want to know, too.”

  “Sandra, keep your fingers crossed; when this stuff’s done and has cooled off, we’re going to see how Diamond likes it. I think we have found out what’s the matter with that Extee-Three.”

  “Estee-fee? You make Estee-fee? Real? Not like other?” Diamond wanted to know.

  “You eat,” Pappy Vic said. “Tell if good. Pappy Vic not know.”

  “Well, what is it?” she asked.

  “Hoenveld found what was different about it.” The explanation was rather complicated; she had been exposed to, rather than studied, chemistry. She got the general idea; the Extee-Three the Fuzzies liked had been cooked in titanium.

  “That’s what this stew pan is; part of a camp cooking kit I brought here from Terra.” He gave the white mess in the pan a final stir and lifted it from the stove, burning his finger and swearing; just like a man in a kitchen. “Now, as soon as this slop’s cool... ”

  Diamond smelled it, and wanted to try it right away. He had to wait, though, until it was cool. Then they carried the pan, it had a treacherous-looking folding handle, out to the Fuzzy-room, and Mr. Grego spooned some onto Diamond’s plate, and Diamond took his little spoon and tasted, cautiously. Then he began shoveling it into his mouth ravenously.

  “The Master Mind crashes through again,” she said. “He really likes it.” Diamond had finished what was on his plate. “You like?” she asked, in Fuzzy. “Want more?”

  “Give him the rest of it, Sandra. I’m going to call Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld, and suggest an experiment for him to try. And after that, Miss Glenn, will you honor me by having a cocktail with me?”

  JACK HOLLOWAY LAUGHED. “So that’s it. When did you find out?”

  “Mallin just screened me; he just got it from Grego,” Gerd van Riebeek, in the screen, said. “They’re going to start tearing out all the stainless-steel cookers right away, and replace them with titanium. Jack, have you any titanium cooking utensils?”

  “No. Everything we have here is steel. We have sheet titanium; the house and the sheds and the old hangar are all sheet-titanium. We might be able to make something... ” He stopped short. “Gerd, we don’t have to cook the food in titanium. We can cook titanium in the food. Cut up some chunks and put them in the kettles. It would work the same way.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerd said. “I never thought of that. I’ll bet nobody else did, either.”

  DR. JAN CHRISTIAAN Hoenveld was disgusted and chagrined and embarrassed, and mostly disgusted.

  It had been gratifying to discover a hitherto unknown biochemical, especially one existing unsuspected in a well known, long manufactured, and widely distributed commercial product. He could understand how it had happened; a by-effect in one of the manufacturing processes, and since the stuff had been proven safe and nutritious for humans and other life-forms having similar biochemistry and metabolism, nobody had bothered until some little animals—no, people, that had been scientifically established—had detected its absence by taste. Things like that happened all the time. He had been proud of the accomplishment; he’d been going to call the newly discovered substance hoenveldine. He could have worked out a way of synthesizing it, too, but by proper scientific methods it would have taken over a year, and he knew it, and he’d said so to everybody.

  And now, within a day, it had been synthesized, if that were the word for it, by a rank amateur, a layman, a complete non-scientist. And not in a laboratory but in a kitchen, with no equipment but a battered old stew pan!

  And the worst of it was that this layman, this empiric, was his employer. The claims of the manager-in-chief of the Zarathustra Company simply couldn’t be brushed off. Not by a Company scientist.

  Well, Grego had found out what he wanted; he could stop worrying about that. He had important work to do; an orderly, long-term study of the differences between Zarathustran and Terran biochemistry. The differences were minute, but they existed, and they had to be understood, and they had to be investigated in an orderly, scientific manner.

  And now, they wanted him to go haring off, hit-or-miss, after this problem about Fuzzy infant mortality and defective births, and they didn’t even know any such problem existed. They had one, just one, case—that six-month fetus the Andrews girl had brought in—and they had a lot of unsubstantiated theorizing by Gerd van Riebeek, pure conclusion jumping. And now they wanted him to find out if eating land-prawns caused these defective births which they believed, on the basis of one case and a lot of supposition, to exist. Maybe after years of observation of hundreds of cases they might have some justification, but...

  He rose from the chair at the desk in the corner of the laboratory and walked slowly among the workbenches. Ten men and women, eight of them working on new projects that had been started since young van Riebeek had started after this mare’s-nest of his, all of them diverted from serious planned research. He stopped at one bench, where a woman was working.

  “Miss Tresca, can’t you keep your bench in better order than this?” he scolded. “Keep things in their places. What are you working on?”

  “Oh, a hunch I had, about this hokfusine.”

  Hunch! That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too many hunches and not enough sound theory.

  “About what?”

  “Oh, the titanium thing. It’s a name Mr. Grego suggested, from a couple of Fuzzy words, hoku fusso, wonderful food. It’s what the Fuzzies call Extee-Three.”

  Hokfusine, indeed. Now they were getting the Fuzzy language into scientific nomenclature.

  “Well, just forget about your hunch,” he told her. “There are a lot of samples of organic matter, blood, body secretions, hormones, tissue, from pregnant female Fuzzies that they want analyzed. I don’t suppose it makes any more sense than your hunch, but they want analyses immediately. They want everything immediately, it seems. And straighten up that clutter on your bench. How often do I have to tell you that order is the first virtue in scientific work?”

  CHA
PTER SIXTEEN

  THEY WERE IN Jack’s living room, and it looked almost exactly as it had the first night Gerd van Riebeek had seen it, when he and Ruth and Juan Jimenez had come out to see the Fuzzies, without the least idea that the validity of the Company’s charter would be involved. All the new office equipment that had cluttered it had gone, in the two weeks he and Ruth had been in Mallorysport, and there was just the sturdy, comfortable furniture Jack had made himself, and the damnthing and the bush-goblin and veldbeest skins on the floor, and the gunrack with the tangle of bedding under it.

  There were just five of them, as there had been that other evening, three months, or was it three ages, ago. Juan Jimenez and Ben Rainsford were absent, in Mallorysport, but they had been replaced by Pancho Ybarra, lounging in one of the deep chairs, and Lynne Andrews, on the couch beside Ruth. Jack sat in the armchair at his table-desk, trying to keep Baby Fuzzy, on his lap, from climbing up to sit on his head. On the floor, the adult Fuzzies—just Jack’s own family; this was their place, and the others didn’t intrude here—were in the middle of the room, playing with the things that had been brought back from Mallorysport. The kind of playthings Fuzzies liked; ingenuity-challenging toys for putting together shapes and colors.

  He was glad they weren’t playing with their molecule-model kit. He’d seen enough molecule models in the last two weeks to last him a lifetime.

  “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, NFMp, 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.”