Fuzzy Sapiens

by H. Beam Piper

  “Oh, they’ll get out all right. They all made three trips already without anything going wrong, didn’t they?” he said. “And don’t talk so damned loud.”

  That was what he was worried about, as much as anything. The whole company police force was concentrated around the place where he and Novaes were waiting. They were outside the actual police zone, but all the other emergency services—fire protection, radiation safety, the first-aid dispensaries and the ambulance hangars—were all around them, and sound carried an incredible distance through these shafts and air ducts and conduits.

  “We have enough, now,” Phil said. “Let’s just pick up and go, now. Why, we must have fifty million already.”

  “Bug out and leave the Fuzzies?”

  “Hell with the Fuzzies,” Phil said.

  “Hell with the Fuzzies, hell! Haven’t you found out yet that Fuzzies can talk? We’ve spent two months, now, cooped up indoors, because that Fuzzy Grego found put the finger on us. We’ve got to get all five back, and we’ve got to finish them off. If we don’t and the police get hold of them, they’ll finish us.”

  Phil, who was stooping by the rectangular outlet, looked up.

  “I hear something. A couple of them, talking.”

  He turned on his hearing aid and put his head to the opening beside Phil’s. Yes, a couple of Fuzzies talking; arguing about how far it was yet.

  “As soon as they come out, let’s just shove them into the chute,” Phil argued, nodding toward the access-port to the trash-chute, that went seven hundred feet down to the mass-energy converters.

  That was where the Fuzzies would go, all of them, when the sunstones were all out of the vault. But the sunstones weren’t all out. He doubted if they had more than half of them, yet.

  “No, not yet. Here they come; grab the first one.”

  Novaes caught the Fuzzy as he came out. He caught the second. They were both carrying loaded packs. He slipped the straps down over the Fuzzy’s arms and gave him to Novaes to hold, then loosened the drawstrings, emptying the stones into the open suitcase along with the other gems. Then he put the rucksack onto the Fuzzy’s back.

  “All right. In with you. Go get stones.”

  The Fuzzy said something, he wasn’t sure what, in a complaining tone. Fusso; that meant food, or eat. Important word to a Fuzzy.

  “No. You get stone; then I give fusso.” He shoved the Fuzzy back into the ventilation duct. “Let’s unload yours and send him back. As long as there’s sunstones in there, we want them.”

  A UNIFORMED SERGEANT was holding down Chief Steefer’s desk, smoking what was probably one of the Chief’s cigars and talking to a girl in another screen. Across the room, Ernst Mallin, Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn were talking to a Fuzzy who sat on the edge of a table, contentedly munching Extee-Three. Khadra was in evening clothes, and Sandra was wearing something glamorous with a lot of black lace. She was also wearing a sunstone which he hadn’t noticed before, on the third finger of her left hand. Wanted, Fuzzy-Sitter. Apply Victor Grego.

  They set Diamond and his friends on the floor; he thanked and dismissed the men who had helped him with them. As soon as they saw the Fuzzy on the table, they raised an outcry and ran forward; the Fuzzy on the table dropped to the floor and hurried to meet them.

  “What did you get from him?” he asked.

  “Herckerd and Novaes, natch,” Khadra said, disgustedly. “All the time I was looking for a black market that wasn’t there, they were right here in town somewhere, being taught to steal sunstones. Fagin-racket, by God!”

  “Herckerd and Novaes and who else?”

  “Two other men, and one woman. And just the five Fuzzies Herckerd and Novaes brought in along with Diamond. They were somewhere not more than fifteen minutes by air from Company House all the time. This gang taught them to go through ventilator ducts, and open the screen-covers on the inlets, and use rope ladders and get stones out of cabinets. They must have had a mockup of the gem-vault and the ventilation system. They had to practice all the time. If they cleaned out the cabinets and brought the stones, river-gravel, I suppose, out, they got Extee-Three. If they goofed, they were punished, electric shock, I suppose, and shoved in a dungeon with nothing to eat. You know, they could be shot for that.”

  “They oughtn’t to be shot; they ought to be burned at the stake!” Sandra cried angrily.

  Gentler sex, indeed! “Well, I’ll settle for shooting, if we can catch them. Done anything in aid of that yet?”

  “Not too much,” Mallin regretted. “His vocabulary is limited, and he hasn’t words for much that he experienced. We’ve been trying to learn his route through the ventilation system. He knows how he went in to the gem-vault, but he simply can’t verbalize it.”

  “Diamond; you help Pappy Vic. Make talk for Unka Ernst, Unka Ahmed, Auntie Sandra; help other Fuzzies make talk about bad Big Ones, about place where were, about what make do, about how go through long little holes.” He turned to Khadra. “Has he seen Herckerd and Novaes on screen?”

  “Not yet; we’ve just been talking to him, so far.”

  “Better let all three of them see those audiovisuals; get identifications made. And keep on about the ventilation ducts. See if any of them can tell which way they went toward the gem vault, and what kind of a place they went in at.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men, policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort. Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system; sewage disposal.

  And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes, named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes were seeking to neutralize.

  He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty, patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would close in on them.

  In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and his three friends.

  Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.

  “Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure so far, though.”

  “Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”

  “I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept that.”

  “We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”

  “I hope we can till we catch these people.”

  “Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”

  “No
. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show you.”

  Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens. When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow chinned face looked out of it.

  “This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking. Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen flickered, and the recording began again.

  “I could put out an emergency call for him, but I don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and we don’t want to alarm them.”

  “No. Four men and one woman; the Fuzzies say there were only two men, presumably Herckerd and Novaes, brought them here. That means two men and a woman somewhere outside waiting for them. And we don’t really need Evins, at present. It’s after midnight now; we can keep calling at his home.”

  Evins and his wife had probably gone to a show, or visiting. Evins’s wife; he couldn’t seem to recall ever having met her. He’d heard something or other about her... He shoved that aside.

  “Don’t they have little robo-snoopers they use to go through the ventilation ducts?” he asked.

  “Yes. Mr. Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, has a dozen of them. He suggested using them, but I vetoed it till I could see what you thought. Those things float on contragravity, and even a miniature Abbot-drive generator makes quite an ultrasonic noise. We still have two Fuzzies loose in the ventilation system; we don’t want to scare them, do we?”

  “No. Let them carry on. There’s a chance they may come out in the gem-vault, if we don’t frighten them.”

  He looked across the room at the viewscreens. Khadra and Mallin had their screen set up, Sandra had brought the Fuzzies over in front of it, and Diamond seemed to be explaining about viewscreens and audiovisual screens to the others. In the gem-vault screen, Lansky and the others were leaning forward across the table, listening. They had a couple of hearing aids, now, which Eggers and one of his detectives were using. Lansky turned to make frantic gestures at the pickup. Steefer picked up a speaker-phone and advised everybody to pay attention to the gem-vault screen.

  For one of those ten-second eternities nothing happened in the screen. A moment later, a Fuzzy came climbing down the ladder. One of the detectives would have grabbed him; Eggers stopped him. A moment later, another Fuzzy appeared.

  Eggers caught him by the feet with both hands and pulled him off the ladder; the Fuzzy hit Eggers in the face with his fist. The first Fuzzy, having dropped to the table, tried to get up the ladder again; Lansky grabbed him. One of the detectives came to Eggers’s assistance. Then the struggle was over, and the two prisoners had been secured. Lansky was yelling:

  “We got them both! We’re bringing them up.”

  Steefer yelled to the girl who was monitoring the screen to cut in sound transmission and tell Lansky and one man to remain on guard; Lansky acknowledged, and Eggers and one of the detectives left the vault, each carrying a Fuzzy. In the screen from Steefer’s office, they had an audiovisual of Moses Herckerd on the screen; it was the employment interview film, and Herckerd was talking about his educational background and former job experience. Steefer was talking to the sergeant at his desk; the latter beckoned Ahmed Khadra over.

  “Good,” Khadra said, when Steefer told him what had happened. “That’s all of them. We’ll run Herckerd over for them when they come up, and show them Novaes. They’re the two who brought them here tonight, the three we have here all say so.”

  “They’re still in here,” Steefer said. “That leaves two men and a woman outside. I wonder... ”

  “I think I know who they are, Chief.”

  It was just a guess, of course, but it fitted. He had suddenly remembered what he knew about Mrs. Conrad Evins.

  When Leo Thaxter, now Loan Broker & Private Financier, first came to Zarathustra ten years ago, a woman had come with him, but she hadn’t been a wife or reasonable facsimile, she had been a sister or reasonable facsimile. Rose Thaxter. After a while, she had left Thaxter and married a company minerologist named Conrad Evins, who, after the discovery of the sunstones, had become chief company gem-buyer.

  “What’s that call-number of Evins?” he asked Steefer, and when Steefer gave it, he repeated it to Khadra. “When those other Fuzzies come in, call it. It’ll be answered by an audiovisual recording. See if the kids recognize him.”

  Steefer looked at him, more amused than surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, myself, Mr. Grego. It seems to fit, though.”

  “Hunch.” If anybody respected hunches, it would be a cop. “I just remembered who Evins was married to. Rose Thaxter.”

  “Yeh!” Steefer muttered something else. “I know that, too; I just never connected it. It all hangs together, too.”

  For a couple of minutes, they were both talking at the same time, telling one another just how it did hang together, and watching the screen from Steefer’s office. Eggers and the detective were coming in, still coatless, carrying a Fuzzy apiece; the one Eggers was carrying was trying to get the gun out of the lieutenant’s shoulder-holster.

  Of course it hung together. Somebody in the gang had to have exact knowledge of the layout of the gem-vault, which Evins, and very few others, could provide. The arrangement of the ventilation-ducts wasn’t classified top-secret; anybody in Evins’s position could have gotten that. They had to have a place to keep the Fuzzies, big enough to build a replica of the gem vault and of the ventilation system. Well, there were all those vacant factories and warehouses out in the district everybody called Mortgageville. The ones Hugo Ingermann had been acquiring title to, with Thaxter as dummy buyer. How Herckerd and Novaes had been roped in wasn’t immediately important; catch them and question them and that would emerge. Ten to one, Rose Thaxter, Mrs. Conrad Evins, was the connecting link and mainspring.

  The Fuzzies in Steefer’s office were having a reunion. Khadra and Mallin and Sandra were trying to get them to look at the communication screen. He turned to Steefer.

  “Get some men to Conrad Evins’s place; make a thorough search, for anything that might look like evidence of anything.”

  “They won’t be there.”

  “No. They’ll be in one of those buildings over in Mortgageville, and we don’t know which one. I’m going to call Ian Ferguson.”

  He told Ferguson quickly what he suspected. The Constabulary commandant nodded.

  “Reasonable,” he agreed. “I’ll call the city police for help; we’ll close the place off so nobody can get in or out and then we’ll start making a search. It’s only about two thousand square miles, and there are only about three hundred buildings on it,” he added. “I think I’ll call Casagra, too, and see how many Marines he can give me.”

  “Well, take your time searching; just make sure anybody who’s there now stays there. We’ll give you what help we can as soon as we can.”

  He looked up at the screen from Steefer’s office. Khadra had called Evins’s home, now, and he could hear Evins’s recorded voice stating that he wouldn’t be home before midnight. The Fuzzies evidently recognized him. It was also evident that they didn’t like him.

  “And put out a general alert to pick up Evins, Mrs. Evins, and Leo Thaxter, and I don’t think you need to worry about how much noise you make doing it.”

  “And Ivan Bowlby, and Raul Laporte, and Spike Heenan,” Ferguson added. “And any or all of their hoods.” He thought for a moment. “And Hugo Ingermann. We may finally have grounds for interrogating him as a suspect. I’ll call Gus Brannhard, too.”

  “And Leslie Coombes; he’ll be a help.”

  “All right, everybody!” Steefer was calling out with his loudspeaker. “We have all the Fuzzies out; now let’s get the show started!” Then he rose and went around the desk.

  Khadra was on the communication screen from the Chief’s desk:

  “They made that fellow Evins, all right. He was one of the gang. Who is he?”

&n
bsp; “Well, he used to be the Company’s chief gem-buyer, up to fifteen minutes ago, but now he has been discharged, without notice, severance pay or recommendation.” He thought for a moment. “Captain, are those Fuzzies’ feet dirty?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Khadra stared at him for an instant, then nodded. “Yes, they are; gray-brown dust. Same kind of dust on their fur.”

  “Uhuh; that’s good.” He rose and went to the big table and the solidigraph, where Steefer was already talking to a dozen or so men. He saw Niles Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, and pulled him aside.

  “Niles, the insides of those ducts are dusty?” he asked.

  “The ones that carry stale air to the reconditioners,” Guerrin replied. “Dust from the air in the rooms... ”

  “They’re the ones we’re interested in. Now, these snoopers, robo-inspectors; could they pick up tracks the Fuzzies make, or traces where they’ve brushed against the sides of the ducts?”

  “Yes, sure. They have a full optical reception and transmission system for visible light and infra-red light, and controllable magnifying vision... ”

  “How soon can you get them started, from the gem-vault and from the captain’s office in detective headquarters?”

  “Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for them in here; did that right at the start.”

  “Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”

  PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it. Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at it last.

  “Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been an hour since the last two went in.”

  “Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.