Jack Holloway landed the manipulator in front of the cluster of prefab
huts. For a moment he sat still, realizing that he was tired, and then he
climbed down from the control cabin and crossed the open grass to the door
of the main living hut, opening it and reaching in to turn on the lights.
Then he hesitated, looking up at Darius.
There was a wide ring around it, and he remembered noticing the wisps of
cirrus clouds gathering overhead through the afternoon. Maybe it would
rain tonight. This dry weather couldn't last forever. He'd been letting
the manipulator stand out overnight lately. He decided to put it in the
hangar. He went and opened the door of the vehicle shed, got back onto the
machine and floated it inside. When he came back to the living hut, he saw
that he had left the door wide open.
"Damn fool!" he rebuked himself. "Place could be crawling with prawns by
now."
He looked quickly around the living room--under the big combination desk
and library table, under the gunrack, under the chairs, back of the
communication screen and the viewscreen, beyond the metal cabinet of the
microfilm library--and saw nothing. Then he hung up his hat, took off his
pistol and laid it on the table, and went back to the bathroom to wash his
hands.
As soon as he put on the light, something inside the shower stall said,
"_Yeeeek!_" in a startled voice.
He turned quickly to see two wide eyes staring up at him out of a ball of
golden fur. Whatever it was, it had a round head and big ears and a
vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. It was sitting on its
haunches, and in that position it was about a foot high. It had two tiny
hands with opposing thumbs. He squatted to have a better look at it.
"Hello there, little fellow," he greeted it. "I never saw anything like
you before. What are you anyhow?"
The small creature looked at him seriously and said, "Yeek," in a timid
voice.
"Why, sure; you're a Little Fuzzy, that's what you are."
He moved closer, careful to make no alarmingly sudden movements, and kept
on talking to it.
"Bet you slipped in while I left the door open. Well, if a Little Fuzzy
finds a door open, I'd like to know why he shouldn't come in and look
around."
He touched it gently. It started to draw back, then reached out a little
hand and felt the material of his shirt-sleeve. He stroked it, and told it
that it had the softest, silkiest fur ever. Then he took it on his lap. It
yeeked in pleasure, and stretched an arm up around his neck.
"Why, sure; we're going to be good friends, aren't we? Would you like
something to eat? Well, suppose you and I go see what we can find."
He put one hand under it, to support it like a baby--at least, he seemed
to recall having seen babies supported in that way; babies were things he
didn't fool with if he could help it--and straightened. It weighed between
fifteen and twenty pounds. At first, it struggled in panic, then quieted
and seemed to enjoy being carried. In the living room he sat down in his
favorite armchair, under a standing lamp, and examined his new
acquaintance.
It was a mammal--there was a fairly large mammalian class on
Zarathustra--but beyond that he was stumped. It wasn't a primate, in the
Terran sense. It wasn't like anything Terran, or anything else on
Zarathustra. Being a biped put it in a class by itself for this planet. It
was just a Little Fuzzy, and that was the best he could do.
That sort of nomenclature was the best anybody could do on a Class-III
planet. On a Class-IV planet, say Loki, or Shesha, or Thor, naming animals
was a cinch. You pointed to something and asked a native, and he'd gargle
a mouthful of syllables at you, which might only mean, "Whaddaya wanna
know for?" and you took it down in phonetic alphabet and the whatzit had a
name. But on Zarathustra, there were no natives to ask. So this was a
Little Fuzzy.
"What would you like to eat, Little Fuzzy?" he asked. "Open your mouth,
and let Pappy Jack see what you have to chew with."
Little Fuzzy's dental equipment, allowing for the fact that his jaw was
rounder, was very much like his own.
"You're probably omnivorous. How would you like some nice Terran
Federation Space Forces Emergency Ration, Extraterrestrial, Type Three?"
he asked.
Little Fuzzy made what sounded like an expression of willingness to try
it. It would be safe enough; Extee Three had been fed to a number of
Zarathustran mammals without ill effects. He carried Little Fuzzy out into
the kitchen and put him on the floor, then got out a tin of the field
ration and opened it, breaking off a small piece and handing it down.
Little Fuzzy took the piece of golden-brown cake, sniffed at it, gave a
delighted yeek and crammed the whole piece in his mouth.
"You never had to live on that stuff and nothing else for a month, that's
for sure!"
He broke the cake in half and broke one half into manageable pieces and
put it down on a saucer. Maybe Little Fuzzy would want a drink, too. He
started to fill a pan with water, as he would for a dog, then looked at
his visitor sitting on his haunches eating with both hands and changed his
mind. He rinsed a plastic cup cap from an empty whisky bottle and put it
down beside a deep bowl of water. Little Fuzzy was thirsty, and he didn't
have to be shown what the cup was for.
It was too late to get himself anything elaborate; he found some leftovers
in the refrigerator and combined them into a stew. While it was heating,
he sat down at the kitchen table and lit his pipe. The spurt of flame from
the lighter opened Little Fuzzy's eyes, but what really awed him was Pappy
Jack blowing smoke. He sat watching this phenomenon, until, a few minutes
later, the stew was hot and the pipe was laid aside; then Little Fuzzy
went back to nibbling Extee Three.
Suddenly he gave a yeek of petulance and scampered into the living room.
In a moment, he was back with something elongated and metallic which he
laid on the floor beside him.
"What have you got there, Little Fuzzy? Let Pappy Jack see?"
Then he recognized it as his own one-inch wood chisel. He remembered
leaving it in the outside shed after doing some work about a week ago, and
not being able to find it when he had gone to look for it. That had
worried him; people who got absent-minded about equipment didn't last long
in the wilderness. After he finished eating and took the dishes to the
sink, he went over and squatted beside his new friend.
"Let Pappy Jack look at it, Little Fuzzy," he said. "Oh, I'm not going to
take it away from you. I just want to see it."
The edge was dulled and nicked; it had been used for a lot of things wood
chisels oughtn't to be used for. Digging, and prying, and most likely, it
had been used as a weapon. It was a handy-sized, all-purpose tool for a
Little Fuzzy. He laid it on the floor where he had gotten it and started
washing the dishes.
Little Fuzzy watched him with interest for a while, and then he began
investigating the kitchen. Some of the things he wanted to investigate had
to be taken away from him; at first that angered him, but he soon learned
that there were things he wasn't supposed to have. Eventually, the dishes
got washed.
There were more things to investigate in the living room. One of them was
the wastebasket. He found that it could be dumped, and promptly dumped it,
pulling out everything that hadn't fallen out. He bit a corner off a sheet
of paper, chewed on it and spat it out in disgust. Then he found that
crumpled paper could be flattened out and so he flattened a few sheets,
and then discovered that it could also be folded. Then he got himself
gleefully tangled in a snarl of wornout recording tape. Finally he lost
interest and started away. Jack caught him and brought him back.
"No, Little Fuzzy," he said. "You do not dump wastebaskets and then walk
away from them. You put things back in." He touched the container and
said, slowly and distinctly, "Waste ... basket." Then he righted it, doing
it as Little Fuzzy would have to, and picked up a piece of paper, tossing
it in from Little Fuzzy's shoulder height. Then he handed Little Fuzzy a
wad of paper and repeated, "Waste ... basket."
Little Fuzzy looked at him and said something that sounded as though it
might be: "What's the matter with you, Pappy; you crazy or something?"
After a couple more tries, however, he got it, and began throwing things
in. In a few minutes, he had everything back in except a brightly colored
plastic cartridge box and a wide-mouthed bottle with a screw cap. He held
these up and said, "Yeek?"
"Yes, you can have them. Here; let Pappy Jack show you something."
He showed Little Fuzzy how the box could be opened and shut. Then, holding
it where Little Fuzzy could watch, he unscrewed the cap and then screwed
it on again.
"There, now. You try it."
Little Fuzzy looked up inquiringly, then took the bottle, sitting down and
holding it between his knees. Unfortunately, he tried twisting it the
wrong way and only screwed the cap on tighter. He yeeked plaintively.
"No, go ahead. You can do it."
Little Fuzzy looked at the bottle again. Then he tried twisting the cap
the other way, and it loosened. He gave a yeek that couldn't possibly be
anything but "Eureka!" and promptly took it off, holding it up. After
being commended, he examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the
threads, and then screwed the cap back on again.
"You know, you're a smart Little Fuzzy." It took a few seconds to realize
just how smart. Little Fuzzy had wondered why you twisted the cap one way
to take it off and the other way to put it on, and he had found out. For
pure reasoning ability, that topped anything in the way of animal
intelligence he'd ever seen. "I'm going to tell Ben Rainsford about you."
Going to the communication screen, he punched out the wave-length
combination of the naturalist's camp, seventy miles down Snake River from
the mouth of Cold Creek. Rainsford's screen must have been on automatic;
it lit as soon as he was through punching. There was a card set up in
front of it, lettered: AWAY ON TRIP, BACK THE FIFTEENTH. RECORDER ON.
"Ben, Jack Holloway," he said. "I just ran into something interesting." He
explained briefly what it was. "I hope he stays around till you get back.
He's totally unlike anything I've ever seen on this planet."
Little Fuzzy was disappointed when Jack turned off the screen; that had
been interesting. He picked him up and carried him over to the armchair,
taking him on his lap.
"Now," he said, reaching for the control panel of the viewscreen. "Watch
this; we're going to see something nice."
When he put on the screen, at random, he got a view, from close up, of the
great fires that were raging where the Company people were burning off the
dead forests on what used to be Big Blackwater Swamp. Little Fuzzy cried
out in alarm, flung his arms around Pappy Jack's neck and buried his face
in the bosom of his shirt. Well, forest fires started from lightning
sometimes, and they'd be bad things for a Little Fuzzy. He worked the
selector and got another pickup, this time on the top of Company House in
Mallorysport, three time zones west, with the city spread out below and
the sunset blazing in the west. Little Fuzzy stared at it in wonder. It
was pretty impressive for a little fellow who'd spent all his life in the
big woods.
So was the spaceport, and a lot of other things he saw, though a view of
the planet as a whole from Darius puzzled him considerably. Then, in the
middle of a symphony orchestra concert from Mallorysport Opera House, he
wriggled loose, dropped to the floor and caught up his wood chisel,
swinging it back over his shoulder like a two-handed sword.
"What the devil? Oh-oh!"
A land-prawn, which must have gotten in while the door was open, was
crossing the living room. Little Fuzzy ran after and past it, pivoted and
brought the corner of the chisel edge down on the prawn's neck, neatly
beheading it. He looked at his victim for a moment, then slid the chisel
under it and flopped it over on its back, slapping it twice with the flat
and cracking the undershell. The he began pulling the dead prawn apart,
tearing out pieces of meat and eating them delicately. After disposing of
the larger chunks, he used the chisel to chop off one of the prawn's
mandibles to use as a pick to get at the less accessible morsels. When he
had finished, he licked his fingers clean and started back to the
armchair.
"No." Jack pointed at the prawn shell. "Wastebasket."
"Yeek?"
"Wastebasket."
Little Fuzzy gathered up the bits of shell, putting them where they
belonged. Then he came back and climbed up on Pappy Jack's lap, and looked
at things in the screen until he fell asleep.
Jack lifted him carefully and put him down on the warm chair seat without
wakening him, then went to the kitchen, poured himself a drink and brought
it in to the big table, where he lit his pipe and began writing up his
diary for the day. After a while, Little Fuzzy woke, found that the lap he
had gone to sleep on had vanished, and yeeked disconsolately.
A folded blanket in one corner of the bedroom made a satisfactory bed,
once Little Fuzzy had assured himself that there were no bugs in it. He
brought in his bottle and his plastic box and put them on the floor beside
it. Then he ran to the front door in the living room and yeeked to be let
out. Going about twenty feet from the house, he used the chisel to dig a
small hole, and after it had served its purpose he filled it in carefully
and came running back.
Well, maybe Fuzzies were naturally gregarious, and were
homemakers--den-holes, or nests, or something like that. Nobody wants
messes made in the house, and when the young ones did it, their parents
would bang them around to teach them better manners. This was Little
Fuzzy's home now; he knew how he ought to behave in it.
* * * * *
The next morning at daylight, he was up on the bed, trying to dig Pappy
Jack out from under the blankets. Besides being a most efficient
land-prawn eradicator, he made a first rate alarm clock. But best of all,
he was Pappy Jack's Little Fuzzy. He wanted out; this time Jack took his
movie camera and got the whole operation on film. One thing, there'd have
to be a little door, with a spring to hold it shut, that little Fuzzy
could operate himself. That was designed during breakfast. It only took a
couple of hours to make and install it; Little Fuzzy got the idea as soon
as he saw it, and figured out how to work it for himself.
Jack went back to the workshop, built a fire on the hand forge and forged
a pointed and rather broad blade, four inches long, on the end of a foot
of quarter-inch round tool-steel. It was too point-heavy when finished, so
he welded a knob on the other end to balance it. Little Fuzzy knew what
that was for right away; running outside, he dug a couple of practice
holes with it, and then began casting about in the grass for land-prawns.
Jack followed him with the camera and got movies of a couple of prawn
killings, accomplished with smooth, by-the-numbers precision. Little Fuzzy
hadn't learned that chop-clap-clap routine in the week since he had found
the wood chisel.
Going into the shed, he hunted for something without more than a general
idea of what it would look like, and found it where Little Fuzzy had
discarded it when he found the chisel. It was a stock of hardwood a foot
long, rubbed down and polished smooth, apparently with sandstone. There
was a paddle at one end, with enough of an edge to behead a prawn, and the
other end had been worked to a point. He took it into the living hut and
sat down at the desk to examine it with a magnifying glass. Bits of soil
embedded in the sharp end--that had been used as a pick. The paddle end
had been used as a shovel, beheader and shell-cracker. Little Fuzzy had
known exactly what he wanted when he'd started making that thing, he'd
kept on until it was as perfect as possible, and had stopped short of
spoiling it by overrefinement.
Finally, Jack put it away in the top drawer of the desk. He was thinking
about what to get for lunch when Little Fuzzy burst into the living room,
clutching his new weapon and yeeking excitedly.
"What's the matter, kid? You got troubles?" He rose and went to the
gunrack, picking down a rifle and checking the chamber. "Show Pappy Jack
what it is."
Little Fuzzy followed him to the big door for human-type people, ready to
bolt back inside if necessary.
The trouble was a harpy--a thing about the size and general design of a
Terran Jurassic pterodactyl, big enough to take a Little Fuzzy at one
mouthful. It must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling
back for another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward
loop and dropped like a stone.
Little Fuzzy made a very surprised remark, looked at the dead harpy for a
moment and then spotted the ejected empty cartridge. He grabbed it and
held it up, asking if he could have it. When told that he could, he ran
back to the bedroom with it. When he returned, Pappy Jack picked him up
and carried him to the hangar and up into the control cabin of the
manipulator.
The throbbing of the contragravity-field generator and the sense of rising
worried him at first, but after they had picked up the harpy with the
grapples and risen to five hundred feet he began to enjoy the ride. They
dropped the harpy a couple of miles up what the latest maps were
designating as Holloway's Run, and then made a wide circle back over the
mountains. Little Fuzzy thought it was fun.
After lunch, Little Fuzzy had a nap on Pappy Jack's bed. Jack took the
manipulator up to the diggings, put off a couple more shots, uncovered
more flint and found another sunstone. It wasn't often that he found
stones on two successive days. When he returned to the camp, Little Fuzzy
was picking another land-prawn apart in front of the living hut.
After dinner--Little Fuzzy liked cooked food, too, if it wasn't too
hot--they went into the living room. He remembered having seen a bolt and
nut in the desk drawer when he had been putting the wooden prawn-killer
away, and he got it out, showing it to Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy studied
it for a moment, then ran into the bedroom and came back with his
screw-top bottle. He took the top off, put it on again and then screwed
the nut off the bolt, holding it up.
"See, Pappy?" Or yeeks to that effect. "Nothing to it."
Then he unscrewed the bottle top, dropped the bolt inside after replacing
the nut and screwed the cap on again.
"Yeek," he said, with considerable self-satisfaction.
He had a right to be satisfied with himself. What he'd been doing had been
generalizing. Bottle tops and nuts belonged to the general class of
things-that-screwed-onto-things. To take them off, you turned left; to put
them on again, you turned right, after making sure that the threads
engaged. And since he could conceive of right- and left-handedness, that
might mean that he could think of properties apart from objects, and that
was forming abstract ideas. Maybe that was going a little far, but....
"You know, Pappy Jack's got himself a mighty smart Little Fuzzy. Are you a
grown-up Little Fuzzy, or are you just a baby Little Fuzzy? Shucks, I'll
bet you're Professor Doctor Fuzzy."
He wondered what to give the professor, if that was what he was, to work
on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him too much about taking
things apart, just at present. Sometime he might come home and find
something important taken apart, or, worse, taken apart and put together
incorrectly. Finally, he went to a closet, rummaging in it until he found
a tin canister. By the time he returned, Little Fuzzy had gotten up on the
chair, found his pipe in the ashtray and was puffing on it and coughing.
"Hey, I don't think that's good for you!"
He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirt-sleeve and put it in
his mouth, then placed the canister on the floor, and put Little Fuzzy on
the floor beside it. There were about ten pounds of stones in it. When he
had first settled here, he had made a collection of the local minerals,
and, after learning what he'd wanted to, he had thrown them out, all but
twenty or thirty of the prettiest specimens. He was glad, now, that he had
kept these.
Little Fuzzy looked the can over, decided that the lid was a member of
the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got it off. The inside
of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a little thought to discover
that what he saw in it was only himself. He yeeked about that, and looked
into the can. This, he decided, belonged to the class of
things-that-can-be-dumped, like wastebaskets, so he dumped it on the
floor. Then he began examining the stones and sorting them by color.
Except for an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was the first
real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He proceeded to
give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, in
correct spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red
stone. Well, maybe he'd seen rainbows. Maybe he'd lived near a big misty
waterfall, where there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining. Or
maybe that was just his natural way of seeing colors.
Then, when he saw what he had to work with, he began making arrangements
with them, laying them out in odd circular and spiral patterns. Each time
he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to call attention to it, sit
and look at it for a while, and then take it apart and start a new one.
Little Fuzzy was capable of artistic gratification too. He made useless
things, just for the pleasure of making and looking at them.
Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and rolled it
into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with his other
treasures. The new weapon he laid on the blanket beside him when he went
to bed.
* * * * *
The next morning, Jack broke up a whole cake of Extee Three and put it
down, filled the bowl with water, and, after making sure he had left
nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on which he might
hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the diggings. He worked all
morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half of flint, and found nothing.
Then he set off a string of shots, brought down an avalanche of sandstone
and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball tree to eat his
lunch.
Half an hour after he went back to work, he found the fossil of some
jellyfish that hadn't eaten the right things in the right combinations,
but a little later, he found four nodules, one after another, and two of
them were sunstones; four or five chunks later, he found a third. Why,
this must be the Dying Place of the Jellyfish! By late afternoon, when he
had cleaned up all his loose flint, he had nine, including one deep red
monster an inch in diameter. There must have been some convection current
in the ancient ocean that had swirled them all into this one place. He
considered setting off some more shots, decided that it was too late and
returned to camp.
"Little Fuzzy!" he called, opening the living-room door. "Where are you,
Little Fuzzy? Pappy Jack's rich; we're going to celebrate!"
Silence. He called again; still no reply or scamper of feet. Probably
cleaned up all the prawns around the camp and went hunting farther out
into the woods, thought Jack. Unbuckling his gun and dropping it onto the
table, he went out to the kitchen. Most of the Extee Three was gone. In
the bedroom, he found that Little Fuzzy had dumped the stones out of the
biscuit tin and made an arrangement, and laid the wood chisel in a neat
diagonal across the blanket.
After getting dinner assembled and in the oven, he went out and called for
a while, then mixed a highball and took it into the living room, sitting
down with it to go over his day's findings. Rather incredulously, he
realized that he had cracked out at least seventy-five thousand sols'
worth of stones today. He put them into the bag and sat sipping the
highball and thinking pleasant thoughts until the bell on the stove warned
him that dinner was ready.
He ate alone--after all the years he had been doing that contentedly, it
had suddenly become intolerable--and in the evening he dialed through his
micro-film library, finding only books he had read and reread a dozen
times, or books he kept for reference. Several times he thought he heard
the little door open, but each time he was mistaken. Finally he went to
bed.
As soon as he woke, he looked across at the folded blanket, but the wood
chisel was still lying athwart it. He put down more Extee Three and
changed the water in the bowl before leaving for the diggings. That day he
found three more sunstones, and put them in the bag mechanically and
without pleasure. He quit work early and spent over an hour spiraling
around the camp, but saw nothing. The Extee Three in the kitchen was
untouched.
Maybe the little fellow ran into something too big for him, even with his
fine new weapon--a hobthrush, or a bush-goblin, or another harpy. Or maybe
he'd just gotten tired staying in one place, and had moved on.
No; he'd liked it here. He'd had fun, and been happy. He shook his head
sadly. Once he, too, had lived in a pleasant place, where he'd had fun,
and could have been happy if he hadn't thought there was something he'd
had to do. So he had gone away, leaving grieved people behind him. Maybe
that was how it was with Little Fuzzy. Maybe he didn't realize how much of
a place he had made for himself here, or how empty he was leaving it.
He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself. Take a
drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a
drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all
around. No; he'd have one drink, maybe a little bigger than usual, before
he went to bed.