Ben Rainsford went back to Beta Continent, and Gerd van Riebeek remained
in Mallorysport. The constabulary at Post Fifteen had made steel
chopper-diggers for their Fuzzies, and reported a gratifying abatement of
the land-prawn nuisance. They also made a set of scaled-down carpenter
tools, and their Fuzzies were building themselves a house out of scrap
crates and boxes. A pair of Fuzzies showed up at Ben Rainsford's camp, and
he adopted them, naming them Flora and Fauna.
Everybody had Fuzzies now, and Pappy Jack only had Baby. He was lying on
the floor of the parlor, teaching Baby to tie knots in a piece of string.
Gus Brannhard, who spent most of the day in the office in the Central
Courts building which had been furnished to him as special prosecutor, was
lolling in an armchair in red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinking
coffee--his whisky consumption was down to a couple of drinks a day--and
studying texts on two reading screens at once, making an occasional remark
into a stenomemophone. Gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper in an
effort to work something out by symbolic logic. Suddenly he crumpled a
sheet and threw it across the room, cursing. Brannhard looked away from
his screens.
"Trouble, Gerd?"
Gerd cursed again. "How the devil can I tell whether Fuzzies generalize?"
he demanded. "How can I tell whether they form abstract ideas? How can I
prove, even, that they have ideas at all? Hell's blazes, how can I even
prove, to your satisfaction, that I think consciously?"
"Working on that idea I mentioned?" Brannhard asked.
"I was. It seemed like a good idea but...."
"Suppose we go back to specific instances of Fuzzy behavior, and present
them as evidence of sapience?" Brannhard asked. "That funeral, for
instance."
"They'll still insist that we define sapience."
The communication screen began buzzing. Baby Fuzzy looked up
disinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a figure-eight knot
he had tied. Jack shoved himself to his feet and put the screen on. It was
Max Fane, and for the first time that he could remember, the Colonial
Marshal was excited.
"Jack, have you had any news on the screen lately?"
"No. Something turn up?"
"God, yes! The cops are all over the city hunting the Fuzzies; they have
orders to shoot on sight. Nick Emmert was just on the air with a reward
offer--five hundred sols apiece, dead or alive."
It took a few seconds for that to register. Then he became frightened. Gus
and Gerd were both on their feet and crowding to the screen behind him.
"They have some bum from that squatters' camp over on the East Side who
claims the Fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old daughter," Fane was saying.
"They have both of them at police headquarters, and they've handed the
story out to Zarathustra News, and Planetwide Coverage. Of course, they're
Company-controlled; they're playing it for all it's worth."
"Have they been veridicated?" Brannhard demanded.
"No, and the city cops are keeping them under cover. The girl says she was
playing outdoors and these Fuzzies jumped her and began beating her with
sticks. Her injuries are listed as multiple bruises, fractured wrist and
general shock."
"I don't believe it! They wouldn't attack a child."
"I want to talk to that girl and her father," Brannhard was saying. "And
I'm going to demand that they make their statements under veridication.
This thing's a frameup, Max; I'd bet my ears on it. Timing's just right;
only a week till the trial."
Maybe the Fuzzies had wanted the child to play with them, and she'd gotten
frightened and hurt one of them. A ten-year-old human child would look
dangerously large to a Fuzzy, and if they thought they were menaced they
would fight back savagely.
They were still alive and in the city. That was one thing. But they were
in worse danger than they had ever been; that was another. Fane was asking
Brannhard how soon he could be dressed.
"Five minutes? Good, I'll be along to pick you up," he said. "Be seeing
you."
Jack hurried into the bedroom he and Brannhard shared; he kicked off his
moccasins and began pulling on his boots. Brannhard, pulling his trousers
up over his pajama pants, wanted to know where he thought he was going.
"With you. I've got to find them before some dumb son of a Khooghra shoots
them."
"You stay here," Gus ordered. "Stay by the communication screen, and keep
the viewscreen on for news. But don't stop putting your boots on; you may
have to get out of here fast if I call you and tell you they've been
located. I'll call you as soon as I get anything definite."
Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide, openly owned
and operated by the Company. The newscaster was wrought up about the
brutal attack on the innocent child, but he was having trouble focusing
the blame. After all, who'd let the Fuzzies escape in the first place? And
even a skilled semanticist had trouble in making anything called a Fuzzy
sound menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at about
twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six Fuzzies,
armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged her down and
beaten her severely. Her screams had brought her father, and he had driven
the Fuzzies away. Police had brought both the girl and her father, Oscar
Lurkin, to headquarters, where they had told their story. City police,
Company police and constabulary troopers and parties of armed citizens
were combing the eastern side of the city; Resident General Emmert had
acted at once to offer a reward of five thousand sols apiece....
"The kid's lying, and if they ever get a veridicator on her, they'll prove
it", he said. "Emmert, or Grego, or the two of them together, bribed those
people to tell that story."
"Oh, I take that for granted," Gerd said. "I know that place. Junktown.
Ruth does a lot of work there for juvenile court." He stopped briefly,
pain in his eyes, and then continued: "You can hire anybody to do anything
over there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in
advance."
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering the Fuzzy
hunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies of Junktown were
floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and poking
among them. Once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring at
the ground from it over a machine gun.
"Wooo! Am I glad I'm not in that mess!" Gerd exclaimed. "Anybody sees
something he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang'll massacre each other
in ten seconds."
"I hope they do!"
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was being
extremely sarcastic about the whole thing. Into the middle of one view of
a rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the studio cut a view of the
Fuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up appealingly while waiting for
breakfast. "These," a voice said, "are the terrible monsters against whom
all these brave men are protecting us."
A few moments later, a rifle flash and a bang, and then a fusillade
brought Jack's heart into his throat. The pickup car jetted toward it; by
the time it reached the spot, the shooting had stopped, and a crowd was
gathering around something white on the ground. He had to force himself to
look, then gave a shuddering breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, a
three-horned domesticated ungulate.
"Oh-Oh! Some squatter's milk supply finished." The commentator laughed.
"Not the first one tonight either. Attorney General--former Chief
Prosecutor--O'Brien's going to have quite a few suits against the
administration to defend as a result of this business."
"He's going to have a goddamn thundering big one from Jack Holloway!"
The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on.
"I just talked to Judge Pendarvis," Gus Brannhard reported out of it.
"He's issuing an order restraining Emmert from paying any reward except
for Fuzzies turned over alive and uninjured to Marshal Fane. And he's
issuing a warning that until the status of the Fuzzies is determined,
anybody killing one will face charges of murder."
"That's fine, Gus! Have you seen the girl or her father yet?"
Brannhard snarled angrily. "The girl's in the Company hospital, in a
private room. The doctors won't let anybody see her. I think Emmert's
hiding the father in the Residency. And I haven't seen the two cops who
brought them in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the
detective lieutenant who was on duty here. They've all lammed out. Max has
a couple of men over in Junktown, trying to find out who called the cops
in the first place. We may get something out of that."
The Chief Justice's action was announced a few minutes later; it got to
the hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy hunt began falling
apart. The City and Company police dropped out immediately. Most of the
civilians, hoping to grab five thousand sols' worth of live Fuzzy, stayed
on for twenty minutes, and so, apparently to control them, did the
constabulary. Then the reward was cancelled, the airborne floodlights went
off and the whole thing broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as soon as he
heeled the door shut after him. When he had his jacket and neckcloth off,
he dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler with whisky, gulped half
of it and then began pulling off his boots.
"If that drink has a kid sister, I'll take it," Gerd muttered. "What
happened, Gus?"
Brannhard began to curse. "The whole thing's a fake; it stinks from here
to Nifflheim. It would stink _on_ Nifflheim." He picked up a cigar butt he
had laid aside when Fane's call had come in and relighted it. "We found
the woman who called the police. Neighbor; she says she saw Lurkin come
home drunk, and a little later she heard the girl screaming. She says he
beats her up every time he gets drunk, which is about five times a week,
and she'd made up her mind to stop it the next chance she got. She denied
having seen anything that even looked like a Fuzzy anywhere around."
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of Fuzzy
reports; Jack went to the marshal's office to interview the people making
them. The first dozen were of a piece with the ones that had come in
originally. Then he talked to a young man who had something of different
quality.
"I saw them as plain as I'm seeing you, not more than fifty feet away," he
said. "I had an autocarbine, and I pulled up on them, but gosh, I couldn't
shoot them. They were just like little people, Mr. Holloway, and they
looked so scared and helpless. So I held over their heads and let off a
two-second burst to scare them away before anybody else saw them and shot
them."
"Well, son, I'd like to shake your hand for that. You know, you thought
you were throwing away a lot of money there. How many did you see?"
"Well, only four. I'd heard that there were six, but the other two could
have been back in the brush where I didn't see them."
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were three other
people who had actually seen Fuzzies; none were sure how many, but they
were all positive about locations and times. Plotting the reports on the
map, it was apparent that the Fuzzies were moving north and west across
the outskirts of the city.
Brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel, still swearing, but half
amusedly.
"They've exhumed Ham O'Brien, and they've put him to work harassing us,"
he said. "Whole flock of civil suits and dangerous-nuisance complaints and
that sort of thing; idea's to keep me amused with them while Leslie
Coombes is working up his case for the trial. Even tried to get the
manager here to evict Baby; I threatened him with a racial-discrimination
suit, and that stopped that. And I just filed suit against the Company for
seven million sols on behalf of the Fuzzies--million apiece for them and a
million for their lawyer."
"This evening," Jack said, "I'm going out in a car with a couple of Max's
deputies. We're going to take Baby, and we'll have a loud-speaker on the
car." He unfolded the city map. "They seem to be traveling this way; they
ought to be about here, and with Baby at the speaker, we ought to attract
their attention."
They didn't see anything, though they kept at it till dusk. Baby had a
wonderful time with the loud-speaker; when he yeeked into it, he produced
an ear-splitting noise, until the three humans in the car flinched every
time he opened his mouth. It affected dogs too; as the car moved back and
forth, it was followed by a chorus of howling and baying on the ground.
The next day, there were some scattered reports, mostly of small thefts. A
blanket spread on the grass behind a house had vanished. A couple of
cushions had been taken from a porch couch. A frenzied mother reported
having found her six-year-old son playing with some Fuzzies; when she had
rushed to rescue him, the Fuzzies had scampered away and the child had
begun weeping. Jack and Gerd rushed to the scene. The child's story,
jumbled and imagination-colored, was definite on one point--the Fuzzies
had been nice to him and hadn't hurt him. They got a recording of that on
the air at once.
When they got back to the hotel, Gus Brannhard was there, bubbling with
glee.
"The Chief Justice gave me another job of special prosecuting," he said.
"I'm to conduct an investigation into the possibility that this thing, the
other night, was a frame-up, and I'm to prepare complaints against anybody
who's done anything prosecutable. I have authority to hold hearings, and
subpoena witnesses, and interrogate them under veridication. Max Fane has
specific orders to cooperate. We're going to start, tomorrow, with Chief
of Police Dumont and work down. And maybe we can work up, too, as far as
Nick Emmert and Victor Grego." He gave a rumbling laugh. "Maybe that'll
give Leslie Coombes something to worry about."
* * * * *
Gerd brought the car down beside the rectangular excavation. It was fifty
feet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper, with a power
shovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside. Five or six men in
coveralls and ankle boots advanced to meet them as they got out.
"Good morning, Mr. Holloway," one of them said. "It's right down over the
edge of the hill. We haven't disturbed anything."
"Mind running over what you saw again? My partner here wasn't in when you
called."
The foreman turned to Gerd. "We put off a couple of shots about an hour
ago. Some of the men, who'd gone down over the edge of the hill, saw these
Fuzzies run out from under that rock ledge down there, and up the hollow,
that way." He pointed. "They called me, and I went down for a look, and
saw where they'd been camping. The rock's pretty hard here, and we used
pretty heavy charges. Shock waves in the ground was what scared them."
They started down a path through the flower-dappled tall grass toward the
edge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of limestone that
formed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a hundred in length. Under
an overhanging ledge, they found two cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, and
some odds and ends of old garments that looked as though they had once
been used for polishing rags. There was a broken kitchen spoon, and a cold
chisel, and some other metal articles.
"That's it, all right. I talked to the people who lost the blanket and the
cushions. They must have made camp last night, after your gang stopped
work; the blasting chased them out. You say you saw them go up that way?"
he asked, pointing up the little stream that came down from the mountains
to the north.
The stream was deep and rapid, too much so for easy fording by Fuzzies;
they'd follow it back into the foothills. He took everybody's names and
thanked them. If he found the Fuzzies himself and had to pay off on an
information-received basis, it would take a mathematical genius to decide
how much reward to pay whom.
"Gerd, if you were a Fuzzy, where would you go up there?" he asked.
Gerd looked up the stream that came rushing down from among the wooded
foothills.
"There are a couple more houses farther up," he said. "I'd get above them.
Then I'd go up one of those side ravines, and get up among the rocks,
where the damnthings couldn't get me. Of course, there are no damnthings
this close to town, but they wouldn't know that."
"We'll need a few more cars. I'll call Colonel Ferguson and see what he
can do for me. Max is going to have his hands full with this investigation
Gus started."
* * * * *
Piet Dumont, the Mallorysport chief of police, might have been a good cop
once, but for as long as Gus Brannhard had known him, he had been what he
was now--an empty shell of unsupported arrogance, with a sagging waistline
and a puffy face that tried to look tough and only succeeded in looking
unpleasant. He was sitting in a seat that looked like an old fashioned
electric chair, or like one of those instruments of torture to which
beauty-shop customers submit themselves. There was a bright conical helmet
on his head, and electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his
anatomy. On the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have
been a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark blue
through violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt and
anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated interrogation.
Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of bright red as he toyed
mentally with some deliberate misstatement of fact.
"You know, yourself, that the Fuzzies didn't hurt that girl," Brannhard
told him.
"I don't know anything of the kind," the police chief retorted. "All I
know's what was reported to me."
That had started out a bright red; gradually it faded into purple.
Evidently Piet Dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence definition of
truth.
"Who told you about it?"
"Luther Woller. Detective lieutenant on duty at the time."
The veridicator agreed that that was the truth and not much of anything
but the truth.
"But you know that what really happened was that Lurkin beat the girl
himself, and Woller persuaded them both to say the Fuzzies did it," Max
Fane said.
"I don't know anything of the kind!" Dumont almost yelled. The screen
blazed red. "All I know's what they told me; nobody said anything else."
Red and blue, juggling in a typical quibbling pattern. "As far as I know,
it was the Fuzzies done it."
"Now, Piet," Fane told him patiently. "You've used this same veridicator
here often enough to know you can't get away with lying on it. Woller's
making you the patsy for this, and you know that, too. Isn't it true, now,
that to the best of your knowledge and belief those Fuzzies never touched
that girl, and it wasn't till Woller talked to Lurkin and his daughter at
headquarters that anybody even mentioned Fuzzies?"
The screen darkened to midnight blue, and then, slowly, it lightened.
"Yeah, that's true," Dumont admitted. He avoided their eyes, and his voice
was surly. "I thought that was how it was, and I asked Woller. He just
laughed at me and told me to forget it." The screen seethed momentarily
with anger. "That son of a Khooghra thinks he's chief, not me. One word
from me and he does just what he damn pleases!"
"Now you're being smart, Piet," Fane said. "Let's start all over...."
* * * * *
A constabulary corporal was at the controls of the car Jack had rented
from the hotel: Gerd had taken his place in one of the two constabulary
cars. The third car shuttled between them, and all three talked back and
forth by radio.
"Mr. Holloway." It was the trooper in the car Gerd had been piloting.
"Your partner's down on the ground; he just called me with his portable.
He's found a cracked prawn-shell."
"Keep talking; give me direction," the corporal at the controls said,
lifting up.
In a moment, they sighted the other car, hovering over a narrow ravine on
the left bank of the stream. The third car was coming in from the north.
Gerd was still squatting on the ground when they let down beside him. He
looked up as they jumped out.
"This is it, Jack" he said. "Regular Fuzzy job."
So it was. Whatever they had used, it hadn't been anything sharp; the head
was smashed instead of being cleanly severed. The shell, however, had been
broken from underneath in the standard manner, and all four mandibles had
been broken off for picks. They must have all eaten at the prawn, share
alike. It had been done quite recently.
They sent the car up, and while all three of them circled about, they went
up the ravine on foot, calling: "Little Fuzzy! Little Fuzzy!" They found a
footprint, and then another, where seepage water had moistened the ground.
Gerd was talking excitedly into the portable radio he carried slung on his
chest.
"One of you, go ahead a quarter of a mile, and then circle back. They're
in here somewhere."
"I see them! I see them!" a voice whooped out of the radio. "They're going
up the slope on your right, among the rocks!"
"Keep them in sight; somebody come and pick us up, and we'll get above
them and head them off."
The rental car dropped quickly, the corporal getting the door open. He
didn't bother going off contragravity; as soon as they were in and had
pulled the door shut behind them, he was lifting again. For a moment, the
hill swung giddily as the car turned, and then Jack saw them, climbing the
steep slope among the rocks. Only four of them, and one was helping
another. He wondered which ones they were, what had happened to the other
two and if the one that needed help had been badly hurt.
The car landed on the top, among the rocks, settling at an awkward angle.
He, Gerd and the pilot piled out and started climbing and sliding down the
declivity. Then he found himself within reach of a Fuzzy and grabbed. Two
more dashed past him, up the steep hill. The one he snatched at had
something in his hand, and aimed a vicious blow at his face with it; he
had barely time to block it with his forearm. Then he was clutching the
Fuzzy and disarming him; the weapon was a quarter-pound ballpeen hammer.
He put it in his hip pocket and then picked up the struggling Fuzzy with
both hands.
"You hit Pappy Jack!" he said reproachfully. "Don't you know Pappy any
more? Poor scared little thing!"
The Fuzzy in his arms yeeked angrily. Then he looked, and it was no Fuzzy
he had ever seen before--not Little Fuzzy, nor funny, pompous Ko-Ko, nor
mischievous Mike. It was a stranger Fuzzy.
"Well, no wonder; of course you didn't know Pappy Jack. You aren't one of
Pappy Jack's Fuzzies at all!"
At the top, the constabulary corporal was sitting on a rock, clutching two
Fuzzies, one under each arm. They stopped struggling and yeeked piteously
when they saw their companion also a captive.
"Your partner's down below, chasing the other one," the corporal said.
"You better take these too; you know them and I don't."
"Hang onto them; they don't know me any better than they do you."
With one hand, he got a bit of Extee Three out of his coat and offered it;
the Fuzzy gave a cry of surprised pleasure, snatched it and gobbled it. He
must have eaten it before. When he gave some to the corporal, the other
two, a male and a female, also seemed familiar with it. From below, Gerd
was calling:
"I got one, It's a girl Fuzzy; I don't know if it's Mitzi or Cinderella.
And, my God, wait till you see what she was carrying."
Gerd came into sight, the fourth Fuzzy struggling under one arm and a
little kitten, black with a white face, peeping over the crook of his
other elbow. He was too stunned with disappointment to look at it with
more than vague curiosity.
"They aren't our Fuzzies, Gerd. I never saw any of them before."
"Jack, are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure!" He was indignant. "Don't you think I know my own
Fuzzies? Don't you think they'd know me?"
"Where'd the pussy come from?" the corporal wanted to know.
"God knows. They must have picked it up somewhere. She was carrying it in
her arms, like a baby."
"They're somebody's Fuzzies. They've been fed Extee Three. We'll take them
to the hotel. Whoever it is, I'll bet he misses them as much as I do
mine."
His own Fuzzies, whom he would never see again. The full realization
didn't hit him until he and Gerd were in the car again. There had been no
trace of his Fuzzies from the time they had broken out of their cages at
Science Center. This quartet had appeared the night the city police had
manufactured the story of the attack on the Lurkin girl, and from the
moment they had been seen by the youth who couldn't bring himself to fire
on them, they had left a trail that he had been able to pick up at once
and follow. Why hadn't his own Fuzzies attracted as much notice in the
three weeks since they had vanished?
Because his own Fuzzies didn't exist any more. They had never gotten out
of Science Center alive. Somebody Max Fane hadn't been able to question
under veridication had murdered them. There was no use, any more, trying
to convince himself differently.
"We'll stop at their camp and pick up the blanket and the cushions and the
rest of the things. I'll send the people who lost them checks," he said.
"The Fuzzies ought to have those things."