XII
Ben Rainsford went back to Beta Continent, and Gerd van Riebeek remainedin Mallorysport. The constabulary at Post Fifteen had made steelchopper-diggers for their Fuzzies, and reported a gratifying abatement ofthe land-prawn nuisance. They also made a set of scaled-down carpentertools, and their Fuzzies were building themselves a house out of scrapcrates and boxes. A pair of Fuzzies showed up at Ben Rainsford's camp, andhe adopted them, naming them Flora and Fauna.
Everybody had Fuzzies now, and Pappy Jack only had Baby. He was lying onthe 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 CentralCourts building which had been furnished to him as special prosecutor, waslolling in an armchair in red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinkingcoffee--his whisky consumption was down to a couple of drinks a day--andstudying texts on two reading screens at once, making an occasional remarkinto a stenomemophone. Gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper in aneffort to work something out by symbolic logic. Suddenly he crumpled asheet and threw it across the room, cursing. Brannhard looked away fromhis 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 Iprove, even, that they have ideas at all? Hell's blazes, how can I evenprove, 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 presentthem as evidence of sapience?" Brannhard asked. "That funeral, forinstance."
"They'll still insist that we define sapience."
The communication screen began buzzing. Baby Fuzzy looked updisinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a figure-eight knothe had tied. Jack shoved himself to his feet and put the screen on. It wasMax Fane, and for the first time that he could remember, the ColonialMarshal 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 haveorders to shoot on sight. Nick Emmert was just on the air with a rewardoffer--five hundred sols apiece, dead or alive."
It took a few seconds for that to register. Then he became frightened. Gusand 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 whoclaims the Fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old daughter," Fane was saying."They have both of them at police headquarters, and they've handed thestory out to Zarathustra News, and Planetwide Coverage. Of course, they'reCompany-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 wasplaying outdoors and these Fuzzies jumped her and began beating her withsticks. Her injuries are listed as multiple bruises, fractured wrist andgeneral 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. "AndI'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 gottenfrightened and hurt one of them. A ten-year-old human child would lookdangerously large to a Fuzzy, and if they thought they were menaced theywould fight back savagely.
They were still alive and in the city. That was one thing. But they werein worse danger than they had ever been; that was another. Fane was askingBrannhard how soon he could be dressed.
"Five minutes? Good, I'll be along to pick you up," he said. "Be seeingyou."
Jack hurried into the bedroom he and Brannhard shared; he kicked off hismoccasins and began pulling on his boots. Brannhard, pulling his trousersup 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 shootsthem."
"You stay here," Gus ordered. "Stay by the communication screen, and keepthe viewscreen on for news. But don't stop putting your boots on; you mayhave to get out of here fast if I call you and tell you they've beenlocated. I'll call you as soon as I get anything definite."
Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide, openly ownedand operated by the Company. The newscaster was wrought up about thebrutal attack on the innocent child, but he was having trouble focusingthe blame. After all, who'd let the Fuzzies escape in the first place? Andeven a skilled semanticist had trouble in making anything called a Fuzzysound menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at abouttwenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six Fuzzies,armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged her down andbeaten her severely. Her screams had brought her father, and he had driventhe Fuzzies away. Police had brought both the girl and her father, OscarLurkin, to headquarters, where they had told their story. City police,Company police and constabulary troopers and parties of armed citizenswere combing the eastern side of the city; Resident General Emmert hadacted 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 proveit", he said. "Emmert, or Grego, or the two of them together, bribed thosepeople 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 anythingover there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed inadvance."
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering the Fuzzyhunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies of Junktown werefloodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and pokingamong them. Once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring atthe ground from it over a machine gun.
"Wooo! Am I glad I'm not in that mess!" Gerd exclaimed. "Anybody seessomething he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang'll massacre each otherin ten seconds."
"I hope they do!"
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was beingextremely sarcastic about the whole thing. Into the middle of one view ofa rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the studio cut a view of theFuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up appealingly while waiting forbreakfast. "These," a voice said, "are the terrible monsters against whomall these brave men are protecting us."
A few moments later, a rifle flash and a bang, and then a fusilladebrought Jack's heart into his throat. The pickup car jetted toward it; bythe time it reached the spot, the shooting had stopped, and a crowd wasgathering around something white on the ground. He had to force himself tolook, then gave a shuddering breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, athree-horned domesticated ungulate.
"Oh-Oh! Some squatter's milk supply finished." The commentator laughed."Not the first one tonight either. Attorney General--former ChiefProsecutor--O'Brien's going to have quite a few suits against theadministration 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 exceptfor Fuzzies turned over alive and uninjured to Marshal Fane. And he'sissuing 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 aprivate room. The doctors won't let anybody see her. I think Emmert'shiding the father in the Resid
ency. And I haven't seen the two cops whobrought them in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or thedetective lieutenant who was on duty here. They've all lammed out. Max hasa couple of men over in Junktown, trying to find out who called the copsin the first place. We may get something out of that."
The Chief Justice's action was announced a few minutes later; it got tothe hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy hunt began fallingapart. The City and Company police dropped out immediately. Most of thecivilians, hoping to grab five thousand sols' worth of live Fuzzy, stayedon for twenty minutes, and so, apparently to control them, did theconstabulary. Then the reward was cancelled, the airborne floodlights wentoff and the whole thing broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as soon as heheeled 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 halfof it and then began pulling off his boots.
"If that drink has a kid sister, I'll take it," Gerd muttered. "Whathappened, Gus?"
Brannhard began to curse. "The whole thing's a fake; it stinks from hereto Nifflheim. It would stink _on_ Nifflheim." He picked up a cigar butt hehad laid aside when Fane's call had come in and relighted it. "We foundthe woman who called the police. Neighbor; she says she saw Lurkin comehome drunk, and a little later she heard the girl screaming. She says hebeats 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 deniedhaving seen anything that even looked like a Fuzzy anywhere around."
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of Fuzzyreports; Jack went to the marshal's office to interview the people makingthem. The first dozen were of a piece with the ones that had come inoriginally. Then he talked to a young man who had something of differentquality.
"I saw them as plain as I'm seeing you, not more than fifty feet away," hesaid. "I had an autocarbine, and I pulled up on them, but gosh, I couldn'tshoot them. They were just like little people, Mr. Holloway, and theylooked so scared and helpless. So I held over their heads and let off atwo-second burst to scare them away before anybody else saw them and shotthem."
"Well, son, I'd like to shake your hand for that. You know, you thoughtyou 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 couldhave been back in the brush where I didn't see them."
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were three otherpeople who had actually seen Fuzzies; none were sure how many, but theywere all positive about locations and times. Plotting the reports on themap, it was apparent that the Fuzzies were moving north and west acrossthe outskirts of the city.
Brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel, still swearing, but halfamusedly.
"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 andthat sort of thing; idea's to keep me amused with them while LeslieCoombes is working up his case for the trial. Even tried to get themanager here to evict Baby; I threatened him with a racial-discriminationsuit, and that stopped that. And I just filed suit against the Company forseven million sols on behalf of the Fuzzies--million apiece for them and amillion for their lawyer."
"This evening," Jack said, "I'm going out in a car with a couple of Max'sdeputies. We're going to take Baby, and we'll have a loud-speaker on thecar." He unfolded the city map. "They seem to be traveling this way; theyought to be about here, and with Baby at the speaker, we ought to attracttheir attention."
They didn't see anything, though they kept at it till dusk. Baby had awonderful time with the loud-speaker; when he yeeked into it, he producedan ear-splitting noise, until the three humans in the car flinched everytime he opened his mouth. It affected dogs too; as the car moved back andforth, 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. Ablanket spread on the grass behind a house had vanished. A couple ofcushions had been taken from a porch couch. A frenzied mother reportedhaving found her six-year-old son playing with some Fuzzies; when she hadrushed to rescue him, the Fuzzies had scampered away and the child hadbegun weeping. Jack and Gerd rushed to the scene. The child's story,jumbled and imagination-colored, was definite on one point--the Fuzzieshad been nice to him and hadn't hurt him. They got a recording of that onthe air at once.
When they got back to the hotel, Gus Brannhard was there, bubbling withglee.
"The Chief Justice gave me another job of special prosecuting," he said."I'm to conduct an investigation into the possibility that this thing, theother night, was a frame-up, and I'm to prepare complaints against anybodywho's done anything prosecutable. I have authority to hold hearings, andsubpoena witnesses, and interrogate them under veridication. Max Fane hasspecific orders to cooperate. We're going to start, tomorrow, with Chiefof Police Dumont and work down. And maybe we can work up, too, as far asNick Emmert and Victor Grego." He gave a rumbling laugh. "Maybe that'llgive Leslie Coombes something to worry about."
* * * * *
Gerd brought the car down beside the rectangular excavation. It was fiftyfeet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper, with a powershovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside. Five or six men incoveralls and ankle boots advanced to meet them as they got out.
"Good morning, Mr. Holloway," one of them said. "It's right down over theedge of the hill. We haven't disturbed anything."
"Mind running over what you saw again? My partner here wasn't in when youcalled."
The foreman turned to Gerd. "We put off a couple of shots about an hourago. Some of the men, who'd gone down over the edge of the hill, saw theseFuzzies 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, andsaw where they'd been camping. The rock's pretty hard here, and we usedpretty heavy charges. Shock waves in the ground was what scared them."
They started down a path through the flower-dappled tall grass toward theedge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of limestone thatformed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a hundred in length. Underan overhanging ledge, they found two cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, andsome odds and ends of old garments that looked as though they had oncebeen used for polishing rags. There was a broken kitchen spoon, and a coldchisel, and some other metal articles.
"That's it, all right. I talked to the people who lost the blanket and thecushions. They must have made camp last night, after your gang stoppedwork; 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 mountainsto 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 andthanked them. If he found the Fuzzies himself and had to pay off on aninformation-received basis, it would take a mathematical genius to decidehow 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 woodedfoothills.
"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 damnthingsthis close to town, but they wouldn't know that."
"We'll need a few more cars. I'll call Colonel Ferguson and see what hecan do for me. Max is going to have his hands full with this investigationGus started."
* * * * *
Piet Dumont, the Mallorysport chief of police, might have been a good coponce, but for as long as Gus Brannhard had known him, he had been what hewas now--an empty shell of unsupported arrogance, with a sagging waistlineand a puffy face that tried to look tough and only succeeded in l
ookingunpleasant. He was sitting in a seat that looked like an old fashionedelectric chair, or like one of those instruments of torture to whichbeauty-shop customers submit themselves. There was a bright conical helmeton his head, and electrodes had been clamped to various portions of hisanatomy. On the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to havebeen a calm turquoise blue, but which was flickering from dark bluethrough violet to mauve. That was simple nervous tension and guilt andanger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated interrogation.Now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of bright red as he toyedmentally with some deliberate misstatement of fact.
"You know, yourself, that the Fuzzies didn't hurt that girl," Brannhardtold him.
"I don't know anything of the kind," the police chief retorted. "All Iknow'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 oftruth.
"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 anythingbut the truth.
"But you know that what really happened was that Lurkin beat the girlhimself, and Woller persuaded them both to say the Fuzzies did it," MaxFane said.
"I don't know anything of the kind!" Dumont almost yelled. The screenblazed 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 veridicatorhere often enough to know you can't get away with lying on it. Woller'smaking 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 touchedthat girl, and it wasn't till Woller talked to Lurkin and his daughter atheadquarters 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 voicewas surly. "I thought that was how it was, and I asked Woller. He justlaughed at me and told me to forget it." The screen seethed momentarilywith anger. "That son of a Khooghra thinks he's chief, not me. One wordfrom 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 rentedfrom the hotel: Gerd had taken his place in one of the two constabularycars. The third car shuttled between them, and all three talked back andforth 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 onthe 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. Helooked 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 headwas smashed instead of being cleanly severed. The shell, however, had beenbroken from underneath in the standard manner, and all four mandibles hadbeen broken off for picks. They must have all eaten at the prawn, sharealike. It had been done quite recently.
They sent the car up, and while all three of them circled about, they wentup the ravine on foot, calling: "Little Fuzzy! Little Fuzzy!" They found afootprint, and then another, where seepage water had moistened the ground.Gerd was talking excitedly into the portable radio he carried slung on hischest.
"One of you, go ahead a quarter of a mile, and then circle back. They'rein here somewhere."
"I see them! I see them!" a voice whooped out of the radio. "They're goingup the slope on your right, among the rocks!"
"Keep them in sight; somebody come and pick us up, and we'll get abovethem and head them off."
The rental car dropped quickly, the corporal getting the door open. Hedidn't bother going off contragravity; as soon as they were in and hadpulled the door shut behind them, he was lifting again. For a moment, thehill swung giddily as the car turned, and then Jack saw them, climbing thesteep slope among the rocks. Only four of them, and one was helpinganother. He wondered which ones they were, what had happened to the othertwo 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 thedeclivity. Then he found himself within reach of a Fuzzy and grabbed. Twomore dashed past him, up the steep hill. The one he snatched at hadsomething in his hand, and aimed a vicious blow at his face with it; hehad barely time to block it with his forearm. Then he was clutching theFuzzy 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 withboth hands.
"You hit Pappy Jack!" he said reproachfully. "Don't you know Pappy anymore? Poor scared little thing!"
The Fuzzy in his arms yeeked angrily. Then he looked, and it was no Fuzzyhe had ever seen before--not Little Fuzzy, nor funny, pompous Ko-Ko, normischievous Mike. It was a stranger Fuzzy.
"Well, no wonder; of course you didn't know Pappy Jack. You aren't one ofPappy Jack's Fuzzies at all!"
At the top, the constabulary corporal was sitting on a rock, clutching twoFuzzies, one under each arm. They stopped struggling and yeeked piteouslywhen 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. Hemust have eaten it before. When he gave some to the corporal, the othertwo, a male and a female, also seemed familiar with it. From below, Gerdwas 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 alittle kitten, black with a white face, peeping over the crook of hisother elbow. He was too stunned with disappointment to look at it withmore 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 ownFuzzies? 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 inher arms, like a baby."
"They're somebody's Fuzzies. They've been fed Extee Three. We'll take themto the hotel. Whoever it is, I'll bet he misses them as much as I domine."
His own Fuzzies, whom he would never see again. The full realizationdidn't hit him until he and Gerd were in the car again. There had been notrace of his Fuzzies from the time they had broken out of their cages atScience Center. This quartet had appeared the night the city police hadmanufactured the story of the attack on the Lurkin girl, and from themoment they had been seen by the youth who couldn't bring himself to fireon them, they had left a trail that he had been able to pick up at onceand follow. Why hadn't his own Fuzzies attracted as much notice in thethree weeks since they had vanished?
Because his own Fuzzies didn't exist any more. They had never gotten outof Science Center alive. Somebody Max Fane hadn't been able to questionunder veridication had murdered them. There was no use, any more, tryingto 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."