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Title: Little Fuzzy


Author: Henry Beam Piper



Release Date: April 9, 2006  [eBook #18137]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


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LITTLE FUZZY

by

H. Beam Piper







I


Jack Holloway found himself squinting, the orange sun full in his eyes. He
raised a hand to push his hat forward, then lowered it to the controls to
alter the pulse rate of the contragravity-field generators and lift the
manipulator another hundred feet. For a moment he sat, puffing on the
short pipe that had yellowed the corners of his white mustache, and looked
down at the red rag tied to a bush against the rock face of the gorge five
hundred yards away. He was smiling in anticipation.

"This'll be a good one," he told himself aloud, in the manner of men who
have long been their own and only company. "I want to see this one go up."

He always did. He could remember at least a thousand blast-shots he had
fired back along the years and on more planets than he could name at the
moment, including a few thermonuclears, but they were all different and
they were always something to watch, even a little one like this. Flipping
the switch, his thumb found the discharger button and sent out a radio
impulse; the red rag vanished in an upsurge of smoke and dust that mounted
out of the gorge and turned to copper when the sunlight touched it. The
big manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently; falling
debris pelted the trees and splashed in the little stream.

He waited till the machine stabilized, then glided it down to where he had
ripped a gash in the cliff with the charge of cataclysmite. Good shot:
brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked the vein of flint and hadn't
thrown it around too much. A lot of big slabs were loose. Extending the
forward claw-arms, he pulled and tugged, and then used the underside
grapples to pick up a chunk and drop it on the flat ground between the
cliff and the stream. He dropped another chunk on it, breaking both of
them, and then another and another, until he had all he could work over
the rest of the day. Then he set down, got the toolbox and the
long-handled contragravity lifter, and climbed to the ground where he
opened the box, put on gloves and an eyescreen and got out a microray
scanner and a vibrohammer.

The first chunk he cracked off had nothing in it; the scanner gave the
uninterrupted pattern of homogenous structure. Picking it up with the
lifter, he swung it and threw it into the stream. On the fifteenth chunk,
he got an interruption pattern that told him that a sunstone--or
something, probably something--was inside.

Some fifty million years ago, when the planet that had been called
Zarathustra (for the last twenty-five million) was young, there had
existed a marine life form, something like a jellyfish. As these died,
they had sunk into the sea-bottom ooze; sand had covered the ooze and
pressed it tighter and tighter, until it had become glassy flint, and the
entombed jellyfish little beans of dense stone. Some of them, by some
ancient biochemical quirk, were intensely thermofluorescent; worn as gems,
they glowed from the wearer's body heat.

On Terra or Baldur or Freya or Ishtar, a single cut of polished sunstone
was worth a small fortune. Even here, they brought respectable prices from
the Zarathustra Company's gem buyers. Keeping his point of expectation
safely low, he got a smaller vibrohammer from the toolbox and began
chipping cautiously around the foreign object, until the flint split open
and revealed a smooth yellow ellipsoid, half an inch long.

"Worth a thousand sols--if it's worth anything," he commented. A deft tap
here, another there, and the yellow bean came loose from the flint.
Picking it up, he rubbed it between gloved palms. "I don't think it is."
He rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of his pipe. It still
didn't respond. He dropped it. "Another jellyfish that didn't live right."

Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He dropped
the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching toward his hip.
Then he saw what had made the noise--a hard-shelled thing a foot in
length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two pairs of clawed mandibles.
He stopped and picked up a shard of flint, throwing it with an oath.
Another damned infernal land-prawn.

He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of course,
wasn't their fault. More to the point, they were destructive. They got
into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. They crawled into
machinery, possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They
cut into electric insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or
rather pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another
land-prawn.

This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and turned,
waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack reached for his hip
again, then checked the motion. Pistol cartridges cost like crazy; they
weren't to be wasted in fits of childish pique. Then he reflected that no
cartridge fired at a target is really wasted, and that he hadn't done any
shooting recently. Stooping again, he picked up another stone and tossed
it a foot short and to the left of the prawn. As soon as it was out of his
fingers, his hand went for the butt of the long automatic. It was out and
the safety off before the flint landed; as the prawn fled, he fired from
the hip. The quasi-crustacean disintegrated. He nodded pleasantly.

"Ol' man Holloway's still hitting things he shoots at."

Was a time, not so long ago, when he took his abilities for granted. Now
he was getting old enough to have to verify them. He thumbed on the safety
and holstered the pistol, then picked up the glove and put it on again.

Never saw so blasted many land-prawns as this summer. They'd been bad last
year, but nothing like this. Even the oldtimers who'd been on Zarathustra
since the first colonization said so. There'd be some simple explanation,
of course; something that would amaze him at his own obtuseness for not
having seen it at once. Maybe the abnormally dry weather had something to
do with it. Or increase of something they ate, or decrease of natural
enemies.

He'd heard that land-prawns had no natural enemies; he questioned that.
Something killed them. He'd seen crushed prawn shells, some of them close
to his camp. Maybe stamped on by something with hoofs, and then picked
clean by insects. He'd ask Ben Rainsford; Ben ought to know.

Half an hour later, the scanner gave him another interruption pattern. He
laid it aside and took up the small vibrohammer. This time it was a large
bean, light pink in color, He separated it from its matrix of flint and
rubbed it, and instantly it began glowing.

"Ahhh! This is something like it, now!"

He rubbed harder; warmed further on his pipe bowl, it fairly blazed.
Better than a thousand sols, he told himself. Good color, too. Getting his
gloves off, he drew out the little leather bag from under his shirt,
loosening the drawstrings by which it hung around his neck. There were a
dozen and a half stones inside, all bright as live coals. He looked at
them for a moment, and dropped the new sunstone in among them, chuckling
happily.

       *       *       *       *       *

Victor Grego, listening to his own recorded voice, rubbed the sunstone on
his left finger with the heel of his right palm and watched it brighten.
There was, he noticed, a boastful ring to his voice--not the suave,
unemphatic tone considered proper on a message-tape. Well, if anybody
wondered why, when they played that tape off six months from now in
Johannesburg on Terra, they could look in the cargo holds of the ship that
had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold
and platinum and gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes
that defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices.
And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the only
really dependable commodities in interstellar trade.

And he had spoken of other things. Veldbeest meat, up seven per cent from
last month, twenty per cent from last year, still in demand on a dozen
planets unable to produce Terran-type foodstuffs. Grain, leather, lumber.
And he had added a dozen more items to the lengthening list of what
Zarathustra could now produce in adequate quantities and no longer needed
to import. Not fishhooks and boot buckles, either--blasting explosives and
propellants, contragravity-field generator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn't need to carry
Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra could carry the Company, and itself.

Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him here, there
had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an improvised landing
field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now stood. Today, Mallorysport
was a city of seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of
nearly a million, and it was still growing. There were steel mills and
chemical plants and reaction plants and machine works. They produced all
their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined
plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.

The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for sixty-speed,
and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty minutes, a copy would be
aboard the ship that would hyper out for Terra that night. While he was
finishing, his communication screen buzzed.

"Dr. Kellogg's screening you, Mr. Grego," the girl in the outside office
told him.

He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a polychromatic explosion;
when it cleared, the chief of the Division of Scientific Study and
Research was looking out of the screen instead. Looking slightly upward at
the showback over his own screen, Victor was getting his warm,
sympathetic, sincere and slightly too toothy smile on straight.

"Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?"

It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he deserved or
it wasn't and he was trying to get somebody else blamed for it before
anybody could blame him.

"Good afternoon, Victor." Just the right shade of deference about using
the first name--big wheel to bigger wheel. "Has Nick Emmert been talking
to you about the Big Blackwater project today?"

Nick was the Federation's resident-general; on Zarathustra he was, to all
intents and purposes, the Terran Federation Government. He was also a
large stockholder in the chartered Zarathustra Company.

"No. Is he likely to?"

"Well, I wondered, Victor. He was on my screen just now. He says there's
some adverse talk about the effect on the rainfall in the Piedmont area of
Beta Continent. He was worried about it."

"Well, it would affect the rainfall. After all, we drained half a million
square miles of swamp, and the prevailing winds are from the west. There'd
be less atmospheric moisture to the east of it. Who's talking adversely
about it, and what worries Nick?"

"Well, Nick's afraid of the effect on public opinion on Terra. You know
how strong conservation sentiment is; everybody's very much opposed to any
sort of destructive exploitation."

"Good Lord! The man doesn't call the creation of five hundred thousand
square miles of new farmland destructive exploitation, does he?"

"Well, no, Nick doesn't call it that; of course not. But he's concerned
about some garbled story getting to Terra about our upsetting the
ecological balance and causing droughts. Fact is, I'm rather concerned
myself."

He knew what was worrying both of them. Emmert was afraid the Federation
Colonial Office would blame him for drawing fire on them from the
conservationists. Kellogg was afraid he'd be blamed for not predicting the
effects before his division endorsed the project. As a division chief, he
had advanced as far as he would in the Company hierarchy; now he was on a
Red Queen's racetrack, running like hell to stay in the same place.

"The rainfall's dropped ten per cent from last year, and fifteen per cent
from the year before that," Kellogg was saying. "And some non-Company
people have gotten hold of it, and so had Interworld News. Why, even some
of my people are talking about ecological side-effects. You know what will
happen when a story like that gets back to Terra. The conservation
fanatics will get hold of it, and the Company'll be criticized."

That would hurt Leonard. He identified himself with the Company. It was
something bigger and more powerful than he was, like God.

Victor Grego identified the Company with himself. It was something big and
powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the controls.

"Leonard, a little criticism won't hurt the Company," he said. "Not where
it matters, on the dividends. I'm afraid you're too sensitive to
criticism. Where did Emmert get this story anyhow? From your people?"

"No, absolutely not, Victor. That's what worries him. It was this man
Rainsford who started it."

"Rainsford?"

"Dr. Bennett Rainsford, the naturalist. Institute of Zeno-Sciences. I
never trusted any of those people; they always poke their noses into
things, and the Institute always reports their findings to the Colonial
Office."

"I know who you mean now; little fellow with red whiskers, always looks as
though he'd been sleeping in his clothes. Why, of course the Zeno-Sciences
people poke their noses into things, and of course they report their
findings to the government." He was beginning to lose patience. "I don't
see what all this is about, Leonard. This man Rainsford just made a
routine observation of meteorological effects. I suggest you have your
meteorologists check it, and if it's correct pass it on to the news
services along with your other scientific findings."

"Nick Emmert thinks Rainsford is a Federation undercover agent."

That made him laugh. Of course there were undercover agents on
Zarathustra, hundreds of them. The Company had people here checking on
him; he knew and accepted that. So did the big stockholders, like
Interstellar Explorations and the Banking Cartel and Terra Baldur-Marduk
Spacelines. Nick Emmert had his corps of spies and stool pigeons, and the
Terran Federation had people here watching both him and Emmert. Rainsford
could be a Federation agent--a roving naturalist would have a wonderful
cover occupation. But this Big Blackwater business was so utterly silly.
Nick Emmert had too much graft on his conscience; it was too bad that
overloaded consciences couldn't blow fuses.

"Suppose he is, Leonard. What could he report on us? We are a chartered
company, and we have an excellent legal department, which keeps us safely
inside our charter. It is a very liberal charter, too. This is a Class-III
uninhabited planet; the Company owns the whole thing outright. We can do
anything we want as long as we don't violate colonial law or the
Federation Constitution. As long as we don't do that, Nick Emmert hasn't
anything to worry about. Now forget this whole damned business, Leonard!"
He was beginning to speak sharply, and Kellogg was looking hurt. "I know
you were concerned about injurious reports getting back to Terra, and that
was quite commendable, but...."

By the time he got through, Kellogg was happy again. Victor blanked the
screen, leaned back in his chair and began laughing. In a moment, the
screen buzzed again. When he snapped it on, his screen-girl said:

"Mr. Henry Stenson's on, Mr. Grego."

"Well, put him on." He caught himself just before adding that it would be
a welcome change to talk to somebody with sense.

The face that appeared was elderly and thin; the mouth was tight, and
there were squint-wrinkles at the corners of the eyes.

"Well, Mr. Stenson. Good of you to call. How are you?"

"Very well, thank you. And you?" When he also admitted to good health, the
caller continued: "How is the globe running? Still in synchronization?"

Victor looked across the office at his most prized possession, the big
globe of Zarathustra that Henry Stenson had built for him, supported six
feet from the floor on its own contragravity unit, spotlighted in orange
to represent the KO sun, its two satellites circling about it as it
revolved slowly.

"The globe itself is keeping perfect time, and Darius is all right, Xerxes
is a few seconds of longitude ahead of true position."

"That's dreadful, Mr. Grego!" Stenson was deeply shocked. "I must adjust
that the first thing tomorrow. I should have called to check on it long
ago, but you know how it is. So many things to do, and so little time."

"I find the same trouble myself, Mr. Stenson." They chatted for a while,
and then Stenson apologized for taking up so much of Mr. Grego's valuable
time. What he meant was that his own time, just as valuable to him, was
wasting. After the screen blanked, Grego sat looking at it for a moment,
wishing he had a hundred men like Henry Stenson in his own organization.
Just men with Stenson's brains and character; wishing for a hundred
instrument makers with Stenson's skills would have been unreasonable, even
for wishing. There was only one Henry Stenson, just as there had been only
one Antonio Stradivari. Why a man like that worked in a little shop on a
frontier planet like Zarathustra....

Then he looked, pridefully, at the globe. Alpha Continent had moved slowly
to the right, with the little speck that represented Mallorysport
twinkling in the orange light. Darius, the inner moon, where the
Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines had their leased terminal, was almost
directly over it, and the other moon, Xerxes, was edging into sight.
Xerxes was the one thing about Zarathustra that the Company didn't own;
the Terran Federation had retained that as a naval base. It was the one
reminder that there was something bigger and more powerful than the
Company.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gerd van Riebeek saw Ruth Ortheris leave the escalator, step aside and
stand looking around the cocktail lounge. He set his glass, with its inch
of tepid highball, on the bar; when her eyes shifted in his direction, he
waved to her, saw her brighten and wave back and then went to meet her.
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, dodged when he reached for her and
took his arm.

"Drink before we eat?" he asked.

"Oh, Lord, yes! I've just about had it for today."

He guided her toward one of the bartending machines, inserted his credit
key, and put a four-portion jug under the spout, dialing the cocktail they
always had when they drank together. As he did, he noticed what she was
wearing: short black jacket, lavender neckerchief, light gray skirt. Not
her usual vacation get-up.

"School department drag you back?" he asked as the jug filled.

"Juvenile court." She got a couple of glasses from the shelf under the
machine as he picked up the jug. "A fifteen-year-old burglar."

They found a table at the rear of the room, out of the worst of the
cocktail-hour uproar. As soon as he filled her glass, she drank half of
it, then lit a cigarette.

"Junktown?" he asked.

She nodded. "Only twenty-five years since this planet was discovered, and
we have slums already. I was over there most of the afternoon, with a pair
of city police." She didn't seem to want to talk about it. "What were you
doing today?"

"Ruth, you ought to ask Doc Mallin to drop in on Leonard Kellogg sometime,
and give him an unobstusive going over."

"You haven't been having trouble with him again?" she asked anxiously.

He made a face, and then tasted his drink. "It's trouble just being around
that character. Ruth, to use one of those expressions your profession
deplores, Len Kellogg is just plain nuts!" He drank some more of his
cocktail and helped himself to one of her cigarettes. "Here," he
continued, after lighting it. "A couple of days ago, he told me he'd been
getting inquiries about this plague of land-prawns they're having over on
Beta. He wanted me to set up a research project to find out why and what
to do about it."

"Well?"

"I did. I made two screen calls, and then I wrote a report and sent it up
to him. That was where I jerked my trigger; I ought to have taken a couple
of weeks and made a real production out of it."

"What did you tell him?"

"The facts. The limiting factor on land-prawn increase is the weather. The
eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig their way out in the
spring. If there's been a lot of rain, most of them drown in their holes
or as soon as they emerge. According to growth rings on trees, last spring
was the driest in the Beta Piedmont in centuries, so most of them
survived, and as they're parthenogenetic females, they all laid eggs. This
spring, it was even drier, so now they have land prawns all over central
Beta. And I don't know that anything can be done about them."

"Well, did he think you were just guessing?"

He shook his head in exasperation. "I don't know what he thinks. You're
the psychologist, you try to figure it. I sent him that report yesterday
morning. He seemed quite satisfied with it at the time. Today, just after
noon, he sent for me and told me it wouldn't do at all. Tried to insist
that the rainfall on Beta had been normal. That was silly; I referred him
to his meteorologists and climatologists, where I'd gotten my information.
He complained that the news services were after him for an explanation. I
told him I'd given him the only explanation there was. He said he simply
couldn't use it. There had to be some other explanation."

"If you don't like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts,
dream up some you do like," she said. "That's typical rejection of
reality. Not psychotic, not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane."
She had finished her first drink and was sipping slowly at her second.
"You know, this is interesting. Does he have some theory that would
disqualify yours?"

"Not that I know of. I got the impression that he just didn't want the
subject of rainfall on Beta discussed at all."

"That is odd. Has anything else peculiar been happening over on Beta
lately?"

"No. Not that I know of," he repeated. "Of course, that swamp-drainage
project over there was what caused the dry weather, last year and this
year, but I don't see...." His own glass was empty, and when he tilted the
jug over it, a few drops trickled out. He looked at his watch. "Think we
could have another cocktail before dinner?" he asked.




II


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 connection 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.




III


He started awake, rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Past twenty-two
hundred; now it really was time for a drink, and then to bed. He rose
stiffly and went out to the kitchen, pouring the whisky and bringing it in
to the table desk, where he sat down and got out his diary. He was almost
finished with the day's entry when the little door behind him opened and a
small voice said, "Yeeek." He turned quickly.

"Little Fuzzy?"

The small sound was repeated, impatiently. Little Fuzzy was holding the
door open, and there was an answer from outside. Then another Fuzzy came
in, and another; four of them, one carrying a tiny, squirming ball of
white fur in her arms. They all had prawn-killers like the one in the
drawer, and they stopped just inside the room and gaped about them in
bewilderment. Then, laying down his weapon, Little Fuzzy ran to him;
stooping from the chair, he caught him and then sat down on the floor with
him.

"So that's why you ran off and worried Pappy Jack? You wanted your family
here, too!"

The others piled the things they were carrying with Little Fuzzy's steel
weapon and approached hesitantly. He talked to them, and so did Little
Fuzzy--at least it sounded like that--and finally one came over and
fingered his shirt, and then reached up and pulled his mustache. Soon all
of them were climbing onto him, even the female with the baby. It was
small enough to sit on his palm, but in a minute it had climbed to his
shoulder, and then it was sitting on his head.

"You people want dinner?" he asked.

Little Fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that was a word he recognized. He took
them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast veldbeest and
yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while they were eating from a couple
of big pans, he went back to the living room to examine the things they
had brought with them. Two of the prawn-killers were wood, like the one
Little Fuzzy had discarded in the shed. A third was of horn, beautifully
polished, and the fourth looked as though it had been made from the
shoulder bone of something like a zebralope. Then there was a small _coup
de poing_ ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the
shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight edge.
For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a scraper. He
puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was serrated, and
decided that it was a saw. And there were three very good flake knives,
and some shells, evidently drinking vessels.

Mamma Fuzzy came in while he was finishing the examination. She seemed
suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property had been taken
or damaged. Baby Fuzzy was clinging to her fur with one hand and holding a
slice of pool-ball fruit, on which he was munching, with the other. He
crammed what was left of the fruit into his mouth, climbed up on Jack and
sat down on his head again. Have to do something to break him of that. One
of these days, he'd be getting too big for it.

In a few minutes, the rest of the family came in, chasing and pummeling
each other and yeeking happily. Mamma jumped off his lap and joined the
free-for-all, and then Baby took off from his head and landed on Mamma's
back. And he thought he'd lost his Little Fuzzy, and, gosh, here he had
five Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy. When they were tired romping, he made beds
for them in the living room, and brought out Little Fuzzy's bedding and
his treasures. One Little Fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine; five and a
Baby Fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing.

They were swarming over the bed, Baby and all, to waken him the next
morning.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next morning he made a steel chopper-digger for each of them, and half
a dozen extras for replacements in case more Fuzzies showed up. He also
made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a handsaw out of a piece of
broken power-saw blade and half a dozen little knives forged in one piece
from quarter-inch coil-spring material. He had less trouble trading the
Fuzzies' own things away from them than he had expected. They had a very
keen property sense, but they knew a good deal when one was offered. He
put the wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the desk
drawer. Start of the Holloway Collection of Zarathustran Fuzzy Weapons and
Implements. Maybe he'd will it to the Federation Institute of
Xeno-Sciences.

Of course, the family had to try out the new chopper-diggers on
land-prawns, and he followed them around with the movie camera. They
killed a dozen and a half that morning, and there was very little interest
in lunch, though they did sit around nibbling, just to be doing what he
was doing. As soon as they finished, they all went in for a nap on his
bed. He spent the afternoon pottering about camp doing odd jobs that he
had been postponing for months. The Fuzzies all emerged in the late
afternoon for a romp in the grass outside.

He was in the kitchen, getting dinner, when they all came pelting in
through the little door into the living room, making an excited outcry.
Little Fuzzy and one of the other males came into the kitchen. Little
Fuzzy squatted, put one hand on his lower jaw, with thumb and little
finger extended, and the other on his forehead, first finger upright. Then
he thrust out his right arm stiffly and made a barking noise of a sort he
had never made before. He had to do it a second time before Jack got it.

There was a large and unpleasant carnivore, called a damnthing--another
example of zoological nomenclature on uninhabited planets--which had a
single horn on its forehead and one on either side of the lower jaw. It
was something for Fuzzies, and even for human-type people, to get excited
about. He laid down the paring knife and the yummiyam he had been peeling,
wiped his hands and went into the living room, taking a quick nose count
and satisfying himself that none of the family were missing as he crossed
to the gunrack.

This time, instead of the 6-mm he had used on the harpy, he lifted down a
big 12.7 double express, making sure that it was loaded and pocketing a
few spare rounds. Little Fuzzy followed him outside, pointing around the
living hut to the left. The rest of the family stayed indoors.

Stepping out about twenty feet, he started around counter-clockwise. There
was no damnthing on the north side, and he was about to go around to the
east side when Little Fuzzy came dashing past him, pointing to the rear.
He whirled, to see the damnthing charging him from behind, head down, and
middle horn lowered. He should have thought of that; damnthings would
double and hunt their hunters.

He lined the sights instinctively and squeezed. The big rifle roared and
banged his shoulder, and the bullet caught the damnthing and hurled all
half-ton of it backward. The second shot caught it just below one of the
fungoid-looking ears, and the beast gave a spasmodic all-over twitch and
was still. He reloaded mechanically, but there was no need for a third
shot. The damnthing was as dead as he would have been except for Little
Fuzzy's warning.

He mentioned that to Little Fuzzy, who was calmly retrieving the empty
cartridges. Then, rubbing his shoulder where the big rifle had pounded
him, he went in and returned the weapon to the rack. He used the
manipulator to carry the damnthing away from the camp and drop it into a
treetop, where it would furnish a welcome if puzzling treat for the
harpies.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was another alarm in the evening after dinner. The family had come in
from their sunset romp and were gathered in the living room, where Little
Fuzzy was demonstrating the principle of things-that-screwed-onto-things
with the wide-mouthed bottle and the bolt and nut, when something huge
began hooting directly overhead. They all froze, looking up at the ceiling,
and then ran over and got under the gunrack. This must be something far
more serious than a damnthing, and what Pappy Jack would do about it would
be nothing short of catastrophic. They were startled to see Pappy Jack
merely go to the door, open it and step outside. After all, none of them
had ever heard a Constabulary aircar klaxon before.

The car settled onto the grass in front of the camp, gave a slight lurch
and went off contragravity. Two men in uniform got out, and in the
moonlight he recognized both of them: Lieutenant George Lunt and his
driver, Ahmed Khadra. He called a greeting to them.

"Anything wrong?" he asked.

"No; just thought we'd drop in and see how you were making out," Lunt told
him. "We don't get up this way often. Haven't had any trouble lately, have
you?"

"Not since the last time." The last time had been a couple of woods
tramps, out-of-work veldbeest herders from the south, who had heard about
the little bag he carried around his neck. All the Constabulary had needed
to do was remove the bodies and write up a report. "Come on in and hang up
your guns awhile. I have something I want to show you."

Little Fuzzy had come out and was pulling at his trouser leg; he stooped
and picked him up, setting him on his shoulder. The rest of the family,
deciding that it must be safe, had come to the door and were looking out.

"Hey! What the devil are those things?" Lunt asked, stopping short halfway
from the car.

"Fuzzies. Mean to tell me you've never seen Fuzzies before?"

"No, I haven't. What are they?"

The two Constabulary men came closer, and Jack stepped back into the
house, shooing the Fuzzies out of the way. Lunt and Khadra stopped inside
the door.

"I just told you. They're Fuzzies. That's all the name I know for them."

A couple of Fuzzies came over and looked up at Lieutenant Lunt; one of
them said, "Yeek?"

"They want to know what you are, so that makes it mutual."

Lunt hesitated for a moment, then took off his belt and holster and hung
it on one of the pegs inside the door, putting his beret over it. Khadra
followed his example promptly. That meant that they considered themselves
temporarily off duty and would accept a drink if one were offered. A Fuzzy
was pulling at Ahmed Khadra's trouser leg and asking to be noticed, and
Mamma Fuzzy was holding Baby up to show to Lunt. Khadra, rather
hesitantly, picked up the Fuzzy who was trying to attract his attention.

"Never saw anything like them before Jack," he said. "Where did they come
from?"

"Ahmed; you don't know anything about those things," Lunt reproved.

"They won't hurt me, Lieutenant; they haven't hurt Jack, have they?" He
sat down on the floor, and a couple more came to him. "Why don't you get
acquainted with them? They're cute."

George Lunt wouldn't let one of his men do anything he was afraid to do;
he sat down on the floor, too, and Mamma brought her baby to him.
Immediately, the baby jumped onto his shoulder and tried to get onto his
head.

"Relax, George," Jack told him, "They're just Fuzzies; they want to make
friends with you."

"I'm always worried about strange life forms," Lunt said. "You've been
around enough to know some of the things that have happened--"

"They are not a strange life form; they are Zarathustran mammals. The same
life form you've had for dinner every day since you came here. Their
biochemistry's identical with ours. Think they'll give you the Polka-Dot
Plague, or something?" He put Little Fuzzy down on the floor with the
others. "We've been exploring this planet for twenty-five years, and
nobody's found anything like that here."

"You said it yourself, Lieutenant," Khadra put in. "Jack's been around
enough to know."

"Well.... They are cute little fellows." Lunt lifted Baby down off his
head and gave him back to Mamma. Little Fuzzy had gotten hold of the chain
of his whistle and was trying to find out what was on the other end. "Bet
they're a lot of company for you."

"You just get acquainted with them. Make yourselves at home; I'll go
rustle up some refreshments."

While he was in the kitchen, filling a soda siphon and getting ice out of
the refrigerator, a police whistle began shrilling in the living room. He
was opening a bottle of whisky when Little Fuzzy came dashing out, blowing
on it, a couple more of the family pursuing him and trying to get it away
from him. He opened a tin of Extee Three for the Fuzzies, as he did,
another whistle in the living room began blowing.

"We have a whole shoebox full of them at the post," Lunt yelled to him
above the din. "We'll just write these two off as expended in service."

"Well, that's real nice of you, George. I want to tell you that the
Fuzzies appreciate that. Ahmed, suppose you do the bartending while I give
the kids their candy."

By the time Khadra had the drinks mixed and he had distributed the Extee
Three to the Fuzzies, Lunt had gotten into the easy chair, and the Fuzzies
were sitting on the floor in front of him, still looking him over
curiously. At least the Extee Three had taken their minds off the whistles
for a while.

"What I want to know, Jack, is where they came from," Lunt said, taking
his drink. "I've been up here for five years, and I never saw anything
like them before."

"I've been here five years longer, and I never saw them before, either. I
think they came down from the north, from the country between the
Cordilleras and the West Coast Range. Outside of an air survey at ten
thousand feet and a few spot landings here and there, none of that country
has been explored. For all anybody knows, it could be full of Fuzzies."

He began with his first encounter with Little Fuzzy, and by the time he
had gotten as far as the wood chisel and the killing of the land-prawn,
Lunt and Khadra were looking at each other in amazement.

"That's it!" Khadra said. "I've found prawn-shells cracked open and the
meat picked out, just the way you describe it. I always wondered what did
that. But they don't all have wood chisels. What do you suppose they used
ordinarily?"

"Ah!" He pulled the drawer open and began getting things out. "Here's the
one Little Fuzzy discarded when he found my chisel. The rest of this stuff
the others brought in when they came."

Lunt and Khadra rose and came over to look at the things. Lunt tried to
argue that the Fuzzies couldn't have made that stuff. He wasn't even able
to convince himself. Having finished their Extee Three, the Fuzzies were
looking expectantly at the viewscreen, and it occurred to him that none of
them except Little Fuzzy had ever seen it on. Then Little Fuzzy jumped up
on the chair Lunt had vacated, reached over to the control-panel and
switched it on. What he got was an empty stretch of moonlit plain to the
south, from a pickup on one of the steel towers the veldbeest herders
used. That wasn't very interesting; he twiddled the selector and finally
got a night soccer game at Mallorysport. That was just fine; he jumped
down and joined the others in front of the screen.

"I've seen Terran monkeys and Freyan Kholphs that liked to watch screens
and could turn them on and work the selector," Lunt said. It sounded like
the token last salvo before the surrender.

"Kholphs are smart," Khadra agreed. "They use tools."

"Do they make tools? Or tools to make tools with, like that saw?" There
was no argument on that. "No. Nobody does that except people like us and
the Fuzzies."

It was the first time he had come right out and said that; the first time
he had even consciously thought it. He realized that he had been convinced
of it all along, though. It startled the constabulary lieutenant and
trooper.

"You mean you think--?" Lunt began.

"They don't talk, and they don't build fires," Ahmed Khadra said, as
though that settled it.

"Ahmed, you know better than that. That talk-and-build-a-fire rule isn't
any scientific test at all."

"It's a legal test." Lunt supported his subordinate.

"It's a rule-of-thumb that was set up so that settlers on new planets
couldn't get away with murdering and enslaving the natives by claiming
they thought they were only hunting and domesticating wild animals," he
said. "Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes.
That's the law. But that doesn't mean that anything that doesn't isn't. I
haven't seen any of this gang building fires, and as I don't want to come
home sometime and find myself burned out, I'm not going to teach them. But
I'm sure they have means of communication among themselves."

"Has Ben Rainsford seen them yet?" Lunt asked.

"Ben's off on a trip somewhere. I called him as soon as Little Fuzzy, over
there, showed up here. He won't be back till Friday."

"Yes, that's right; I did know that." Lunt was still looking dubiously at
the Fuzzies. "I'd like to hear what he thinks about them."

If Ben said they were safe, Lunt would accept that. Ben was an expert, and
Lunt respected expert testimony. Until then, he wasn't sure. He'd probably
order a medical check-up for himself and Khadra the first thing tomorrow,
to make sure they hadn't picked up some kind of bug.




IV


The Fuzzies took the manipulator quite calmly the next morning. That
wasn't any horrible monster, that was just something Pappy Jack took rides
in. He found one rather indifferent sunstone in the morning and two good
ones in the afternoon. He came home early and found the family in the
living room; they had dumped the wastebasket and were putting things back
into it. Another land-prawn seemed to have gotten into the house; its
picked shell was with the other rubbish in the basket. They had dinner
early, and he loaded the lot of them into the airjeep and took them for a
long ride to the south and west.

The following day, he located the flint vein on the other side of the
gorge and spent most of the morning blasting away the sandstone above it.
The next time he went into Mallorysport, he decided, he was going to shop
around for a good power-shovel. He had to blast a channel to keep the
little stream from damming up on him. He didn't get any flint cracked at
all that day. There was another harpy circling around the camp when he got
back; he chased it with the manipulator and shot it down with his pistol.
Harpies probably found Fuzzies as tasty as Fuzzies found land-prawns. The
family were all sitting under the gunrack when he entered the living room.

The next day he cracked flint, and found three more stones. It really
looked as though he had found the Dying Place of the Jellyfish at that. He
knocked off early that afternoon, and when he came in sight of the camp,
he saw an airjeep grounded on the lawn and a small man with a red beard in
a faded Khaki bush-jacket sitting on the bench by the kitchen door,
surrounded by Fuzzies. There was a camera and some other equipment laid up
where the Fuzzies couldn't get at it. Baby Fuzzy, of course, was sitting
on his head. He looked up and waved, and then handed Baby to his mother
and rose to his feet.

"Well, what do you think of them, Ben?" Jack called down, as he grounded
the manipulator.

"My God, don't start me on that now!" Ben Rainsford replied, and then
laughed. "I stopped at the constabulary post on the way home. I thought
George Lunt had turned into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. Then I
went home, and found your call on the recorder, so I came over here."

"Been waiting long?"

The Fuzzies had all abandoned Rainsford and come trooping over as soon as
the manipulator was off contragravity. He climbed down among them, and
they followed him across the grass, catching at his trouser legs and
yeeking happily.

"Not so long." Rainsford looked at his watch. "Good Lord, three and half
hours is all. Well, the time passed quickly. You know, your little fellows
have good ears. They heard you coming a long time before I did."

"Did you see them killing any prawns?"

"I should say! I got a lot of movies of it." He shook his head slowly.
"Jack, this is almost incredible."

"You're staying for dinner, of course?"

"You try and chase me away. I want to hear all about this. Want you to
make a tape about them, if you're willing."

"Glad to. We'll do that after we eat." He sat down on the bench, and the
Fuzzies began climbing upon and beside him. "This is the original, Little
Fuzzy. He brought the rest in a couple of days later. Mamma Fuzzy, and
Baby Fuzzy. And these are Mike and Mitzi. I call this one Ko-Ko, because
of the ceremonious way he beheads land-prawns."

"George says you call them all Fuzzies. Want that for the official
designation?"

"Sure. That's what they are, isn't it?"

"Well, let's call the order Hollowayans," Rainsford said. "Family,
Fuzzies; genus, Fuzzy. Species, Holloway's Fuzzy--_Fuzzy fuzzy holloway_.
How'll that be?"

That would be all right, he supposed. At least, they didn't try to
Latinize things in extraterrestrial zoology any more.

"I suppose our bumper crop of land-prawns is what brought them into this
section?"

"Yes, of course. George was telling me you thought they'd come down from
the north; about the only place they could have come from. This is
probably just the advance guard; we'll be having Fuzzies all over the
place before long. I wonder how fast they breed."

"Not very fast. Three males and two females in this crowd, and only one
young one." He set Mike and Mitzi off his lap and got to his feet. "I'll
go start dinner now. While I'm doing that, you can look at the stuff they
brought in with them."

When he had placed the dinner in the oven and taken a couple of highballs
into the living room, Rainsford was still sitting at the desk, looking at
the artifacts. He accepted his drink and sipped it absently, then raised
his head.

"Jack, this stuff is absolutely amazing," he said.

"It's better than that. It's unique. Only collection of native weapons and
implements on Zarathustra."

Ben Rainsford looked up sharply. "You mean what I think you mean?" he
asked. "Yes; you do." He drank some of his highball, set down the glass
and picked up the polished-horn prawn-killer. "Anything--pardon,
anybody--who does this kind of work is good enough native for me." He
hesitated briefly. "Why, Jack this tape you said you'd make. Can I
transmit a copy to Juan Jimenez? He's chief mammalogist with the Company
science division; we exchange information. And there's another Company man
I'd like to have hear it. Gerd van Riebeek. He's a general
xeno-naturalist, like me, but he's especially interested in animal
evolution."

"Why not? The Fuzzies are a scientific discovery. Discoveries ought to be
reported."

Little Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi strolled in from the kitchen. Little Fuzzy
jumped up on the armchair and switched on the viewscreen. Fiddling with
the selector, he got the Big Blackwater woods-burning. Mike and Mitzi
shrieked delightedly, like a couple of kids watching a horror show. They
knew, by now, that nothing in the screen could get out and hurt them.

"Would you mind if they came out here and saw the Fuzzies?"

"Why, the Fuzzies would love that. They like company."

Mamma and Baby and Ko-Ko came in, seemed to approve what was on the screen
and sat down to watch it. When the bell on the stove rang, they all got
up, and Ko-Ko jumped onto the chair and snapped the screen off. Ben
Rainsford looked at him for a moment.

"You know, I have married friends with children who have a hell of a time
teaching eight-year-olds to turn off screens when they're through watching
them," he commented.

       *       *       *       *       *

It took an hour, after dinner, to get the whole story, from the first
little yeek in the shower stall, on tape. When he had finished, Ben
Rainsford made a few remarks and shut off the recorder, then looked at his
watch.

"Twenty hundred; it'll be seventeen hundred in Mallorysport," he said. "I
could catch Jimenez at Science Center if I called now. He usually works a
little late."

"Go ahead. Want to show him some Fuzzies?" He moved his pistol and some
other impedimenta off the table and set Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and
Baby upon it, then drew up a chair beside it, in range of the
communication screen, and sat down with Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko.
Rainsford punched out a wavelength combination. Then he picked up Baby
Fuzzy and set him on his head.

In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man looked out
of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants to make sure his
public face is on straight. It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted,
group-integrated sort of face--the face turned out in thousands of copies
every year by the educational production lines on Terra.

"Why, Bennett, this is a pleasant surprise," he began. "I never expec--"
Then he choked; at least, he emitted a sound of surprise. "What in the
name of Dai-Butsu are those things on the table in front of you?" he
demanded. "I never saw anything--_And what is that on your head?_"

"Family group of Fuzzies," Rainsford said. "Mature male, mature female,
immature male." He lifted Baby Fuzzy down and put him in Mamma's arms.
"Species _Fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra_. The gentleman on my left is
Jack Holloway, the sunstone operator, who is the original discoverer.
Jack, Juan Jimenez."

They shook their own hands at one another in the ancient Terran-Chinese
gesture that was used on communication screens, and assured each
other--Jimenez rather absently--that it was a pleasure. He couldn't take
his eyes off the Fuzzies.

"Where did they come from?" he wanted to know. "Are you sure they're
indigenous?"

"They're not quite up to spaceships, yet, Dr. Jimenez. Fairly early
Paleolithic, I'd say."

Jimenez thought he was joking, and laughed. The sort of a laugh that could
be turned on and off, like a light. Rainsford assured him that the Fuzzies
were really indigenous.

"We have everything that's known about them on tape," he said. "About an
hour of it. Can you take sixty-speed?" He was making adjustments on the
recorder as he spoke. "All right, set and we'll transmit to you. And can
you get hold of Gerd van Riebeek? I'd like him to hear it too; it's as
much up his alley as anybody's."

When Jimenez was ready, Rainsford pressed the play-off button, and for a
minute the recorder gave a high, wavering squeak. The Fuzzies all looked
startled. Then it ended.

"I think, when you hear this, that you and Gerd will both want to come out
and see these little people. If you can, bring somebody who's a qualified
psychologist, somebody capable of evaluating the Fuzzies' mentation. Jack
wasn't kidding about early Paleolithic. If they're not sapient, they only
miss it by about one atomic diameter."

Jimenez looked almost as startled as the Fuzzies had. "You surely don't
mean that?" He looked from Rainsford to Jack Holloway and back. "Well,
I'll call you back, when we've both heard the tape. You're three time
zones west of us, aren't you? Then we'll try to make it before your
midnight--that'll be twenty-one hundred."

He called back half an hour short of that. This time, it was from the
living room of an apartment instead of an office. There was a portable
record player in the foreground and a low table with snacks and drinks,
and two other people were with him. One was a man of about Jimenez's age
with a good-humored, non-life-adjusted, non-group-integrated and slightly
weather-beaten face. The other was a woman with glossy black hair and a
Mona Lisa-ish smile. The Fuzzies had gotten sleepy, and had been bribed
with Extee Three to stay up a little longer. Immediately, they registered
interest. This was more fun than the viewscreen.

Jimenez introduced his companions as Gerd van Riebeek and Ruth Ortheris.
"Ruth is with Dr. Mallin's section; she's been working with the school
department and the juvenile court. She can probably do as well with your
Fuzzies as a regular xeno-psychologist."

"Well, I have worked with extraterrestrials," the woman said. "I've been
on Loki and Thor and Shesha."

Jack nodded. "Been on the same planets myself. Are you people coming out
here?"

"Oh, yes," van Riebeek said. "We'll be out by noon tomorrow. We may stay a
couple of days, but that won't put you to any trouble; I have a boat
that's big enough for the three of us to camp on. Now, how do we get to
your place?"

Jack told him, and gave map coordinates. Van Riebeek noted them down.

"There's one thing, though, I'm going to have to get firm about. I don't
want to have to speak about it again. These little people are to be
treated with consideration, and not as laboratory animals. You will not
hurt them, or annoy them, or force them to do anything they don't want to
do."

"We understand that. We won't do anything with the Fuzzies without your
approval. Is there anything you'd want us to bring out?"

"Yes. A few things for the camp that I'm short of; I'll pay you for them
when you get here. And about three cases of Extee Three. And some toys.
Dr. Ortheris, you heard the tape, didn't you? Well, just think what you'd
like to have if you were a Fuzzy, and bring it."




V


Victor Grego crushed out his cigarette slowly and deliberately.

"Yes, Leonard," he said patiently. "It's very interesting, and doubtless
an important discovery, but I can't see why you're making such a
production of it. Are you afraid I'll blame you for letting non-Company
people beat you to it? Or do you merely suspect that anything Bennett
Rainsford's mixed up in is necessarily a diabolical plot against the
Company and, by consequence, human civilization?"

Leonard Kellogg looked pained. "What I was about to say, Victor, is that
both Rainsford and this man Holloway seem convinced that these things they
call Fuzzies aren't animals at all. They believe them to be sapient
beings."

"Well, that's--" He bit that off short as the significance of what Kellogg
had just said hit him. "Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I
don't blame you for taking it seriously. Why, that would make Zarathustra
a Class-IV inhabited planet."

"For which the Company holds a Class-III charter," Kellogg added. "For an
uninhabited planet."

Automatically void if any race of sapient beings were discovered on
Zarathustra.

"You know what will happen if this is true?"

"Well, I should imagine the charter would have to be renegotiated, and now
that the Colonial Office knows what sort of a planet this is, they'll be
anything but generous with the Company...."

"They won't renegotiate anything, Leonard. The Federation government will
simply take the position that the Company has already made an adequate
return on the original investments, and they'll award us what we can show
as in our actual possession--I hope--and throw the rest into the public
domain."

The vast plains on Beta and Delta continents, with their herds of
veldbeest--all open range, and every 'beest that didn't carry a Company
brand a maverick. And all the untapped mineral wealth, and the untilled
arable land; it would take years of litigation even to make the Company's
claim to Big Blackwater stick. And Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines would
lose their monopolistic franchise and get sticky about it in the courts,
and in any case, the Company's import-export monopoly would go out the
airlock. And the squatters rushing in and swamping everything--

"Why, we won't be any better off than the Yggdrasil Company, squatting on
a guano heap on one continent!" he burst out. "Five years from now,
they'll be making more money out of bat dung than we'll be making out of
this whole world!"

And the Company's good friend and substantial stockholder, Nick Emmert,
would be out, too, and a Colonial Governor General would move in, with
regular army troops and a complicated bureaucracy. Elections, and a
representative parliament, and every Tom, Dick and Harry with a grudge
against the Company would be trying to get laws passed--And, of course, a
Native Affairs Commission, with its nose in everything.

"But they couldn't just leave us without any kind of a charter," Kellogg
insisted. Who was he trying to kid--besides himself? "It wouldn't be
fair!" As though that clinched it. "It isn't our fault!"

He forced more patience into his voice. "Leonard, please try to realize
that the Terran Federation government doesn't give one shrill soprano hoot
on Nifflheim whether it's fair or not, or whose fault what is. The
Federation government's been repenting that charter they gave the Company
ever since they found out what they'd chartered away. Why, this planet is
a better world than Terra ever was, even before the Atomic Wars. Now, if
they have a chance to get it back, with improvements, you think they won't
take it? And what will stop them? If those creatures over on Beta
Continent are sapient beings, our charter isn't worth the parchment it's
engrossed on, and that's an end of it." He was silent for a moment. "You
heard that tape Rainsford transmitted to Jimenez. Did either he or
Holloway actually claim, in so many words, that these things really are
sapient beings?"

"Well, no; not in so many words. Holloway consistently alluded to them as
people, but he's just an ignorant old prospector. Rainsford wouldn't come
out and commit himself one way or another, but he left the door wide open
for anybody else to."

"Accepting their account, could these Fuzzies be sapient?"

"Accepting the account, yes," Kellogg said, in distress. "They could be."

They probably were, if Leonard Kellogg couldn't wish the evidence out of
existence.

"Then they'll look sapient to these people of yours who went over to Beta
this morning, and they'll treat it purely as a scientific question and
never consider the legal aspects. Leonard, you'll have to take charge of
the investigation, before they make any reports everybody'll be sorry
for."

Kellogg didn't seem to like that. It would mean having to exercise
authority and getting tough with people, and he hated anything like that.
He nodded very reluctantly.

"Yes. I suppose I will. Let me think about it for a moment, Victor."

One thing about Leonard; you handed him something he couldn't delegate or
dodge and he'd go to work on it. Maybe not cheerfully, but
conscientiously.

"I'll take Ernst Mallin along," he said at length. "This man Rainsford has
no grounding whatever in any of the psychosciences. He may be able to
impose on Ruth Ortheris, but not on Ernst Mallin. Not after I've talked to
Mallin first." He thought some more. "We'll have to get these Fuzzies away
from this man Holloway. Then we'll issue a report of discovery, being
careful to give full credit to both Rainsford and Holloway--we'll even
accept the designation they've coined for them--but we'll make it very
clear that while highly intelligent, the Fuzzies are not a race of sapient
beings. If Rainsford persists in making any such claim, we will brand it
as a deliberate hoax."

"Do you think he's gotten any report off to the Institute of Xeno-Sciences
yet?"

Kellogg shook his head. "I think he wants to trick some of our people into
supporting his sapience claims; at least, corroborating his and Holloway's
alleged observations. That's why I'll have to get over to Beta as soon as
possible."

By now, Kellogg had managed to convince himself that going over to Beta
had been his idea all along. Probably also convincing himself that
Rainsford's report was nothing but a pack of lies. Well, if he could work
better that way, that was his business.

"He will, before long, if he isn't stopped. And a year from now, there'll
be a small army of investigators here from Terra. By that time, you should
have both Rainsford and Holloway thoroughly discredited. Leonard, you get
those Fuzzies away from Holloway and I'll personally guarantee they won't
be available for investigation by then. Fuzzies," he said reflectively.
"Fur-bearing animals, I take it?"

"Holloway spoke, on the tape, of their soft and silky fur."

"Good. Emphasize that in your report. As soon as it's published, the
Company will offer two thousand sols apiece for Fuzzy pelts. By the time
Rainsford's report brings anybody here from Terra, we may have them all
trapped out."

Kellogg began to look worried.

"But, Victor, that's genocide!"

"Nonsense! Genocide is defined as the extermination of a race of sapient
beings. These are fur-bearing animals. It's up to you and Ernst Mallin to
prove that."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Fuzzies, playing on the lawn in front of the camp, froze into
immobility, their faces turned to the west. Then they all ran to the bench
by the kitchen door and scrambled up onto it.

"Now what?" Jack Holloway wondered.

"They hear the airboat," Rainsford told him. "That's the way they acted
yesterday when you were coming in with your machine." He looked at the
picnic table they had been spreading under the featherleaf trees.
"Everything ready?"

"Everything but lunch; that won't be cooked for an hour yet. I see them
now."

"You have better eyes than I do, Jack. Oh, I see it. I hope the kids put
on a good show for them," he said anxiously.

He'd been jittery ever since he arrived, shortly after breakfast. It
wasn't that these people from Mallorysport were so important themselves;
Ben had a bigger name in scientific circles than any of this Company
crowd. He was just excited about the Fuzzies.

The airboat grew from a barely visible speck, and came spiraling down to
land in the clearing. When it was grounded and off contragravity, they
started across the grass toward it, and the Fuzzies all jumped down from
the bench and ran along with them.

The three visitors climbed down. Ruth Ortheris wore slacks and a sweater,
but the slacks were bloused over a pair of ankle boots. Gerd van Riebeek
had evidently done a lot of field work: his boots were stout, and he wore
old, faded khakis and a serviceable-looking sidearm that showed he knew
what to expect up here in the Piedmont. Juan Jimenez was in the same
sports casuals in which he had appeared on screen last evening. All of
them carried photographic equipment. They shook hands all around and
exchanged greetings, and then the Fuzzies began clamoring to be noticed.
Finally all of them, Fuzzies and other people drifted over to the table
under the trees.

Ruth Ortheris sat down on the grass with Mamma and Baby. Immediately Baby
became interested in a silver charm which she wore on a chain around her
neck which tinkled fascinatingly. Then he tried to sit on her head. She
spent some time gently but firmly discouraging this. Juan Jimenez was
squatting between Mike and Mitzi, examining them alternately and talking
into a miniature recorder phone on his breast, mostly in Latin. Gerd van
Riebeek dropped himself into a folding chair and took Little Fuzzy on his
lap.

"You know, this is kind of surprising," he said. "Not only finding
something like this, after twenty-five years, but finding something as
unique as this. Look, he doesn't have the least vestige of a tail, and
there isn't another tailless mammal on the planet. Fact, there isn't
another mammal on this planet that has the slightest kinship to him. Take
ourselves; we belong to a pretty big family, about fifty-odd genera of
primates. But this little fellow hasn't any relatives at all."

"Yeek?"

"And he couldn't care less, could he?" Van Riebeek pummeled Little Fuzzy
gently. "One thing, you have the smallest humanoid known; that's one
record you can claim. Oh-oh, what goes on?"

Ko-Ko, who had climbed upon Rainsford's lap, jumped suddenly to the
ground, grabbed the chopper-digger he had left beside the chair and
started across the grass. Everybody got to their feet, the visitors
getting cameras out. The Fuzzies seemed perplexed by all the excitement.
It was only another land-prawn, wasn't it?

Ko-Ko got in front of it, poked it on the nose to stop it and then struck
a dramatic pose, flourishing his weapon and bringing it down on the
prawn's neck. Then, after flopping it over, he looked at it almost in
sorrow and hit it a couple of whacks with the flat. He began pulling it
apart and eating it.

"I see why you call him Ko-Ko," Ruth said, aiming her camera, "Don't the
others do it that way?"

"Well, Little Fuzzy runs along beside them and pivots and gives them a
quick chop. Mike and Mitzi flop theirs over first and behead them on their
backs. And Mamma takes a swipe at their legs first. But beheading and
breaking the undershell, they all do that."

"Uh-huh; that's basic," she said. "Instinctive. The technique is either
self-learned or copied. When Baby begins killing his own prawns, see if he
doesn't do it the way Mamma does!"

"Hey, look!" Jimenez cried. "He's making a lobster pick for himself!"

Through lunch, they talked exclusively about Fuzzies. The subjects of the
discussion nibbled things that were given to them, and yeeked among
themselves. Gerd van Riebeek suggested that they were discussing the odd
habits of human-type people. Juan Jimenez looked at him, slightly
disturbed, as though wondering just how seriously he meant it.

"You know, what impressed me most in the taped account was the incident of
the damnthing," said Ruth Ortheris. "Any animal associating with man will
try to attract attention if something's wrong, but I never heard of one,
not even a Freyan kholph or a Terran chimpanzee, that would use
descriptive pantomime. Little Fuzzy was actually making a symbolic
representation, by abstracting the distinguishing characteristic of the
damnthing."

"Think that stiff-arm gesture and bark might have been intended to
represent a rifle?" Gerd van Riebeek asked. "He'd seen you shooting
before, hadn't he?"

"I don't think it was anything else. He was telling me, 'Big nasty
damnthing outside; shoot it like you did the harpy.' And if he hadn't run
past me and pointed back, that damnthing would have killed me."

Jimenez, hesitantly, said, "I know I'm speaking from ignorance. You're the
Fuzzy expert. But isn't it possible that you're overanthropomorphizing?
Endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?"

"Juan, I'm not going to answer that right now. I don't think I'll answer
at all. You wait till you've been around these Fuzzies a little longer,
and then ask it again, only ask yourself."

       *       *       *       *       *

"So you see, Ernst, that's the problem."

Leonard Kellogg laid the words like a paperweight on the other words he
had been saying, and waited. Ernst Mallin sat motionless, his elbows on
the desk and his chin in his hands. A little pair of wrinkles, like
parentheses, appeared at the corners of his mouth.

"Yes. I'm not a lawyer, of course, but...."

"It's not a legal question. It's a question for a psychologist."

That left it back with Ernst Mallin, and he knew it.

"I'd have to see them myself before I could express an opinion. You have
that tape of Holloway's with you?" When Kellogg nodded, Mallin continued:
"Did either of them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?"

He answered it as he had when Victor Grego had asked the same question,
adding:

"The account consists almost entirely of Holloway's uncorroborated
statements concerning things to which he claims to have been the sole
witness."

"Ah." Mallin permitted himself a tight little smile. "And he's not a
qualified observer. Neither, for that matter, is Rainsford. Regardless of
his position as a xeno-naturalist, he is complete layman in the
psychosciences. He's just taken this other man's statements uncritically.
As for what he claims to have observed for himself, how do we know he
isn't including a lot of erroneous inferences with his descriptive
statements?"

"How do we know he's not perpetrating a deliberate hoax?"

"But, Leonard, that's a pretty serious accusation."

"It's happened before. That fellow who carved a Late Upland Martian
inscription in that cave in Kenya, for instance. Or Hellermann's claim to
have cross-bred Terran mice with Thoran tilbras. Or the Piltdown Man, back
in the first century Pre-Atomic?"

Mallin nodded. "None of us like to think of a thing like that, but, as you
say, it's happened. You know, this man Rainsford is just the type to do
something like that, too. Fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badly
adjusted personality type. Say he wants to make some sensational discovery
which will assure him the position in the scientific world to which he
believes himself entitled. He finds this lonely old prospector, into whose
isolated camp some little animals have strayed. The old man has made pets
of them, taught them a few tricks, finally so projected his own
personality onto them that he has convinced himself that they are people
like himself. This is Rainsford's great opportunity; he will present
himself as the discoverer of a new sapient race and bring the whole
learned world to his feet." Mallin smiled again. "Yes, Leonard, it is
altogether possible."

"Then it's our plain duty to stop this thing before it develops into
another major scientific scandal like Hellermann's hybrids."

"First we must go over this tape recording and see what we have on our
hands. Then we must make a thorough, unbiased study of these animals, and
show Rainsford and his accomplice that they cannot hope to foist these
ridiculous claims on the scientific world with impunity. If we can't
convince them privately, there'll be nothing to do but expose them
publicly."

"I've heard the tape already, but let's play if off now. We want to
analyze these tricks this man Holloway has taught these animals, and see
what they show."

"Yes, of course. We must do that at once," Mallin said. "Then we'll have
to consider what sort of statement we must issue, and what sort of
evidence we will need to support it."

       *       *       *       *       *

After dinner was romptime for Fuzzies on the lawn, but when the dusk came
creeping into the ravine, they all went inside and were given one of their
new toys from Mallorysport--a big box of many-colored balls and short
sticks of transparent plastic. They didn't know that it was a
molecule-model kit, but they soon found that the sticks would go into
holes in the balls, and that they could be built into three-dimensional
designs.

This was much more fun than the colored stones. They made a few
experimental shapes, then dismantled them and began on a single large
design. Several times they tore it down, entirely or in part, and began
over again, usually with considerable yeeking and gesticulation.

"They have artistic sense," Van Riebeek said. "I've seen lots of abstract
sculpture that wasn't half as good as that job they're doing."

"Good engineering, too," Jack said. "They understand balance and
center-of-gravity. They're bracing it well, and not making it top-heavy."

"Jack, I've been thinking about that question I was supposed to ask
myself," Jimenez said. "You know, I came out here loaded with suspicion.
Not that I doubted your honesty; I just thought you'd let your obvious
affection for the Fuzzies lead you into giving them credit for more
intelligence than they possess. Now I think you've consistently
understated it. Short of actual sapience, I've never seen anything like
them."

"Why short of it?" van Riebeek asked. "Ruth, you've been pretty quiet this
evening. What do you think?"

Ruth Ortheris looked uncomfortable. "Gerd, it's too early to form opinions
like that. I know the way they're working together looks like cooperation
on an agreed-upon purpose, but I simply can't make speech out of that
yeek-yeek-yeek."

"Let's keep the talk-and-build-a-fire rule out of it," van Riebeek said.
"If they're working together on a common project, they must be
communicating somehow."

"It isn't communication, it's symbolization. You simply can't think
sapiently except in verbal symbols. Try it. Not something like changing
the spools on a recorder or field-stripping a pistol; they're just learned
tricks. I mean ideas."

"How about Helen Keller?" Rainsford asked. "Mean to say she only started
thinking sapiently after Anna Sullivan taught her what words were?"

"No, of course not. She thought sapiently--And she only thought in
sense-imagery limited to feeling." She looked at Rainsford reproachfully;
he'd knocked a breach in one of her fundamental postulates. "Of course,
she had inherited the cerebroneural equipment for sapient thinking." She
let that trail off, before somebody asked her how she knew that the
Fuzzies hadn't.

"I'll suggest, just to keep the argument going, that speech couldn't have
been invented without pre-existing sapience," Jack said.

Ruth laughed. "Now you're taking me back to college. That used to be one
of the burning questions in first-year psych students' bull sessions. By
the time we got to be sophomores, we'd realized that it was only an
egg-and-chicken argument and dropped it."

"That's a pity," Ben Rainsford said. "It's a good question."

"It would be if it could be answered."

"Maybe it can be," Gerd said. "There's a clue to it, right there. I'll say
that those fellows are on the edge of sapience, and it's an even-money bet
which side."

"I'll bet every sunstone in my bag they're over."

"Well, maybe they're just slightly sapient," Jimenez suggested.

Ruth Ortheris hooted at that. "That's like talking about being just
slightly dead or just slightly pregnant," she said. "You either are or you
aren't."

Gerd van Riebeek was talking at the same time. "This sapience question is
just as important in my field as yours, Ruth. Sapience is the result of
evolution by natural selection, just as much as a physical characteristic,
and it's the most important step in the evolution of any species, our own
included."

"Wait a minute, Gerd," Rainsford said. "Ruth, what do you mean by that?
Aren't there degrees of sapience?"

"No. There are degrees of mentation--intelligence, if you prefer--just as
there are degrees of temperature. When psychology becomes an exact science
like physics, we'll be able to calibrate mentation like temperature. But
sapience is qualitatively different from nonsapience. It's more than just
a higher degree of mental temperature. You might call it a sort of mental
boiling point."

"I think that's a damn good analogy," Rainsford said. "But what happens
when the boiling point is reached?"

"That's what we have to find out," van Riebeek told him. "That's what I
was talking about a moment ago. We don't know any more about how sapience
appeared today than we did in the year zero, or in the year 654 Pre-Atomic
for that matter."

"Wait a minute," Jack interrupted. "Before we go any deeper, let's agree
on a definition of sapience."

Van Riebeek laughed. "Ever try to get a definition of life from a
biologist?" he asked. "Or a definition of number from a mathematician?"

"That's about it." Ruth looked at the Fuzzies, who were looking at their
colored-ball construction as though wondering if they could add anything
more without spoiling the design. "I'd say: a level of mentation
qualitatively different from nonsapience in that it includes ability to
symbolize ideas and store and transmit them, ability to generalize and
ability to form abstract ideas. There; I didn't say a word about
talk-and-build-a-fire, did I?"

"Little Fuzzy symbolizes and generalizes," Jack said. "He symbolizes a
damnthing by three horns, and he symbolizes a rifle by a long thing that
points and makes noises. Rifles kill animals. Harpies and damnthings are
both animals. If a rifle will kill a harpy, it'll kill a damnthing too."

Juan Jimenez had been frowning in thought; he looked up and asked, "What's
the lowest known sapient race?"

"Yggdrasil Khooghras," Gerd van Riebeek said promptly. "Any of you ever
been on Yggdrasil?"

"I saw a man shot once on Mimir, for calling another man a son of a
Khooghra," Jack said. "The man who shot him had been on Yggdrasil and knew
what he was being called."

"I spent a couple of years among them," Gerd said. "They do build fires;
I'll give them that. They char points on sticks to make spears. And they
talk. I learned their language, all eighty-two words of it. I taught a few
of the intelligentsia how to use machetes without maiming themselves, and
there was one mental giant I could trust to carry some of my equipment, if
I kept an eye on him, but I never let him touch my rifle or my camera."

"Can they generalize?" Ruth asked.

"Honey, they can't do nothin' else but! Every word in their language is a
high-order generalization. _Hroosha_, live-thing. _Noosha_, bad-thing.
_Dhishta_, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine
more of them."

Before anybody could stop him, the communication screen got itself into an
uproar. The Fuzzies all ran over in front of it, and Jack switched it on.
The caller was a man in gray semiformals; he had wavy gray hair and a face
that looked like Juan Jimenez's twenty years from now.

"Good evening; Holloway here."

"Oh, Mr. Holloway, good evening." The caller shook hands with himself,
turning on a dazzling smile. "I'm Leonard Kellogg, chief of the Company's
science division. I just heard the tape you made about the--the Fuzzies?"
He looked down at the floor. "Are these some of the animals?"

"These are the Fuzzies." He hoped it sounded like the correction it was
intended to be. "Dr. Bennett Rainsford's here with me now, and so are Dr.
Jimenez, Dr. van Riebeek and Dr. Ortheris." Out of the corner of his eye
he could see Jimenez squirming as though afflicted with ants, van Riebeek
getting his poker face battened down and Ben Rainsford suppressing a grin.
"Some of us are out of screen range, and I'm sure you'll want to ask a lot
of questions. Pardon us a moment, while we close in."

He ignored Kellogg's genial protest that that wouldn't be necessary until
the chairs were placed facing the screen. As an afterthought, he handed
Fuzzies around, giving Little Fuzzy to Ben, Ko-Ko to Gerd, Mitzi to Ruth,
Mike to Jimenez and taking Mamma and Baby on his own lap.

Baby immediately started to climb up onto his head, as expected. It seemed
to disconcert Kellogg, also as expected. He decided to teach Baby to thumb
his nose when given some unobtrusive signal.

"Now, about that tape I recorded last evening," he began.

"Yes, Mr. Holloway." Kellogg's smile was getting more mechanical every
minute. He was having trouble keeping his eyes off Baby. "I must say, I
was simply astounded at the high order of intelligence claimed for these
creatures."

"And you wanted to see how big a liar I was. I don't blame you; I had
trouble believing it myself at first."

Kellogg gave a musically blithe laugh, showing even more dental equipment.

"Oh, no. Mr. Holloway; please don't misunderstand me. I never thought
anything like that."

"I hope not," Ben Rainsford said, not too pleasantly. "I vouched for Mr.
Holloway's statements, if you'll recall."

"Of course, Bennett; that goes without saying. Permit me to congratulate
you upon a most remarkable scientific discovery. An entirely new order of
mammals--"

"Which may be the ninth extrasolar sapient race," Rainsford added.

"Good heavens, Bennett!" Kellogg jettisoned his smile and slid on a look
of shocked surprise. "You surely can't be serious?" He looked again at the
Fuzzies, pulled the smile back on and gave a light laugh.

"I thought you'd heard that tape," Rainsford said.

"Of course, and the things reported were most remarkable. But sapiences!
Just because they've been taught a few tricks, and use sticks and stones
for weapons--" He got rid of the smile again, and quick-changed to
seriousness. "Such an extreme claim must only be made after careful
study."

"Well, I won't claim they're sapient," Ruth Ortheris told him. "Not till
day after tomorrow, at the earliest. But they very easily could be. They
have learning and reasoning capacity equal to that of any eight-year-old
Terran Human child, and well above that of the adults of some recognizedly
sapient races. And they have not been taught tricks; they have learned by
observation and reasoning."

"Well, Dr. Kellogg, mentation levels isn't my subject," Jimenez took it
up, "but they do have all the physical characteristics shared by other
sapient races--lower limbs specialized for locomotion and upper limbs for
manipulation, erect posture, stereoscopic vision, color perception, erect
posture, hand with opposing thumb--all the characteristics we consider as
prerequisite to the development of sapience."

"I think they're sapient, myself," Gerd van Riebeek said, "but that's not
as important as the fact that they're on the very threshold of sapience.
This is the first race of this mental level anybody's ever seen. I believe
that study of the Fuzzies will help us solve the problem of how sapience
developed in any race."

Kellogg had been laboring to pump up a head of enthusiasm; now he was
ready to valve it off.

"But this is amazing! This will make scientific history! Now, of course,
you all realize how pricelessly valuable these Fuzzies are. They must be
brought at once to Mallorysport, where they can be studied under
laboratory conditions by qualified psychologists, and--"

"No."

Jack lifted Baby Fuzzy off his head and handed him to Mamma, and set Mamma
on the floor. That was reflex; the thinking part of his brain knew he
didn't need to clear for action when arguing with the electronic image of
a man twenty-five hundred miles away.

"Just forget that part of it and start over," he advised.

Kellogg ignored him. "Gerd, you have your airboat; fix up some nice
comfortable cages--"

_"Kellogg!_"

The man in the screen stopped talking and stared in amazed indignation. It
was the first time in years he had been addressed by his naked patronymic,
and possibly the first time in his life he had been shouted at.

"Didn't you hear me the first time Kellogg? Then stop gibbering about
cages. These Fuzzies aren't being taken anywhere."

"But Mr. Holloway! Don't you realize that these little beings must be
carefully studied? Don't you want them given their rightful place in the
hierarchy of nature?"

"If you want to study them, come out here and do it. That's so long as you
don't annoy them, or me. As far as study's concerned, they're being
studied now. Dr. Rainsford's studying them, and so are three of your
people, and when it comes to that, I'm studying them myself."

"And I'd like you to clarify that remark about qualified psychologists,"
Ruth Ortheris added, in a voice approaching zero-Kelvin. "You wouldn't be
challenging my professional qualifications, would you?"

"Oh, Ruth, you know I didn't mean anything like that. Please don't
misunderstand me," Kellogg begged. "But this is highly specialized work--"

"Yes; how many Fuzzy specialists have you at Science Center, Leonard?"
Rainsford wanted to know. "The only one I can think of is Jack Holloway,
here."

"Well, I'd thought of Dr. Mallin, the Company's head psychologist."

"He can come too, just as long as he understands that he'll have to have
my permission for anything he wants to do with the Fuzzies," Jack said.
"When can we expect you?"

Kellogg thought some time late the next afternoon. He didn't have to ask
how to get to the camp. He made a few efforts to restore the conversation
to its original note of cordiality, gave that up as a bad job and blanked
out. There was a brief silence in the living room. Then Jimenez said
reproachfully:

"You certainly weren't very gracious to Dr. Kellogg, Jack. Maybe you don't
realize it, but he is a very important man."

"He isn't important to me, and I wasn't gracious to him at all. It doesn't
pay to be gracious to people like that. If you are, they always try to
take advantage of it."

"Why, I didn't know you knew Len," van Riebeek said.

"I never saw the individual before. The species is very common and widely
distributed." He turned to Rainsford. "You think he and this Mallin will
be out tomorrow?"

"Of course they will. This is a little too big for underlings and
non-Company people to be allowed to monkey with. You know, we'll have to
watch out or in a year we'll be hearing from Terra about the discovery of
a sapient race on Zarathustra; _Fuzzy fuzzy Kellogg_. As Juan says, Dr.
Kellogg is a very important man. That's how he got important."




VI


The recorded voice ceased; for a moment the record player hummed
voicelessly. Loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a double click,
opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another at the
opposite side of the dome. Space Commodore Alex Napier glanced up from his
desk and out at the harshly angular landscape of Xerxes and the blackness
of airless space beyond the disquietingly close horizon. Then he picked up
his pipe and knocked the heel out into the ashtray. Nobody said anything.
He began packing tobacco into the bowl.

"Well, gentlemen?" He invited comment.

"Pancho?" Captain Conrad Greibenfeld, the Exec., turned to Lieutenant
Ybarra, the chief psychologist.

"How reliable is this stuff?" Ybarra asked.

"Well, I knew Jack Holloway thirty years ago, on Fenris, when I was just
an ensign. He must be past seventy now," he parenthesized. "If he says he
saw anything, I'll believe it. And Bennett Rainsford's absolutely
reliable, of course."

"How about the agent?" Ybarra insisted.

He and Stephen Aelborg, the Intelligence officer, exchanged glances. He
nodded, and Aelborg said:

"One of the best. One of our own, lieutenant j.g., Naval Reserve. You
don't need to worry about credibility, Pancho."

"They sound sapient to me," Ybarra said. "You know, this is something I've
always been half hoping and half afraid would happen."

"You mean an excuse to intervene in that mess down there?" Greibenfeld
asked.

Ybarra looked blankly at him for a moment. "No. No, I meant a case of
borderline sapience; something our sacred talk-and-build-a-fire rule won't
cover. Just how did this come to our attention, Stephen?"

"Well, it was transmitted to us from Contact Center in Mallorysport late
Friday night. There seem to be a number of copies of this tape around; our
agent got hold of one of them and transmitted it to Contact Center, and it
was relayed on to us, with the agent's comments," Aelborg said. "Contact
Center ordered a routine surveillance inside Company House and, to play
safe, at the Residency. At the time, there seemed no reason to give the
thing any beat-to-quarters-and-man-guns treatment, but we got a report on
Saturday afternoon--Mallorysport time, that is--that Leonard Kellogg had
played off the copy of the tape that Juan Jimenez had made for file, and
had alerted Victor Grego immediately.

"Of course, Grego saw the implications at once. He sent Kellogg and the
chief Company psychologist, Ernst Mallin, out to Beta Continent with
orders to brand Rainsford's and Holloway's claims as a deliberate hoax.
Then the Company intends to encourage the trapping of Fuzzies for their
fur, in hopes that the whole species will be exterminated before anybody
can get out from Terra to check on Rainsford's story."

"I hadn't heard that last detail before."

"Well, we can prove it," Aelborg assured him.

It sounded like a Victor Grego idea. He lit his pipe slowly. Damnit, he
didn't want to have to intervene. No Space Navy C.O. did. Justifying
intervention on a Colonial planet was too much bother--always a board of
inquiry, often a courtmartial. And supersession of civil authority was
completely against Service Doctrine. Of course, there were other and more
important tenets of Service Doctrine. The sovereignty of the Terran
Federation for one, and the inviolability of the Federation Constitution.
And the rights of extraterrestrials, too. Conrad Greibenfeld, too, seemed
to have been thinking about that.

"If those Fuzzies are sapient beings, that whole setup down there is
illegal. Company, Colonial administration and all," he said.
"Zarathustra's a Class-IV planet, and that's all you can make out of it."

"We won't intervene unless we're forced to. Pancho, I think the decision
will be largely up to you."

Pancho Ybarra was horrified.

"Good God, Alex! You can't mean that. Who am I? A nobody. All I have is an
ordinary M.D., and a Psych.D. Why, the best psychological brains in the
Federation--"

"Aren't on Zarathustra, Pancho. They're on Terra, five hundred
light-years, six months' ship voyage each way. Intervention, of course, is
my responsibility, but the sapience question is yours. I don't envy you,
but I can't relieve you of it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Gerd van Riebeek's suggestion that all three of the visitors sleep aboard
the airboat hadn't been treated seriously at all. Gerd himself was
accommodated in the spare room of the living hut. Juan Jimenez went with
Ben Rainsford to his camp for the night. Ruth Ortheris had the cabin of
the boat to herself. Rainsford was on the screen the next morning, while
Jack and Gerd and Ruth and the Fuzzies were having breakfast; he and
Jimenez had decided to take his airjeep and work down from the head of
Cold Creek in the belief that there must be more Fuzzies around in the
woods.

Both Gerd and Ruth decided to spend the morning at the camp and get
acquainted with the Fuzzies on hand. The family had had enough breakfast
to leave them neutral on the subject of land-prawns, and they were given
another of the new toys, a big colored ball. They rolled it around in the
grass for a while, decided to save it for their evening romp and took it
into the house. Then they began playing aimlessly among some junk in the
shed outside the workshop. Once in a while one of them would drift away to
look for a prawn, more for sport than food.

Ruth and Gerd and Jack were sitting at the breakfast table on the grass,
talking idly and trying to think of excuses for not washing the dishes.
Mamma Fuzzy and Baby were poking about in the tall grass. Suddenly Mamma
gave a shrill cry and started back for the shed, chasing Baby ahead of her
and slapping him on the bottom with the flat of her chopper-digger to
hurry him along.

Jack started for the house at a run. Gerd grabbed his camera and jumped up
on the table. It was Ruth who saw the cause of the disturbance.

"Jack! Look, over there!" She pointed to the edge of the clearing. "Two
strange Fuzzies!"

He kept on running, but instead of the rifle he had been going for, he
collected his movie camera, two of the spare chopper-diggers and some
Extee Three. When he emerged again, the two Fuzzies had come into the
clearing and stood side by side, looking around. Both were females, and
they both carried wooden prawn-killers.

"You have plenty of film?" he asked Gerd. "Here, Ruth; take this." He
handed her his own camera. "Keep far enough away from me to get what I'm
doing and what they're doing. I'm going to try to trade with them."

He went forward, the steel weapons in his hip pocket and the Extee Three
in his hand, talking softly and soothingly to the newcomers. When he was
as close to them as he could get without stampeding them, he stopped.

"Our gang's coming up behind you," Gerd told him. "Regular skirmish line;
choppers at high port. Now they've stopped, about thirty feet behind you."

He broke off a piece of Extee Three, put it in his mouth and ate it. Then
he broke off two more pieces and held them out. The two Fuzzies were
tempted, but not to the point of rashness. He threw both pieces within a
few feet of them. One darted forward, threw a piece to her companion and
then snatched the other piece and ran back with it. They stood together,
nibbling and making soft delighted noises.

His own family seemed to disapprove strenuously of this lavishing of
delicacies upon outsiders. However, the two strangers decided that it
would be safe to come closer, and soon he had them taking bits of field
ration from his hand. Then he took the two steel chopper-diggers out of
his pocket, and managed to convey the idea that he wanted to trade. The
two strange Fuzzies were incredulously delighted. This was too much for
his own tribe; they came up yeeking angrily.

The two strange females retreated a few steps, their new weapon ready.
Everybody seemed to expect a fight, and nobody wanted one. From what he
could remember of Old Terran history, this was a situation which could
develop into serious trouble. Then Ko-Ko advanced, dragging his
chopper-digger in an obviously pacific manner, and approached the two
females, yeeking softly and touching first one and then the other. Then he
laid his weapon down and put his foot on it. The two females began
stroking and caressing him.

Immediately the crisis evaporated. The others of the family came forward,
stuck their weapons in the ground and began fondling the strangers. Then
they all sat in a circle, swaying their bodies rhythmically and making
soft noises. Finally Ko-Ko and the two females rose, picked up their
weapons and started for the woods.

"Jack, stop them," Ruth called out. "They're going away."

"If they want to go, I have no right to stop them."

When they were almost at the edge of the woods, Ko-Ko stopped, drove the
point of his weapon into the ground and came running back to Pappy Jack,
throwing his arms around the human knees and yeeking. Jack stooped and
stroked him, but didn't try to pick him up. One of the two females pulled
his chopper-digger out, and they both came back slowly. At the same time,
Little Fuzzy, Mamma Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi came running back. For a while,
all the Fuzzies embraced one another, yeeking happily. Then they all
trooped across the grass and went into the house.

"Get that all, Gerd?" he asked.

"On film, yes. That's the only way I did, though. What happened?"

"You have just made the first film of intertribal social and mating
customs, Zarathustran Fuzzy. This is the family's home; they don't want
any strange Fuzzies hanging around. They were going to run the girls off.
Then Ko-Ko decided he liked their looks, and he decided he'd team up with
them. That made everything different; the family sat down with them to
tell them what a fine husband they were getting and to tell Ko-Ko
good-bye. Then Ko-Ko remembered that he hadn't told me good-bye, and he
came back. The family decided that two more Fuzzies wouldn't be in excess
of the carrying capacity of this habitat, seeing what a good provider
Pappy Jack is, so now I should imagine they're showing the girls the
family treasures. You know, they married into a mighty well-to-do family."

The girls were named Goldilocks and Cinderella. When lunch was ready, they
were all in the living room, with the viewscreen on; after lunch, the
whole gang went into the bedroom for a nap on Pappy Jack's bed. He spent
the afternoon developing movie film, while Gerd and Ruth wrote up the
notes they had made the day before and collaborated on an account of the
adoption. By late afternoon, when they were finished, the Fuzzies came out
for a frolic and prawn hunt.

They all heard the aircar before any of the human people did, and they all
ran over and climbed up on the bench beside the kitchen door. It was a
constabulary cruise car; it landed, and a couple of troopers got out,
saying that they'd stopped to see the Fuzzies. They wanted to know where
the extras had come from, and when Jack told them, they looked at one
another.

"Next gang that comes along, call us and keep them entertained till we can
get here," one of them said. "We want some at the post, for prawns if
nothing else."

"What's George's attitude?" he asked. "The other night, when he was here,
he seemed half scared of them."

"Aah, he's got over that," one of the troopers said. "He called Ben
Rainsford; Ben said they were perfectly safe. Hey, Ben says they're not
animals; they're people."

He started to tell them about some of the things the Fuzzies did. He was
still talking when the Fuzzies heard another aircar and called attention
to it. This time, it was Ben Rainsford and Juan Jimenez. They piled out as
soon as they were off contragravity, dragging cameras after them.

"Jack, there are Fuzzies all over the place up there," Rainsford began,
while he was getting out. "All headed down this way; regular
_Volkerwanderung_. We saw over fifty of them--four families, and
individuals and pairs. I'm sure we missed ten for every one we saw."

"We better get up there with a car tomorrow," one of the troopers said.
"Ben, just where were you?"

"I'll show you on the map." Then he saw Goldilocks and Cinderella. "Hey!
Where'd you two girls come from? I never saw you around here before."

       *       *       *       *       *

There was another clearing across the stream, with a log footbridge and a
path to the camp. Jack guided the big airboat down onto it, and put his
airjeep alongside with the canopy up. There were two men on the forward
deck of the boat, Kellogg and another man who would be Ernst Mallin. A
third man came out of the control cabin after the boat was off
contragravity. Jack didn't like Mallin. He had a tight, secretive face,
with arrogance and bigotry showing underneath. The third man was younger.
His face didn't show anything much, but his coat showed a bulge under the
left arm. After being introduced by Kellogg, Mallin introduced him as Kurt
Borch, his assistant.

Mallin had to introduce Borch again at the camp, not only to Ben Rainsford
but also to van Riebeek, to Jimenez and even to Ruth Ortheris, which
seemed a little odd. Ruth seemed to think so, too, and Mallin hastened to
tell her that Borch was with Personnel, giving some kind of tests. That
appeared to puzzle her even more. None of the three seemed happy about the
presence of the constabulary troopers, either; they were all relieved when
the cruise car lifted out.

Kellogg became interested in the Fuzzies immediately, squatting to examine
them. He said something to Mallin, who compressed his lips and shook his
head, saying:

"We simply cannot assume sapience until we find something in their
behavior which cannot be explained under any other hypothesis. We would be
much safer to assume nonsapience and proceed to test that assumption."

That seemed to establish the keynote. Kellogg straightened, and he and
Mallin started one of those "of course I agree, doctor, but don't you
find, on the other hand, that you must agree" sort of arguments, about the
difference between scientific evidence and scientific proof. Jimenez got
into it to the extent of agreeing with everything Kellogg said, and
differing politely with everything Mallin said that he thought Kellogg
would differ with. Borch said nothing; he just stood and looked at the
Fuzzies with ill-concealed hostility. Gerd and Ruth decided to help
getting dinner.

They ate outside on the picnic table, with the Fuzzies watching them
interestedly. Kellogg and Mallin carefully avoided discussing them. It
wasn't until after dusk, when the Fuzzies brought their ball inside and
everybody was in the living room, that Kellogg, adopting a
presiding-officer manner, got the conversation onto the subject. For some
time, without giving anyone else an opportunity to say anything, he gushed
about what an important discovery the Fuzzies were. The Fuzzies themselves
ignored him and began dismantling the stick-and-ball construction. For a
while Goldilocks and Cinderella watched interestedly, and then they began
assisting.

"Unfortunately," Kellogg continued, "so much of our data is in the form of
uncorroborated statements by Mr. Holloway. Now, please don't misunderstand
me. I don't, myself, doubt for a moment anything Mr. Holloway said on that
tape, but you must realize that professional scientists are most reluctant
to accept the unsubstantiated reports of what, if you'll pardon me, they
think of as nonqualified observers."

"Oh, rubbish, Leonard!" Rainsford broke in impatiently. "I'm a
professional scientist, of a good many more years' standing than you, and
I accept Jack Holloway's statements. A frontiersman like Jack is a very
careful and exact observer. People who aren't don't live long on frontier
planets."

"Now, please don't misunderstand me," Kellogg reiterated. "I don't doubt
Mr. Holloway's statements. I was just thinking of how they would be
received on Terra."

"I shouldn't worry about that, Leonard. The Institute accepts my reports,
and I'm vouching for Jack's reliability. I can substantiate most of what
he told me from personal observation."

"Yes, and there's more than just verbal statements," Gerd van Riebeek
chimed in. "A camera is not a nonqualified observer. We have quite a bit
of film of the Fuzzies."

"Oh, yes; there was some mention of movies," Mallin said. "You don't have
any of them developed yet, do you?"

"Quite a lot. Everything except what was taken out in the woods this
afternoon. We can run them off right now."

He pulled down the screen in front of the gunrack, got the film and loaded
his projector. The Fuzzies, who had begun on a new stick-and-ball
construction, were irritated when the lights went out, then wildly excited
when Little Fuzzy, digging a toilet pit with the wood chisel, appeared.
Little Fuzzy in particular was excited about that; if he didn't recognize
himself, he recognized the chisel. Then there were pictures of Little
Fuzzy killing and eating land-prawns, Little Fuzzy taking the nut off the
bolt and putting it on again, and pictures of the others, after they had
come in, hunting and at play. Finally, there was the film of the adoption
of Goldilocks and Cinderella.

"What Juan and I got this afternoon, up in the woods, isn't so good, I'm
afraid," Rainsford said when the show was over and the lights were on
again. "Mostly it's rear views disappearing into the brush. It was very
hard to get close to them in the jeep. Their hearing is remarkably acute.
But I'm sure the pictures we took this afternoon will show the things they
were carrying--wooden prawn-killers like the two that were traded from the
new ones in that last film."

Mallin and Kellogg looked at one another in what seemed oddly like
consternation.

"You didn't tell us there were more of them around," Mallin said, as
though it were an accusation of duplicity. He turned to Kellogg. "This
alters the situation."

"Yes, indeed, Ernst," Kellogg burbled delightedly. "This is a wonderful
opportunity. Mr. Holloway, I understand that all this country up here is
your property, by landgrant purchase. That's right, isn't it? Well, would
you allow us to camp on that clearing across the run, where our boat is
now? We'll get prefab huts--Red Hill's the nearest town, isn't it?--and
have a Company construction gang set them up for us, and we won't be any
bother at all to you. We had only intended staying tonight on our boat,
and returning to Mallorysport in the morning, but with all these Fuzzies
swarming around in the woods, we can't think of leaving now. You don't
have any objection, do you?"

He had lots of objections. The whole business was rapidly developing into
an acute pain in the neck for him. But if he didn't let Kellogg camp
across the run, the three of them could move seventy or eighty miles in
any direction and be off his land. He knew what they'd do then. They'd
live-trap or sleep-gas Fuzzies; they'd put them in cages, and torment them
with maze and electric-shock experiments, and kill a few for dissection,
or maybe not bother killing them first. On his own land, if they did
anything like that, he could do something about it.

"Not at all. I'll have to remind you again, though, that you're to treat
these little people with consideration."