Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper [rainbow fish read aloud txt] 📗

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