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

“Yes, I thought of that angle myself,” Lunt said disgustedly. “I didn’t think of it till this morning, though, and I didn’t think things would blow up as fast as this. Hell, I just didn’t think! Well, go on.”

He interrupted a little later to ask: “Kellogg was stamping on the Fuzzy when you hit him. You were trying to stop him?”

“That’s right. You can veridicate me on that if you want to.”

“I will; I’ll veridicate this whole damn gang. And this guy Borch had his heater out when you turned around? Nothing to it, Jack. We’ll have to have some kind of a hearing, but it’s just plain self-defense. Think any of this gang will tell the truth here, without taking them in and putting them under veridication?”

“Ruth Ortheris will, I think.”

“Send her over here, will you.”

She was still with the Fuzzies, and Ben Rainsford was standing beside her, his camera ready. The Fuzzies were still swaying and yeeking plaintively. She nodded and rose without speaking, going over to where Lunt waited.

“Just what did happen, Jack?” Rainsford wanted to know. “And whose side is he on?” He nodded toward van Riebeek, standing guard over Kellogg and Mallin, his thumbs in his pistol belt.

“Ours. He’s quit the Company.”

Just as he was finishing, Car Three put in an appearance; he had to tell the same story over again. The area in front of the Kellogg camp was getting congested; he hoped Mike Hennen’s labor gang would stay away for a while. Lunt talked to van Riebeek when he had finished with Ruth, and then with Jimenez and Mallin and Kellogg. Then he and one of the men from Car Three came over to where Jack and Rainsford were standing. Gerd van Riebeek joined them just as Lunt was saying:

“Jack, Kellogg’s made a murder complaint against you. I told him it was self-defense, but he wouldn’t listen. So, according to the book, I have to arrest you.”

“All right.” He unbuckled his gun and handed it over. “Now, George, I herewith make complaint and accusation against Leonard Kellogg, charging him with the unlawful and unjustified killing of a sapient being, to wit, an aboriginal native of the planet of Zarathustra commonly known as Goldilocks.”

Lunt looked at the small battered body and the six mourners around it.

“But, Jack, they aren’t legally sapient beings.”

“There is no such thing. A sapient being is a being on the mental level of sapience, not a being that has been declared sapient.”

“Fuzzies are sapient beings,” Rainsford said. “That’s the opinion of a qualified xeno-naturalist.”

“Two of them,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “That is the body of a sapient being. There’s the man who killed her. Go ahead, Lieutenant, make your pinch.”

“Hey! Wait a minute!”

The Fuzzies were rising, sliding their chopper-diggers under the body of Goldilocks and lifting it on the steel shafts. Ben Rainsford was aiming his camera as Cinderella picked up her sister’s weapon and followed, carrying it; the others carried the body toward the far corner of the clearing, away from the camp. Rainsford kept just behind them, pausing to photograph and then hurrying to keep up with them.

They set the body down. Mike and Mitzi and Cinderella began digging; the others scattered to hunt for stones. Coming up behind them, George Lunt took off his beret and stood holding it in both hands; he bowed his head as the grass-wrapped body was placed in the little grave and covered.

Then, when the cairn was finished, he replaced it, drew his pistol and checked the chamber.

“That does it, Jack,” he said. “I am now going to arrest Leonard Kellogg for the murder of a sapient being.”

Jack Holloway had been out on bail before, but never for quite so much. It was almost worth it, though, to see Leslie Coombes’s eyes widen and Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones, blazing with the heat of the day and of his body, on George Lunt’s magisterial bench and invited George to pick out twenty-five thousand sols’ worth. Especially after the production Coombes had made of posting Kellogg’s bail with one of those precertified Company checks.

He looked at the whisky bottle in his hand, and then reached into the cupboard for another one. One for Gus Brannhard, and one for the rest of them. There was a widespread belief that that was why Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out here in the boondocks of a boondock planet, defending gun fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It wasn’t. Nobody on Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn’t whisky. Whisky was only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory of the reason.

He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had taken instantly to Gus. Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.

“Aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were placed beside him. “Been staying alive for hours hoping for this.”

“Well, don’t let any of the kids get at it. Little Fuzzy trying to smoke pipes is bad enough; I don’t want any dipsos in the family, too.”

Gus filled the glass. To be on the safe side, he promptly emptied it into himself.

“You got a nice family, Jack. Make a wonderful impression in court—as long as Baby doesn’t try to sit on the judge’s head. Any jury that sees them and hears that Ortheris girl’s story will acquit you from the box, with a vote of censure for not shooting Kellogg, too.”

“I’m not worried about that. What I want is Kellogg convicted.”

“You better worry, Jack,” Rainsford said. “You saw the combination against us at the hearing.”

Leslie Coombes, the Company’s top attorney, had come out from Mallorysport in a yacht rated at Mach 6, and he must have crowded it to the limit all the way. With him, almost on a leash, had come Mohammed Ali O’Brien, the Colonial Attorney General, who doubled as Chief Prosecutor. They had both tried to get the whole thing dismissed—self-defense for Holloway, and killing an unprotected wild animal for Kellogg. When that had failed, they had teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence about the Fuzzies. After all it was only a complaint court; Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited powers.

“You saw how far they got, didn’t you?”

“I hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,” Rainsford said gloomily.

“What do you mean, Ben?” Brannhard asked. “What do you think they’ll do?”

“I don’t know. That’s what worries me. We’re threatening the Zarathustra Company, and the Company’s too big to be threatened safely,” Rainsford replied. “They’ll try to frame something on Jack.”

“With veridication? That’s ridiculous, Ben.”

“Don’t you think we can prove sapience?” Gerd van Riebeek demanded.

“Who’s going to define sapience? And how?” Rainsford asked. “Why, between them, Coombes and O’Brien can even agree to accept the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.”

“Huh-uh!” Brannhard was positive. “Court ruling on that, about forty years ago, on Vishnu. Infanticide case, woman charged with murder in the death of her infant child. Her lawyer moved for dismissal on the grounds that murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is defined as one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither. Motion denied; the court ruled that while ability to speak and produce fire is positive proof of sapience, inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. If O’Brien doesn’t know that, and I doubt if he does, Coombes will.” Brannhard poured another drink and gulped it before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “You know what? I will make a small wager, and I will even give odds, that the first thing Ham O’Brien does when he gets back to Mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges. What I’d like would be for him to nol. pros. Kellogg and let the charge against Jack go to court. He would be dumb enough to do that himself, but Leslie Coombes wouldn’t let him.”

“But if he throws out the Kellogg case, that’s it,” Gerd van Riebeek said. “When Jack comes to trial, nobody’ll say a mumblin’ word about sapience.”

“I will, and I will not mumble it. You all know colonial law on homicide. In the case of any person killed while in commission of a felony, no prosecution may be brought in any degree, against anybody. I’m going to contend that Leonard Kellogg was murdering a sapient being, that Jack Holloway acted lawfully in attempting to stop it and that when Kurt Borch attempted to come to Kellogg’s assistance he, himself, was guilty of felony, and consequently any prosecution against Jack Holloway is illegal. And to make that contention stick, I shall have to say a great many words, and produce a great deal of testimony, about the sapience of Fuzzies.”

“It’ll have to be expert testimony,” Rainsford said. “The testimony of psychologists. I suppose you know that the only psychologists on this planet are employed by the chartered Zarathustra Company.” He drank what was left of his highball, looked at the bits of ice in the bottom of his glass and then rose to mix another one. “I’d have done the same as you did, Jack, but I still wish this hadn’t happened.”

“Huh!” Mamma Fuzzy looked up, startled by the exclamation. “What do you think Victor Grego’s wishing, right now?”

Victor Grego replaced the hand-phone. “Leslie, on the yacht,” he said. “They’re coming in now. They’ll stop at the hospital to drop Kellogg, and then they’re coming here.”

Nick Emmert nibbled a canape. He had reddish hair, pale eyes and a wide, bovine face.

“Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he said.

“I wish Holloway’d killed him!” He blurted it angrily, and saw the Resident General’s shocked expression.

“You don’t really mean that, Victor?”

“The devil I don’t!” He gestured at the recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing, transmitted from the yacht at sixty-speed. “That’s only a teaser to what’ll come out at the trial. You know what the Company’s epitaph will be? Kicked to death, along with a Fuzzy, by Leonard Kellogg.”

Everything would have worked out perfectly if Kellogg