Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper [ebook reader computer txt] 📗

“Nothing, for about a year. Six months from now, when the ship gets in, the Institute will release it to the press, and then they’ll send an investigation team here. So will any of the other universities or scientific institutes that may be interested. I suppose the government’ll send somebody, too. After all, subcivilized natives on colonized planets are wards of the Terran Federation.”

He didn’t know that he liked that. The less he had to do with the government the better, and his Fuzzies were wards of Pappy Jack Holloway. He said as much.

Rainsford picked up Mitzi and stroked her. “Nice fur,” he said. “Fur like that would bring good prices. It will, if we don’t get these people recognized as sapient beings.”

He looked across the run at the new camp and wondered. Maybe Leonard Kellogg saw that, too, and saw profits for the Company in Fuzzy fur.

The airjeeps returned in the middle of the afternoon, first Mallin’s, and then Kellogg’s. Everybody went inside. An hour later, a constabulary car landed in front of the Kellogg camp. George Lunt and Ahmed Khadra got out. Kellogg came outside, spoke with them and then took them into the main living hut. Half an hour later, the lieutenant and the trooper emerged, lifted their car across the run and set it down on the lawn. The Fuzzies ran to meet them, possibly expecting more whistles, and followed them into the living room. Lunt and Khadra took off their berets, but made no move to unbuckle their gun belts.

“We got your package off all right Ben,” Lunt said. He sat down and took Goldilocks on his lap; immediately Cinderella jumped up, also. “Jack, what the hell’s that gang over there up to anyhow?”

“You got that, too?”

“You can smell it on them for a mile, against the wind. In the first place, that Borch. I wish I could get his prints; I’ll bet we have them on file. And the whole gang’s trying to hide something, and what they’re trying to hide is something they’re scared of, like a body in a closet. When we were over there, Kellogg did all the talking; anybody else who tried to say anything got shut up fast. Kellogg doesn’t like you, Jack, and he doesn’t like Ben, and he doesn’t like the Fuzzies. Most of all he doesn’t like the Fuzzies.”

“Well, I told you what I thought this morning,” Rainsford said. “They don’t want outsiders discovering things on this planet. It wouldn’t make them look good to the home office on Terra. Remember, it was some non-Company people who discovered the first sunstones, back in ’Forty-eight.”

George Lunt looked thoughtful. On him, it was a scowl.

“I don’t think that’s it, Ben. When we were talking to him, he admitted very freely that you and Jack discovered the Fuzzies. The way he talked, he didn’t seem to think they were worth discovering at all. And he asked a lot of funny questions about you, Jack. The kind of questions I’d ask if I was checking up on somebody’s mental competence.” The scowl became one of anger now. “By God, I wish I had an excuse to question him⁠—with a veridicator!”

Kellogg didn’t want the Fuzzies to be sapient beings. If they weren’t they’d be⁠ ⁠… fur-bearing animals. Jack thought of some overfed society dowager on Terra or Baldur, wearing the skins of Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Goldilocks wrapped around her adipose carcass. It made him feel sick.

Tuesday dawned hot and windless, a scarlet sun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. The Fuzzies, who were in to wake Pappy Jack with their whistles, didn’t like it; they were edgy and restless. Maybe it would rain today after all. They had breakfast outside on the picnic table, and then Ben decided he’d go back to his camp and pick up a few things he hadn’t brought and now decided he needed.

“My hunting rifle’s one,” he said, “and I think I’ll circle down to the edge of the brush country and see if I can pick off a zebralope. We ought to have some more fresh meat.”

So, after eating, Rainsford got into his jeep and lifted away. Across the run, Kellogg and Mallin were walking back and forth in front of the camp, talking earnestly. When Ruth Ortheris and Gerd van Riebeek came out, they stopped, broke off their conversation and spoke briefly with them. Then Gerd and Ruth crossed the footbridge and came up the path together.

The Fuzzies had scattered, by this time, to hunt prawns. Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Goldilocks ran to meet them; Ruth picked Goldilocks up and carried her, and Ko-Ko and Little Fuzzy ran on ahead. They greeted Jack, declining coffee; Ruth sat down in a chair with Goldilocks, Little Fuzzy jumped up on the table and began looking for goodies, and when Gerd stretched out on his back on the grass Ko-Ko sat down on his chest.

“Goldilocks is my favorite Fuzzy,” Ruth was saying. “She is the sweetest thing. Of course, they’re all pretty nice. I can’t get over how affectionate and trusting they are; the ones we saw out in the woods were so timid.”

“Well, the ones out in the woods don’t have any Pappy Jack to look after them,” Gerd said. “I’d imagine they’re very affectionate among themselves, but they have so many things to be afraid of. You know, there’s another prerequisite for sapience. It develops in some small, relatively defenseless, animal surrounded by large and dangerous enemies he can’t outrun or outfight. So, to survive, he has to learn to outthink them. Like our own remote ancestors, or like Little Fuzzy; he had his choice of getting sapient or getting exterminated.”

Ruth seemed troubled. “Gerd, Dr. Mallin has found absolutely nothing about them that indicates true sapience.”

“Oh, Mallin be bloodied; he doesn’t know what sapience is any more than I do. And a good deal less