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something about information, too-Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies,
psychology of; language. We'll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and
language-learning tapes. And hearing-aids."
The door at the side of the room was marked INVESTIGATION. He found Ahmed
Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a city police uniform by
screen.
"Well, have you gotten anything from any of them?" he was asking.
"Damn little," the city policeman told him. "We've been pulling them in all
day, everybody in town who has a record. And Hugo In-germarm's been pulling
them away from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his legmen and
assistants here with portable ra-dios, and as fast as we bring some punk in,
they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ; order to show grounds
for suspi-cion. Most of them we can't question at all; it takes an hour to an
hour and a half from the time they're brought in before we can veridicate
those we can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do."
"Well, how about known associates? Didn't either of them have any friends?"
"Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they've been cooperat-ing, but none of
them know anything."
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they blanked screens.
Khadra turned in his chair and lit a cigarette.
"Well, you heard it, Jack," he said. "They just vanished, and the Fuzzies with
them. I'm not surprised we're not getting anything out of their friends in the
Company. They wouldn't know. We searched their rooms; they seem to have
cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared. And we can't get
anything from underworld sources. None of the city police stool-pigeons know
anything."
"You know, Ahmed, I'm worried about that. I wonder what's hap-pened to those
Fuzzies . . ." He sat down on the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and
tobacco. "How soon will you be able to start investigating these people who
want Fuzzies?"
Gerd van Riebeek refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across the table to
George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they both ought to. Work was
piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away and
Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.
"Eighty-seven," Lunt said. "That's not counting yours and mine and Jack's."
"The Extee Three's getting low." They'd had to start rationing it; tomorrow,
they'd not be able to issue any, or on alternate days there-after. The Fuzzies
wouldn't like that. "Jack says he thinks specula-tors are buying it and
holding it off the market. They'll get big prices for it when the Fuzzies
start coming in to
Mallorysport."
There wasn't much Extee Three on Zarathustra. People kept a tin or so in their
aircars, in case of forced
landings in the wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet's land
surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption had been
practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for emergency ships' stores,
in-dividual survival kits and so on, but that wouldn't last. It was on order,
but it would be four months till any could get in from the nearest Federation
planet. And the supply on hand wouldn't last that long.
"Personally, I wish there was eighty-seven hundred of them," Lunt said. 'No,
I'm not crazy, and I mean it.
The ones we have here aren't getting into deviltry down in the farming
country. So far, I haven't heard of any of them getting that far, except that
one family that's moved in on that backwoods farm, and they're behaving
themselves. But wait till they get down in the real farm-country, and among
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the sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our big
job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to me, now, like
it's going to be the other way round too."
"That's right. They won't mean any harm; the only malicious thing I ever heard
of Fuzzies doing was the time Jack's family wrecked Juan Jimenez's office,
after they broke out of the cages he put them in, and I
don't blame them for that. But they just don't understand about what they
mustn't do among humans.
They don't seem to have any idea at all of property in the absence of a
visible owner."
'That's what I'm talking about. Crops; they won't understand that somebody's
planted them, they'll think they're just there. And I never saw a farmer that
wouldn't shoot first and argue afterward to protect his crops."
"Education," Gerd said.
"Recipe for roast turkey-first catch a turkey," Lunt said. "We're educating
this crowd. How in Niffilieim, are we going to catch all the other ones?"
"Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside Extee Three?"
"Zatku, and they've cleaned all of them out around the camp. That's why we
have to have one car patroling a couple of miles out to shoot harpies off."
'And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don't destroy? I was making a
study of them, for a while. I don't. That's what I mean by educating the
farmers. A Fuzzy does X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen
land-prawns a day, and among them they do about X-times-ten damage."
"Write up a script about it, and we'll put it on the air this evening. 'Be
good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the farmer's best friend.' Maybe that'll help
some."
Gerd nodded. 'Ughty-seven, we have now. How many little ones?"
"Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?"
"And we think we have five pregnancies. That's all Lynne An-drews is sure of;
the only way she can tell is listening with a stetho-scope for fetal
movements. They seem to be too small to make any conspicuous visible
difference. This is out of eighty-seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call
that, George?"
George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it auto-matically.
Somewhere, maybe
Constabulary School, the coffee had al-ways been too hot to drink right away.
Across the messhall, half a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it
clear the tables.
'T sure to Niffiheim isn't any population explosion," he said.
"Race extinction, George. I don't know what the normal life ex-pectancy is in
the woods, but I'd say four out of five of them die by violence. When the
birthrate curve drops below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out."
"A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you said five of the girls
were pregnant, didn't you?
And you admit that's not com-plete, if Doc Andrews has to use a stethoscope
for a pregnancy-test."
"I wondered if you'd notice that. That's not a bad ratio, for fe-males who
have a monthly cycle instead of an annual mating season. And these four
children; we don't know anything about the matura-tion period, but in the
three months we've been checking on him, Baby Fuzzy's only gained six ounces
and an inch. I'd make it about fifteen years, ten at very least." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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