THE MANAGEMENT OF the Hotel Mallory appeared to have undergone a
change of heart, or of policy, toward Fuzzies. It might have been
Gus Brannhard’s threats of action for racial discrimination
and the possibility that the Fuzzies might turn out to be a race
instead of an animal species after all. The manager might have been
shamed by the way the Lurkin story had crumbled into discredit, and
influenced by the revived public sympathy for the Fuzzies. Or maybe
he just decided that the Chartered Zarathustra Company wasn’t
as omnipotent as he’d believed. At any rate, a large room,
usually used for banquets, was made available for the Fuzzies
George Lunt and Ben Rainsford were bringing in for the trial, and
the four strangers and their black-and-white kitten were installed
there. There were a lot of toys of different sorts, courtesy of the
management, and a big viewscreen. The four strange Fuzzies dashed
for this immediately and turned it on, yeeking in delight as they
watched landing craft coming down and lifting out at the municipal
spaceport. They found it very interesting. It only bored the
kitten.
With some misgivings, Jack brought Baby down and introduced him.
They were delighted with Baby, and Baby thought the kitten was the
most wonderful thing he had ever seen. When it was time to feed
them, Jack had his own dinner brought in, and ate with them. Gus
and Gerd came down and joined him later.
“We got the Lurkin kid and her father,” Gus said,
and then falsettoed: “ ‘Naw, Pop gimme a beatin’,
and the cops told me to say it was the Fuzzies.’ ”
“She say that?”
“Under veridication, with the screen blue as a sapphire,
in front of half a dozen witnesses and with audiovisuals on.
Interworld’s putting it on the air this evening. Her father
admitted it, too; named Woller and the desk sergeant. We’re
still looking for them; till we get them, we aren’t any
closer to Emmert or Grego. We did pick up the two car cops, but
they don’t know anything on anybody but Woller.”
That was good enough, as far as it went, Brannhard thought, but
it didn’t go far enough. There were those four strange
Fuzzies showing up out of nowhere, right in the middle of Nick
Emmert’s drive-hunt. They’d been kept somewhere by
somebody—that was how they’d learned to eat Extee Three and
found out about viewscreens. Their appearance was too well
synchronized to be accidental. The whole thing smelled to him of a
booby trap.
One good thing had happened. Judge Pendarvis had decided that it
would be next to impossible, in view of the widespread public
interest in the case and the influence of the Zarathustra Company,
to get an impartial jury, and had proposed a judicial trial by a
panel of three judges, himself one of them. Even Leslie Coombes had
felt forced to agree to that.
He told Jack about the decision. Jack listened with apparent
attentiveness, and then said:
“You know, Gus, I’ll always be glad I let Little
Fuzzy smoke my pipe when he wanted to, that night out at
camp.”
The way he was feeling, he wouldn’t have cared less if the
case was going to be tried by a panel of three zaragoats.
Ben Rainsford, his two Fuzzies, and George Lunt, Ahmed Khadra
and the other constabulary witnesses and their family, arrived
shortly before noon on Saturday. The Fuzzies were quartered in the
stripped-out banquet room, and quickly made friends with the four
already there, and with Baby. Each family bedded down apart, but
they ate together and played with each other’s toys and sat
in a clump to watch the viewscreen. At first, the Ferny Creek
family showed jealousy when too much attention was paid to their
kitten, until they decided that nobody was trying to steal it.
It would have been a lot of fun, eleven Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy
and a black-and-white kitten, if Jack hadn’t kept seeing his
own family, six quiet little ghosts watching but unable to join the
frolicking.
MAX FANE BRIGHTENED when he saw who was on his screen.
“Well, Colonel Ferguson, glad to see you.”
“Marshal,” Ferguson was smiling broadly.
“You’ll be even gladder in a minute. A couple of my
men, from Post Eight, picked up Woller and that desk sergeant,
Fuentes.”
“Ha!” He started feeling warm inside, as though he
had just downed a slug of Baldur honeyrum. “How?”
“Well, you know Nick Emmert has a hunting lodge down
there. Post Eight keeps an eye on it for him. This afternoon, one
of Lieutenant Obefemi’s cars was passing over it, and they
picked up some radiation and infrared on their detectors, as though
the power was on inside. When they went down to investigate, they
found Woller and Fuentes making themselves at home. They brought
them in, and both of them admitted under veridication that Emmert
had given them the keys and sent them down there to hide out till
after the trial.
“They denied that Emmert had originated the frame-up. That
had been one of Woller’s own flashes of genius, but Emmert
knew what the score was and went right along with it. They’re
being brought up here the first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Well, that’s swell, Colonel! Has it gotten out to
the news services yet?”
“No. We would like to have them both questioned here in
Mallorysport, and their confessions recorded, before we let the
story out. Otherwise, somebody might try to take steps to shut them
up for good.”
That had been what he had been thinking of. He said so, and
Ferguson nodded. Then he hesitated for a moment, and said:
“Max, do you like the situation here in Mallorysport? Be
damned if I do.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are too many strangers in town,” Ian Ferguson
said. “All the same kind of strangers, husky-looking young
men, twenty to thirty, going around in pairs and small groups.
I’ve been noticing it since day before last, and there seem
to be more of them every time I look around.”
“Well, Ian, it’s a young man’s planet, and we
can expect a big crowd in town for the trial . . . ”
He didn’t really believe that. He just wanted Ian Ferguson
to put a name on it first. Ferguson shook his head.
“No, Max. This isn’t a trial-day crowd. We both know
what they’re like; remember when they tried the Gawn
brothers? No whooping it up in bars, no excitement, no big crap
games; this crowd’s just walking around, keeping quiet, as
though they expected a word from somebody.”
“Infiltration.” Goddamit, he’d said it first,
himself after all! “Victor Grego’s worried about
this.”
“I know it, Max. And Victor Grego’s like a veldbeest
bull; he isn’t dangerous till he’s scared, and then
watch out. And against the gang that’s moving in here, the
men you and I have together would last about as long as a pint of
trade-gin at a Sheshan funeral.”
“You thinking of pushing the panic-button?”
The constabulary commander frowned. “I don’t want
to. A dim view would be taken back on Terra if I did it without
needing to. Dimmer view would be taken of needing to without doing
it, though. I’ll make another check, first.”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK sorted the papers on the desk into piles, lit a
cigarette and then started to mix himself a highball.
“Fuzzies are members of a sapient race,” he
declared. “They reason logically, both deductively and
inductively. They learn by experiment, analysis and association.
They formulate general principles, and apply them to specific
instances. They plan their activities in advance. They make
designed artifacts, and artifacts to make artifacts. They are able
to symbolize, and convey ideas in symbolic form, and form symbols
by abstracting from objects.
“They have aesthetic sense and creativity,” he
continued. “They become bored in idleness, and they enjoy
solving problems for the pleasure of solving them. They bury their
dead ceremoniously, and bury artifacts with them.”
He blew a smoke ring, and then tasted his drink. “They do
all these things, and they also do carpenter work, blow police
whistles, make eating tools to eat land-prawns with and put
molecule-model balls together. Obviously they are sapient beings.
But don’t, please don’t ask me to define sapience,
because God damn it to Nifflheim, I still can’t!”
“I think you just did.” Jack said.
“No, that won’t do. I need a definition.”
“Don’t worry, Gerd,” Gus Brannhard told him.
“Leslie Coombes will bring a nice shiny new definition into
court. We’ll just use that.”
THE MANAGEMENT OF the Hotel Mallory appeared to have undergone a
change of heart, or of policy, toward Fuzzies. It might have been
Gus Brannhard’s threats of action for racial discrimination
and the possibility that the Fuzzies might turn out to be a race
instead of an animal species after all. The manager might have been
shamed by the way the Lurkin story had crumbled into discredit, and
influenced by the revived public sympathy for the Fuzzies. Or maybe
he just decided that the Chartered Zarathustra Company wasn’t
as omnipotent as he’d believed. At any rate, a large room,
usually used for banquets, was made available for the Fuzzies
George Lunt and Ben Rainsford were bringing in for the trial, and
the four strangers and their black-and-white kitten were installed
there. There were a lot of toys of different sorts, courtesy of the
management, and a big viewscreen. The four strange Fuzzies dashed
for this immediately and turned it on, yeeking in delight as they
watched landing craft coming down and lifting out at the municipal
spaceport. They found it very interesting. It only bored the
kitten.
With some misgivings, Jack brought Baby down and introduced him.
They were delighted with Baby, and Baby thought the kitten was the
most wonderful thing he had ever seen. When it was time to feed
them, Jack had his own dinner brought in, and ate with them. Gus
and Gerd came down and joined him later.
“We got the Lurkin kid and her father,” Gus said,
and then falsettoed: “ ‘Naw, Pop gimme a beatin’,
and the cops told me to say it was the Fuzzies.’ ”
“She say that?”
“Under veridication, with the screen blue as a sapphire,
in front of half a dozen witnesses and with audiovisuals on.
Interworld’s putting it on the air this evening. Her father
admitted it, too; named Woller and the desk sergeant. We’re
still looking for them; till we get them, we aren’t any
closer to Emmert or Grego. We did pick up the two car cops, but
they don’t know anything on anybody but Woller.”
That was good enough, as far as it went, Brannhard thought, but
it didn’t go far enough. There were those four strange
Fuzzies showing up out of nowhere, right in the middle of Nick
Emmert’s drive-hunt. They’d been kept somewhere by
somebody—that was how they’d learned to eat Extee Three and
found out about viewscreens. Their appearance was too well
synchronized to be accidental. The whole thing smelled to him of a
booby trap.
One good thing had happened. Judge Pendarvis had decided that it
would be next to impossible, in view of the widespread public
interest in the case and the influence of the Zarathustra Company,
to get an impartial jury, and had proposed a judicial trial by a
panel of three judges, himself one of them. Even Leslie Coombes had
felt forced to agree to that.
He told Jack about the decision. Jack listened with apparent
attentiveness, and then said:
“You know, Gus, I’ll always be glad I let Little
Fuzzy smoke my pipe when he wanted to, that night out at
camp.”
The way he was feeling, he wouldn’t have cared less if the
case was going to be tried by a panel of three zaragoats.
Ben Rainsford, his two Fuzzies, and George Lunt, Ahmed Khadra
and the other constabulary witnesses and their family, arrived
shortly before noon on Saturday. The Fuzzies were quartered in the
stripped-out banquet room, and quickly made friends with the four
already there, and with Baby. Each family bedded down apart, but
they ate together and played with each other’s toys and sat
in a clump to watch the viewscreen. At first, the Ferny Creek
family showed jealousy when too much attention was paid to their
kitten, until they decided that nobody was trying to steal it.
It would have been a lot of fun, eleven Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy
and a black-and-white kitten, if Jack hadn’t kept seeing his
own family, six quiet little ghosts watching but unable to join the
frolicking.
MAX FANE BRIGHTENED when he saw who was on his screen.
“Well, Colonel Ferguson, glad to see you.”
“Marshal,” Ferguson was smiling broadly.
“You’ll be even gladder in a minute. A couple of my
men, from Post Eight, picked up Woller and that desk sergeant,
Fuentes.”
“Ha!” He started feeling warm inside, as though he
had just downed a slug of Baldur honeyrum. “How?”
“Well, you know Nick Emmert has a hunting lodge down
there. Post Eight keeps an eye on it for him. This afternoon, one
of Lieutenant Obefemi’s cars was passing over it, and they
picked up some radiation and infrared on their detectors, as though
the power was on inside. When they went down to investigate, they
found Woller and Fuentes making themselves at home. They brought
them in, and both of them admitted under veridication that Emmert
had given them the keys and sent them down there to hide out till
after the trial.
“They denied that Emmert had originated the frame-up. That
had been one of Woller’s own flashes of genius, but Emmert
knew what the score was and went right along with it. They’re
being brought up here the first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Well, that’s swell, Colonel! Has it gotten out to
the news services yet?”
“No. We would like to have them both questioned here in
Mallorysport, and their confessions recorded, before we let the
story out. Otherwise, somebody might try to take steps to shut them
up for good.”
That had been what he had been thinking of. He said so, and
Ferguson nodded. Then he hesitated for a moment, and said:
“Max, do you like the situation here in Mallorysport? Be
damned if I do.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are too many strangers in town,” Ian Ferguson
said. “All the same kind of strangers, husky-looking young
men, twenty to thirty, going around in pairs and small groups.
I’ve been noticing it since day before last, and there seem
to be more of them every time I look around.”
“Well, Ian, it’s a young man’s planet, and we
can expect a big crowd in town for the trial . . . ”
He didn’t really believe that. He just wanted Ian Ferguson
to put a name on it first. Ferguson shook his head.
“No, Max. This isn’t a trial-day crowd. We both know
what they’re like; remember when they tried the Gawn
brothers? No whooping it up in bars, no excitement, no big crap
games; this crowd’s just walking around, keeping quiet, as
though they expected a word from somebody.”
“Infiltration.” Goddamit, he’d said it first,
himself after all! “Victor Grego’s worried about
this.”
“I know it, Max. And Victor Grego’s like a veldbeest
bull; he isn’t dangerous till he’s scared, and then
watch out. And against the gang that’s moving in here, the
men you and I have together would last about as long as a pint of
trade-gin at a Sheshan funeral.”
“You thinking of pushing the panic-button?”
The constabulary commander frowned. “I don’t want
to. A dim view would be taken back on Terra if I did it without
needing to. Dimmer view would be taken of needing to without doing
it, though. I’ll make another check, first.”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK sorted the papers on the desk into piles, lit a
cigarette and then started to mix himself a highball.
“Fuzzies are members of a sapient race,” he
declared. “They reason logically, both deductively and
inductively. They learn by experiment, analysis and association.
They formulate general principles, and apply them to specific
instances. They plan their activities in advance. They make
designed artifacts, and artifacts to make artifacts. They are able
to symbolize, and convey ideas in symbolic form, and form symbols
by abstracting from objects.
“They have aesthetic sense and creativity,” he
continued. “They become bored in idleness, and they enjoy
solving problems for the pleasure of solving them. They bury their
dead ceremoniously, and bury artifacts with them.”
He blew a smoke ring, and then tasted his drink. “They do
all these things, and they also do carpenter work, blow police
whistles, make eating tools to eat land-prawns with and put
molecule-model balls together. Obviously they are sapient beings.
But don’t, please don’t ask me to define sapience,
because God damn it to Nifflheim, I still can’t!”
“I think you just did.” Jack said.
“No, that won’t do. I need a definition.”
“Don’t worry, Gerd,” Gus Brannhard told him.
“Leslie Coombes will bring a nice shiny new definition into
court. We’ll just use that.”