JACK HOLLOWAY LANDED the manipulator in front of the cluster of
prefab huts. For a moment he sat still, realizing that he was
tired, and then he climbed down from the control cabin and crossed
the open grass to the door of the main living hut, opening it and
reaching in to turn on the lights. Then he hesitated, looking up at
Darius.
There was a wide ring around it, and he remembered noticing the
wisps of cirrus clouds gathering overhead through the afternoon.
Maybe it would rain tonight. This dry weather couldn’t last
forever. He’d been letting the manipulator stand out
overnight lately. He decided to put it in the hangar. He went and
opened the door of the vehicle shed, got back onto the machine and
floated it inside. When he came back to the living hut, he saw that
he had left the door wide open.
“Damn fool!” he rebuked himself. “Place could
be crawling with prawns by now.”
He looked quickly around the living room—under the big
combination desk and library table, under the gunrack, under the
chairs, back of the communication screen and the viewscreen, beyond
the metal cabinet of the microfilm library—and saw nothing. Then he
hung up his hat, took off his pistol and laid it on the table, and
went back to the bathroom to wash his hands.
As soon as he put on the light, something inside the shower
stall said, “Yeeeek!” in a startled voice.
He turned quickly, to see two wide eyes staring up at him out of
a ball of golden fur. Whatever it was, it had a round head and big
ears and a vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. It was
sitting on its haunches, and in that position it was about a foot
high. It had two tiny hands with opposing thumbs. He squatted to
have a better look at it.
“Hello there, little fellow,” he greeted it.
“I never saw anything like you before. What are you
anyhow?”
The small creature looked at him seriously and said,
“Yeek,” in a timid voice.
“Why, sure; you’re a Little Fuzzy, that’s what
you are.”
He moved closer, careful to make no alarmingly sudden movements,
and kept on talking to it.
“Bet you slipped in while I left the door open. Well, if a
Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he
shouldn’t come in and look around.”
He touched it gently. It started to draw back, then reached out
a little hand and felt the material of his shirtsleeve. He stroked
it, and told it that it had the softest, silkiest fur ever. Then he
took it on his lap. It yeeked in pleasure, and stretched an arm up
around his neck.
“Why, sure; we’re going to be good friends,
aren’t we? Would you like something to eat? Well, suppose you
and I go see what we can find.”
He put one hand under it, to support it like a baby—at least, he
seemed to recall having seen babies supported in that way; babies
were things he didn’t fool with if the could help it—and
straightened. It weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds. At
first, it struggled in panic, and then quieted and seemed to enjoy
being carried. In the living room he sat down in his favorite
armchair, under a standing lamp, and examined his new
acquaintance.
It was a mammal—there was a fairly large mammalian class on
Zarathustra, but beyond that he was stumped. It wasn’t a
primate, in the Terran sense. It wasn’t like anything Terran,
or anything else on Zarathustra. Being a biped put it in a class by
itself for this planet. It was just a Little Fuzzy, and that was
the best he could do.
That sort of nomenclature was the best anybody could do on a
Class-III planet. On a Class IV planet, say Loki, or Shesha, or
Thor, naming animals was a cinch. You pointed to something and
asked a native, and he’d gargle a mouthful of syllables at
you, which might only mean, “Whaddaya wanna know for?”
and you took it down in phonetic alphabet and the whatzit had a
name. But on Zarathustra there were no natives to ask. So this was
a Little Fuzzy.
“What would you like to eat, Little Fuzzy?” he
asked. “Open your mouth, and let Pappy Jack see what you have
to chew with.”
Little Fuzzy’s dental equipment, allowing for the fact
that his jaw was rounder, was very much like his own.
“You’re probably omnivorous. How would you like some
nice Terran Federation Space Forces Emergency Ration,
Extraterrestrial, Type Three?” he asked.
Little Fuzzy made what sounded like an expression of willingness
to try it. It would be safe enough; Extee-Three had been fed to a
number a Zarathustran mammals without ill effects. He carried
Little Fuzzy out into the kitchen and put him on the floor, then
got out a tin of the field ration and opened it, breaking off a
small piece and handing it down. Little Fuzzy took the piece of
golden-brown cake, sniffed at it, gave it a delighted yeek and
crammed the whole piece in his mouth.
“You never had to live on that stuff and nothing else for
a month, that’s for sure!”
He broke the cake in half and broke one half into manageable
pieces and put it down on a saucer. Maybe Little Fuzzy would want a
drink, too. He started to fill a pan with water, as he would for a
dog, then looked at his visitor sitting on his haunches eating with
both hands and changed his mind. He rinsed a plastic cup cap from
an empty whisky bottle and put it down beside a deep bowl of water.
Little Fuzzy was thirsty, and he didn’t have to be shown what
the cup was for.
It was too late to get himself anything elaborate; he found some
leftovers in the refrigerator and combined them into a stew. While
it was heating, he sat down at the kitchen table and lit his pipe.
The spurt of flame from the lighter opened Little Fuzzy’s
eyes, but what really awed him was Pappy Jack blowing smoke. He sat
watching this phenomenon, until, a few minutes later, the stew was
hot and the pipe was laid aside; then Little Fuzzy went back to
nibbling Extee Three.
Suddenly he gave a yeek of petulance and scampered into the
living room. In a moment, he was back with something elongated and
metallic which he laid on the floor beside him.
“What have you got there, Little Fuzzy? Let Pappy Jack
see?”
Then he recognized it as his own one-inch wood chisel. He
remembered leaving it in the outside shed after doing some work
about a week ago, and not being able to find it when he had gone to
look for it. That had worried him; people who got absent-minded
about equipment didn’t last long in the wilderness. After he
finished eating and took the dishes to the sink, he went over and
squatted beside his new friend.
“Let Pappy Jack look at it, Little Fuzzy,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not going to take it away from you. I just
want to see it.”
The edge was dulled and nicked; it had been used for a lot of
things wood chisel oughtn’t to be used for. Digging, and
prying, and most likely, it had been used as a weapon. It was a
handy-sized, all-purpose tool for a Little Fuzzy. He laid it on the
floor where he had gotten it and started washing the dishes.
Little Fuzzy watched him with interest for a while, and then he
began investigating the kitchen. Some of the things he wanted to
investigate had to be taken away from him; at first that angered
him, but he soon learned that there were things he wasn’t
suppose to have. Eventually, the dishes got washed.
There were more things to investigate in the living room. One of
them was the wastebasket. He found that it could be dumped, and
promptly dumped it, pulling out everything that hadn’t fallen
out. He bit a corner off a sheet of paper, chewed on it and spat it
out in disgust. Then he found that crumpled paper could be
flattened out and so he flatted a few sheets, and then discovered
that it could also be folded. Then he got himself gleefully tangled
in a snarl of worn-out recording tape. Finally he lost interest and
started away. Jack caught him and brought him back.
“No, Little Fuzzy,” he said. “You do not dump
wastebaskets and then walk away from them. You put things back
in.” He touched the container and said, slowly and
distinctly, “Waste . . . basket.” Then he righted it,
doing it as Little Fuzzy would have to, and picked up a piece of
paper, tossing it in from Little Fuzzy’s shoulder height.
Then he handed Little Fuzzy a wad of paper and repeated,
“Waste . . . basket.”
Little Fuzzy looked at him and said something that sounded as
though it might be: “What’s the matter with you, Pappy;
you crazy or something?” After a couple more tries, however,
he got it, and began throwing things in. In a few minutes, he had
everything back in except a brightly colored plastic cartridge box
and a wide-mouthed bottle with a screw cap. He held these up and
said, “Yeek?”
“Yes, you can have them. Here; let Pappy Jack show you
something.”
He showed Little Fuzzy how the box could be opened and shut.
Then, holding it where Little Fuzzy could watch, he unscrewed the
cap and then screwed it on again.
“There, now. You try it.”
Little Fuzzy looked up inquiringly, then took the bottle,
sitting down and holding it between his knees. Unfortunately, he
tried twisting it the wrong way and only screwed the cap on
tighter. He yeeked plaintively.
“No, go ahead. You can do it.”
Little Fuzzy look at the bottle again. Then he tried twisting
the cap the other way, and it loosened. He gave a yeek that
couldn’t possibly be anything but “Eureka!” and
promptly took it off, holding it up. After being commended, he
examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the threads, and then
screwed the cap back on again.
“You know, you’re a smart Little Fuzzy.” It
took a few seconds to realize just how smart. Little Fuzzy had
wondered why you twist the cap one way to take it off and the other
way to put it on, and he had found out. For pure reasoning ability,
that topped anything in the way of animal intelligence he’d
ever seen. “I’m going to tell Ben Rainsford about
you.”
Going to the communication screen, he punched out the
wave-length combination of the naturalist’s camp, seventy
miles down Snake River from the mouth of Cold Creek.
Rainsford’s screen must have been on automatic; it lit as
soon as he was through punching. There was a card set up in front
of it, lettered: away on trip, back the fifteenth. recorder on.
“Ben, Jack Holloway,” he said. “I just ran
into something interesting.” He explained briefly what it
was. “I hope he stays around till you get back. He’s
totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen on this
planet.”
Little Fuzzy was disappointed when Jack turned off the screen;
that had been interesting. He picked him up and carried him over to
the armchair, taking him on his lap.
“Now,” he said, reaching for the control panel of
the viewscreen. “Watch this; we’re going to see
something nice.”
When he put on the screen, at random, he got a view, from close
up, of the great fires that were raging where the Company people
were burning off the dead forests on what used to be Big Blackwater
Swamp. Little Fuzzy cried out in alarm, flung his arms around Pappy
Jack’s neck and buried his face in the bosom of his shirt.
Well, forest fires started from lightning sometimes, and
they’d be bad things for a Little Fuzzy. He worked the
selector and got another pickup, this time on the top of Company
House in Mallorysport, three time zones west, with the city spread
out below and the sunset blazing in the west. Little Fuzzy stared
at it in wonder. It was pretty impressive for a little fellow
who’d spent all his life in the big woods.
So was the spaceport, and a lot of other things he saw, though a
view of the planet as a whole from Darius puzzled him considerably.
Then, in the middle of a symphony orchestra concert from
Mallorysport Opera House, he wriggled loose, dropped to the floor
and caught up his wood chisel, swinging it back over his shoulder
like a two-handed sword.
“What the devil? Oh-oh!”
A land-prawn, which must have gotten in while the door was open,
was crossing the living room. Little Fuzzy ran after and past it,
pivoted and brought the corner of the chisel edge down on the
prawn’s neck, neatly beheading it. He looked at his victim
for a moment, then slid the chisel under it and flopped it over on
its back, slapping it twice with the flat and cracking the
undershell. Then he began pulling the dead prawn apart, tearing
pieces of meat and eating them delicately. After disposing of the
larger chunks, he used the chisel to chop off one of the
prawn’s mandibles to use as a pick to get the less accessible
morsels. When he had finished, he licked his fingers clean and
started back to the armchair.
“No.” Jack pointed at the prawn shell.
“Wastebasket.”
“Yeek?”
“Wastebasket.”
Little Fuzzy gathered up the bits of shell, putting them where
they belonged. Then he came back and climbed up on Pappy
Jack’s lap, and looked at things in the screen until he fell
asleep.
Jack lifted him carefully and put him down on the warm chair
seat without wakening him, then went to the kitchen, poured himself
a drink and brought it in to the big table, where he lit his pipe
and began writing up his diary for the day. After a while, Little
Fuzzy woke, found that the lap he had gone to sleep on had
vanished, and yeeked disconsolately.
A folded blanket in one corner of the bedroom made a
satisfactory bed, once Little Fuzzy had assured himself that there
were no bugs in it. He brought in his bottle and his plastic box
and put them on the floor beside it. Then he ran to the front door
in the living room and yeeked to be let out. Going about twenty
feet from the house, he used the chisel to dig a small hole, and
after it had served its purpose he filled it in carefully and came
running back.
Well, maybe Fuzzies were naturally gregarious, and were
homemakers—den-holes, or nests, or something like that. Nobody wants
messes made in the house, and when the young ones did it, their
parents would bang them around to teach them better manners. This
was Little Fuzzy’s home now; he knew how he ought to behave
in it.
THE NEXT MORNING at daylight, he was up on the bed, trying to
dig Pappy Jack out from under the blankets. Besides being a most
efficient land-prawn eradicator, he made a first-rate alarm clock.
But best of all, he was Pappy Jack’s Little Fuzzy. He wanted
out; this time Jack took his movie camera and got the whole
operation on film. One thing, there’d have to be a little
door, with a spring to hold it shut, that Little Fuzzy could
operate himself. That was designed during breakfast. It only took a
couple of hours to make and install it; Little Fuzzy got the whole
idea as soon as he saw it, and figured out how to work it for
himself.
Jack went back to the workshop, built a fire on the hand forge
and forged a pointed and rather broad blade, four inches long, on
the end of a foot of quarter-inch round tool-steel. It was too
point-heavy when finished, so he welded a knob on the other end to
balance it. Little Fuzzy knew what that was for right away; running
outside, he dug a couple of practice holes with it, and then began
casting about in the grass for land-prawns.
Jack followed him with the camera and got movies of a couple of
prawn killings, accomplished with smooth, by-the-numbers precision.
Little Fuzzy hadn’t learned that chop-slap-slap routine in
the week since he had found the wood chisel.
Going into the shed, he hunted for something without more than a
general idea of what it would look like, and found it where Little
Fuzzy had discarded it when he found the chisel. It was a stock of
hardwood a foot long, rubbed down and polished smooth, apparently
with sandstone. There was a paddle at one end, with enough of an
edge to behead a prawn, and the other end had been worked into a
point. He took it into the living hut and sat down at the desk to
examine it with a magnifying glass. Bits of soil embedded in the sharp
end—that had been used as a pick. The paddle end had been used as a
shovel, beheader and shell-cracker. Little Fuzzy had known exactly
what he wanted when he’d started making that thing,
he’d kept on until it was as perfect as possible, and he had
stopped short of spoiling it by over refinement.
Finally, Jack put it away in the top drawer of the desk. He was
thinking about what to get for lunch when Little Fuzzy burst into
the living room, clutching his new weapon and yeeking
excitedly.
“What’s the matter, kid? You got troubles?” He
rose and went to the gunrack, picking down a rifle and checking the
chamber. “Show Pappy Jack what it is.”
Little Fuzzy followed him to the big door for human-type people,
ready to bolt back inside if necessary. The trouble was a harpy—a
thing about the size and general design of a Terran Jurassic
pterodactyl, big enough to take a Little Fuzzy at one mouthful. It
must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling back for
another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward loop
and dropped like a stone.
Little Fuzzy made a very surprised remark, looked at the dead
harpy for a moment and then spotted the ejected empty cartridge. He
grabbed it and held it up, asking if he could have it. When told
that he could, he ran back to the bedroom with it. When he
returned, Pappy Jack picked him up and carried him to the hangar
and up into the control cabin of the manipulator.
The throbbing of the contragravity-field generator and the sense
of rising worried him at first, but after they had picked up the
harpy with the grapples and risen to five hundred feet he began to
enjoy the ride. They dropped the harpy a couple of miles up what
the latest maps were designating as Holloway’s Run, and then
made a wide circle back over the mountains. Little Fuzzy thought it
was fun.
After lunch, Little Fuzzy had a nap on Pappy Jack’s bed.
Jack took the manipulator up to the diggings, put off a couple more
shots, uncovered more flint and found another sunstone. It
wasn’t often that he found stones on two successive days.
When he returned to the camp, Little Fuzzy was picking another
land-prawn apart in front of the living hut.
After dinner—Little Fuzzy like cooked food, too, if it
wasn’t too hot—they went into the living room. He remembered
having seen a bolt and nut in the desk drawer when he had been
putting the wooden prawn-killer away, and he got it out, showing it
to Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy studied it for a moment, then ran
into the bedroom and came back with his screw-top bottle. He took
the top off, put it on again and then screwed the nut off the bolt,
holding it up.
“See, Pappy?” Or yeeks to that effect.
“Nothing to it.”
Then he unscrewed the bottle top, dropped the bolt inside after
replacing the nut and screwed the cap on again.
“Yeek,” he said, with considerable
self-satisfaction.
He had a right to be satisfied with himself. What he’d
been doing had been generalizing. Bottle tops and nuts belonged to
the general class of things-that-screwed-onto-things. To take them
off, you turned left; to put them on again, you turned right, after
making sure that the threads engaged. And since he could conceive
of right- and left-handedness, that might mean that he could think
of properties apart from objects, and that was forming abstract
ideas. Maybe that was going a little far, but . . .
“You know, Pappy Jack’s got himself a mighty smart
Little Fuzzy. Are you a grown-up Little Fuzzy, or are you just a
baby Little Fuzzy? Shucks, I’ll bet you’re Professor
Doctor Fuzzy.”
He wondered what to give the professor, if that was what he was,
to work on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him too much
about taking things apart, just at present. Sometime he might come
home and find something important taken apart, or, worse, taken
apart and put together incorrectly. Finally, he went to a closet,
rummaging in it until he found a tin cannister. By the time he
returned, Little Fuzzy had gotten up on a chair, found his pipe in
the ashtray and was puffing on it and coughing.
“Hey, I don’t think that’s good for
you!”
He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirtsleeve and put
it in his mouth, then placed the cannister on the floor, and put
Little Fuzzy on the floor beside it. There were about ten pounds of
stones in it. When he had first settled here, he had made a
collection of the local minerals, and, after learning what
he’d wanted to, he had thrown them out, all twenty or thirty
of the prettiest specimens. He was glad, now, that he had kept
these.
Little Fuzzy looked the can over, decided that the lid was a
member of the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got it
off. The inside of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a
little thought to discover that what he saw in it was only himself.
He yeeked about that, and looked into the can. This, he decided,
belonged to the class of things-that-can-be-dumped, like
wastebaskets, so he dumped it on the floor. Then he began examining
the stones and sorting them by color.
Except for an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was
the first real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He
proceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the
stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethyst
like quartz to a dark red stone. Well, maybe he’d seen
rainbows. Maybe he’d lived near a big misty waterfall, where
there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining. Or maybe that
was just his natural way of seeing colors.
Then, when he saw what he had to work with, he began making
arrangements with them, laying them out in odd circular and spiral
patterns. Each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to
call attention to it, sit and look at it for a while, and then take
it apart and start a new one. Little Fuzzy was capable of artistic
gratification too. He made useless things, just for the pleasure of
making and looking at them.
Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and
rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with
his other treasures. The new weapon he laid on the blanket beside
him when he went to bed.
THE NEXT MORNING, Jack broke up a whole cake of Extee Three and
put it down, filled the bowl with water, and, after making sure he
had left nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on
which he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the
diggings. He worked all morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half
of flint, and found nothing. Then he set off a string of shots,
brought down an avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and
sat down under a pool-ball tree to eat his lunch.
Half an hour after he went back to work, he found the fossil of
some jellyfish that hadn’t eaten the right things in the
right combinations, but a little later, he found four nodules, one
after another, and two of them were sunstones; four or five chunks
later, he found a third. Why, this must be the Dying Place of the
Jellyfish! By late afternoon, when he had cleaned up all his loose
flint, he had nine, including one deep red monster an inch in
diameter. There must have been some connection current in the
ancient ocean that had swirled them all into this one place. He
considered setting off some more shots, decided that it was too
late and returned to camp.
“Little Fuzzy!” he called, opening the living-room
door. “Where are you, Little Fuzzy? Pappy Jack’s rich;
we’re going to celebrate!”
Silence. He called again; still no reply or scamper of feet.
Probably cleaned up all the prawns around the camp and went hunting
farther into the woods, thought Jack. Unbuckling his gun and
dropping it onto the table, he went out to the kitchen. Most of the
Extee Three was gone. In the bedroom, he found that Little Fuzzy
had dumped the stones out of the biscuit tin and made an
arrangement, and laid the wood chisel in a neat diagonal across the
blanket.
After getting dinner assembled and in the oven, he went out and
called for a while, then mixed a highball and took it into the
living room, sitting down with it to go over his day’s
findings. Rather incredulously, he realized that he had cracked out
at least seventy-five thousand sols’ worth of stones today.
He put them into the bag and sat sipping the highball and thinking
pleasant thoughts until the bell on the stove warned him that
dinner was ready.
He ate alone—after all the years he had been doing that
contentedly, it had suddenly become intolerable—and in the evening
he dialed through his microfilm library, finding only books he had
read and reread a dozen times, or books he kept for reference.
Several times he thought he heard the little door open, but each
time he was mistaken. Finally he went to bed.
As soon as he woke, he looked across at the folded blanket, but
the wood chisel was still lying athwart it. He put down more Extee
Three and changed the water in the bowl before leaving for the
diggings. That day he found three more sunstones, and put them in
the bag mechanically and without pleasure. He quit work early and
spent over an hour spiraling around the camp, but saw nothing. The
Extee Three in the kitchen was untouched.
Maybe the little fellow ran into something too big for him, even
with his fine new weapon—a hobthrush, or a bush-goblin, or another
harpy. Or maybe he’d just gotten tired staying in one place,
and had moved on.
No; he’d liked it here. He’d had fun, and been
happy. He shook his head sadly. Once he, too, had lived in a
pleasant place, where he’d had fun, and could have been happy
if he hadn’t thought there was something he’d had to
do. So he had gone away, leaving grieved people behind him. Maybe
that was how it was with Little Fuzzy. Maybe he didn’t
realize how much of a place he had made for himself here, or how
empty he was leaving it.
He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself.
Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities
you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that
calls for drinks all around. No; he’d have one drink, maybe a
little bigger than usual, before he went to bed.
JACK HOLLOWAY LANDED the manipulator in front of the cluster of
prefab huts. For a moment he sat still, realizing that he was
tired, and then he climbed down from the control cabin and crossed
the open grass to the door of the main living hut, opening it and
reaching in to turn on the lights. Then he hesitated, looking up at
Darius.
There was a wide ring around it, and he remembered noticing the
wisps of cirrus clouds gathering overhead through the afternoon.
Maybe it would rain tonight. This dry weather couldn’t last
forever. He’d been letting the manipulator stand out
overnight lately. He decided to put it in the hangar. He went and
opened the door of the vehicle shed, got back onto the machine and
floated it inside. When he came back to the living hut, he saw that
he had left the door wide open.
“Damn fool!” he rebuked himself. “Place could
be crawling with prawns by now.”
He looked quickly around the living room—under the big
combination desk and library table, under the gunrack, under the
chairs, back of the communication screen and the viewscreen, beyond
the metal cabinet of the microfilm library—and saw nothing. Then he
hung up his hat, took off his pistol and laid it on the table, and
went back to the bathroom to wash his hands.
As soon as he put on the light, something inside the shower
stall said, “Yeeeek!” in a startled voice.
He turned quickly, to see two wide eyes staring up at him out of
a ball of golden fur. Whatever it was, it had a round head and big
ears and a vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. It was
sitting on its haunches, and in that position it was about a foot
high. It had two tiny hands with opposing thumbs. He squatted to
have a better look at it.
“Hello there, little fellow,” he greeted it.
“I never saw anything like you before. What are you
anyhow?”
The small creature looked at him seriously and said,
“Yeek,” in a timid voice.
“Why, sure; you’re a Little Fuzzy, that’s what
you are.”
He moved closer, careful to make no alarmingly sudden movements,
and kept on talking to it.
“Bet you slipped in while I left the door open. Well, if a
Little Fuzzy finds a door open, I’d like to know why he
shouldn’t come in and look around.”
He touched it gently. It started to draw back, then reached out
a little hand and felt the material of his shirtsleeve. He stroked
it, and told it that it had the softest, silkiest fur ever. Then he
took it on his lap. It yeeked in pleasure, and stretched an arm up
around his neck.
“Why, sure; we’re going to be good friends,
aren’t we? Would you like something to eat? Well, suppose you
and I go see what we can find.”
He put one hand under it, to support it like a baby—at least, he
seemed to recall having seen babies supported in that way; babies
were things he didn’t fool with if the could help it—and
straightened. It weighed between fifteen and twenty pounds. At
first, it struggled in panic, and then quieted and seemed to enjoy
being carried. In the living room he sat down in his favorite
armchair, under a standing lamp, and examined his new
acquaintance.
It was a mammal—there was a fairly large mammalian class on
Zarathustra, but beyond that he was stumped. It wasn’t a
primate, in the Terran sense. It wasn’t like anything Terran,
or anything else on Zarathustra. Being a biped put it in a class by
itself for this planet. It was just a Little Fuzzy, and that was
the best he could do.
That sort of nomenclature was the best anybody could do on a
Class-III planet. On a Class IV planet, say Loki, or Shesha, or
Thor, naming animals was a cinch. You pointed to something and
asked a native, and he’d gargle a mouthful of syllables at
you, which might only mean, “Whaddaya wanna know for?”
and you took it down in phonetic alphabet and the whatzit had a
name. But on Zarathustra there were no natives to ask. So this was
a Little Fuzzy.
“What would you like to eat, Little Fuzzy?” he
asked. “Open your mouth, and let Pappy Jack see what you have
to chew with.”
Little Fuzzy’s dental equipment, allowing for the fact
that his jaw was rounder, was very much like his own.
“You’re probably omnivorous. How would you like some
nice Terran Federation Space Forces Emergency Ration,
Extraterrestrial, Type Three?” he asked.
Little Fuzzy made what sounded like an expression of willingness
to try it. It would be safe enough; Extee-Three had been fed to a
number a Zarathustran mammals without ill effects. He carried
Little Fuzzy out into the kitchen and put him on the floor, then
got out a tin of the field ration and opened it, breaking off a
small piece and handing it down. Little Fuzzy took the piece of
golden-brown cake, sniffed at it, gave it a delighted yeek and
crammed the whole piece in his mouth.
“You never had to live on that stuff and nothing else for
a month, that’s for sure!”
He broke the cake in half and broke one half into manageable
pieces and put it down on a saucer. Maybe Little Fuzzy would want a
drink, too. He started to fill a pan with water, as he would for a
dog, then looked at his visitor sitting on his haunches eating with
both hands and changed his mind. He rinsed a plastic cup cap from
an empty whisky bottle and put it down beside a deep bowl of water.
Little Fuzzy was thirsty, and he didn’t have to be shown what
the cup was for.
It was too late to get himself anything elaborate; he found some
leftovers in the refrigerator and combined them into a stew. While
it was heating, he sat down at the kitchen table and lit his pipe.
The spurt of flame from the lighter opened Little Fuzzy’s
eyes, but what really awed him was Pappy Jack blowing smoke. He sat
watching this phenomenon, until, a few minutes later, the stew was
hot and the pipe was laid aside; then Little Fuzzy went back to
nibbling Extee Three.
Suddenly he gave a yeek of petulance and scampered into the
living room. In a moment, he was back with something elongated and
metallic which he laid on the floor beside him.
“What have you got there, Little Fuzzy? Let Pappy Jack
see?”
Then he recognized it as his own one-inch wood chisel. He
remembered leaving it in the outside shed after doing some work
about a week ago, and not being able to find it when he had gone to
look for it. That had worried him; people who got absent-minded
about equipment didn’t last long in the wilderness. After he
finished eating and took the dishes to the sink, he went over and
squatted beside his new friend.
“Let Pappy Jack look at it, Little Fuzzy,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not going to take it away from you. I just
want to see it.”
The edge was dulled and nicked; it had been used for a lot of
things wood chisel oughtn’t to be used for. Digging, and
prying, and most likely, it had been used as a weapon. It was a
handy-sized, all-purpose tool for a Little Fuzzy. He laid it on the
floor where he had gotten it and started washing the dishes.
Little Fuzzy watched him with interest for a while, and then he
began investigating the kitchen. Some of the things he wanted to
investigate had to be taken away from him; at first that angered
him, but he soon learned that there were things he wasn’t
suppose to have. Eventually, the dishes got washed.
There were more things to investigate in the living room. One of
them was the wastebasket. He found that it could be dumped, and
promptly dumped it, pulling out everything that hadn’t fallen
out. He bit a corner off a sheet of paper, chewed on it and spat it
out in disgust. Then he found that crumpled paper could be
flattened out and so he flatted a few sheets, and then discovered
that it could also be folded. Then he got himself gleefully tangled
in a snarl of worn-out recording tape. Finally he lost interest and
started away. Jack caught him and brought him back.
“No, Little Fuzzy,” he said. “You do not dump
wastebaskets and then walk away from them. You put things back
in.” He touched the container and said, slowly and
distinctly, “Waste . . . basket.” Then he righted it,
doing it as Little Fuzzy would have to, and picked up a piece of
paper, tossing it in from Little Fuzzy’s shoulder height.
Then he handed Little Fuzzy a wad of paper and repeated,
“Waste . . . basket.”
Little Fuzzy looked at him and said something that sounded as
though it might be: “What’s the matter with you, Pappy;
you crazy or something?” After a couple more tries, however,
he got it, and began throwing things in. In a few minutes, he had
everything back in except a brightly colored plastic cartridge box
and a wide-mouthed bottle with a screw cap. He held these up and
said, “Yeek?”
“Yes, you can have them. Here; let Pappy Jack show you
something.”
He showed Little Fuzzy how the box could be opened and shut.
Then, holding it where Little Fuzzy could watch, he unscrewed the
cap and then screwed it on again.
“There, now. You try it.”
Little Fuzzy looked up inquiringly, then took the bottle,
sitting down and holding it between his knees. Unfortunately, he
tried twisting it the wrong way and only screwed the cap on
tighter. He yeeked plaintively.
“No, go ahead. You can do it.”
Little Fuzzy look at the bottle again. Then he tried twisting
the cap the other way, and it loosened. He gave a yeek that
couldn’t possibly be anything but “Eureka!” and
promptly took it off, holding it up. After being commended, he
examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the threads, and then
screwed the cap back on again.
“You know, you’re a smart Little Fuzzy.” It
took a few seconds to realize just how smart. Little Fuzzy had
wondered why you twist the cap one way to take it off and the other
way to put it on, and he had found out. For pure reasoning ability,
that topped anything in the way of animal intelligence he’d
ever seen. “I’m going to tell Ben Rainsford about
you.”
Going to the communication screen, he punched out the
wave-length combination of the naturalist’s camp, seventy
miles down Snake River from the mouth of Cold Creek.
Rainsford’s screen must have been on automatic; it lit as
soon as he was through punching. There was a card set up in front
of it, lettered: away on trip, back the fifteenth. recorder on.
“Ben, Jack Holloway,” he said. “I just ran
into something interesting.” He explained briefly what it
was. “I hope he stays around till you get back. He’s
totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen on this
planet.”
Little Fuzzy was disappointed when Jack turned off the screen;
that had been interesting. He picked him up and carried him over to
the armchair, taking him on his lap.
“Now,” he said, reaching for the control panel of
the viewscreen. “Watch this; we’re going to see
something nice.”
When he put on the screen, at random, he got a view, from close
up, of the great fires that were raging where the Company people
were burning off the dead forests on what used to be Big Blackwater
Swamp. Little Fuzzy cried out in alarm, flung his arms around Pappy
Jack’s neck and buried his face in the bosom of his shirt.
Well, forest fires started from lightning sometimes, and
they’d be bad things for a Little Fuzzy. He worked the
selector and got another pickup, this time on the top of Company
House in Mallorysport, three time zones west, with the city spread
out below and the sunset blazing in the west. Little Fuzzy stared
at it in wonder. It was pretty impressive for a little fellow
who’d spent all his life in the big woods.
So was the spaceport, and a lot of other things he saw, though a
view of the planet as a whole from Darius puzzled him considerably.
Then, in the middle of a symphony orchestra concert from
Mallorysport Opera House, he wriggled loose, dropped to the floor
and caught up his wood chisel, swinging it back over his shoulder
like a two-handed sword.
“What the devil? Oh-oh!”
A land-prawn, which must have gotten in while the door was open,
was crossing the living room. Little Fuzzy ran after and past it,
pivoted and brought the corner of the chisel edge down on the
prawn’s neck, neatly beheading it. He looked at his victim
for a moment, then slid the chisel under it and flopped it over on
its back, slapping it twice with the flat and cracking the
undershell. Then he began pulling the dead prawn apart, tearing
pieces of meat and eating them delicately. After disposing of the
larger chunks, he used the chisel to chop off one of the
prawn’s mandibles to use as a pick to get the less accessible
morsels. When he had finished, he licked his fingers clean and
started back to the armchair.
“No.” Jack pointed at the prawn shell.
“Wastebasket.”
“Yeek?”
“Wastebasket.”
Little Fuzzy gathered up the bits of shell, putting them where
they belonged. Then he came back and climbed up on Pappy
Jack’s lap, and looked at things in the screen until he fell
asleep.
Jack lifted him carefully and put him down on the warm chair
seat without wakening him, then went to the kitchen, poured himself
a drink and brought it in to the big table, where he lit his pipe
and began writing up his diary for the day. After a while, Little
Fuzzy woke, found that the lap he had gone to sleep on had
vanished, and yeeked disconsolately.
A folded blanket in one corner of the bedroom made a
satisfactory bed, once Little Fuzzy had assured himself that there
were no bugs in it. He brought in his bottle and his plastic box
and put them on the floor beside it. Then he ran to the front door
in the living room and yeeked to be let out. Going about twenty
feet from the house, he used the chisel to dig a small hole, and
after it had served its purpose he filled it in carefully and came
running back.
Well, maybe Fuzzies were naturally gregarious, and were
homemakers—den-holes, or nests, or something like that. Nobody wants
messes made in the house, and when the young ones did it, their
parents would bang them around to teach them better manners. This
was Little Fuzzy’s home now; he knew how he ought to behave
in it.
THE NEXT MORNING at daylight, he was up on the bed, trying to
dig Pappy Jack out from under the blankets. Besides being a most
efficient land-prawn eradicator, he made a first-rate alarm clock.
But best of all, he was Pappy Jack’s Little Fuzzy. He wanted
out; this time Jack took his movie camera and got the whole
operation on film. One thing, there’d have to be a little
door, with a spring to hold it shut, that Little Fuzzy could
operate himself. That was designed during breakfast. It only took a
couple of hours to make and install it; Little Fuzzy got the whole
idea as soon as he saw it, and figured out how to work it for
himself.
Jack went back to the workshop, built a fire on the hand forge
and forged a pointed and rather broad blade, four inches long, on
the end of a foot of quarter-inch round tool-steel. It was too
point-heavy when finished, so he welded a knob on the other end to
balance it. Little Fuzzy knew what that was for right away; running
outside, he dug a couple of practice holes with it, and then began
casting about in the grass for land-prawns.
Jack followed him with the camera and got movies of a couple of
prawn killings, accomplished with smooth, by-the-numbers precision.
Little Fuzzy hadn’t learned that chop-slap-slap routine in
the week since he had found the wood chisel.
Going into the shed, he hunted for something without more than a
general idea of what it would look like, and found it where Little
Fuzzy had discarded it when he found the chisel. It was a stock of
hardwood a foot long, rubbed down and polished smooth, apparently
with sandstone. There was a paddle at one end, with enough of an
edge to behead a prawn, and the other end had been worked into a
point. He took it into the living hut and sat down at the desk to
examine it with a magnifying glass. Bits of soil embedded in the sharp
end—that had been used as a pick. The paddle end had been used as a
shovel, beheader and shell-cracker. Little Fuzzy had known exactly
what he wanted when he’d started making that thing,
he’d kept on until it was as perfect as possible, and he had
stopped short of spoiling it by over refinement.
Finally, Jack put it away in the top drawer of the desk. He was
thinking about what to get for lunch when Little Fuzzy burst into
the living room, clutching his new weapon and yeeking
excitedly.
“What’s the matter, kid? You got troubles?” He
rose and went to the gunrack, picking down a rifle and checking the
chamber. “Show Pappy Jack what it is.”
Little Fuzzy followed him to the big door for human-type people,
ready to bolt back inside if necessary. The trouble was a harpy—a
thing about the size and general design of a Terran Jurassic
pterodactyl, big enough to take a Little Fuzzy at one mouthful. It
must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling back for
another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward loop
and dropped like a stone.
Little Fuzzy made a very surprised remark, looked at the dead
harpy for a moment and then spotted the ejected empty cartridge. He
grabbed it and held it up, asking if he could have it. When told
that he could, he ran back to the bedroom with it. When he
returned, Pappy Jack picked him up and carried him to the hangar
and up into the control cabin of the manipulator.
The throbbing of the contragravity-field generator and the sense
of rising worried him at first, but after they had picked up the
harpy with the grapples and risen to five hundred feet he began to
enjoy the ride. They dropped the harpy a couple of miles up what
the latest maps were designating as Holloway’s Run, and then
made a wide circle back over the mountains. Little Fuzzy thought it
was fun.
After lunch, Little Fuzzy had a nap on Pappy Jack’s bed.
Jack took the manipulator up to the diggings, put off a couple more
shots, uncovered more flint and found another sunstone. It
wasn’t often that he found stones on two successive days.
When he returned to the camp, Little Fuzzy was picking another
land-prawn apart in front of the living hut.
After dinner—Little Fuzzy like cooked food, too, if it
wasn’t too hot—they went into the living room. He remembered
having seen a bolt and nut in the desk drawer when he had been
putting the wooden prawn-killer away, and he got it out, showing it
to Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy studied it for a moment, then ran
into the bedroom and came back with his screw-top bottle. He took
the top off, put it on again and then screwed the nut off the bolt,
holding it up.
“See, Pappy?” Or yeeks to that effect.
“Nothing to it.”
Then he unscrewed the bottle top, dropped the bolt inside after
replacing the nut and screwed the cap on again.
“Yeek,” he said, with considerable
self-satisfaction.
He had a right to be satisfied with himself. What he’d
been doing had been generalizing. Bottle tops and nuts belonged to
the general class of things-that-screwed-onto-things. To take them
off, you turned left; to put them on again, you turned right, after
making sure that the threads engaged. And since he could conceive
of right- and left-handedness, that might mean that he could think
of properties apart from objects, and that was forming abstract
ideas. Maybe that was going a little far, but . . .
“You know, Pappy Jack’s got himself a mighty smart
Little Fuzzy. Are you a grown-up Little Fuzzy, or are you just a
baby Little Fuzzy? Shucks, I’ll bet you’re Professor
Doctor Fuzzy.”
He wondered what to give the professor, if that was what he was,
to work on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him too much
about taking things apart, just at present. Sometime he might come
home and find something important taken apart, or, worse, taken
apart and put together incorrectly. Finally, he went to a closet,
rummaging in it until he found a tin cannister. By the time he
returned, Little Fuzzy had gotten up on a chair, found his pipe in
the ashtray and was puffing on it and coughing.
“Hey, I don’t think that’s good for
you!”
He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirtsleeve and put
it in his mouth, then placed the cannister on the floor, and put
Little Fuzzy on the floor beside it. There were about ten pounds of
stones in it. When he had first settled here, he had made a
collection of the local minerals, and, after learning what
he’d wanted to, he had thrown them out, all twenty or thirty
of the prettiest specimens. He was glad, now, that he had kept
these.
Little Fuzzy looked the can over, decided that the lid was a
member of the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got it
off. The inside of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a
little thought to discover that what he saw in it was only himself.
He yeeked about that, and looked into the can. This, he decided,
belonged to the class of things-that-can-be-dumped, like
wastebaskets, so he dumped it on the floor. Then he began examining
the stones and sorting them by color.
Except for an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was
the first real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He
proceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the
stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethyst
like quartz to a dark red stone. Well, maybe he’d seen
rainbows. Maybe he’d lived near a big misty waterfall, where
there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining. Or maybe that
was just his natural way of seeing colors.
Then, when he saw what he had to work with, he began making
arrangements with them, laying them out in odd circular and spiral
patterns. Each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to
call attention to it, sit and look at it for a while, and then take
it apart and start a new one. Little Fuzzy was capable of artistic
gratification too. He made useless things, just for the pleasure of
making and looking at them.
Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and
rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with
his other treasures. The new weapon he laid on the blanket beside
him when he went to bed.
THE NEXT MORNING, Jack broke up a whole cake of Extee Three and
put it down, filled the bowl with water, and, after making sure he
had left nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on
which he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the
diggings. He worked all morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half
of flint, and found nothing. Then he set off a string of shots,
brought down an avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and
sat down under a pool-ball tree to eat his lunch.
Half an hour after he went back to work, he found the fossil of
some jellyfish that hadn’t eaten the right things in the
right combinations, but a little later, he found four nodules, one
after another, and two of them were sunstones; four or five chunks
later, he found a third. Why, this must be the Dying Place of the
Jellyfish! By late afternoon, when he had cleaned up all his loose
flint, he had nine, including one deep red monster an inch in
diameter. There must have been some connection current in the
ancient ocean that had swirled them all into this one place. He
considered setting off some more shots, decided that it was too
late and returned to camp.
“Little Fuzzy!” he called, opening the living-room
door. “Where are you, Little Fuzzy? Pappy Jack’s rich;
we’re going to celebrate!”
Silence. He called again; still no reply or scamper of feet.
Probably cleaned up all the prawns around the camp and went hunting
farther into the woods, thought Jack. Unbuckling his gun and
dropping it onto the table, he went out to the kitchen. Most of the
Extee Three was gone. In the bedroom, he found that Little Fuzzy
had dumped the stones out of the biscuit tin and made an
arrangement, and laid the wood chisel in a neat diagonal across the
blanket.
After getting dinner assembled and in the oven, he went out and
called for a while, then mixed a highball and took it into the
living room, sitting down with it to go over his day’s
findings. Rather incredulously, he realized that he had cracked out
at least seventy-five thousand sols’ worth of stones today.
He put them into the bag and sat sipping the highball and thinking
pleasant thoughts until the bell on the stove warned him that
dinner was ready.
He ate alone—after all the years he had been doing that
contentedly, it had suddenly become intolerable—and in the evening
he dialed through his microfilm library, finding only books he had
read and reread a dozen times, or books he kept for reference.
Several times he thought he heard the little door open, but each
time he was mistaken. Finally he went to bed.
As soon as he woke, he looked across at the folded blanket, but
the wood chisel was still lying athwart it. He put down more Extee
Three and changed the water in the bowl before leaving for the
diggings. That day he found three more sunstones, and put them in
the bag mechanically and without pleasure. He quit work early and
spent over an hour spiraling around the camp, but saw nothing. The
Extee Three in the kitchen was untouched.
Maybe the little fellow ran into something too big for him, even
with his fine new weapon—a hobthrush, or a bush-goblin, or another
harpy. Or maybe he’d just gotten tired staying in one place,
and had moved on.
No; he’d liked it here. He’d had fun, and been
happy. He shook his head sadly. Once he, too, had lived in a
pleasant place, where he’d had fun, and could have been happy
if he hadn’t thought there was something he’d had to
do. So he had gone away, leaving grieved people behind him. Maybe
that was how it was with Little Fuzzy. Maybe he didn’t
realize how much of a place he had made for himself here, or how
empty he was leaving it.
He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself.
Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities
you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that
calls for drinks all around. No; he’d have one drink, maybe a
little bigger than usual, before he went to bed.