I MUST BE very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be very nice to
Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be . . . Ruth van Riebeek repeated it
silently, as though writing it a hundred times on a mental
blackboard, as an airboat lost altitude and came slanting down
across the city, past the high crag of Company House, with the
lower, broader, butte of Central Courts Building in the distance to
the left. Ahead, the sanatorium area drew closer, wide parklands
scattered with low white buildings. She hadn’t seen Mallin
since the trial, and even then she had avoided speaking to him as
much as possible. Part of it was because of the things he had done
with the four Fuzzies; Pancho Ybarra said she also had a
guilt-complex because of the way she’d fifth colunmed the
company. Rubbish! That had been intelligence work; that had been
why she’d taken a job with the CZC in the first place. She
had nothing at all to feel guilty about . . .
“I must be very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin,” she said,
aloud. “And I’m going to have one Nifflheim of a time
doing it.”
“So am I,” her husband, standing beside her, said.
“He’ll have to make an effort to be nice to us, too.
He’ll still remember my pistol shoved into his back out at
Holloway’s the day Goldilocks was killed. I wonder if he
knows how little it would have taken to make me squeeze the
trigger.”
“Pancho says he is a reformed character.”
“Pancho’s seen him since we have. He could be right.
Anyhow, he’s helping us, and we need all the help we can get.
And he won’t hurt the Fuzzies, not with Ahmed Khadra and Mrs.
Pendarvis keeping an eye on him.”
The Fuzzies, crowded on the cargo-deck below, were becoming
excited. There was a forward view screen rigged where they could
see it, and they could probably sense as well as see that the boat
was descending. And this place ahead must be the place Pappy Jack
and Pappy Gerd and Unka Panko and Little Fuzzy had been telling
them about, where the Big Ones would come and take them away to
nice places of their own.
She hoped too many of them wouldn’t be too badly
disappointed. She hoped this adoption deal wouldn’t be too
much of a failure.
The airboat grounded on the vitrified stone apron beside the
building. It looked like a good place; Jack said it had been
intended for but never used as a mental ward-unit; four stories
high, each with its own terrace, and a flat garden-planted roof.
High mesh fences around each level; the Fuzzies wouldn’t fall
off. Plenty of trees and bushes; the Fuzzies would like that.
They got the Fuzzies off and into the building, helped by the
small crowd who were waiting for them. Mrs. Pendarvis; she and the
Chief Justice’s wife were old friends. And a tall, red haired
girl, Grego’s Fuzzy-sitter, Sandra Glenn. And Ahmed Khadra,
in a new suit of civvies but bulging slightly under the left arm.
And half a dozen other people whom she had met now and then—school
department and company public health section. And Ernst Mallin,
pompous and black-suited and pedantic-looking. I must be very nice
. . . She extended a hand to him.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Mallin.”
Maybe Gerd was right; maybe she did feel guilty about the way
she’d tricked him. She was, she found, being
counter-offensively defensive.
“Good afternoon, Ruth. Dr. van Riebeek,” he
corrected himself. “Can you bring your people down this
way?” he asked, nodding to the hundred and fifty Fuzzies
milling about in the hall, yeeking excitedly. People, he called
them. He must be making an effort, too. “We have refreshments
for them. Extee-Three. And things for them to play with.”
“Where do you get the Extee-Three?” she asked.
“We haven’t been able to get any for almost a week,
now.”
Mallin gave one of his little secretive smiles, the sort he gave
when he was one up on somebody.
“We got it from Xerxes. The Company’s started
producing it, but unfortunately, the Fuzzies don’t like it.
We still can’t find out why; it’s made on exactly the
same formula. And as it’s entirely up to Government
specifications, Mr. Grego was able to talk Commodore Napier into
accepting it in exchange for what he has on hand. We have about
five tons of it. How much do you need at Holloway’s Camp?
Will a couple of tons help you any?”
Would a couple of tons help them any? “Why, I don’t
know how to thank you, Dr. Mallin! Of course it will; we’ve
been giving it to our Fuzzies, a quarter-cake apiece on alternate
days.” I muust be very, VERY, nice to Dr Mallin! “Why
don’t they like the stuff you people have been making?
What’s wrong with it?”
“We don’t know. Mr. Grego has been raging at
everybody to find out; it’s made in exactly the same way . . . ”
WHEN MALCOLM DUNBAR lighted his screen, Dr. Jan Christiaan
Hoenveld appeared in it. He didn’t waste time on greetings or
other superfluities.
“I think we have something, Mr. Dunbar. There is a
component in both the Odin Dietetics and the Argentine Syntho-Foods
products that is absent from our own product. It is not one of the
synthetic nutrient or vitamin or hormone compounds which are part
of the field-ration formula; it is not a compound regularly
synthesized, either commercially or experimentally in any
laboratory I know of. It’s a rather complicated long-chain
organic molecule; most of it seems to be oxygen-hydrogen-carbon,
but there are a few atoms of titanium in it. If that’s what
the Fuzzies find lacking in our products, all I can say is that
they have the keenest taste perception of any creature, sapient or
nonsapient, that I have ever heard of.”
“All right, then; they have. I saw them reject our
Extee-Three in disgust, and then Mr. Grego gave them a little of
the Argentine stuff, and they ate it with the greatest pleasure.
How much of this unknown compound is there in
Extee-Three?”
“About one part in ten thousand,” Hoenveld said.
“And the titanium?”
“Five atoms out of sixty-four in the molecule.”
“That’s pretty keen tasting.” He thought for a
moment. “I suppose it’s in the wheat; the rest of that
stuff is synthesized.”
“Well, naturally, Mr. Dunbar. That would seem to be the
inescapable conclusion,” Hoenveld said, patronizingly.
“We have quite a bit of metallic titanium, imported in
fabricated form before we got our own steel-mills working. Do you
think you could synthesize that molecule, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld gave him a look of undisguised contempt.
“Certainly, Mr. Dunbar. In about a year and a half to two
years. As I understand, the object of manufacturing the stuff here
is to supply a temporary shortage which will be relieved in about
six months, when imported Extee-Three begins coming in from Marduk.
Unless I am directly and specifically ordered to do so by Mr.
Grego, I will not waste my time on trying.”
OF COURSE, IT was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran
humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and
cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or
introduced something that would ferment to produce C2H5OH and
around 1730-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on
planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller
thought it was a religious observance.
Maybe it was, at that.
Sipping his own cocktail, Gerd van Riebeek ignored, for a
moment, the conversation in which he had become involved and
eavesdropped on his wife and Claudette Pendarvis and Ernst Mallin
and Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn.
“Well, we want to keep them here for at least a week
before we let people take them away,” the Chief
Justice’s wife was saying. “You’ll have to stay
with us for a day or so, Ruth, and help us teach them what to
expect in their new homes.”
“You’re going to have to educate the people who
adopt them,” Sandra Glenn said. “What to expect and
what not to expect from Fuzzies. I think, evening classes.
Language, for one thing.”
“You know,” Mallin said, “I’d like to
take a few Fuzzies around through the other units of the
sanatorium, to visit the patients. The patients here would like it.
They don’t have an awful lot of fun, you know.”
That was new for Ernst Mallin. He never seemed to recall that
Mallin had thought having fun was important, before. Maybe the
Fuzzies had taught him that it was.
The group he was drinking with were Science Center and Public
Health people. One of them, a woman gynecologist, was wondering
what Chris Hoenveld had found out, so far.
“What can he find out?” Raynier, the pathologist,
asked. “He only has the one specimen, and it probably
isn’t there at all, it’s probably something in the
mother’s metabolism. It might be radioactivity, but that
would only produce an occasional isolated case, and from what
you’ve seen, it seems to be a racial characteristic. I think
you’ll find it in the racial dietary habits.”
“Land-prawns,” somebody suggested. “As far as
I know, nothing else eats them but Fuzzies; that right,
Gerd?”
“Yes. We always thought they had no natural enemies at
all, till we found out about the Fuzzies. But it’s been our
observation that Fuzzies won’t take anything that’ll
hurt them.”
“They won’t take anything that gives them a
bellyache or a hangover, no. They can establish a direct
relationship there. But whatever caused this defective birth we
were investigating, and I agree that that’s probably a common
thing with Fuzzies, was something that acted on a level the Fuzzies
couldn’t be aware of. I think there’s a good chance
that eating land-prawns may be responsible.”
“Well, let’s find out. Put Chris Hoenveld to work on
that.”
“You put him to work on it. Or get Victor Grego to; he
won’t throw Grego out of his lab. Chris is sore enough about
this Fuzzy business as it is.”
“Well, we’ll have to study more than one fetus. We
have a hundred and fifty Fuzzies here, we ought to find something
out . . . ”
“Isolate all the pregnant females; get Mrs. Pendarvis to
withhold them from adoption . . . ”
“ . . . may have to perform a few abortions . . . ”
“ . . . microsurgery; fertilized ova . . . ”
That wasn’t what he and Ruth and Jack Holloway had had in
mind, when they’d brought this lot to Mallorysport. But they
had to find out; if they didn’t, in a few more generations
there might be no more Fuzzies at all. If a few of them suffered,
now . . .
Well, hadn’t poor Goldilocks had to be killed before the
Fuzzies were recognized for the people they were?
“TITANIUM,” VICTOR GREGO said. “Now
that’s interesting.”
“Is that all you can call it, Mr. Grego?” Dunbar, in
the screen, demanded. “I call it impossible. I was checking
up. Titanium, on this planet, is damn near as rare as calcium on
Uller. It’s present, and that’s all; I’ll bet
most of the titanium on Zarathustra was brought here in fabricated
form between the time the planet was discovered and seven years ago
when we got our steel-mill going.”
That was a big exaggeration, of course. It existed, but it was a
fact that they’d never been able to extract it by any
commercially profitable process, and on Zarathustra they used
light-alloy steel for everything for which titanium was used
elsewhere. So a little of it got picked up, as a trace-element, in
wheat grown on Terra or on Odin, but it was useless to hope for it
in Zarathustran wheat.
“It looks,” he said, “as though we’re
stuck, Mal. Do you think Chris Hoenveld could synthesize that
molecule? We could add it to the other ingredients . . . ”
“He says he could—in six months to a year. He refuses to
try unless you order him categorically to.”
“And by that time, we’ll have all the Extee-Three we
want. Well, a lot of Fuzzies, including mine, are going to have to
do without, then.”
He blanked the screen and lit a cigarette and looked at the
globe of Zarathustra, which Henry Stenson had running on time again
and which he could interpret like a clock. Be another hour till
Sandra got back from the new Adoption Center; she’d have to
pick up Diamond at Government House. And Leslie wouldn’t be
in for cocktails this evening; he was over on Epsilon Continent,
talking to people about things he didn’t want to discuss by
screen. Ben Rainsford had finally gotten around to calling for an
election for delegates to a constitutional convention, and they
wanted to line up candidates of their own. It looked as though Mr.
Victor Grego would have cocktails with the manager-in-chief of the
Charterless Zarathustra Company, this evening. Might as well have
them here.
Titanium, he thought disgustedly. It would be something like
that. What was it they called the stuff? Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac
metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything. An idea suddenly
danced just out of reach. He stopped, halfway from the desk to the
cabinet, his eyes closed. Then he caught it, and dashed for the
communication screen, punching Malcolm Dunbar’s call
combination.
It was a few minutes before Dunbar answered; he had his hat and
coat on.
“I was just going out, Mr. Grego.”
“So I see. That man Vespi, the one who worked for Odin
Dietetics; is he still around?”
“Why, no. He left twenty minutes ago, and I don’t
know how to reach him right away.”
“No matter; get him in the morning. Listen, the pressure
cookers, the ones you use to cook the farina for bulk-matter. What
are they made of?”
“Why, light nonox-steel; our manufacture. Why?”
“Ask Vespi what they used for that purpose on Odin.
Don’t suggest the answer, but see if it wasn’t
titanium.”
Dunbar’s eyes widened. He’d heard about the chemical
nymphomania of titanium, too.
“Sure; that’s what they’d use, there. And at
Argentine Syntho-Foods, too. Listen, suppose I give the police an
emergency-call request; they could find Joe in half an
hour.”
“Don’t bother; tomorrow morning’s good enough.
I want to try something first.”
He blanked the screen, and called Myra Fallada. She never left
the office before he did.
“Myra; call out and get me five pounds of pure wheat
farina, and be sure it’s made from Zarathustran wheat. Have
it sent up to my apartment, fifteen minutes ago.”
“Fifteen minutes from now do?” she asked.
“What’s it for; the Little Monster? All right, Mr.
Grego.”
He forgot about the drink he was going to have with Mr. Victor
Grego. You had a drink when the work was done, and there was still
work to do.
THERE WAS CLATTERING in the kitchenette when Sandra Glenn
brought Diamond into the Fuzzy-room. She opened the door between
and looked through, and Diamond crowded past her knees for a look,
too. Mr. Grego was cooking something, in a battered old stew pan
she had never seen around the place before. He looked over his
shoulder and said, “Hi, Sandra. Heyo, Diamond; use
Fuzzyphone, Pappy Vic no get ear-thing.”
“What make do, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked.
“That’s what I want to know, too.”
“Sandra, keep your fingers crossed; when this
stuff’s done and has cooled off, we’re going to see how
Diamond likes it. I think we have found out what’s the matter
with that Extee-Three.”
“Estee-fee? You make Estee-fee? Real? Not like
other?” Diamond wanted to know.
“You eat,” Pappy Vic said. “Tell if good.
Pappy Vic not know.”
“Well, what is it?” she asked.
“Hoenveld found what was different about it.” The
explanation was rather complicated; she had been exposed to, rather
than studied, chemistry. She got the general idea; the Extee-Three
the Fuzzies liked had been cooked in titanium.
“That’s what this stew pan is; part of a camp
cooking kit I brought here from Terra.” He gave the white
mess in the pan a final stir and lifted it from the stove, burning
his finger and swearing; just like a man in a kitchen. “Now,
as soon as this slop’s cool . . . ”
Diamond smelled it, and wanted to try it right away. He had to
wait, though, until it was cool. Then they carried the pan, it had
a treacherous-looking folding handle, out to the Fuzzy-room, and
Mr. Grego spooned some onto Diamond’s plate, and Diamond took
his little spoon and tasted, cautiously. Then he began shoveling it
into his mouth ravenously.
“The Master Mind crashes through again,” she said.
“He really likes it.” Diamond had finished what was on
his plate. “You like?” she asked, in Fuzzy. “Want
more?”
“Give him the rest of it, Sandra. I’m going to call
Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld, and suggest an experiment for him to
try. And after that, Miss Glenn, will you honor me by having a
cocktail with me?”
JACK HOLLOWAY LAUGHED. “So that’s it. When did you
find out?”
“Mallin just screened me; he just got it from
Grego,” Gerd van Riebeek, in the screen, said.
“They’re going to start tearing out all the
stainless-steel cookers right away, and replace them with titanium.
Jack, have you any titanium cooking utensils?”
“No. Everything we have here is steel. We have sheet
titanium; the house and the sheds and the old hangar are all
sheet-titanium. We might be able to make something . . . ” He
stopped short. “Gerd, we don’t have to cook the food in
titanium. We can cook titanium in the food. Cut up some chunks and
put them in the kettles. It would work the same way.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerd said. “I
never thought of that. I’ll bet nobody else did,
either.”
DR JAN CHRISTIAAN Hoenveld was disgusted and chagrined and
embarrassed, and mostly disgusted.
It had been gratifying to discover a hitherto unknown
biochemical, especially one existing unsuspected in a well known,
long manufactured, and widely distributed commercial product. He
could understand how it had happened; a by-effect in one of the
manufacturing processes, and since the stuff had been proven safe
and nutritious for humans and other life-forms having similar
biochemistry and metabolism, nobody had bothered until some little
animals—no, people, that had been scientifically established—had
detected its absence by taste. Things like that happened all the
time. He had been proud of the accomplishment; he’d been
going to call the newly discovered substance hoenveldine. He could
have worked out a way of synthesizing it, too, but by proper
scientific methods it would have taken over a year, and he knew it,
and he’d said so to everybody.
And now, within a day, it had been synthesized, if that were the
word for it, by a rank amateur, a layman, a complete non-scientist.
And not in a laboratory but in a kitchen, with no equipment but a
battered old stew pan!
And the worst of it was that this layman, this empiric, was his
employer. The claims of the manager-in-chief of the Zarathustra
Company simply couldn’t be brushed off. Not by a Company
scientist.
Well, Grego had found out what he wanted; he could stop worrying
about that. He had important work to do; an orderly, long-term
study of the differences between Zarathustran and Terran
biochemistry. The differences were minute, but they existed, and
they had to be understood, and they had to be investigated in an
orderly, scientific manner.
And now, they wanted him to go haring off, hit-or-miss, after
this problem about Fuzzy infant mortality and defective births, and
they didn’t even know any such problem existed. They had one,
just one, case—that six-month fetus the Andrews girl had brought
in—and they had a lot of unsubstantiated theorizing by Gerd van
Riebeek, pure conclusion jumping. And now they wanted him to find
out if eating land-prawns caused these defective births which they
believed, on the basis of one case and a lot of supposition, to
exist. Maybe after years of observation of hundreds of cases they
might have some justification, but . . .
He rose from the chair at the desk in the corner of the
laboratory and walked slowly among the workbenches. Ten men and
women, eight of them working on new projects that had been started
since young van Riebeek had started after this mare’s-nest of
his, all of them diverted from serious planned research. He stopped
at one bench, where a woman was working.
“Miss Tresca, can’t you keep your bench in better
order than this?” he scolded. “Keep things in their
places. What are you working on?”
“Oh, a hunch I had, about this hokfusine.”
Hunch! That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too
many hunches and not enough sound theory.
“About what?”
“Oh, the titanium thing. It’s a name Mr. Grego
suggested, from a couple of Fuzzy words, hoku fusso, wonderful
food. It’s what the Fuzzies call Extee-Three.”
Hokfusine, indeed. Now they were getting the Fuzzy language into
scientific nomenclature.
“Well, just forget about your hunch,” he told her.
“There are a lot of samples of organic matter, blood, body
secretions, hormones, tissue, from pregnant female Fuzzies that
they want analyzed. I don’t suppose it makes any more sense
than your hunch, but they want analyses immediately. They want
everything immediately, it seems. And straighten up that clutter on
your bench. How often do I have to tell you that order is the first
virtue in scientific work?”
I MUST BE very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be very nice to
Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be . . . Ruth van Riebeek repeated it
silently, as though writing it a hundred times on a mental
blackboard, as an airboat lost altitude and came slanting down
across the city, past the high crag of Company House, with the
lower, broader, butte of Central Courts Building in the distance to
the left. Ahead, the sanatorium area drew closer, wide parklands
scattered with low white buildings. She hadn’t seen Mallin
since the trial, and even then she had avoided speaking to him as
much as possible. Part of it was because of the things he had done
with the four Fuzzies; Pancho Ybarra said she also had a
guilt-complex because of the way she’d fifth colunmed the
company. Rubbish! That had been intelligence work; that had been
why she’d taken a job with the CZC in the first place. She
had nothing at all to feel guilty about . . .
“I must be very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin,” she said,
aloud. “And I’m going to have one Nifflheim of a time
doing it.”
“So am I,” her husband, standing beside her, said.
“He’ll have to make an effort to be nice to us, too.
He’ll still remember my pistol shoved into his back out at
Holloway’s the day Goldilocks was killed. I wonder if he
knows how little it would have taken to make me squeeze the
trigger.”
“Pancho says he is a reformed character.”
“Pancho’s seen him since we have. He could be right.
Anyhow, he’s helping us, and we need all the help we can get.
And he won’t hurt the Fuzzies, not with Ahmed Khadra and Mrs.
Pendarvis keeping an eye on him.”
The Fuzzies, crowded on the cargo-deck below, were becoming
excited. There was a forward view screen rigged where they could
see it, and they could probably sense as well as see that the boat
was descending. And this place ahead must be the place Pappy Jack
and Pappy Gerd and Unka Panko and Little Fuzzy had been telling
them about, where the Big Ones would come and take them away to
nice places of their own.
She hoped too many of them wouldn’t be too badly
disappointed. She hoped this adoption deal wouldn’t be too
much of a failure.
The airboat grounded on the vitrified stone apron beside the
building. It looked like a good place; Jack said it had been
intended for but never used as a mental ward-unit; four stories
high, each with its own terrace, and a flat garden-planted roof.
High mesh fences around each level; the Fuzzies wouldn’t fall
off. Plenty of trees and bushes; the Fuzzies would like that.
They got the Fuzzies off and into the building, helped by the
small crowd who were waiting for them. Mrs. Pendarvis; she and the
Chief Justice’s wife were old friends. And a tall, red haired
girl, Grego’s Fuzzy-sitter, Sandra Glenn. And Ahmed Khadra,
in a new suit of civvies but bulging slightly under the left arm.
And half a dozen other people whom she had met now and then—school
department and company public health section. And Ernst Mallin,
pompous and black-suited and pedantic-looking. I must be very nice
. . . She extended a hand to him.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Mallin.”
Maybe Gerd was right; maybe she did feel guilty about the way
she’d tricked him. She was, she found, being
counter-offensively defensive.
“Good afternoon, Ruth. Dr. van Riebeek,” he
corrected himself. “Can you bring your people down this
way?” he asked, nodding to the hundred and fifty Fuzzies
milling about in the hall, yeeking excitedly. People, he called
them. He must be making an effort, too. “We have refreshments
for them. Extee-Three. And things for them to play with.”
“Where do you get the Extee-Three?” she asked.
“We haven’t been able to get any for almost a week,
now.”
Mallin gave one of his little secretive smiles, the sort he gave
when he was one up on somebody.
“We got it from Xerxes. The Company’s started
producing it, but unfortunately, the Fuzzies don’t like it.
We still can’t find out why; it’s made on exactly the
same formula. And as it’s entirely up to Government
specifications, Mr. Grego was able to talk Commodore Napier into
accepting it in exchange for what he has on hand. We have about
five tons of it. How much do you need at Holloway’s Camp?
Will a couple of tons help you any?”
Would a couple of tons help them any? “Why, I don’t
know how to thank you, Dr. Mallin! Of course it will; we’ve
been giving it to our Fuzzies, a quarter-cake apiece on alternate
days.” I muust be very, VERY, nice to Dr Mallin! “Why
don’t they like the stuff you people have been making?
What’s wrong with it?”
“We don’t know. Mr. Grego has been raging at
everybody to find out; it’s made in exactly the same way . . . ”
WHEN MALCOLM DUNBAR lighted his screen, Dr. Jan Christiaan
Hoenveld appeared in it. He didn’t waste time on greetings or
other superfluities.
“I think we have something, Mr. Dunbar. There is a
component in both the Odin Dietetics and the Argentine Syntho-Foods
products that is absent from our own product. It is not one of the
synthetic nutrient or vitamin or hormone compounds which are part
of the field-ration formula; it is not a compound regularly
synthesized, either commercially or experimentally in any
laboratory I know of. It’s a rather complicated long-chain
organic molecule; most of it seems to be oxygen-hydrogen-carbon,
but there are a few atoms of titanium in it. If that’s what
the Fuzzies find lacking in our products, all I can say is that
they have the keenest taste perception of any creature, sapient or
nonsapient, that I have ever heard of.”
“All right, then; they have. I saw them reject our
Extee-Three in disgust, and then Mr. Grego gave them a little of
the Argentine stuff, and they ate it with the greatest pleasure.
How much of this unknown compound is there in
Extee-Three?”
“About one part in ten thousand,” Hoenveld said.
“And the titanium?”
“Five atoms out of sixty-four in the molecule.”
“That’s pretty keen tasting.” He thought for a
moment. “I suppose it’s in the wheat; the rest of that
stuff is synthesized.”
“Well, naturally, Mr. Dunbar. That would seem to be the
inescapable conclusion,” Hoenveld said, patronizingly.
“We have quite a bit of metallic titanium, imported in
fabricated form before we got our own steel-mills working. Do you
think you could synthesize that molecule, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld gave him a look of undisguised contempt.
“Certainly, Mr. Dunbar. In about a year and a half to two
years. As I understand, the object of manufacturing the stuff here
is to supply a temporary shortage which will be relieved in about
six months, when imported Extee-Three begins coming in from Marduk.
Unless I am directly and specifically ordered to do so by Mr.
Grego, I will not waste my time on trying.”
OF COURSE, IT was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran
humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and
cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or
introduced something that would ferment to produce C2H5OH and
around 1730-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on
planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller
thought it was a religious observance.
Maybe it was, at that.
Sipping his own cocktail, Gerd van Riebeek ignored, for a
moment, the conversation in which he had become involved and
eavesdropped on his wife and Claudette Pendarvis and Ernst Mallin
and Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn.
“Well, we want to keep them here for at least a week
before we let people take them away,” the Chief
Justice’s wife was saying. “You’ll have to stay
with us for a day or so, Ruth, and help us teach them what to
expect in their new homes.”
“You’re going to have to educate the people who
adopt them,” Sandra Glenn said. “What to expect and
what not to expect from Fuzzies. I think, evening classes.
Language, for one thing.”
“You know,” Mallin said, “I’d like to
take a few Fuzzies around through the other units of the
sanatorium, to visit the patients. The patients here would like it.
They don’t have an awful lot of fun, you know.”
That was new for Ernst Mallin. He never seemed to recall that
Mallin had thought having fun was important, before. Maybe the
Fuzzies had taught him that it was.
The group he was drinking with were Science Center and Public
Health people. One of them, a woman gynecologist, was wondering
what Chris Hoenveld had found out, so far.
“What can he find out?” Raynier, the pathologist,
asked. “He only has the one specimen, and it probably
isn’t there at all, it’s probably something in the
mother’s metabolism. It might be radioactivity, but that
would only produce an occasional isolated case, and from what
you’ve seen, it seems to be a racial characteristic. I think
you’ll find it in the racial dietary habits.”
“Land-prawns,” somebody suggested. “As far as
I know, nothing else eats them but Fuzzies; that right,
Gerd?”
“Yes. We always thought they had no natural enemies at
all, till we found out about the Fuzzies. But it’s been our
observation that Fuzzies won’t take anything that’ll
hurt them.”
“They won’t take anything that gives them a
bellyache or a hangover, no. They can establish a direct
relationship there. But whatever caused this defective birth we
were investigating, and I agree that that’s probably a common
thing with Fuzzies, was something that acted on a level the Fuzzies
couldn’t be aware of. I think there’s a good chance
that eating land-prawns may be responsible.”
“Well, let’s find out. Put Chris Hoenveld to work on
that.”
“You put him to work on it. Or get Victor Grego to; he
won’t throw Grego out of his lab. Chris is sore enough about
this Fuzzy business as it is.”
“Well, we’ll have to study more than one fetus. We
have a hundred and fifty Fuzzies here, we ought to find something
out . . . ”
“Isolate all the pregnant females; get Mrs. Pendarvis to
withhold them from adoption . . . ”
“ . . . may have to perform a few abortions . . . ”
“ . . . microsurgery; fertilized ova . . . ”
That wasn’t what he and Ruth and Jack Holloway had had in
mind, when they’d brought this lot to Mallorysport. But they
had to find out; if they didn’t, in a few more generations
there might be no more Fuzzies at all. If a few of them suffered,
now . . .
Well, hadn’t poor Goldilocks had to be killed before the
Fuzzies were recognized for the people they were?
“TITANIUM,” VICTOR GREGO said. “Now
that’s interesting.”
“Is that all you can call it, Mr. Grego?” Dunbar, in
the screen, demanded. “I call it impossible. I was checking
up. Titanium, on this planet, is damn near as rare as calcium on
Uller. It’s present, and that’s all; I’ll bet
most of the titanium on Zarathustra was brought here in fabricated
form between the time the planet was discovered and seven years ago
when we got our steel-mill going.”
That was a big exaggeration, of course. It existed, but it was a
fact that they’d never been able to extract it by any
commercially profitable process, and on Zarathustra they used
light-alloy steel for everything for which titanium was used
elsewhere. So a little of it got picked up, as a trace-element, in
wheat grown on Terra or on Odin, but it was useless to hope for it
in Zarathustran wheat.
“It looks,” he said, “as though we’re
stuck, Mal. Do you think Chris Hoenveld could synthesize that
molecule? We could add it to the other ingredients . . . ”
“He says he could—in six months to a year. He refuses to
try unless you order him categorically to.”
“And by that time, we’ll have all the Extee-Three we
want. Well, a lot of Fuzzies, including mine, are going to have to
do without, then.”
He blanked the screen and lit a cigarette and looked at the
globe of Zarathustra, which Henry Stenson had running on time again
and which he could interpret like a clock. Be another hour till
Sandra got back from the new Adoption Center; she’d have to
pick up Diamond at Government House. And Leslie wouldn’t be
in for cocktails this evening; he was over on Epsilon Continent,
talking to people about things he didn’t want to discuss by
screen. Ben Rainsford had finally gotten around to calling for an
election for delegates to a constitutional convention, and they
wanted to line up candidates of their own. It looked as though Mr.
Victor Grego would have cocktails with the manager-in-chief of the
Charterless Zarathustra Company, this evening. Might as well have
them here.
Titanium, he thought disgustedly. It would be something like
that. What was it they called the stuff? Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac
metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything. An idea suddenly
danced just out of reach. He stopped, halfway from the desk to the
cabinet, his eyes closed. Then he caught it, and dashed for the
communication screen, punching Malcolm Dunbar’s call
combination.
It was a few minutes before Dunbar answered; he had his hat and
coat on.
“I was just going out, Mr. Grego.”
“So I see. That man Vespi, the one who worked for Odin
Dietetics; is he still around?”
“Why, no. He left twenty minutes ago, and I don’t
know how to reach him right away.”
“No matter; get him in the morning. Listen, the pressure
cookers, the ones you use to cook the farina for bulk-matter. What
are they made of?”
“Why, light nonox-steel; our manufacture. Why?”
“Ask Vespi what they used for that purpose on Odin.
Don’t suggest the answer, but see if it wasn’t
titanium.”
Dunbar’s eyes widened. He’d heard about the chemical
nymphomania of titanium, too.
“Sure; that’s what they’d use, there. And at
Argentine Syntho-Foods, too. Listen, suppose I give the police an
emergency-call request; they could find Joe in half an
hour.”
“Don’t bother; tomorrow morning’s good enough.
I want to try something first.”
He blanked the screen, and called Myra Fallada. She never left
the office before he did.
“Myra; call out and get me five pounds of pure wheat
farina, and be sure it’s made from Zarathustran wheat. Have
it sent up to my apartment, fifteen minutes ago.”
“Fifteen minutes from now do?” she asked.
“What’s it for; the Little Monster? All right, Mr.
Grego.”
He forgot about the drink he was going to have with Mr. Victor
Grego. You had a drink when the work was done, and there was still
work to do.
THERE WAS CLATTERING in the kitchenette when Sandra Glenn
brought Diamond into the Fuzzy-room. She opened the door between
and looked through, and Diamond crowded past her knees for a look,
too. Mr. Grego was cooking something, in a battered old stew pan
she had never seen around the place before. He looked over his
shoulder and said, “Hi, Sandra. Heyo, Diamond; use
Fuzzyphone, Pappy Vic no get ear-thing.”
“What make do, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked.
“That’s what I want to know, too.”
“Sandra, keep your fingers crossed; when this
stuff’s done and has cooled off, we’re going to see how
Diamond likes it. I think we have found out what’s the matter
with that Extee-Three.”
“Estee-fee? You make Estee-fee? Real? Not like
other?” Diamond wanted to know.
“You eat,” Pappy Vic said. “Tell if good.
Pappy Vic not know.”
“Well, what is it?” she asked.
“Hoenveld found what was different about it.” The
explanation was rather complicated; she had been exposed to, rather
than studied, chemistry. She got the general idea; the Extee-Three
the Fuzzies liked had been cooked in titanium.
“That’s what this stew pan is; part of a camp
cooking kit I brought here from Terra.” He gave the white
mess in the pan a final stir and lifted it from the stove, burning
his finger and swearing; just like a man in a kitchen. “Now,
as soon as this slop’s cool . . . ”
Diamond smelled it, and wanted to try it right away. He had to
wait, though, until it was cool. Then they carried the pan, it had
a treacherous-looking folding handle, out to the Fuzzy-room, and
Mr. Grego spooned some onto Diamond’s plate, and Diamond took
his little spoon and tasted, cautiously. Then he began shoveling it
into his mouth ravenously.
“The Master Mind crashes through again,” she said.
“He really likes it.” Diamond had finished what was on
his plate. “You like?” she asked, in Fuzzy. “Want
more?”
“Give him the rest of it, Sandra. I’m going to call
Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld, and suggest an experiment for him to
try. And after that, Miss Glenn, will you honor me by having a
cocktail with me?”
JACK HOLLOWAY LAUGHED. “So that’s it. When did you
find out?”
“Mallin just screened me; he just got it from
Grego,” Gerd van Riebeek, in the screen, said.
“They’re going to start tearing out all the
stainless-steel cookers right away, and replace them with titanium.
Jack, have you any titanium cooking utensils?”
“No. Everything we have here is steel. We have sheet
titanium; the house and the sheds and the old hangar are all
sheet-titanium. We might be able to make something . . . ” He
stopped short. “Gerd, we don’t have to cook the food in
titanium. We can cook titanium in the food. Cut up some chunks and
put them in the kettles. It would work the same way.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerd said. “I
never thought of that. I’ll bet nobody else did,
either.”
DR JAN CHRISTIAAN Hoenveld was disgusted and chagrined and
embarrassed, and mostly disgusted.
It had been gratifying to discover a hitherto unknown
biochemical, especially one existing unsuspected in a well known,
long manufactured, and widely distributed commercial product. He
could understand how it had happened; a by-effect in one of the
manufacturing processes, and since the stuff had been proven safe
and nutritious for humans and other life-forms having similar
biochemistry and metabolism, nobody had bothered until some little
animals—no, people, that had been scientifically established—had
detected its absence by taste. Things like that happened all the
time. He had been proud of the accomplishment; he’d been
going to call the newly discovered substance hoenveldine. He could
have worked out a way of synthesizing it, too, but by proper
scientific methods it would have taken over a year, and he knew it,
and he’d said so to everybody.
And now, within a day, it had been synthesized, if that were the
word for it, by a rank amateur, a layman, a complete non-scientist.
And not in a laboratory but in a kitchen, with no equipment but a
battered old stew pan!
And the worst of it was that this layman, this empiric, was his
employer. The claims of the manager-in-chief of the Zarathustra
Company simply couldn’t be brushed off. Not by a Company
scientist.
Well, Grego had found out what he wanted; he could stop worrying
about that. He had important work to do; an orderly, long-term
study of the differences between Zarathustran and Terran
biochemistry. The differences were minute, but they existed, and
they had to be understood, and they had to be investigated in an
orderly, scientific manner.
And now, they wanted him to go haring off, hit-or-miss, after
this problem about Fuzzy infant mortality and defective births, and
they didn’t even know any such problem existed. They had one,
just one, case—that six-month fetus the Andrews girl had brought
in—and they had a lot of unsubstantiated theorizing by Gerd van
Riebeek, pure conclusion jumping. And now they wanted him to find
out if eating land-prawns caused these defective births which they
believed, on the basis of one case and a lot of supposition, to
exist. Maybe after years of observation of hundreds of cases they
might have some justification, but . . .
He rose from the chair at the desk in the corner of the
laboratory and walked slowly among the workbenches. Ten men and
women, eight of them working on new projects that had been started
since young van Riebeek had started after this mare’s-nest of
his, all of them diverted from serious planned research. He stopped
at one bench, where a woman was working.
“Miss Tresca, can’t you keep your bench in better
order than this?” he scolded. “Keep things in their
places. What are you working on?”
“Oh, a hunch I had, about this hokfusine.”
Hunch! That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too
many hunches and not enough sound theory.
“About what?”
“Oh, the titanium thing. It’s a name Mr. Grego
suggested, from a couple of Fuzzy words, hoku fusso, wonderful
food. It’s what the Fuzzies call Extee-Three.”
Hokfusine, indeed. Now they were getting the Fuzzy language into
scientific nomenclature.
“Well, just forget about your hunch,” he told her.
“There are a lot of samples of organic matter, blood, body
secretions, hormones, tissue, from pregnant female Fuzzies that
they want analyzed. I don’t suppose it makes any more sense
than your hunch, but they want analyses immediately. They want
everything immediately, it seems. And straighten up that clutter on
your bench. How often do I have to tell you that order is the first
virtue in scientific work?”