THE SMOKE OF the fire wasn’t visible at all when Jack
Holloway came in. Yellowsand looked quiet from the air, the
diggings empty of equipment and deserted. Every machine must have
been shifted north and west to the fire. He saw a few people around
the fenced-in flint cracking area, mostly in CZC Police uniform.
The Zebralope was gone, probably sent off for reinforcements. He
set the car down in front of the administration hut, and half a
dozen men advanced to meet him. Luther McGinnis, the
superintendent; Stan Farr, the personnel man; Jose Durrante, the
forester; Harry Steefer. He and Gerd got out; the two ZNPF troopers
in the front seat followed them.
“We have Mr. Grego on screen now,” McGinnis said.
“He’s in his yacht, about halfway from Alpha; he has a
load of fire-fighting experts with him. You know what he
thinks?”
“The same as I do; I was talking to him. Little Fuzzy got
careless dumping out his pipe. I have to watch that myself, and
I’ve been smoking in the woods longer than he has.”
Gerd was asking just where the fire was.
“Show you,” McGinnis said. “But if you think
it really was Little Fuzzy, how in Nifflheim did he get way up
there?”
“Walked.” Jack gave his reasons for thinking so
while they were going toward the but door. “He probably
thought he was going up the Yellowsand till he got up to the
lakes.”
There was a monster military-type screen rigged inside, fifteen
feet square; in it a view of the fire, from around five thousand
feet, rotated slowly as the vehicle on which the pickup was mounted
circled over it. He’d seen a lot of forest fires, helped
fight most of them. This one was a real baddie, and if it
hadn’t been for the big river and the lakes that clustered
along it like variously shaped leaves on a vine, it would have been
worse. It was all on the north side, and from the way the smoke was
blowing, the water-barriers had stopped it.
“Wind must have done a lot of shifting,” he
commented.
“Yes.” That was the camp meteorologist. “It
was steady from the southwest last night; we think the fire started
sometime after midnight. A little before daybreak, it started
moving around, blowing more toward the north, and then it backed
around to the southwest where it had come from. That was general
wind, of course. In broken country like that, there are always a
lot of erratic ground winds. After the fire started, there were
convection currents from the heat.”
“Never can trust the wind in a fire,” he said.
“Hey, Jack! Is that you?” a voice called. “You
just get in?”
He turned in the direction of the speaker whence it came, saw
Victor Grego in bush-clothes in one of the communication screens,
with a background that looked like an air-yacht cabin.
“Yes. I’m going out and have a look as soon as I
find out where. I have a couple more cars on the way, George Lunt
and some ZNPF, and three lorries full of troopers and construction
men following. I didn’t bring any equipment. All we have is
light stuff, and it’d take four or five hours to get it here
on its own contragravity.”
Grego nodded. “We have plenty of that. I’ll be
getting in around 1430; I probably won’t see you till you get
back in. I hope the kid did start it, and I hope he didn’t
get caught in it afterward.”
So did Jack. Be a hell of a note, getting out of Yellowsand
River alive and then getting burned in this fire. No, Little Fuzzy
was too smart to get caught.
He looked at other screens, views transmitted in from vehicles
over the fire-lines—bulldozers flopping off contragravity in the
woods and snorting forward, sending trees toppling in front of
them; manipulators picking them up as they fell and carrying them
away; draglines and scoops dumping earth and rock to windward.
People must have been awfully helpless with a big fire before they
had contragravity. They’d only gotten onto this around noon,
and they’d have it all out by sunset; he’d read about
old-time forest-fires that had burned for days.
“These people all been warned to keep an eye out for a
Fuzzy running around?” he asked McGinnis.
“Yes, that’s gone out to everybody. I hope
he’s alive and out of danger. We’ll have a Nifflheim of
a time finding him after the fire’s out, though.”
“You may have a Nifflheim of a time putting out the next
fire he starts. He may have started this one for a smoke
signal.” He turned to Durrante. “How much do you know
about that country up there?”
“Well, I’ve been out with survey crews all over
it.” That meant, at a couple of thousand feet. “I know
what’s in there.”
“Okay. Gerd and I are going out now. Suppose you come
along. Where do you think this started?”
“I’ll show you.” Durrante led them to a table
map, now marked in different shadings of red. “As nearly as I
can figure, in about here, along the north shore of this lake. The
first burn was along the shore and up this run; that was while the
wind was still blowing northeast. It was burning all over here, and
here, when the Zebralope sighted it, but that was after the wind
shifted. We didn’t get a car to the scene till around 1030,
and by that time this area was burned out, nothing but snags
burning, and there was a hell of a crown-fire going over this way.
This part here is an old burn, fire started by lightning maybe
fifteen years ago. There was nobody on this continent north of the
Big Bend then. The fire hasn’t gotten in there at all. This
hill is all in bluegums; that’s where the latest
crown-fire’s going.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
They went out to the car. Gerd took the controls; the forester
got in beside him. Jack took the back seat, where he could look out
on both sides.
“Hand my rifle back to me,” he said.
“I’ll want it if I get out to look around on
foot.”
The forester lifted it out of the clips on the dashboard; it was
the 12.7-mm double. “Good Lord, you lug a lot of gun
around,” he said, passing it back.
“I may have a lot of animal to stop. You run into a
damnthing at ten yards, seven thousand foot-pounds isn’t too
much.”
“N-no,” Durrante agreed. “I never used
anything heavier than a 7-mm, myself.” He never bothered with
a rifle at a fire; animals, he said, never attacked when running
away from a fire.
Now, there was the kind of guy they make angels out of. That was
all he knew about damnthings; a scared damnthing would attack
anything that moved, just because it was scared. Some human people
were like that too.
They came in over the lakes a trifle above the point where the
fire was supposed to have started and let down on the black and
ash-powdered shore. A lot of snags, some large, were still burning.
They were damn good things to stay away from. He saw one sway and
fall in a cloud of pink spark, powdered dust, and smoke. He climbed
out of the car, broke the double express, and slipped in two of the
thumb-thick, span-long cartridges, snapping it shut and checking
the safety. Wouldn’t be anything alive here, but he
hadn’t lived to be past seventy by taking things for granted.
Durrante, who got out with him, had only a pistol. If he stayed on
Beta, maybe he wouldn’t get to be that old.
It was Durrante who spotted the little triangle of unburned
grass between the mouth of the run and the lake. At the apex a tree
had been burned off at the base and the branches lopped off with
something that had made not quite rectilinear cuts—a little flint
hatchet, maybe. The fire had started on both sides of it, eight
feet from the butt. He let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Up
to this, he had only hoped Little Fuzzy had gotten out of the river
alive and started the fire; now he knew it.
“He wasn’t trying to make a signal-fire,” he
said. “He was building himself a raft.” He looked at
the log. “How the devil did he expect to get that into the
water, though? It’d take half a dozen Fuzzies to roll
that.”
Under a couple of blackened and still burning snags he found
what was left of Little Fuzzy’s camp, burned branches mixed
with the powdery ash of grass and fern-fronds; a pile of ash that
showed traces of having been coils of rope made from hair-roots. He
found bones which frightened him until he saw that they were all
goofer and zarabunny bones. Little Fuzzy hadn’t gone hungry.
Durrante found a lot of flint, broken and chipped, a flint
spearhead and an axehead, and, among some tree-branch ashes,
another axehead with fine beryl-steel wire around it and the
charred remains of an axe-helve.
“Little Fuzzy was here, all right. He always carried a
spool of wire around with him.” He slung his rifle and got
out his pipe and tobacco. Gerd had brought the car to within a yard
of the ground and had his head out the open window beside him. He
handed the remains of the axe up to him. “What do you think,
Gerd?”
“If you were a Fuzzy and you woke up in the middle of the
night with the woods on fire, what would you do?” Gerd
asked.
“Little Fuzzy knows a few of the simpler principles of
thermodynamics. I think he’d get out in the water as far as
he could and sit tight till the fire was past, and then try to get
to windward of it. Let’s go up along the lake shore
first.”
Gerd set the car down and they got in. Jack didn’t bother
unloading the big rifle. West of the little run, the whole country
was burned, but that must have happened after the wind backed
around. The lake narrowed into the river; the river twisted and
widened into another lake, with a ground-fire going furiously on
the left bank. Then they came to a promontory jutting into the
water a couple of hundred feet high. On top of it a crown-fire was
just before burning out, with a ground-fire raging behind it. They
passed a narrow gorge, just a split in the cliff, with a stream
tumbling out of it. Things were burning on both sides of it on the
top.
He had the window down and was peering out; a little beyond the
gorge he heard the bellowing of some big animal in agony—something
the fire had caught and hadn’t quite killed. He shoved the
muzzle of the 12.7-double out the window.
“See if you can see where it is, Gerd. Whatever it is, we
don’t want to leave it like that.”
“I see it,” Gerd said, a moment later. “Over
where that chunk slid out of the cliff.”
Then he saw it. It was a damnthing, a monster, with a brow-horn
long enough to make a walking stick and side-horns as big as
sickles. It had blundered into a hollow, burned and probably
blinded, and fallen, until its body caught on a point of rock. The
sounds it was making were like nothing he had ever heard a
damnthing make before; it was a frightful pain.
Kneeling on the floor, he closed his sights on the beast’s
head just below an ear that was now a lump of undercooked meat, and
squeezed. He’d been a little off balance; the recoil almost
knocked him over: When he looked again, the damnthing was
still.
“Move in a little, Gerd. Back a bit.” He wanted to
be sure, and with a damnthing the only way to be sure was shoot it
again. “I think it’s dead, but . . . ”
Somewhere a whistle blew shrilly, then blew again and again.
“What the hell?” Gerd was asking.
“Why, it’s in the middle of that fire!”
Durrante cried. “Nothing could live in there.”
Wanting to get as much for his cartridge and his pounded
shoulder as he could, he aimed at the damnthing’s head and
let off the left barrel with another thunderclap report. The body
jerked from the impact of the bullet and nothing else.
“It’s up that gorge. I told you Little Fuzzy knows a
few of the rudiments of thermodynamics. He’s down under the
head, sitting it out. You think you can get the car in
there?”
“I can get her in. I’ll probably have to get her out
straight up, though, through the fire, so have everything shut when
I do.”
They inched into the gorge. Twenty-five width would have been
plenty, if it had been straight. It wasn’t, and there were
times when it looked like a no-go. Ahead, the whistle was still
blowing, and he could hear calls of “Pappy Jack! Pappy
Jack!” in several voices, he realized, while the whistle was
blowing. And there was yeeking. Little Fuzzy had picked up a gang;
that was how he was going to get that log into the water.
“Hang on, Little Fuzzy!” he shouted. “Pappy
Jack come!”
There was a nasty scraping as Gerd got the patrol car around a
corner. Then he saw them. Nine of them, by golly. Little Fuzzy,
still wearing his shoulder bag, and eight others. One had a foot
bandaged in what looked like a zarabunny skin. A couple had flint
tipped spears and flint axes, the heads bound on with wire. They
were all clinging to an outthrust ledge, halfway down to the
water.
Gerd got the car down. Jack opened the door and reached out,
pulling the nearest Fuzzy into the car. It was a female, with an
axe. She clung to it as he got her into the car. He picked up the
one with the bandaged foot and got him in, handing him forward and
warning Durrante to be careful of the foot. Little Fuzzy was next;
he was saying, “Pappy Jack! You did come!” and then,
“And Pappy Gerd!” Then he shouted encouragement to the
others outside until they were all in the car.
“Now, we all go to Wonderful Place,” Little Fuzzy
was saying. “Pappy Jack take care of us. Pappy Jack friend of
all Fuzzies. You see what I tell.”
HE SAW GREGO’S maroon and silver air-yacht grounded by the
administration hut as they came in. Gerd, in front, had already
called in the rescue of Little Fuzzy and eight other assorted
Fuzzies. There was a crowd; he saw Grego and Diamond in front. Gerd
set down the car and Durrante got out carrying the burned-foot
case. He opened the rear door and waited for the other survivors to
pile out under their own power. Those who could speak
audibly—Little Fuzzy seemed to have been teaching them to talk like
Big Ones—wanted to know if this place Hoksu-Mitto. They were given
an ovation, Diamond rushing forward as soon as he saw his friend.
Then they were all herded into the camp hospital.
Little Fuzzy had a burn on his back and a lot of fur singed off.
He was treated first, to show the others that they would be
medicated instead of murdered. The burned foot was really nasty,
especially as the Fuzzy had been walking on it quite a lot.
Everybody praised the zarabunny-skin wrapping. The camp doctor
wanted to put the lot of them to bed. He didn’t know enough
about Fuzzies to know that no Fuzzy with anything less than a
broken leg could be kept in bed. As soon as they were all bandaged
up, they were taken to the executives’ living quarters for an
Extee-Three banquet, and when that was over, they all wanted
smokko.
The news services began screening in almost at once, wanting
views and interviews. They weren’t much interested in the
fire; they wanted Little Fuzzy and his new friends. It was a pain
in the neck, but Grego insisted that they be fully satisfied; with
the Constitutional Convention just opened, the Friends of Little
Fuzzy needed a good press. It was well after dinner-time, and the
fire had been stopped all around its perimeter, before anybody
could get any privacy at all.
The Fuzzies were sprawled on a couple of mattresses on the
floor, all but Little Fuzzy who wanted to sit on Pappy Vic. It was
taking a long time for Little Fuzzy to tell about everything that
had happened since he’d gone in the river in Yellowsand
Canyon; apparently he had already told the other Fuzzies his
adventures, because they were constantly interrupting to remind him
of things he was forgetting. Then, after he got to where he had
joined Wise One and his band—Wise One was the one who had the
whistle and the bandaged head—everybody tried to tell about it at
once. Harry Steefer and Jose Durrante were missing a lot of it
because they couldn’t understand Fuzzy. It was surprising how
well this crowd had learned to pitch their voices to human
audibility in the time Little Fuzzy had been with them.
Finally, Little Fuzzy got to where, trying to run ahead of the
crown-fire at the top of the cliff, they had found themselves
stopped by the deep chasm.
“Come this place, not get over, we think all make
dead,” Little Fuzzy said. “Then I remember what Pappy
Jack say. Fire make heat, heat always go up, never go down. So we
go down, heat go away from us. Then Pappy Jack come.”
That called for praise, which Little Fuzzy accepted as his due,
with becoming modesty.
“Pappy Jack smart, too. Not make shoot with big rifle, we
not hear, not blow whistle.”
Let it go at that; hell, he couldn’t have gone on and left
that damnthing bellowing in pain. He wanted to know how Wise One
and his band had first learned about the Big Ones, and, sure
enough, they were the same gang he and Gerd had run into in the
north when the harpies had shown up. They told about their fright
at the thunder-noises, and about coming back and finding the empty
cartridges. This reminded one of the females of something.
“Big Ones’ Friend!” she cried out. “You
still have bright-things? You not lose?”
Little Fuzzy unzipped his shoulder bag and dug out three fired
rifle cartridges and showed them. The female came over and
repossessed them. Then Little Fuzzy found something else in his
bag, and cried out.
“I forget! Have shining-stone; find where we work to make
raft in little moving-water.”
And he brought out, of all things, a big sunstone. It’d
run about twenty to twenty-five carats. He rubbed it till it
glowed.
“Look! Pretty!”
Grego set Diamond on the floor and came over to look; so did
Diamond. Steefer and Durrante had also left their chairs.
“Where you get, Little Fuzzy?” Grego asked.
Steefer and Durrante were just swearing. People’d have to
stop swearing around Fuzzies; Little Fuzzy was beginning to curse
like a spaceport labor-boss already.
“Up little moving-water, run, come into lake where we make
camp to make raft.”
“You sure you didn’t get this here at
Yellowsand?”
“I tell you where I get. I not tell you not-so
thing.”
No, they could depend on that; Fuzzies didn’t tell not-so
things. Damnit!
“Good God! You know what’ll happen if this gets
out,” Grego said. “Every son of a Khooghra and his
brother who can scare up air-vehicles will be swarming in there. We
can keep them off Yellowsand, but there’s too much country up
there. Need an army to police it.”
“Why don’t you operate it?”
Grego’s language became as lurid as the forest-fire.
“We need more sunstone-diggings like we need a hole in the
head. If our lease is upheld, we’ll cut work here to about
twenty percent of the present rate. What do you want us to do,
flood the market? Get enough sunstones out and they won’t be
worth the S-450 royalty the Fuzzies are getting.”
That was true. They’d had that same trouble with diamonds
on Terra, back Pre-Atomic.
“Little Fuzzy,” he said, “you found
shining-stone like you tell. Is yours.”
“My God, Jack!” Harry Steefer almost howled.
“That thing’s worth twenty-five grand!”
“That doesn’t make a damn’s worth of
difference. Little Fuzzy found it, it’s his. Now listen,
Little Fuzzy. You keep, you not lose, not give to anybody. You keep
safe, all time. Savvy?”
“Yes, sure. Is pretty. Always want
shining-stone.”
“You not show to people you not know. Anybody see, maybe
be bad Big One, try to take. And anybody ask where you get, you
say, Pappy Vic give you, because you find here at
Yellowsand.”
“But not find here. Find in hard-stone, in little
moving-water . . . ”
“I know, I know!” This was what Leslie Coombes and
Ernst Mallin always ran into. “Is not-so thing. But you can
say.”
Little Fuzzy looked puzzled. Then he gave a laugh.
“Sure! Can say not-so thing! Wise One say not-so thing
once. Say he see damnthing; was no damnthing at all. Tell rest of
band, they all think is so.”
“Huh?” Victor Grego looked at Little Fuzzy, and then
at the Fuzzy with the whistle hung around his neck and the
bandage-turban on his head. “Tell about, Wise One.”
Wise One shrugged; an Old Terran Frenchman couldn’t have
done it better.
“Others want to stay in place, once. I want to go on, hunt
for Big One Place, make friends with Big Ones. They not want. They
afraid, want to stay in same place all time. So, I tell them big
dam’fing come, chase me, chase Stabber, come eat everybody
up. They all frightened. All jump up, make run away up mountain, go
down other side. Then, forget about place they want to stay, go on
to sun’s left—to south, like I want.”
One of the females howled like a miniature police-siren, and not
so miniature, either. With his ultrasonic hearing aid on, it almost
shattered Victor’s ear.
“You make talk you see hesh-nazza, hesh-nazza come eat us
all up, and no hesh-nazza at all?” She was dumbfounded with
horrified indignation. “You make us run away from nice-place,
good-to-eat things . . . ?”
“Jeeze-krise sunnabish!” Wise One shouted at her.
He’d only been around Little Fuzzy a week, and listen to
him. “You think this not nice-place? We stay where you want,
we never see nice-place like this. You make talk about good-to-eat
things; you think we get estee-fee in place you want to stay? You
think we get smokko? You think we find Big Ones, make friends? You
make bloody-hell talk like big fool!”
“You mean, you told these other Fuzzies you saw a
damnthing and you knew you hadn’t at all?” Grego
demanded. “Well, hallelujah, praise Saint Beelzebub! You talk
to the kids, Jack; I’m going to call Leslie Coombes right
away!”
THE SMOKE OF the fire wasn’t visible at all when Jack
Holloway came in. Yellowsand looked quiet from the air, the
diggings empty of equipment and deserted. Every machine must have
been shifted north and west to the fire. He saw a few people around
the fenced-in flint cracking area, mostly in CZC Police uniform.
The Zebralope was gone, probably sent off for reinforcements. He
set the car down in front of the administration hut, and half a
dozen men advanced to meet him. Luther McGinnis, the
superintendent; Stan Farr, the personnel man; Jose Durrante, the
forester; Harry Steefer. He and Gerd got out; the two ZNPF troopers
in the front seat followed them.
“We have Mr. Grego on screen now,” McGinnis said.
“He’s in his yacht, about halfway from Alpha; he has a
load of fire-fighting experts with him. You know what he
thinks?”
“The same as I do; I was talking to him. Little Fuzzy got
careless dumping out his pipe. I have to watch that myself, and
I’ve been smoking in the woods longer than he has.”
Gerd was asking just where the fire was.
“Show you,” McGinnis said. “But if you think
it really was Little Fuzzy, how in Nifflheim did he get way up
there?”
“Walked.” Jack gave his reasons for thinking so
while they were going toward the but door. “He probably
thought he was going up the Yellowsand till he got up to the
lakes.”
There was a monster military-type screen rigged inside, fifteen
feet square; in it a view of the fire, from around five thousand
feet, rotated slowly as the vehicle on which the pickup was mounted
circled over it. He’d seen a lot of forest fires, helped
fight most of them. This one was a real baddie, and if it
hadn’t been for the big river and the lakes that clustered
along it like variously shaped leaves on a vine, it would have been
worse. It was all on the north side, and from the way the smoke was
blowing, the water-barriers had stopped it.
“Wind must have done a lot of shifting,” he
commented.
“Yes.” That was the camp meteorologist. “It
was steady from the southwest last night; we think the fire started
sometime after midnight. A little before daybreak, it started
moving around, blowing more toward the north, and then it backed
around to the southwest where it had come from. That was general
wind, of course. In broken country like that, there are always a
lot of erratic ground winds. After the fire started, there were
convection currents from the heat.”
“Never can trust the wind in a fire,” he said.
“Hey, Jack! Is that you?” a voice called. “You
just get in?”
He turned in the direction of the speaker whence it came, saw
Victor Grego in bush-clothes in one of the communication screens,
with a background that looked like an air-yacht cabin.
“Yes. I’m going out and have a look as soon as I
find out where. I have a couple more cars on the way, George Lunt
and some ZNPF, and three lorries full of troopers and construction
men following. I didn’t bring any equipment. All we have is
light stuff, and it’d take four or five hours to get it here
on its own contragravity.”
Grego nodded. “We have plenty of that. I’ll be
getting in around 1430; I probably won’t see you till you get
back in. I hope the kid did start it, and I hope he didn’t
get caught in it afterward.”
So did Jack. Be a hell of a note, getting out of Yellowsand
River alive and then getting burned in this fire. No, Little Fuzzy
was too smart to get caught.
He looked at other screens, views transmitted in from vehicles
over the fire-lines—bulldozers flopping off contragravity in the
woods and snorting forward, sending trees toppling in front of
them; manipulators picking them up as they fell and carrying them
away; draglines and scoops dumping earth and rock to windward.
People must have been awfully helpless with a big fire before they
had contragravity. They’d only gotten onto this around noon,
and they’d have it all out by sunset; he’d read about
old-time forest-fires that had burned for days.
“These people all been warned to keep an eye out for a
Fuzzy running around?” he asked McGinnis.
“Yes, that’s gone out to everybody. I hope
he’s alive and out of danger. We’ll have a Nifflheim of
a time finding him after the fire’s out, though.”
“You may have a Nifflheim of a time putting out the next
fire he starts. He may have started this one for a smoke
signal.” He turned to Durrante. “How much do you know
about that country up there?”
“Well, I’ve been out with survey crews all over
it.” That meant, at a couple of thousand feet. “I know
what’s in there.”
“Okay. Gerd and I are going out now. Suppose you come
along. Where do you think this started?”
“I’ll show you.” Durrante led them to a table
map, now marked in different shadings of red. “As nearly as I
can figure, in about here, along the north shore of this lake. The
first burn was along the shore and up this run; that was while the
wind was still blowing northeast. It was burning all over here, and
here, when the Zebralope sighted it, but that was after the wind
shifted. We didn’t get a car to the scene till around 1030,
and by that time this area was burned out, nothing but snags
burning, and there was a hell of a crown-fire going over this way.
This part here is an old burn, fire started by lightning maybe
fifteen years ago. There was nobody on this continent north of the
Big Bend then. The fire hasn’t gotten in there at all. This
hill is all in bluegums; that’s where the latest
crown-fire’s going.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
They went out to the car. Gerd took the controls; the forester
got in beside him. Jack took the back seat, where he could look out
on both sides.
“Hand my rifle back to me,” he said.
“I’ll want it if I get out to look around on
foot.”
The forester lifted it out of the clips on the dashboard; it was
the 12.7-mm double. “Good Lord, you lug a lot of gun
around,” he said, passing it back.
“I may have a lot of animal to stop. You run into a
damnthing at ten yards, seven thousand foot-pounds isn’t too
much.”
“N-no,” Durrante agreed. “I never used
anything heavier than a 7-mm, myself.” He never bothered with
a rifle at a fire; animals, he said, never attacked when running
away from a fire.
Now, there was the kind of guy they make angels out of. That was
all he knew about damnthings; a scared damnthing would attack
anything that moved, just because it was scared. Some human people
were like that too.
They came in over the lakes a trifle above the point where the
fire was supposed to have started and let down on the black and
ash-powdered shore. A lot of snags, some large, were still burning.
They were damn good things to stay away from. He saw one sway and
fall in a cloud of pink spark, powdered dust, and smoke. He climbed
out of the car, broke the double express, and slipped in two of the
thumb-thick, span-long cartridges, snapping it shut and checking
the safety. Wouldn’t be anything alive here, but he
hadn’t lived to be past seventy by taking things for granted.
Durrante, who got out with him, had only a pistol. If he stayed on
Beta, maybe he wouldn’t get to be that old.
It was Durrante who spotted the little triangle of unburned
grass between the mouth of the run and the lake. At the apex a tree
had been burned off at the base and the branches lopped off with
something that had made not quite rectilinear cuts—a little flint
hatchet, maybe. The fire had started on both sides of it, eight
feet from the butt. He let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Up
to this, he had only hoped Little Fuzzy had gotten out of the river
alive and started the fire; now he knew it.
“He wasn’t trying to make a signal-fire,” he
said. “He was building himself a raft.” He looked at
the log. “How the devil did he expect to get that into the
water, though? It’d take half a dozen Fuzzies to roll
that.”
Under a couple of blackened and still burning snags he found
what was left of Little Fuzzy’s camp, burned branches mixed
with the powdery ash of grass and fern-fronds; a pile of ash that
showed traces of having been coils of rope made from hair-roots. He
found bones which frightened him until he saw that they were all
goofer and zarabunny bones. Little Fuzzy hadn’t gone hungry.
Durrante found a lot of flint, broken and chipped, a flint
spearhead and an axehead, and, among some tree-branch ashes,
another axehead with fine beryl-steel wire around it and the
charred remains of an axe-helve.
“Little Fuzzy was here, all right. He always carried a
spool of wire around with him.” He slung his rifle and got
out his pipe and tobacco. Gerd had brought the car to within a yard
of the ground and had his head out the open window beside him. He
handed the remains of the axe up to him. “What do you think,
Gerd?”
“If you were a Fuzzy and you woke up in the middle of the
night with the woods on fire, what would you do?” Gerd
asked.
“Little Fuzzy knows a few of the simpler principles of
thermodynamics. I think he’d get out in the water as far as
he could and sit tight till the fire was past, and then try to get
to windward of it. Let’s go up along the lake shore
first.”
Gerd set the car down and they got in. Jack didn’t bother
unloading the big rifle. West of the little run, the whole country
was burned, but that must have happened after the wind backed
around. The lake narrowed into the river; the river twisted and
widened into another lake, with a ground-fire going furiously on
the left bank. Then they came to a promontory jutting into the
water a couple of hundred feet high. On top of it a crown-fire was
just before burning out, with a ground-fire raging behind it. They
passed a narrow gorge, just a split in the cliff, with a stream
tumbling out of it. Things were burning on both sides of it on the
top.
He had the window down and was peering out; a little beyond the
gorge he heard the bellowing of some big animal in agony—something
the fire had caught and hadn’t quite killed. He shoved the
muzzle of the 12.7-double out the window.
“See if you can see where it is, Gerd. Whatever it is, we
don’t want to leave it like that.”
“I see it,” Gerd said, a moment later. “Over
where that chunk slid out of the cliff.”
Then he saw it. It was a damnthing, a monster, with a brow-horn
long enough to make a walking stick and side-horns as big as
sickles. It had blundered into a hollow, burned and probably
blinded, and fallen, until its body caught on a point of rock. The
sounds it was making were like nothing he had ever heard a
damnthing make before; it was a frightful pain.
Kneeling on the floor, he closed his sights on the beast’s
head just below an ear that was now a lump of undercooked meat, and
squeezed. He’d been a little off balance; the recoil almost
knocked him over: When he looked again, the damnthing was
still.
“Move in a little, Gerd. Back a bit.” He wanted to
be sure, and with a damnthing the only way to be sure was shoot it
again. “I think it’s dead, but . . . ”
Somewhere a whistle blew shrilly, then blew again and again.
“What the hell?” Gerd was asking.
“Why, it’s in the middle of that fire!”
Durrante cried. “Nothing could live in there.”
Wanting to get as much for his cartridge and his pounded
shoulder as he could, he aimed at the damnthing’s head and
let off the left barrel with another thunderclap report. The body
jerked from the impact of the bullet and nothing else.
“It’s up that gorge. I told you Little Fuzzy knows a
few of the rudiments of thermodynamics. He’s down under the
head, sitting it out. You think you can get the car in
there?”
“I can get her in. I’ll probably have to get her out
straight up, though, through the fire, so have everything shut when
I do.”
They inched into the gorge. Twenty-five width would have been
plenty, if it had been straight. It wasn’t, and there were
times when it looked like a no-go. Ahead, the whistle was still
blowing, and he could hear calls of “Pappy Jack! Pappy
Jack!” in several voices, he realized, while the whistle was
blowing. And there was yeeking. Little Fuzzy had picked up a gang;
that was how he was going to get that log into the water.
“Hang on, Little Fuzzy!” he shouted. “Pappy
Jack come!”
There was a nasty scraping as Gerd got the patrol car around a
corner. Then he saw them. Nine of them, by golly. Little Fuzzy,
still wearing his shoulder bag, and eight others. One had a foot
bandaged in what looked like a zarabunny skin. A couple had flint
tipped spears and flint axes, the heads bound on with wire. They
were all clinging to an outthrust ledge, halfway down to the
water.
Gerd got the car down. Jack opened the door and reached out,
pulling the nearest Fuzzy into the car. It was a female, with an
axe. She clung to it as he got her into the car. He picked up the
one with the bandaged foot and got him in, handing him forward and
warning Durrante to be careful of the foot. Little Fuzzy was next;
he was saying, “Pappy Jack! You did come!” and then,
“And Pappy Gerd!” Then he shouted encouragement to the
others outside until they were all in the car.
“Now, we all go to Wonderful Place,” Little Fuzzy
was saying. “Pappy Jack take care of us. Pappy Jack friend of
all Fuzzies. You see what I tell.”
HE SAW GREGO’S maroon and silver air-yacht grounded by the
administration hut as they came in. Gerd, in front, had already
called in the rescue of Little Fuzzy and eight other assorted
Fuzzies. There was a crowd; he saw Grego and Diamond in front. Gerd
set down the car and Durrante got out carrying the burned-foot
case. He opened the rear door and waited for the other survivors to
pile out under their own power. Those who could speak
audibly—Little Fuzzy seemed to have been teaching them to talk like
Big Ones—wanted to know if this place Hoksu-Mitto. They were given
an ovation, Diamond rushing forward as soon as he saw his friend.
Then they were all herded into the camp hospital.
Little Fuzzy had a burn on his back and a lot of fur singed off.
He was treated first, to show the others that they would be
medicated instead of murdered. The burned foot was really nasty,
especially as the Fuzzy had been walking on it quite a lot.
Everybody praised the zarabunny-skin wrapping. The camp doctor
wanted to put the lot of them to bed. He didn’t know enough
about Fuzzies to know that no Fuzzy with anything less than a
broken leg could be kept in bed. As soon as they were all bandaged
up, they were taken to the executives’ living quarters for an
Extee-Three banquet, and when that was over, they all wanted
smokko.
The news services began screening in almost at once, wanting
views and interviews. They weren’t much interested in the
fire; they wanted Little Fuzzy and his new friends. It was a pain
in the neck, but Grego insisted that they be fully satisfied; with
the Constitutional Convention just opened, the Friends of Little
Fuzzy needed a good press. It was well after dinner-time, and the
fire had been stopped all around its perimeter, before anybody
could get any privacy at all.
The Fuzzies were sprawled on a couple of mattresses on the
floor, all but Little Fuzzy who wanted to sit on Pappy Vic. It was
taking a long time for Little Fuzzy to tell about everything that
had happened since he’d gone in the river in Yellowsand
Canyon; apparently he had already told the other Fuzzies his
adventures, because they were constantly interrupting to remind him
of things he was forgetting. Then, after he got to where he had
joined Wise One and his band—Wise One was the one who had the
whistle and the bandaged head—everybody tried to tell about it at
once. Harry Steefer and Jose Durrante were missing a lot of it
because they couldn’t understand Fuzzy. It was surprising how
well this crowd had learned to pitch their voices to human
audibility in the time Little Fuzzy had been with them.
Finally, Little Fuzzy got to where, trying to run ahead of the
crown-fire at the top of the cliff, they had found themselves
stopped by the deep chasm.
“Come this place, not get over, we think all make
dead,” Little Fuzzy said. “Then I remember what Pappy
Jack say. Fire make heat, heat always go up, never go down. So we
go down, heat go away from us. Then Pappy Jack come.”
That called for praise, which Little Fuzzy accepted as his due,
with becoming modesty.
“Pappy Jack smart, too. Not make shoot with big rifle, we
not hear, not blow whistle.”
Let it go at that; hell, he couldn’t have gone on and left
that damnthing bellowing in pain. He wanted to know how Wise One
and his band had first learned about the Big Ones, and, sure
enough, they were the same gang he and Gerd had run into in the
north when the harpies had shown up. They told about their fright
at the thunder-noises, and about coming back and finding the empty
cartridges. This reminded one of the females of something.
“Big Ones’ Friend!” she cried out. “You
still have bright-things? You not lose?”
Little Fuzzy unzipped his shoulder bag and dug out three fired
rifle cartridges and showed them. The female came over and
repossessed them. Then Little Fuzzy found something else in his
bag, and cried out.
“I forget! Have shining-stone; find where we work to make
raft in little moving-water.”
And he brought out, of all things, a big sunstone. It’d
run about twenty to twenty-five carats. He rubbed it till it
glowed.
“Look! Pretty!”
Grego set Diamond on the floor and came over to look; so did
Diamond. Steefer and Durrante had also left their chairs.
“Where you get, Little Fuzzy?” Grego asked.
Steefer and Durrante were just swearing. People’d have to
stop swearing around Fuzzies; Little Fuzzy was beginning to curse
like a spaceport labor-boss already.
“Up little moving-water, run, come into lake where we make
camp to make raft.”
“You sure you didn’t get this here at
Yellowsand?”
“I tell you where I get. I not tell you not-so
thing.”
No, they could depend on that; Fuzzies didn’t tell not-so
things. Damnit!
“Good God! You know what’ll happen if this gets
out,” Grego said. “Every son of a Khooghra and his
brother who can scare up air-vehicles will be swarming in there. We
can keep them off Yellowsand, but there’s too much country up
there. Need an army to police it.”
“Why don’t you operate it?”
Grego’s language became as lurid as the forest-fire.
“We need more sunstone-diggings like we need a hole in the
head. If our lease is upheld, we’ll cut work here to about
twenty percent of the present rate. What do you want us to do,
flood the market? Get enough sunstones out and they won’t be
worth the S-450 royalty the Fuzzies are getting.”
That was true. They’d had that same trouble with diamonds
on Terra, back Pre-Atomic.
“Little Fuzzy,” he said, “you found
shining-stone like you tell. Is yours.”
“My God, Jack!” Harry Steefer almost howled.
“That thing’s worth twenty-five grand!”
“That doesn’t make a damn’s worth of
difference. Little Fuzzy found it, it’s his. Now listen,
Little Fuzzy. You keep, you not lose, not give to anybody. You keep
safe, all time. Savvy?”
“Yes, sure. Is pretty. Always want
shining-stone.”
“You not show to people you not know. Anybody see, maybe
be bad Big One, try to take. And anybody ask where you get, you
say, Pappy Vic give you, because you find here at
Yellowsand.”
“But not find here. Find in hard-stone, in little
moving-water . . . ”
“I know, I know!” This was what Leslie Coombes and
Ernst Mallin always ran into. “Is not-so thing. But you can
say.”
Little Fuzzy looked puzzled. Then he gave a laugh.
“Sure! Can say not-so thing! Wise One say not-so thing
once. Say he see damnthing; was no damnthing at all. Tell rest of
band, they all think is so.”
“Huh?” Victor Grego looked at Little Fuzzy, and then
at the Fuzzy with the whistle hung around his neck and the
bandage-turban on his head. “Tell about, Wise One.”
Wise One shrugged; an Old Terran Frenchman couldn’t have
done it better.
“Others want to stay in place, once. I want to go on, hunt
for Big One Place, make friends with Big Ones. They not want. They
afraid, want to stay in same place all time. So, I tell them big
dam’fing come, chase me, chase Stabber, come eat everybody
up. They all frightened. All jump up, make run away up mountain, go
down other side. Then, forget about place they want to stay, go on
to sun’s left—to south, like I want.”
One of the females howled like a miniature police-siren, and not
so miniature, either. With his ultrasonic hearing aid on, it almost
shattered Victor’s ear.
“You make talk you see hesh-nazza, hesh-nazza come eat us
all up, and no hesh-nazza at all?” She was dumbfounded with
horrified indignation. “You make us run away from nice-place,
good-to-eat things . . . ?”
“Jeeze-krise sunnabish!” Wise One shouted at her.
He’d only been around Little Fuzzy a week, and listen to
him. “You think this not nice-place? We stay where you want,
we never see nice-place like this. You make talk about good-to-eat
things; you think we get estee-fee in place you want to stay? You
think we get smokko? You think we find Big Ones, make friends? You
make bloody-hell talk like big fool!”
“You mean, you told these other Fuzzies you saw a
damnthing and you knew you hadn’t at all?” Grego
demanded. “Well, hallelujah, praise Saint Beelzebub! You talk
to the kids, Jack; I’m going to call Leslie Coombes right
away!”