"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 3 - Other People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

H Beam Piper - Fuzzy 3 - Other People

H.Beam Piper - Fuzzies and Other People

Officially, on all the half-thousand human-populated planets of the
Terran Federation, the date was September 14, 654 Atomic Era,
but on Zarathustra it was First Day, Year Zero, Anno Fuzzy.

It wasn't the day that the Fuzzies were discovered— that had been
in early June, when old Jack Holloway had found a small and
unfamiliar being crouching in his shower stall at his camp up Cold
Creek Valley on Beta Continent. He had made friends with the
uninvited visitor and named him Little Fuzzy. A week later, four
more Fuzzies and a baby Fuzzy had moved in, and Bennett
Rainsford, then a field naturalist for the Institute of Xeno-Sciences,
had seen them. They were completelynew to him, too. He named
the order Hollowayans, in honor of their discoverer, and called the
genus Fuzzy and the species Holloway's Fuzzy: Fuzzy fuzzy
holloway.

Fuzzies were erect bipeds, two feet tall and weighing fifteen to
twenty pounds; their bodies were covered with silky golden fur.
They had five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, large eyes
set close enough together for stereoscopic vision, and vaguely
humanoid features.

They seemed to know nothing of fire and, as far as Holloway and
Rainsford were able to determine, they were incapable of speech.
The fact that they spoke in the ultrasonic range was yet to be
discovered. They made a few artifacts, however, and their
reasoning ability amazed both men. As soon as he saw them,
Rainsford insisted that Jack tape an account of them.

Twenty-four hours later, a number of people had heard that tape.
One was Victor Grego, manager- inchief of the Chartered
Zarathustra Company. If, as seemed probable, these Fuzzies were
sapient beings, Zarathustra automatically became a Class-IV
inhabited planet. The Company's charter, conferring outright
ownership of Zarathustra as a Class-111 uninhabited planet, would
be just as automatically void.

Grego's instinct was to fight, and he was a resourceful, resolute
and ruthless fighter. He was not stupid, but some of his
subordinates were; a week later, everybody on the planet had
heard of the Fuzzies because a CZC executive named Leonard
Kellogg was facing trial for murder—defined as the unjustified
killing of any sapient being of any race whatsoever—for having
kicked to death a Fuzzy named Goldilocks. Jack Holloway was