Not that Gerd liked harpies any better than anybody else; not even that he liked them, period. Along with everybody else on Zarathustra, he was convinced that there were two kinds of harpies — live ones and good ones. But he was a general naturalist; ecology was a big part of his subject, and he knew that as soon as you wipe out any single species, things that will affect a dozen other species are going to start happening because every living thing has a role in the general ecological drama.
Harpies were killers. All right, they kept something down; remove them, and that something would have a sudden increase, and that would deplete something they fed on. Or they would begin competing with some other species. And there could be side effects. There was that old story about how the cats killed the field mice and the field mice destroyed the bumblebees’ nests. But the bumblebees pollenated clover; so, when the bird-lovers started shooting cats — just the way the Fuzzylovers were shooting harpies — the clover crop started to fail. Wasn’t that something Darwin wrote up, back about the beginning of the first century Pre-Atomic?
The trouble was, he wasn’t keeping up with things. He’d stopped being a general naturalist and become a Fuzzyologist. Well, the Company’s Science Center tried to keep up with everything. After lunch — well, say just before cocktail time, which would be just after lunch in Mallorysport — he’d screen Juan Jimenez and find out if anything unusual was happening.
THE FUZZY NAMED Kraft — he was the male of the pair — wriggled in the little chair. The globe above and behind him glowed clear blue. Leslie Coombes sympathized with Kraft; he’d seen enough witnesses wriggling like that in the same kind of chair.
“You want to help Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee,” Ernst Mallin was pleading. “Maybe this is not so, but you say. You not, Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee have bad trouble. Other Big Ones be angry with them.”
“But, Unka Ernst,” Kraft insisted. “I not break asht’ay, Unka Less’ee break.”
The woman in the white smock said, “You tell Auntie Anne you break ashtray. Auntie Anne not be angry at you.”
“Go ahead, Kraft. Tell Miss Nelson you broke ashtray,” he urged.
“Come on, Kraft,” Mallin’s assistant said. “Who broke ashtray?”
The steady blue glow darkened and swirled, as though a bottle of ink had been emptied into it. There were brief glints of violet. Kraft gulped once or twice.
“Unka Less’ee broke asht’ay,” he said.
The globe turned bright red.
Somebody said, “Oh, no!” and he realized that it was himself. Mallin closed his eyes and shuddered. Miss Nelson said something, and he hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was.
“Oh, God; if anything like that happens in court…” he began. The red flush was fading from the veridicator globe. “You’d better send that veridicator to the shop. Or psychoanalyze it; it’s gone bughouse.”
“Unka Ernst,” the Fuzzy was pleading. “Plis, not make do anymore. Kraft not know what to say.”
“No, I won’t, Kraft. Poor little fellow.” Mallin released the Fuzzy from the veridicator, hugging him with a tenderness Coombes had never thought him capable of. “And Auntie Anne not angry with Unka Less’ee. Everybody friends.” He handed Kraft to the girl. “Take him out, Miss Nelson. Give him something nice, and talk to him for a while.”
He waited till she carried the Fuzzy from the room.
“Well, do you know what happened?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. We’ll test the veridicator with a normally mendacious human, but I doubt if there’s anything wrong with it. You know, a veridicator does not actually detect falsification. A veridicator is a machine, and knows nothing about truth or falsehood. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the experiment with the paranoid under veridication?”
“Got that in law-school psychology. Paranoid claimed he was God, and the veridicator confirmed his claim. But why did this veridicator red-light when Kraft was telling the truth?”
“The veridicator only detects the suppression of a statement and the substitution of another. The veridicator here had a subject with two conflicting statements, both of which he had to regard as true. We were insisting that he confess to breaking that ashtray, so, since we said so, it must be true. But he’d seen you break it, so he knew that was also true. He had to suppress one of these true-relative-to-him statements.”
“Well, maybe if he tries it again…”
“No, Mr. Coombes.” Even Frederic Pendarvis ruling on a point of law could not have been more inflexible. “I will not subject this Fuzzy to any more of this. Nor Ebbing. They are both beginning to develop psychoneurotic symptoms, the first I have ever seen in any Fuzzy. We’ll have to get different subjects. How about your defendants, Mr. Coombes?”
“Well, the test-witness isn’t supposed to be a person giving actual testimony. Besides, I don’t want them taught to lie and then have them do it on the stand. How about some of the Fuzzies at Holloway’s?”
“I talked to Mr. Holloway. While he’s aware of the gravity of the situation, he was most hostile to using any of his own family, or Major Lunt’s, or Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s. He uses those Fuzzies as teachers, and lying isn’t something he wants on the curriculum at Fuzzy school.”
“No. I can see that.” Jack wasn’t the type to win battles by losing the war. “Have you no other Fuzzies?”
“Well, certainly Mrs. Hawkwood wouldn’t want the ones I’ve loaned her for the schools trained in prevarication. And the ones I have helping with mental patients at the hospital have been successful mainly because of their complete agreement with reality. I don’t know, Mr. Coombes.”
“Well, we only have three weeks till the trial opens, you know.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WISE ONE WAS not happy. They had been in this place for four day-times and four darktimes, and none of the others wanted to leave. It was a good place, and he himself would have wanted to stay if it were not that he wanted more to go on to the Big One Place.
They had found it almost toward sundown-time on the day it had rained by following a little moving-water up the side of the mountain the way from which it came into a little valley that had been wide when they had first entered it and had become narrower as the mountain had grown steeper on either side. They had found a good sleeping-place where a tree had fallen in a small hollow beside a rock-ledge. Back under the ledge and the fallen tree the ground had been dry, although it had rained hard until sun-highest-time. They had gathered many ferns and had made a bed big enough for all of them together, and had made a place to put the bright-things so that they would not have to carry them when they hunted. After the first night, with the sleeping-place made, they played on the bank of the little moving-water until it became dark. There were good-to-eat growing-things nearby, and hatta-zosa among the trees below and on either side; and best of all, there were many zatku, more than anybody could remember. Last day-time they had found and eaten a whole hand and one finger of them, almost a whole zatku for each of them.
They had seen flying-things several times after they had crossed the moving-water to the sun’s right hand. Always they had been far away, to sun-upward. They seemed to be going along over the great-great moving-water that went from the sun’s left hand toward the sun’s right hand. Big She and some of the others had been afraid and had hidden, but that had been foolish, for the flying-things were too far away for the Big Ones in them to see. Big She said they were hunting, and would eat them all if they found them. That was more of Big She’s foolishness. The Big Ones were People, and People did not eat People. That was a foolish thing even to think about. Only gotza ate their own kind. And the Big Ones must hate gotza, for they killed them whenever they found them. But Big She and Stonebreaker and Fruitfinder, who listened to her, were afraid, and their foolish talk made the others afraid too.