“Hi, Gerd. What’s new?”
Gerd van Riebeek shrugged. “Still sitting on top of ’steen billion sols’ worth of sunstones. Victor Grego was up; you heard about that?”
“Yes. I was looking at the photos of those stones a moment ago. How much flint did he have to crack to get them?”
“About seventy-five tons. He took them out from five different locations, on both sides of the canyon. Took him about eight hours, after he got the sandstone off.”
“That’s better than I ever did; I thought I’d hit it rich when I got one good stone out of six tons of flint. We can tell the Fuzzies they’re all rich now.”
“They’ll want to know if it’s good to eat,” Gerd said.
They probably would. He asked if Gerd had been seeing many Fuzzies.
“South of the Divide, yes, quite a few in small bands, mostly headed south or southwest. We get more on the movie film than we actually see. North of the Divide, hardly any. Oh, you remember the band we saw the day we found the sunstone flint? The ones who’d killed those goofers and were eating them?”
Holloway laughed, remembering their consternation when the three harpies had put in an appearance and been knocked down by his and Gerd’s rifle fire.
“ ‘Thunder-noise kill gotza; maybe kill us next’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Bad place this, make run fast.’ Man, were they a scared lot of Fuzzies.”
“They didn’t stay scared long; they were back as soon as we were out of there,” Gerd told him. “I was up that way this morning and recognized the place; I set down for a look around. The dead harpies were pretty well cleaned up — other harpies and what have you — just a few bones scattered around. I was up on top, where we’d been. It was three weeks ago, and it’d rained a few times since; so, no tracks. I could hardly see where we’d set the aircar down. But I know the Fuzzies were there from what I didn’t find.”
Gerd paused, grinning. Expecting Holloway to ask what.
“The empties, two from my 9.7 and one from your Sterberg,” Holloway said. “Sure. Pretty things.” He laughed again. Fuzzies always picked up empty brass. “You find some Fuzzies with empty cartridges, you’ll know who they are.”
“Oh, they won’t keep them. They’ve gotten tired of them and dropped them long ago.”
They talked for a while, and finally Gerd broke the connection, probably to call Ruth. Holloway went back to his paperwork. The afternoon passed, and eventually he finished everything they had piled up on him. He rose stiffly. Wasn’t used to this damned sitting on a chair all day. He refilled and lighted his pipe, got his hat, and looked for the pistol that should be hanging under it before he remembered that he wasn’t bothering to wear it around the camp anymore. Then, after a glance around to make sure he hadn’t left anything a Fuzzy oughtn’t to get at, he went out.
They’d built all the walls of the permanent office that was to replace this hut, and they’d started on the roof. The ZNPF barracks and headquarters were finished and occupied; in front of the latter a number of contragravity vehicles were grounded: patrol cars and combat cars. Some of the former were new, light green with yellow trim, lettered ZNPF. Some of the latter were olive green; they and the men who operated them had been borrowed from the Space Marines. Across the little stream, he couldn’t see his original camp buildings for the new construction that had gone up in the past two and a half months; the whole place, marked with a tiny dot on the larger maps as Holloway’s Camp, had been changed beyond recognition.
Maybe the name ought to be changed, too. Call it Hoksu-Mitto — that was what the Fuzzies called it — “Wonderful Place.” Well, it was pretty wonderful, to a Fuzzy just out of the big woods; and even those who went on to Mallorysport, a much more wonderful place, to live with human families still called it that, and looked back on it with the nostalgic affection of an old grad for his alma mater. He’d talked to Ben Rainsford about getting the name officially changed.
Half a dozen Fuzzies were playing on the bridge; they saw him and ran to him, yeeking. They all wore zipper-closed shoulder bags, with sheath-knives and little trowels attached, and silver identity disks at their throats, and they carried the weapons that had been issued to them to replace their wooden prawn-killers — six-inch steel blades on twelve-inch steel shafts. They were newcomers, hadn’t had their vocal training yet; he put in the earplug and switched on the hearing aid he had to use less and less frequently now, and they were all yelling:
“Pappy Jack! Heyo, Pappy Jack. You make play with us?”
They’d been around long enough to learn that he was Pappy Jack to every Fuzzy in the place, which as of the noon count stood at three hundred sixty-two, and they all thought he had nothing to do but “make play” with them. He squatted down, looking at their ID-disks; all numbered in the twelve-twenties, which meant they’d come in day before yesterday.
“Why aren’t you kids in school?” he asked, grabbing one who was trying to work the zipper of his shirt.
“Skool? What is, skool?”
“School,” he told them, “is place where Fuzzies learn new things. Learn to make talk like Big Ones, so Big Ones not need put-in-ear things. Learn to make things, have fun. Learn not get hurt by Big One things.” He pointed to a long corrugated metal shed across the run. “School in that place. Come; I show.”
He knew what had happened. This gang had met some Fuzzy in the woods who had told them about Hoksu-Mitto, and they’d come to get in on it. They’d been taken in tow by Little Fuzzy or Ko-Ko or one of George Lunt’s or Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s Fuzzies, and brought to ZNPF headquarters to be fingerprinted and given ID-disks and issued equipment, and then told to go amuse themselves. He started across the bridge, the Fuzzies running beside and ahead of him.
The interior of the long shed was cool and shady, but not quiet. There were about two hundred Fuzzies, all talking at once; when he switched off his hearing aid, most of it was the yeek-yeeking which was the audible fringe sound of their ultrasonic voices. Two of George Lunt’s family, named Dillinger and Ned Kelly, were teaching a class — most of whom had already learned to pitch their voices to human audibility — how to make bows and arrows. Considering that they’d only become bowyers and fletchers themselves a month ago, they were doing very well, and the class was picking it up quickly and enthusiastically. His own Mike and Mitzi were giving a class in fire-making, sawing a length of hard wood back and forth across the grain of a softer log. They had a score or so of pupils, all whooping excitedly as the wood-dust began to smoke: Another crowd stood or squatted around a ZNPF corporal who was using a jackknife to skin a small animal Terrans called a zarabunny. Like any good cop, he was continuously aware of everything that went on around him. He looked up.
“Hi, Jack. Soon as that crowd over there have a fire going, I’ll show them how to broil this on a stick. Then I’ll show them how to use the brains to cure the skin, the way the Old Terran Indians did, and how to make a bowstring out of the gut.”
And then, after they’d learned all this stuff, they’d go in to Mallorysport to be adopted by some human family and never use any of it. Well, maybe not. There were a lot of Fuzzies — ten, maybe twenty thousand of them. In spite of what Little Fuzzy was telling everybody about all the Fuzzies having Big Ones of their own, it wouldn’t work out that way. There just weren’t enough humans who wanted to adopt Fuzzies. So some of this gang would go to the ZNPF posts to the south or along the edge of Big Blackwater to the west, and teach other Fuzzies who’d pass the instruction on. Bows and arrows, fire, cooked food, cured hides. Basketry and pottery, too. Seeing this gang here, it was hard to realize just how primitively woods-Fuzzies had lived. Hadn’t even learned to make anything like these shoulder bags to carry things in; had to keep moving all the time, too, hunting and foraging.