“Fuzzies are not animals. They are sapient beings. The Chief Justice himself said so. Have you never heard of the Pendarvis Decisions?”
“Have I heard of anything else, lately? Mr. Grego, how you can make a pet of that little demon, after all that’s happened…”
“All right, Myra. I’ll take him.”
He went through Myra’s office and into the big room they called executive operations center, through which reports from all over the Company’s shrunken but still extensive empire reached him and his decisions and directives and orders and instructions were handed down to his subjects. There were eight girls there, none particularly busy. One was reading alternately from several sets of clipboarded papers and talking into a vocowriter. Another was making a subdued clatter with a teleprint machine. A third was at a drawing board, constructing one of those multicolored zigzag graphs so dear to the organizational heart. The rest sat smoking and chatting; they all made hasty pretense of busying themselves as he entered. Then one of them saw the Fuzzy in his arms.
“Look! Mr. Grego has a Fuzzy!”
“Why, it’s a real live Fuzzy!”
Then they were all on their feet and crowding forward in a swirl of colored dresses and perfumes and eager, laughing voices and pretty, smiling faces.
“Where did you get him, Mr. Grego?”
“Oh, can we see him?”
“Yes, girls.” He set the Fuzzy down on the floor. “I don’t know where he came from, but I think he wants to stay with us. I’m going to leave him here for a while. Don’t let him interfere too much with your work, but keep an eye on him and don’t let him get into any trouble. It’ll be at least an hour before I have anything ready to go out. You can give him anything you’d eat yourselves; if he doesn’t want, he won’t take it. I don’t think he’s very hungry right now. And don’t kill him with affection.”
When he went out, they were all sitting on the floor in a circle around the Fuzzy, who was having a wonderful time. He told Myra to leave the doors of her office open so he could go through when he wanted to. Then he went through another door, into the computer room.
It was quarter-circular; two straight walls twenty feet long at right angles and the curved wall between, the latter occupied by the input board for the situation-analysis and operation-guidance computers. This was a band of pale green plastic, three feet wide, divided into foot squares by horizontal and vertical red lines, each square perforated with thousands of tiny holes, in some of them little plug-in lights twinkled in every color of the spectrum. Three levels down, a whole floor was occupied with the computers this board serviced. From it, new information was added in the quasi-mathematical symbology computers understood.
He stood for a moment, looking at the Christmas-tree lights. Nothing in the world would have tempted him to touch it; he knew far too little about it. He wondered if they had started the computers working on the sunstone-buying policy problem, then went out into his own office, closing the door behind him, and sat down at his desk.
In the old, pre-Fuzzy days, he would have spent a leisurely couple of hours here, drinking more coffee and going over reports. Once in a while he would have made some comment, or asked a question, or made a suggestion, to show that he was keeping up with what was going on. Only rarely would any situation arise requiring his personal action.
Now everybody was having situations; things he had thought settled at the marathon staff conference of the past four days were coming unstuck; conflicts were developing. He had to make screen-calls to people he would never have bothered talking to under ordinary circumstances — the superintendent of the meat-packing plant on Delta Continent, the chief engineer on the now-idle Big Blackwater drainage project, the master mechanic at the nuclear-electric power-unit plant. He welcomed one such necessity, the master mechanic at the electronics-equipment factory; they were starting production of ultrasonic hearing-aids for the Government, and he ordered half a dozen sent around to his office. When he got one of them, he could hear what his new friend was saying.
Myra Fallada came in, dithering in the doorway till he had finished talking to the chief of chemical industries about a bottleneck in blasting-explosive production. As soon as he blanked the screen, she began.
“Mr. Grego, you will simply have to get that horrid creature out of operations center. The girls aren’t doing a bit of work, and the noise is driving me simply mad!”
He could hear shrieks of laughter, and the running scamper of Fuzzy feet. Now that he thought of it, he had been hearing that for some time.
“And I positively can’t work… Aaaaaa!”
Something bright red hit her on the back of the head and bounced into the room. A red plastic bag, a sponge bag or swimsuit bag or something like that, stuffed with tissue paper. The Fuzzy ran into the room, dodging past Myra, and hurled it back, within inches of her face, then ran after it.
“Well, yes, Myra. I’m afraid this is being carried a bit far.” He rose and went past her into her office, in time to see the improvised softball come whizzing at him from the big office beyond. He caught it and went on through; the Fuzzy ran ahead of him to a tall girl with red hair who stooped and caught him up.
“Look, girls,” he said, “I said keep the Fuzzy amused; I didn’t say turn this into a kindergarten with the teacher gone AWOL. It’s bad enough to have the Fuzzies tear up our charter, without letting them stop work on what we have left.”
“Well, it did get a little out of hand,” the tall redhead understated.
“Yes. Slightly.” Nobody was going to under-understate him. What was her name? Sandra Glenn. “Sandra, he seems to like you. You take care of him. Just keep him quiet and keep him from bothering everybody else.”
He hoped she wouldn’t ask him how. She didn’t; she just said, “I’ll try, Mr. Grego.” He decided to settle for that; that was all anybody could do.
By the time he got back to his desk, there was a call from the head of Public Services, wanting to know what he was going to tell the school teachers about their job futures. When he got rid of that, he called Dr. Ernst Mallin at Science Center.
The acting head of Science Center was fussily neat in an uncompromisingly black and white costume which matched his uncompromisingly black and white mind. He had a narrow face and a small, tight mouth; it had been an arrogantly positive face once. Now it was the face of a man who expects the chair he is sitting on to collapse under him at any moment.
“Good morning, Mr. Grego.” Apprehensive, and trying not to show it.
“Good morning, Doctor. Those Fuzzies you were working with before the trial; the ones Dr. and Mrs. van Riebeek have now. Were they the only ones you had?”
The question took Mallin by surprise. They were, he stated positively. And to the best of his knowledge Juan Jimenez, who had secured them for him, had caught no others.
“Have you talked to Dr. Jimenez yet?” he asked, after hearing about the Fuzzy in Company House. “I don’t believe he brought any when he came in from Beta Continent.”
“No, not yet. I wanted to talk to you, first, about the Fuzzy and about something else. Dr. Mallin, I gather you’re not exactly happy in charge of Science Center.”
“No, Mr. Grego. I took it over because it was the only thing to do at the time, but now that the trial is over, I’d much rather go back to my own work.”
“Well, so you shall, and your salary definitely won’t suffer because of it. And I want to assure you again of my complete confidence in you, Doctor. During the Fuzzy trouble you did the best any man could have, in a thoroughly impossible situation…”
He watched the anxiety ebb out of Mallin’s face; before he was finished, the psychologist was smiling one of his tight little smiles.