“Oh, you do? Well, they are not your laboratory workers, Dr. Hoenveld; they are employees of the Zarathustra Company, the same as you. Or I. And the biochemistry laboratory is not your private empire. It is a part of Science Center, of which I am division chief, and from where I sit the difference between you and Charlotte Tresca is barely perceptible to the naked eye. Is that clear, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld was looking at him as though a pistol had blown up in his hand. He was, in fact, mildly surprised at himself. A month ago, he wouldn’t have dreamed of talking so to anybody, least of all a man as much older than himself as Hoenveld, and one with Hoenveld’s imposing reputation.
But as division chief, he had to get things done, and there could be only one chief in the division.
“I am quite well aware of your recent and sudden promotion, Dr. Jimenez,” Hoenveld retorted acidly. “Over the heads of a dozen of your seniors.”
“Including yourself; well, you’ve just demonstrated the reason why you were passed over. Now, I want some work done, and if you can’t or won’t do it, I can promote somebody to replace you very easily.”
“What do you think we’ve been doing? Every ranger and hunter on the company payroll has been shooting everything from damnthings and wild veldbeest to ground-mice and dumping the digestive and reproductive tracts in my — I beg your pardon, I mean the Charterless Zarathustra Company’s — laboratory.”
“Have you found any trace of NFMP in any of them?”
“Negative. They don’t have the glands to secrete it; I have that on the authority of the comparative mammalian anatomists.”
“Then stop looking for it; I’ll order the specimen collecting stopped at once. Now, I want analyses of land-prawns made, and I want to know just what Miss Tresca found in them; whether it was really hokfusine, or anything similar to it, or just trace-presences of titanium, and I want to know how it gets into the land-prawns’ systems and where it concentrates there. I would suggest — correction, I direct — that Miss Tresca be put to work on that herself, and that she report directly to me.”
“WHAT’S YOUR OPINION of Chris Hoenveld, Ernst?” Victor Grego asked.
Mallin frowned — his standard think-seriously-and-weigh-every-word frown.
“Dr. Hoenveld is a most distinguished scientist. He has an encyclopedic grasp on his subject, an infallible memory, and an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No. A computer has all that, to a much higher degree, and a computer couldn’t make an original scientific discovery in a hundred million years. A computer has no imagination, and neither has Hoenveld.”
“Well, he has very little, I’ll admit. Why do you ask about him?”
“Juan Jimenez is having trouble with him.”
“I can believe it,” Mallin said. “Hoenveld has one characteristic a computer lacks. Egotism. Has Jimenez complained to you?”
“Nifflheim, no; he’s running Science Center without yelling to Big Brother for help. I got this off the powder-room and coffee-stand telegraph, to which I have excellent taps. Juan cut him down to size; he’s doing all right.”
“Well, how about the NFM p problem?”
“Nowhere, on hyperdrive. The Fuzzies just manufacture it inside themselves, and nobody knows why. It seems mainly to be associated with the digestive system, and gets from there into the blood-stream, and into the gonads, in both sexes, from there. Thirty-six births, so far; three viable.”
From the terrace outside came the happy babble of Fuzzy voices. They were using their Fuzzyphones to talk to one another; wanted to talk like the Hagga. Poor little tail-enders of a doomed race.
THE WHOLE DAMNED thing was getting too big for comfort, Jack Holloway thought. A month ago, there’d only been Gerd and Ruth and Lynne Andrews and Pancho Ybarra, and George Lunt, and the men George had brought when he’d transferred from the Constabulary. They all had cocktails together before dinner, and ate at one table, and had bull-sessions in the evenings, and everybody had known what everybody else was doing. And there had only been forty or fifty Fuzzies, beside his and George’s and Gerd’s and Ruth’s.
Now Gerd had three assistants, and Ruth had dropped work on Fuzzy psychology and was helping him with whatever he was doing, and what that was he wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t quite sure what anybody was doing, anymore. And Pancho was practically commuting to and from Mallorysport, and Ernst Mallin was out at least once a week. Funny, too; he used to think Mallin was a solid, three-dimensional bastard, and now he found he rather liked him. Even Victor Grego was out, one weekend, and everybody liked him.
Lynne had a couple of helpers, too, and a hospital and clinic, and there was a Fuzzy school, where they were taught Lingua Terra and how to use Fuzzyphones and about the strange customs of the Hagga. Some old hen Ruth had kidnapped from the Mallorysport schools was in charge of it, or thought she was; actually Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Lizzie Borden and Dillinger were running it.
And he and George Lunt couldn’t yell back and forth to each other any more, because their offices, at opposite ends of the long hut, were partitioned off and separated by a hundred and twenty feet of middle office, full of desks and business machines and roboclerks, and humans working with them. And he had a secretary, now, and she had a secretary, or at least a stenographer, of her own.
Gerd van Riebeek came in from the outside, tossing his hat on top of a microbook-case and unbuckling his pistol.
“Hi, Jack. Anything new?” he asked.
Gerd and Ruth had been away for a little over a week, in the country to the south. It must have been fun, just the two of them and Complex and Superego and Dr. Crippen and Calamity Jane, camping in Gerd’s airboat and visiting the posts Lunt had strung out along the edge of the big woods.
“I was going to ask you that. Where’s Ruth?”
“She’s staying another week, at the Kirtland plantation, with Superego and Complex; there must be fifty to seventy-five Fuzzies there; she’s helping the Kirtland people with them, teaching them not to destroy young sugarplant shoots. Kirtland’s been taking a lot of damage to his shoots from zatku. What’s the latest from Mallorysport?”
“Well, nowhere on the NFM p , but they seem to have found something interesting about the land-prawns.”
“More on that?” Gerd had heard about the alleged hokfusine. “Have they found out what it is?”
“It isn’t hokfusine, it’s just a rather complicated titanium salt. The land-prawns eat titanium, mostly in moss and fungus and stuff like that. It probably grades about ten atoms to the ton on what they eat. But they fix it, apparently in that middle intestine that they have. I have a big long write-up on what it does there. The Fuzzies seem to convert it to something else in their own digestive system. Whatever it does, hokfusine seems to do it a lot better. They’re still working on it.”
“They ate land-prawns all along, but it was only since this new generation hatched, this Spring, that they really got all they wanted of them. I wonder what they ate before, up north.”
“Well, we know what all they eat beside zatku and the stuff we give them. Animals small enough to kill with those little sticks, fruit, bird eggs, those little yellow lizards, grubs.”
“What are Paine’s Marines doing up north now, beside looking for nonexistent Fuzzy catchers?”
“That’s about all. Flying patrol, taking photos, mapping. They say there are lots of Fuzzies north of the Divide that haven’t started south yet, probably haven’t heard about the big zatku bonanza yet.”