“I’m going up there, Jack. I want to look at them, see what they live on.”
“Don’t go right away; wait a week, and I’ll go along with you. I still have a lot of this damn stuff to clear up, and I have to go in to Mallorysport tomorrow. Casagra’s talking about recalling Paine and his men and vehicles. You know where that would put us.”
Gerd nodded. “We’d have to double the ZNPF. It’s all George can do to maintain those posts along the edge of the big woods and fly inspections in the farm country, without having to patrol in the north too.”
“I don’t know how we could pay or equip them, even if we could recruit them. We’re operating on next year’s budget now. That’s another thing I’ll have to talk to Ben about. He’ll have to allocate us more money.”
“GOD DAMN IT, there’s no money to give him!”
Ben Rainsford spoke aloud and bitterly, and then caught himself and puffed furiously on his pipe, the smoke reddening in the sunset afterglow. Have to watch that; people hear him talking to himself, it would be all over Government House, and all over Mallorysport in the next day, that Governor Rainsford was going crazy. Not that it would be any wonder if he were.
The three Fuzzies, Flora and Fauna and their friend Diamond, who had gotten hold of a lot of wooden strips of the sort the gardeners used for trelliswork and were building a little arbor of their own, looked up quickly and then realized that he wasn’t speaking to them and went on with what they were doing. The sun had gone to bed already, and the sky-light was fading, and they wanted to get whatever it was they were making finished before it got dark. Fuzzies, like Colonial Governors, found time running out on them occasionally.
Time was running out fast for him. The ninety days the CZC had allowed him to take over all the public services they were no longer obliged to maintain were more than half gone now, and nothing had been done. The election for delegates to a constitutional convention was still a month in the future, and he had no idea how long it would take the elected delegates, whoever they’d be, to argue out a constitution, and how long thereafter it would take to get a Colonial Legislature set up, and how long after tax laws were enacted it would be before the Government would begin collecting money.
He wished he’d been able to borrow that half billion sols from the Banking Cartel that Hugo Ingermann had been yakking about. Ingermann had later been forced to back down to something closer to the actual figure of fifty million, just as he had been forced to retreat from some of his exaggerated statements about the Adoption Bureau, but it seemed that the public still believed his original statements and were disregarding the hedging and weasel-worded retractions. Fifty million sounded like a lot of money, too — till you had to run a planetary government on it, and everything was going to cost so much more than he had expected.
The Native Affairs Commission, for instance. He and Jack had both believed that a hundred and fifty men would be ample for the Native Protection Force; now they were finding that three times that number wouldn’t be enough. They had thought that Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek and Lynne Andrews, and Pancho Ybarra, on loan from the Navy, would be able to do all the study and research work; now that was spread out to Mallorysport Hospital and Science Center, for which the CZC was paying and would expect compensation. And the Adoption Bureau was costing as much, now, as the whole original Native Affairs Commission estimate.
At least, he’d been able to do one thing for Jack. Alex Napier had agreed that protection and/or policing of natives on Class-IV planets was a proper function of the Armed Forces, and instead of recalling his fifty men, Casagra had been ordered to reinforce them with twenty more.
The Fuzzies suddenly stopped what they were doing and turned. Diamond drew his Fuzzyphone. “Pappy Vic!” he called, in delighted surprise. “Come; look what we make!” Flora and Fauna were whooping greetings, too.
He rose, and saw behind him the short, compactly-built man, familiar from news-screen views, whom he had so far avoided meeting personally. Victor Grego greeted the Fuzzies, and then said, “Good evening, Governor. Sorry to intrude, but Miss Glenn has a dinner-and-dancing date, and I told her I’d get Diamond myself.”
“Good evening, Mr. Grego.” Somehow, he didn’t feel the hostility to the man that he had expected. “Could you wait a little while? They have an important project, here, and they want to finish it while there’s still daylight.”
“Well, so I see.” Grego spoke to the Fuzzies in their own language, and listened while they explained what they were doing. “Of course; we can’t interfere with that.”
The Fuzzies went back to their trellis-building. He and Grego sat down in lawn-chairs; Grego lit a cigarette. He watched the CZC manager-in-chief as the latter sat watching the Fuzzies. This couldn’t be Victor Grego; “Victor Grego” was a label for a personification of black-hearted villainy and ruthless selfishness; this was a pleasant-spoken, courteous gentleman who loved Fuzzies, and was considerate of his employees.
“Miss Glenn’s date was with Captain Ahmed Khadra,” Grego was saying, to make conversation. “The fifth in the last two weeks. I’m afraid I’m just before losing a good Fuzzy sitter by marriage.”
“I’m afraid so; they seem quite serious about each other. If so, she’ll be getting a good husband. I’ve known Ahmed for some time; he was at the Constabulary post near my camp, on Beta. It’s too bad,” he added, “that he seems to be getting nowhere on this Herckerd-Novaes investigation. It’s certainly not from lack of trying.”
“My police chief, Harry Steefer, is getting nowhere just as rapidly,” Grego said. “He’s ready to give the whole thing up, and when Harry Steefer gives up, it’s hopeless.”
“Do you think there is anything to this theory that somebody is training those Fuzzies to help catch other Fuzzies?”
Grego shook his head. “You know Fuzzies at least as well as I do, Governor. Almost two months; anything you can train a Fuzzy to do, you can train him to do it in less than that,” he said. “And I don’t see why anybody would try to catch wild Fuzzies, not with the bloodthirsty laws you’ve enacted. Criminals only take chances in proportion to profits, and almost anybody who wants a Fuzzy can get one free.”
That was true. And there was no indication of any black market in Fuzzies here, and Jack’s patrols over northern Beta Continent hadn’t found any evidence that anybody was live trapping Fuzzies there.
“Ahmed had an idea, for a while, that they were going into the export business; catching Fuzzies to smuggle out for sale off-planet.”
“He mentioned that to Harry Steefer. Jack Holloway was talking to me about that, too; wanted to know what could be done to prevent it. I told him it would be impossible to get Fuzzies onto a ship from Darius, or onto Darius from Mallorysport Space Terminal. As long as we keep our ‘flagrant and heinous space-traffic monopoly,’ you can be sure no Fuzzies are going to be shipped off-planet.”
“You think Ingermann really has anything to do with it?” he asked hopefully, recognizing the source of the quotation.
“If there is a black market in Fuzzies, Ingermann’s back of it,” Grego said, as though stating a natural law. “In the six or so years he’s infected this planet, I’ve learned a lot about the soi-disant Honorable Hugo Ingermann, and none of it’s been good.”
“Ahmed Khadra thinks his attacks on the CZC space-monopoly may stem from a desire to get some way around your controls at the ground terminal here and on Darius. Of course, he’s talking about a Government spaceport, and that would be just as tightly controlled…”
Grego hesitated for a moment, then dropped his cigarette to the ground and heeled it out. He leaned toward Rainsford in his chair.