“They know it’s their home. Gerd, this has happened on other Class-IV planets we’ve moved in on. We give the natives a reservation; we tell them it’ll be theirs forever, Terran’s word of honor. Then we find something valuable on it — gold on Loki, platinum on Thor, vanadium and wolfram on Hathor, nitrates on Yggdrasil, uranium on Gimli. So the natives get shoved off onto another reservation, where there isn’t anything anybody wants, and finally they just get shoved off, period. We aren’t going to do that here, to the Fuzzies.”
“What are you going to do? Try to keep it a secret?” he asked. “If that’s what you want, we’ll just throw those two sunstones in the river and forget about it,” he agreed. “But how long do you think it’ll be before somebody else finds out about it?”
“We can keep other people out of here. That’s what the Fuzzy Reservation’s for, isn’t it?”
“We need people to keep people out; Paine’s Marines, George Lunt’s Protection Force. I think we can trust George. I wouldn’t know about Paine. Anybody below them I wouldn’t trust at all. Sooner or later somebody’ll fly up this canyon and see this, and their it’ll be out. And you know what’ll happen then.” He thought for a moment. “Are you going to tell Ben Rainsford?”
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Gerd.” Jack fumbled his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket. “I suppose I’ll have to. Have to give him these stones; they’re Government property. Well, bizzo; we’ll go straight to camp.” He looked up at the sun. “Make it in about three hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to Mallorysport.”
“I’M AFRAID To believe it, Dr. Jimenez,” Ernst Mallin said. “It would be so wonderful if it were true. Can you be certain?”
“We’re all certain, now, that this hormone, NFM p , is what prevents normal embryonic development,” Juan Jimenez, in the screen, replied. “We’re certain, now, that hokfusine combines destructively with NFM p ; even Chris Hoenveld, he’s seen it happen in a test tube, and he has to believe it whether he wants to or not. It appears that hokfusine also has an inhibitory effect on the glands secreting NFM p . But to be certain, we’ll have to wait four more months, until the infants conceived after the mothers began eating Extee-Three are born. Ideally, we should wait until the females we have begun giving daily doses of pure hokfusine conceive and bear children. But if I’m not certain now, I’m confident.”
“What put your people onto this, Dr. Jimenez?”
“A hunch,” the younger man smiled. “A hunch by the girl in Dr. Hoenveld’s lab, Charlotte Tresca.” The smile became an audible laugh. “Hoenveld is simply furious about it. No sound theoretical basis, just a lot of unsupported surmises. You know how he talks. He did have to grant her results; they’ve been duplicated. But he rejects her whole line of reasoning.”
He would; Jan Christiaan Hoenveld’s mind plodded obstinately along, step by step, from A to B to C to D; it wasn’t fair for somebody suddenly to leap to W or X and run from there to Z. For his own part, Ernst Mallin respected hunches; he knew how much mental activity went on below the level of consciousness and with what seemingly irrationality fragments of it rose to the conscious mind. His only regret was that he had so few good hunches, himself.
“Well, what was her reasoning?” he asked. “Or was it pure intuition?”
“Well, she just got the idea that hokfusine would neutralize the NFM p hormone, and worked from there,” Jimenez said. “As she rationalizes it, all Fuzzies have a craving for land-prawn meat, without exception. This is a racial constant with them. Right?”
“Yes, as far as we can tell. I hate to use the word loosely, but I’d say, instinctual.”
“And all Fuzzies, for which read, all studied individuals, have a craving for Extee-Three. Once they taste the stuff, they eat it at every opportunity. This isn’t a learned taste, like our taste for, say, coffee or tobacco or alcohol; every human has to learn to like all three. The Fuzzy’s response to Extee-Three is immediate and automatic. Still with it, Doctor?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve seen quite a few Fuzzies taking their first taste of Extee-Three. It’s just what you call it; a physical response.” He gave that a moment’s thought, adding: “If it’s an instinct, it’s the result of natural selection.”
“Yes. She reasoned that a taste for the titanium-molecule compound present both in land-prawns and Extee-Three contributed to racial survival; that Fuzzies lacking it died out, and Fuzzies having it to a pronounced degree survived and transmitted it. So she went to work over Hoenveld’s vehement objections that she was wasting her time — and showed the effect of hokfusine on the NFM p hormone. Now, the physiologists who had that theory about cyclic production of NFM p getting out of phase with the menstrual cycle and permitting an occasional viable birth are finding that the NFM p fluctuations aren’t cyclic at all but related to hokfusine consumption.”
“Well, you have a fine circumstantial case there. Everything seems to fit together with everything else. As you say, you’ll have to wait about a year before you can really prove a one-to-one relationship between hokfusine and viable births, but if I were inclined to gamble I’d risk a small wager on it.”
Jimenez grinned. “I have, already, with Dr. Hoenveld. I think it’s money in the bank now.”
BENNETT RAINSFORD WARMED the two sunstones between his palms, then rolled them, like a pair of dice, on the desk in front of him. He had been so happy, ever since Victor Grego had called him to tell him what had been discovered at Science Center about the hokfusine and the NFM p hormone. They were on the right track, he was sure of it, and in a few years all the Fuzzy children would be born alive and normal.
And then, just after lunch, Jack Holloway had come dropping out of the sky from Beta Continent with this.
“You can’t keep it a secret, Jack. You can’t keep any discovery a secret, because anything anybody discovers, somebody else can, and will, discover later. Look how the power interests tried to suppress the discovery of direct conversion of nuclear energy to electric current, back in the First Century. Look how they tried to suppress the Abbot Drive.”
“This is different,” Jack Holloway argued, bullheadedly. “This isn’t a scientific principle anybody, anywhere, can discover. This is something at a certain place, and if we can keep people away from it…”
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Then, realizing that Latin was terra incognita to Jack, he translated: “Who’ll watch the watchmen?”
Jack nodded. “That’s what Gerd said. A thing like that would be an awful strain on anybody’s moral fiber. And you know what’ll happen as soon as it gets out.
“There’d be pressure on me to open the Fuzzy Reservation. Hugo Ingermann’s John Doe and Richard Roe and all. I suppose I could stall it off till a legislature was elected, but after that…”
“I wasn’t talking about political pressure. I was talking about a sunstone rush. There’d be twenty thousand men stampeding up there, with everything they could put onto contragravity. And everything they could find to shoot with, too. And the longer it’s stalled off, the worse it’ll be, because in six months the off-planet immigrants’ll start coming in.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He should have; he’d been on other frontier planets where rich deposits of mineral wealth had been discovered. And there was nothing in the Galaxy that concentrated more value in less bulk than sunstones.
“Ben, I’ve been thinking,” Jack continued. “I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only idea I have. Those sunstones are in a little section about fifty miles square on the north side of the Divide. Suppose the Government makes that a sort of reservation-inside-the-reservation, and operates the sunstone mines. You do it before anything leaks out — announce that the Government has discovered sunstones on the Fuzzy Reservation, that the Government claims all the sunstones on Fuzzy land in the name of the Fuzzies, and that the Government is operating all sunstone mines, and it’ll head off the rush, or the worst of it. And the Fuzzies’ll get out of that immediate area; they won’t stay around where there’s underground blasting. And the money the Government gets out of it can go to the Fuzzies in protection and welfare and medical aid and shoppo-diggo and shodda-bag and Estee-fee.”