Major George Lunt, Commandant, Zarathustra Native Protection Force, agreed wearily and profanely, taking off his beret and his pistol-belt and dropping them on the makeshift table. Then, looking around, he went to a chair and lifted from it four loose-leaf books and a fiberboard carton full of papers, marked old atomic-bomb bourbon, and set them on the floor. Then he unzipped his tunic, sat down, and got out his cigarettes.
“Office hut’s all up, now,” he reported. “They’re waiting on a scow-load of flooring for it.”
“I was talking on screen about that an hour ago. It’ll be here by this evening.” By this time tomorrow, all this junk could be moved out, and the place would be home again. “Any men coming out on the afternoon boat?”
“Three. They only got the recruiting office opened yesterday, and there isn’t any big rush of recruits. Captain Casagra says he’ll lend us fifty Marines and some vehicles, temporarily. How many Fuzzies have we, now, with this new bunch?”
He counted mentally. His own family: Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Baby Fuzzy and Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko and Cinderella. George Lunt’s Fuzzies. Dr. Crippen and Dillinger and Ned Kelly and Lizzie Borden and Calamity Jane. The nine whom they had found at the camp when they returned from Mallorysport after the trial, and the six who came in day before yesterday, and four yesterday morning, and the two last evening, and now this gang.
“Thirty-eight, counting Baby. That’s a lot of Fuzzies,” he observed.
“You just think it is,” Lunt told him. “The patrols we’ve had out north of here say they’re still coming. This time next week, we’ll have a couple of hundred.”
And before then, the ones who were here would begin to feel overcrowded, and lot of nice new shoppo-diggo would get bloodied. He said so, adding:
“You have a tactical plan for dealing with a native uprising, Major?”
“I’ve been worrying about it. You know, we could get rid of a lot of them,” Lunt said. “Just mention on telecast that we have more Fuzzies than we know what to do with, and we’d have to start rationing them.”
They’d have to do that, anyhow. With all the publicity since the trial, everybody was Fuzzy crazy. Everybody wanted Fuzzies of their own, and where there’s a demand, there are suppliers, legitimate or otherwise. It was a wonder the woods weren’t full of people catching Fuzzies to sell now. For all he knew, maybe they were.
And a lot of people shouldn’t be allowed to have Fuzzies. Not just sadists and perverts, either. People who’d want Fuzzies because the Joneses had them, and then neglect them. People who would get tired of them after a while and dump them outside town. People who couldn’t get it through their moronic heads that Fuzzies were people too. So they’d have to set up some regular system of Fuzzy adoption.
He’d thought, at first, of Ruth Ortheris, Ruth van Riebeek she was, now, for that, but she and her husband were needed too urgently here at the camp on the Fuzzy-study program. There were just too many things about Fuzzies neither he nor anybody else knew, yet, and he’d have to find out what was good for them and what wasn’t.
He looked at the clock; 0935; that would be 0635 in Mallorysport. After lunch, which would be mid-morning there, he’d call her and find out how soon she’d be coming out.
CHAPTER THREE
RUTH VAN RIEBEEK — she had resigned both her Navy commission and her maiden name simultaneously five days ago — ought, she told herself, to be happy and excited. She was clear out of the Navy Intelligence and its dark corridors of deceit and suspicion, and she and Gerd were married, and any scientific worker in the Federation would give anything to be in her place. A whole new science, the study of a new race of sapient beings; why, it was only the ninth time that had happened in the five centuries since the first Terran starship left the Sol System. A tiny spot of light — what they really knew about the Fuzzies — surrounded by a twilight zone of what they thought they knew, mostly erroneous. And beyond that, the dark of ignorance, full of strange surprises, waiting to be conquered. And she was in on the very beginning of it. It was a wonderful opportunity.
But wasn’t it just one Nifflheim of a way to spend a honeymoon?
When she and Gerd were married, everything was going to be so wonderful. They would spend a lazy week here in the city, just being happy together and making plans and gathering things for their new home. Then they would go back to Beta Continent, and Gerd would work the sunstone diggings in partnership with Jack Holloway while she kept house, and they would spend the rest of their lives being happy together in the woods, with their four Fuzzies, Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome.
The honeymoon, as such, had lasted one night, here at the Hotel Mallory. The next morning, before they were through breakfast, Jack Holloway was screening them. Space Commodore Napier had appointed Ben Rainsford Governor, and Ben had immediately appointed Jack Commissioner of Native Affairs, and now Jack was appointing Gerd to head his study and research bureau, taking it for granted that Gerd would accept. Gerd had, taking it for granted that she would agree, as, after a rebellious moment, she had.
After all, weren’t they all responsible for what had happened? The Fuzzies certainly weren’t; they hadn’t gone to law to be declared sapient. All a Fuzzy wanted was to have fun. And they were responsible to the Fuzzies for what would happen to them hereafter, all of them together, Ben Rainsford and Jack Holloway and she and Gerd, and Pancho Ybarra. And now, Lynne Andrews.
Through the open front of the room, on the balcony, she could hear Lynne’s voice, half amused and half exasperated:
“You little devils! Bring that back here! Do-bizzo. So josso-aki!”
A Fuzzy — one of the two males, Superego — dashed inside with a lighted cigarette, the other male, Id, and one of the girls, Syndrome, pursuing. She put in her earplug and turned on her hearing-aid, wishing for the millionth time that Fuzzies had humanly audible voices. Id was clamoring that it was his turn and trying to take the cigarette away from Superego, who pushed him off with his free hand, took a quick puff, and handed it to Syndrome, who began puffing hastily on it. Id started to grab it, then saw the cigarette she was smoking and ran to climb on her lap, pleading:
“Mummy Woof, josso-aki smokko.”
Lynne Andrews, slender and blonde, followed them into the room, the earplug wire of her hearing-aid leading down from under the green bandeau around her head. She carried Complex, squirming in her arms. Complex was complaining that Auntie Lynne wouldn’t give her smokko.
“That’s one Terran word they picked up soon enough,” Lynne was commenting.
“Let her have one; it won’t hurt her.” With scientific caution, she added, “It doesn’t seem to hurt them.”
She knew what Lynne was thinking. She had been recruited — shanghaied would probably be a better word — from Mallorysport General Hospital because they wanted somebody whose M.D. was a little less a matter of form than hers or Pancho Ybarra’s. Lynne was a pediatrician, which had seemed appropriate because Fuzzies were about the size of year-old human children and because a pediatrician, like a veterinarian, has to be able to get along with a minimum of cooperation from the patient. Unfortunately, she was carrying it beyond analogy and equating Fuzzies with human children. A year-old human oughtn’t to be allowed to smoke, so neither should a Fuzzy, who might be fifty for all anybody knew to the contrary.
She gave Id her cigarette. Lynne, apparently much against her better judgment, sat down on a couch and lit one for Complex, and one for herself, and then lit a third for Superego. Now all the Fuzzies had smokko. Syndrome ran to one of the low cocktail tables and came back with an ashtray, which she put on the floor. The others sat down with her around it, all but Id, who stayed on Mummy Woof’s lap.