Grego nodded again. “Precisely. Well, we won’t have anything to do with him. We’ll just let Hugo go his malodorous way, and cash in on any scandals he creates. You say Rainsford thinks in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys? Well, Hugo Ingermann is the baddest Bad Guy on the planet, and if Rainsford doesn’t know that, and he probably doesn’t, Gus Brannhard’ll tell him. I just hope Hugo Ingermann goes on attacking the Company every time he opens his mouth.” He finished what was in his glass and unstoppered the jug. “Still with me, Leslie? It’s a half hour yet to dinner.”
As Gus Brannhard started across the lawn on the south side of Government House, two Fuzzies came dashing to meet him. Their names were Flora and Fauna, and as usual he had to pause and remember that fauns were male and that Flora was a regular feminine name. The names some people gave Fuzzies. Of course, Ben was a naturalist. If he had a pair of Fuzzies of his own, he’d probably have called them Felony and Misdemeanor, or Misfeasance and Malfeasance. He put in his earphone and squatted to get down to their level.
“Hello, sapient being. Now keep your hands out of Uncle Gus’s whiskers.” He glanced up and saw the small man with the red beard approaching. “Hello, Ben. They pull yours much?”
“Sometimes. I haven’t so much to pull. Yours is more fun. Jack Holloway says they think you’re a Big Fuzzy.” The Fuzzies were pointing across the lawn, clamoring for him to come and see something. “Oh, sure; their new home. I’ll bet there isn’t a Fuzzy anywhere had a nicer home. Hokay, kids; bizzo.”
The new home was a Marine Corps pup-tent, pitched in an open glade beside a fountain; it would be a lot roomier for two Fuzzies than for two Marines. There were Fuzzy treasures scattered around it, things from toy shops, and odds and ends of bright or colored or oddly shaped junk they had scavenged for themselves. He noticed, and commented on, a stout toy wheelbarrow.
“Oh, yes; we have discovered the wheel,” Ben said. “They were explaining it to me yesterday; very intelligently, as far as I could follow. They give each other rides, and they are very good about taking turns. And they use it to collect loot. Very good about that, too; always ask if they can have anything they find.”
“Well, this is just wonderful,” he told them, and then repeated it in Fuzzy. Ben complimented him on his progress in the language.
“I damn well better learn it. Pendarvis is going to set up a Native Cases Court, like the ones on Loki and Gimli and Thor. Be anybody’s guess how soon I’ll have to listen to a flock of Fuzzy witnesses.”
He looked inside the tent. The blankets and cushions were all piled at one end; bed-making, it seemed, wasn’t a Fuzzy accomplishment. A bed was to sleep in, and no Fuzzy could see the sense in making a bed and then having to unmake it before he could use it. He looked at some of their things, and picked up a little knife, trying the edge on his thumb. Immediately, Flora cried out:
“Keffu, Unka Gus! Sha’ap; kuttsu!”
“Muhgawd, Ben; you hear what she said? She speaks Lingua Terra!”
“That’s right. That was one of the first things I taught them. And you don’t have to teach them anything more than once, either.” He looked at his watch, and spoke to the Fuzzies. They seemed disappointed, but Fauna said, “Hokay,” and ran into the tent, bringing out his shoulderbag and chopper-digger, and Flora’s. “Told them we have to make Big One talk, to go hunt landprawns. I had a bunch brought in, this morning, and turned loose for them.”
Fauna piled into the wheelbarrow; Flora got between the shafts and picked it up, starting off at a run, the passenger whooping loudly. Ben watched them vanish among the shrubbery, and got out his pipe and tobacco.
“Gus, why in Nifflheim did Leslie Coombes show up in court today and back you against this fellow Ingermann?” he demanded. “I thought Grego put Ingermann up to that himself.”
That’s right; any time anything happens, blame Grego.
“No, Ben. The company doesn’t want a big land-rush starting, any more than we do. They don’t want their whole labor force bugging out on them, and that’s what it would come to. I don’t know why I can’t pound it into your head that Victor Grego had as big a stake in keeping things together on this planet as you have.”
“Yes, if he can control it the way he used to. Well, I’m not going to let him…”
He made an impatient noise. “And Ingermann; Grego wouldn’t touch him with a ten-light-year pole. You call Grego a criminal? Well, maybe you were too busy, over on Beta, counting tree rings and checking on the love life of bush-goblins, to know about the Mallorysport underworld, but as a criminal lawyer I had to. Beside Hugo Ingermann, Victor Grego is a saint, and they have images of him in all the churches and work miracles with them. You name any kind of a racket — dope, prostitution, gambling, protection-shakedowns, illicit gem buying, shylocking, stolen goods — and Ingermann’s at the back of it. This action of his, today; he has a ring of crooks who want to make a killing in land speculation. That’s why I wanted to stop him, and that’s why Grego sent Coombes to help me. Ben, you’re going to find that this is only the first of many occasions when you and Grego are going to be on the same side.”
Rainsford started an angry reply; before he could speak, Gerd van Riebeek’s voice floated down from the escalator-head on the terrace above.
“Anybody home down there?”
“No, nobody but us Fuzzies,” Rainsford called back. “Come on down.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WITH A SIGH of relief, Victor Grego entered the living room of his penthouse apartment. His hand rose to the switch beside the door, then dropped; the faint indirect glow from around the edge of the ceiling was enough. He’d just pour himself a drink and sit here in the crepuscular silence, resting. His body was tired, more so than it should be, at his age, but his brain was still racing at top speed. No use trying to go to sleep now.
He took off his jacket and neckcloth and dropped them on a chair, opening his shirt collar as he went to the cellaret; he poured a big inhaler-glass half full of brandy and started for his favorite chair, then returned to get the bottle. It would take more than one glass to brake the speeding wheels inside his head. He placed the bottle on a low table, beside the fluted glass bowl, and sat down, wondering what he had noticed that had disturbed him. Nothing important; he sipped from the glass and leaned back, closing his eyes.
They had the trouble in the veldbeest country on Beta and Delta Continents worked out, at least to where they knew what to do about it. Close down all the engineering jobs, the Big Blackwater drainage project on Beta, and the various construction jobs, and shift men to the cattle ranges; issue them combat equipment and put them on fighting pay, to deal with these gangs of rustlers that were springing up. Maybe if they started a couple of range-wars, Ian Ferguson and his Colonial Constabulary would have to take a hand. But the main thing was to keep the herds together. And the wild veldbeest; Ben Rainsford was a conservationist, he ought to be interested in protecting them.
And he still hadn’t decided on a sunstone buying policy. Not enough information on the present situation. He’d have to do something about that.
Oh, Nifflheim with it; think about it tomorrow.
He drank more brandy, and reached to the glass bowl on the low table, and found that it was empty. That was what had bothered him. It had been half full of the sort of tidbits he privately called nibblements — salted nuts, wafers, things like that — when he and Leslie Coombes had gone through the room on their way down for dinner.
Or had it? Maybe he just thought it had been. He began worrying about that, too. And the way he’d forgotten, this morning, about the sunstone inventory. Better call in Ernst Mallin to give him a checkup.