Khadra came back; he had his beret on, and was buckling on his pistol.
“Earlie says he has a report on a Fuzzy being seen in an apartment-unit over on the north side of the city,” he said. “Informant says a Fuzzy is being kept by a family on one of the upper floors. He’s sending men there now.”
That would probably be one of the five Herckerd and Novaes had brought in. He could see what had happened. The two former Company employees had sold them all to somebody here in Mallorysport, some racketeer who was selling them individually. There was somebody who really did need shooting. And by this time, Herckerd and Novaes would be back on Beta Continent, trapping more. Get the people who had bought this Fuzzy under veridication, the police had plenty of ways to make people want to talk, and work back from there.
“I’ll go see what it is,” Khadra was saying. “I’ll call in as soon as I can. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. In case I don’t get back, thanks for a nice evening, Judge, Mrs. Pendarvis.”
He hurried out, and for a moment nobody said anything. Then Jimenez suggested that if this were one of the Herckerd-Novaes lot, Diamond ought to see him as soon as possible; he’d be able to identify him. Khadra would think of that. Mrs. Pendarvis hoped there wouldn’t be any shooting. Mallorysport city police were notoriously trigger-happy. The conversation continued by jerks and starts; the two Fuzzies seemed to be the only ones unconcerned.
After about an hour, Khadra returned; he had left his belt and beret in the hall.
“What was it?” Brannhard asked. Jack was wanting to know if the Fuzzy was all right.
“It wasn’t a Fuzzy,” Khadra said disgustedly. “It was a Terran marmoset; these people have had it for a couple of years; brought it from Terra. The people who own it have had a wire screen around their terrace to keep it, ever since they moved in. Somebody in an aircar saw it outside and thought it was a Fuzzy. I wonder how much more of this we’re going to get.”
It was a wonder he hadn’t gotten that, himself, when his own family was lost and he was hunting for them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE AIR TRAFFIC around Central Courts Building the next morning seemed normal to Jack Holloway. There were quite a few cars on the landing stage above the sixth level down when he came in, but no more than he remembered from the time of the Fuzzy Trial. It was not until he left the escalator on the fourth floor below, where the Adoption Bureau offices were, that he began to suspect that there was a Fuzzy rush on.
The corridor leading back from the main hall to the suite that had been taken over yesterday was jammed. It was a well behaved, well dressed crowd, mostly couples clinging to each other to avoid being jostled apart. Everybody seemed to be happy and excited; it was more like a Year-End Holidays shopping crowd than anything else.
A uniformed deputy-marshal saw him and approached, touching his cap-brim in a half salute.
“Mr. Holloway; are you trying to get in to your offices? You’d better come this way, sir; there’s a queue down at the other end.”
There must be five or six hundred of them. Cut that in half; most of them were couples.
“How long’s this been going on?” he asked, noticing that several more couples and individuals were coming behind him.
“Since about 0700. There were a few here before then; the big rush didn’t start till 0830.”
Some of the people in the rear of the jam saw and recognized him. “Holloway.” “Jack Holloway; he’s the Commissioner.” “Mr. Holloway; are there Fuzzies here now?”
The deputy took him down the hall and unlocked the door of an office; it was empty, and the desks and chairs and things shrouded in dust-covers. They went through and out into a back hall, where another deputy-marshal was arguing with some people who were trying to get in that way.
“Well, why are they letting him in; who’s he?” a woman demanded.
“He works here. That’s Jack Holloway.”
“Oh! Mr. Holloway! Can you tell us how soon we can get Fuzzies?”
His guide rushed him, almost as though he were under arrest, along the hall, and opened another door.
“In here, Mr. Holloway; Mrs. Pendarvis’s office. I’ll have to get back and keep that mob in front straightened out.” He touched his cap-brim again and hastened away.
Mrs. Pendarvis sat at a desk, her back to the door, going over a stack of forms in front of her. Beside her, at a smaller desk, a girl was taking them as she finished with them, and talking into the whisper-mouthpiece of a vocowriter. Two more girls sat at another desk, one talking to somebody in a communication screen. Mrs. Pendarvis said, “Who is it?” and turned her head, then rose, extending her hand. “Oh; Mr. Holloway. Good morning. What’s it like out in the hall, now?”
“Well, you see how I had to come in. I’d say about five hundred, now. How are you handling them?”
She gestured toward the door to the front office, and he opened it and looked through. Five girls sat at five desks; each was interviewing applicants. Another girl was gathering up application-forms and carrying them to a desk where they were being sorted to be passed on to the back office.
“I arrived at 0830,” Mrs. Pendarvis said. “Just after I dropped Pierrot and Columbine off at Government House. There was a crowd then, and it’s been going on ever since. How many Fuzzies have you, Mr. Holloway?”
“Available for adoption? I don’t know. Beside mine and Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s and the Constabulary Fuzzies, there were forty day before yesterday. That had gotten up to a hundred and three by last evening.”
“We have, to date, three hundred and eleven applications; there are possibly twenty more that haven’t been sent back to me yet. By the time we close, it’ll be five or six hundred. How are we going to handle this, anyhow? Some of these people want just one Fuzzy, some of them want two, some of them will take a whole family. And we can’t separate Fuzzies who want to stay together. If you’d separate Pierrot and Columbine, they’d both grieve themselves to death. And there are families of five or six who want to stay together, aren’t there?”
“Well, not permanently. These groups aren’t really families; they’re sort of temporary gangs for mutual assistance. Five or six are about as many as can make a living together in the woods. They’re hunters and food-gatherers, low Paleolithic economy, and individual small-game hunters at that. When a gang gets too big to live together, they split up; when one couple meets another, they team up to hunt together. That’s why they have such a well-developed and uniform language, and I imagine that’s how the news about the zatku spread all over the Fuzzy country as fast as it did. They don’t even mate permanently. Your pair are just young, first mating for both of them. They think each other are the most wonderful ever. But you will have others that won’t want to be separated; you’ll have to let them be adopted together.” He thought for a moment. “You can’t begin to furnish Fuzzies for everybody; why don’t you give them out by lot? Each of those applications is numbered, isn’t it? Draw numbers.”
“Like a jury-drawing, of course. Let the jury-commissioners handle that,” the Chief Justice’s wife said.
“Fair enough. You’ll have to investigate each of these applicants, of course; that’ll take a little time, won’t it?”
“Well, Captain Khadra’s taking charge of them. He’s borrowed some people from the schools, and some from the city police juvenile squad and some from the company personnel division. I’ve been getting my staff together the same way — parent-teacher groups, Juvenile Welfare. I’m going to get a paid staff together, as soon as I can. I think they’ll come from the Company’s public service division; I’m told that Mr. Grego’s going to suspend all those activities in ninety days.”