“That’s right. That includes the schools, and the hospitals. Why don’t you talk to Ernst Mallin? He’ll find you all the people you want. He’s joined the Friends of Little Fuzzy, too, now.”
“Well, after we’ve allocated Fuzzies to these people, what then? Do they come out to your camp and pick their own?”
“Good Lord, no! We have enough trouble, without having the place overrun with human people.” He hadn’t given that thought until now. “What we’ll need will be a place here in Mallorysport where a couple of hundred Fuzzies can stay and where the people who have been endorsed for foster-parents can come and select the ones they want.”
That would have to be a big place, with a park all around it, that could be fenced in to keep them from wandering off and getting lost. A nice place, where they could all have fun together. He didn’t know of any such place, and asked her about it.
“I’ll talk to Mr. Urswick, he’s the Company Chief of Public Services. He’ll know about something. You know, Mr. Holloway, I didn’t have any idea, when I took this job, that it was going to be so complicated.”
“Mrs. Pendarvis, I’ve been saying that every hour on the hour since I let Ben Rainsford talk me into taking the job I have. You’re going to have to do something about information, too — Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies, psychology of; language. We’ll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and language-learning tapes. And hearing aids.”
The door at the side of the room was marked investigation. He found Ahmed Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a city police uniform by screen.
“Well, have you gotten anything from any of them?” he was asking.
“Damn little,” the city policeman told him. “We’ve been pulling them in all day, everybody in town who has a record. And Hugo Ingermann’s been pulling them away from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his legmen and assistants here with portable radios, and as fast as we bring some punk in, they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ; order to show grounds for suspicion. Most of them we can’t question at all; it takes an hour to an hour and a half from the time they’re brought in before we can veridicate those we can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do.”
“Well, how about known associates? Didn’t either of them have any friends?”
“Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they’ve been cooperating, but none of them knows anything.”
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they blanked screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a cigarette.
“Well, you heard it, Jack,” he said. “They just vanished, and the Fuzzies with them. I’m not surprised we’re not getting anything out of their friends in the Company. They wouldn’t know. We searched their rooms; they seem to have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared. And we can’t get anything from underworld sources. None of the city police stool-pigeons knows anything.”
“You know, Ahmed, I’m worried about that. I wonder what’s happened to those Fuzzies…” He sat down on the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and tobacco. “How soon will you be able to start investigating these people who want Fuzzies?”
GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across the table to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they both ought to. Work was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away. and Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.
“Eighty-seven,” Lunt said. “That’s not counting yours and mine and Jack’s.”
“The Extee-Three’s getting low.” They’d had to start rationing it; tomorrow, they’d not be able to issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The Fuzzies wouldn’t like that. “Jack says he thinks speculators are buying it and holding it off the market. They’ll get big prices for it when the Fuzzies start coming in to Mallorysport.”
There wasn’t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept a tin or so in their aircars, in case of forced landings in the wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet’s land surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on, but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet. And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.
“Personally, I wish there were eighty-seven hundred of them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But wait till they get down in the real farm country, and among the sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round too.”
“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them for that. But they just don’t understand about what they mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any idea at all of property in the absence of a visible owner.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they won’t understand that somebody’s planted them, they’ll think they’re just there. And I never saw a farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to protect his crops.”
“Education,” Gerd said.
“Recipe for roast turkey — first catch a turkey,” Lunt said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are we going to catch all the other ones?”
“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside Extee-Three?”
“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patrolling a couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”
“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while. I don’t. That’s what I mean by educating the farmers. A Fuzzy does X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen land-prawns a day, and among them they do about X-times-ten damage.”
“Write up a script about it, and we’ll put it on the air this evening. ‘Be good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the farmer’s best friend.’ Maybe that’ll help some.”
Gerd nodded. “Eighty-seven, we have now. How many little ones?”
“Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?”
“And we think we have five pregnancies. That’s all Lynne Andrews is sure of; the only way she can tell is listening with a stethoscope for fetal movements. They seem to be too small to make any conspicuous visible difference. This is out of eighty seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call that, George?”
George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it automatically. Somewhere, maybe Constabulary School, the coffee had always been too hot to drink right away. Across the messhall, half a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it clear the tables.
“It sure to Nifflheim isn’t any population explosion,” he said.
“Race extinction, George. I don’t know what the normal life expectancy is in the woods, but I’d say four out of five of them die by violence. When the birthrate curve drops below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out.”
“A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you said five of the girls were pregnant, didn’t you? And you admit that’s not complete, if Doc Andrews has to use a stethoscope for a pregnancy test.”