Maybe the Fuzzies had wanted the child to play with them, and she’d gotten frightened and hurt one of them. A ten-year-old human child would look dangerously large to a Fuzzy, and if they thought they were menaced they would fight back savagely.
They were still alive and in the city. That was one thing. But they were in worse danger than they had ever been; that was another. Fane was asking Brannhard how soon he could be dressed.
“Five minutes? Good, I’ll be along to pick you up,” he said. “Be seeing you.”
Jack hurried into the bedroom he and Brannhard shared; he kicked off his moccasins and began pulling on his boots. Brannhard, pulling his trousers up over his pajama pants, wanted to know where he thought he was going.
“With you. I’ve got to find them before some dumb son of a Khooghra shoots them.”
“You stay here,” Gus ordered. “Stay by the communication screen, and keep the viewscreen on for the news. But don’t stop putting your boots on; you may have to get out of here fast if I call you and tell you they’ve been located. I’ll call you as soon as I get anything definite.”
Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide, openly owned and operated by the Company. The newscaster was wrought up about the brutal attack on the innocent child, but he was having trouble focusing the blame. After all, who’d let the Fuzzies escape in the first place? And even a skilled semanticist had trouble making anything called a Fuzzy sound menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at about twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six Fuzzies, armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged her down and beaten her severely. Her screams had brought her father, and he had driven the Fuzzies away. Police had brought both the girl and her father, Oscar Lurkin, to headquarters, where they had told their story. City police, Company police and constabulary troopers and parties of armed citizens were combing the eastern side of the city; Resident General Emmert had acted at once to offer a reward of five thousand sols apiece…
“The kid’s lying, and if they ever get a veridicator on her, they’ll prove it,” he said. “Emmert, or Grego, or the two of them together, bribed those people to tell that story.”
“Oh, I take that for granted,” Gerd said. “I know that place. Junktown. Ruth does a lot of work there for juvenile court.” He stopped briefly, pain in his eyes, and then continued: “You can hire anybody to do anything over there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in advance.”
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering the Fuzzy hunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies of Junktown were floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and poking among them. Once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring at the ground from it over a machine gun.
“Wooo! Am I glad I’m not in that mess!” Gerd exclaimed. “Anybody sees something he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang’ll massacre each other in ten seconds.”
“I hope they do!”
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was being extremely saracastic about the whole thing. Into the middle of one view of a rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the studio cut a view of the Fuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up appealing while waiting for breakfast. “These,” a voice said, “are the terrible monsters against whom all these brave men are protecting us.”
A few moments later, a rife flash and a bang, and then a fusillade brought Jack’s heart into his throat. The pickup car jetted toward it; by the time it reached the spot, the shooting had stopped, and a crowd was gathering around something white on the ground. He had to force himself to look, then gave a shuddering breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, a three-horned domesticated ungulate.
“Oh-Oh! Some squatter’s milk supply finished.” The commentator laughed. “Not the first one tonight either. Attorney General — former Chief Prosecutor — O’Brien’s going to have quite a few suits against the administration to defend as a result of this business.”
“He’s going to have a goddamn thundering big one from Jack Holloway!”
The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on.
“I just talked to Judge Pendarvis,” Gus Brannhard reported out of it. “He’s issuing an order restraining Emmert from paying any reward except for Fuzzies turned over alive and uninjured to Marshal Fane. And he’s issuing a warning that until the status of the Fuzzies is determined, anybody killing one will face charges of murder.”
“That’s fine, Gus! Have you seen the girl or her father yet?”
Brannhard snarled angrily. “The girl’s in the Company hospital, in a private room. The doctors won’t let anybody see her. I think Emmert’s hiding the father in the Residency. And I haven’t seen the two cops who brought them in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the detective lieutenant who was on duty here. They’ve all lammed out. Max has a couple of men over in Junktown, trying to find out who called the cops in the first place. We may get something out of that.”
The Chief Justice’s action was announced a few minutes later; it got to the hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy hunt began falling apart. The City and Company police dropped out immediately. Most of the civilians, hoping to grab five thousand sols’ worth of live Fuzzy, stayed on for twenty minutes, and so, apparently to control them, did the constabulary. Then the reward was canceled, the airborne floodlights went off and the whole thing broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as soon as he heeled the door shut after him. When he had his jacket and neckcloth off, he dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler with whisky, gulped half of it and then began pulling off his boots.
“If that drink has a kid sister, I’ll take it,” Gerd muttered. “What happened, Gus?”
Brannhard began to curse. “The whole thing’s a fake; it stinks from here to Nifflheim. It would stink on Nifflheim.” He picked up a cigar butt he had laid aside when Fane’s call had come in and relighted it. “We found the woman who called the police. Neighbor; she says she saw Lurkin come home drunk, and a little later she heard the girl screaming. She says he beats her up every time he gets drunk, which is about five times a week, and she’d made up her mind to stop it the next chance she got. She denied having seen anything that even looked like a Fuzzy anywhere around.”
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of Fuzzy reports; Jack went to the marshal’s office to interview the people making them. The first dozen were of a piece with the ones that had come in originally. Then he talked to a young man who had something of different quality.
“I saw them as plain as I’m seeing you, not more than fifty feet away,” he said. “I had an autocarbine, and I pulled up on them, but, gosh, I couldn’t shoot them. They were just like little people, Mr. Holloway, and they looked so scared and helpless. So I held over their heads and let off a two-second burst to scare them away before anybody else saw them and shot them.”
“Well, son, I’d like to shake your hand for that. You know, you thought you were throwing away a lot of money there. How many did you see?”
“Well, only four. I’d heard that there were six, but the other two could have been back in the brush where I didn’t see them.”
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were three other people who had actually seen Fuzzies; none was sure how many, but they were all positive about locations and times. Plotting the reports on the map, it was apparent that the Fuzzies were moving north and west across the outskirts of the city.