Fuzzies and Other People

CHAPTER TEN

IT WAS ELECTION day at Hoksu-Mitto. Not Fuzzy tribal election; this was for Big Ones, for delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and it had been going on all over the planet, starting hours ago at Kellytown on Epsilon Continent.

Voting was a simple matter. Jack Holloway had exercised his right of suffrage in his own living room after finishing breakfast by screening the Constabulary post two hundred odd miles south of him and transmitting his fingerprints there. Then he loaded his pipe, and before he had it drawing properly the robot at Constabulary Fifteen had sent his prints to Red Hill. The election robot there had transmitted them to the planetary election office in Central Courts Building in Mallorysport on Alpha Continent, then reported back that Jack Holloway, of Hoksu-Mitto, formerly Holloway’s Camp, was a properly registered voter, and the machine gave a small cluck and ejected a photoprinted ballot. He marked the ballot with an X after the name of the Hon. Horace Stannery, an undistinguished and rather less-than-brilliant lawyer in Red Hill but a loyal Company and Government man, and held it up to the transmitting screen.

The whole thing was handled precisely and secretly by incorruptible robots. At least, that was what all the school civics books said. He carried the ballot original over and put it in the drawer of his big table. Hang onto that, he thought; be a museum-piece in half a century. Then he put on the telecast screen while he drank another cup of coffee.

The Gamma Continent vote was all in, what there was of it. Ten seats on the Convention, eight of them Government-CZC regulars. In his own district on Beta, seventy-eight votes, his own included, had given Stannery sixty-two, with the remaining sixteen divided between the two wildcat candidates. It was rather like that all over the continent. Alpha, where a hundred ten out of a hundred fifty seats were being contested, hadn’t begun to vote yet; it was only 0445 there.

He kept a telecast screen on in his office throughout the morning. By noon, nine out of ten of the Rainsford-Grego slate were well in the lead everywhere. The polls had closed on Epsilon Continent: eighteen out of eighteen regulars elected. It went on like that all afternoon, and by cocktail time the election looked safe. They’d really have something to drink a toast to this afternoon.

The Fuzzies didn’t seem to know that anything out of the ordinary was happening.

GERD VAN RIEBEEK was bothered. Not seriously worried, just nagged by a few small uncertainties and doubts. In the last three weeks, the Protection Force patrol, working to a radius of five hundred miles from Hoksu-Mitto, hadn’t reported seeing a single harpy. In that time, there had been two shot in the Fuzzy country south of the Divide, and another one in the Yellowsand Valley to the north. But not one anywhere near Hoksu-Mitto in the last week. It was looking like Zarathustran pseudopterodactyls were becoming about as extinct as the Terran variety.

There hadn’t been many to start with, of course. Their kills would have wiped out everything else long ago if there had been. Say, one harpy to about a hundred or two hundred square miles. And once Homo s. terra moved into the area, those wouldn’t last long. People liked to be able to let the children run around outdoors, for one thing, and nobody wanted all the calves in a veldbeest herd eaten up before they could grow up. The harpy might have been lord of the Zarathustran skies before the Terrans came, but what chance had it against an aircar rated at Mach 3, carrying a couple of machine guns?

Not that Gerd liked harpies any better than anybody else; not even that he liked them, period. Along with everybody else on Zarathustra, he was convinced that there were two kinds of harpies — live ones and good ones. But he was a general naturalist; ecology was a big part of his subject, and he knew that as soon as you wipe out any single species, things that will affect a dozen other species are going to start happening because every living thing has a role in the general ecological drama.

Harpies were killers. All right, they kept something down; remove them, and that something would have a sudden increase, and that would deplete something they fed on. Or they would begin competing with some other species. And there could be side effects. There was that old story about how the cats killed the field mice and the field mice destroyed the bumblebees’ nests. But the bumblebees pollenated clover; so, when the bird-lovers started shooting cats — just the way the Fuzzylovers were shooting harpies — the clover crop started to fail. Wasn’t that something Darwin wrote up, back about the beginning of the first century Pre-Atomic?

The trouble was, he wasn’t keeping up with things. He’d stopped being a general naturalist and become a Fuzzyologist. Well, the Company’s Science Center tried to keep up with everything. After lunch — well, say just before cocktail time, which would be just after lunch in Mallorysport — he’d screen Juan Jimenez and find out if anything unusual was happening.

THE FUZZY NAMED Kraft — he was the male of the pair — wriggled in the little chair. The globe above and behind him glowed clear blue. Leslie Coombes sympathized with Kraft; he’d seen enough witnesses wriggling like that in the same kind of chair.

“You want to help Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee,” Ernst Mallin was pleading. “Maybe this is not so, but you say. You not, Unka Ernst, Unka Less’ee have bad trouble. Other Big Ones be angry with them.”

“But, Unka Ernst,” Kraft insisted. “I not break asht’ay, Unka Less’ee break.”

The woman in the white smock said, “You tell Auntie Anne you break ashtray. Auntie Anne not be angry at you.”

“Go ahead, Kraft. Tell Miss Nelson you broke ashtray,” he urged.

“Come on, Kraft,” Mallin’s assistant said. “Who broke ashtray?”

The steady blue glow darkened and swirled, as though a bottle of ink had been emptied into it. There were brief glints of violet. Kraft gulped once or twice.

“Unka Less’ee broke asht’ay,” he said.

The globe turned bright red.

Somebody said, “Oh, no!” and he realized that it was himself. Mallin closed his eyes and shuddered. Miss Nelson said something, and he hoped it wasn’t what he thought it was.

“Oh, God; if anything like that happens in court…” he began. The red flush was fading from the veridicator globe. “You’d better send that veridicator to the shop. Or psychoanalyze it; it’s gone bughouse.”

“Unka Ernst,” the Fuzzy was pleading. “Plis, not make do anymore. Kraft not know what to say.”

“No, I won’t, Kraft. Poor little fellow.” Mallin released the Fuzzy from the veridicator, hugging him with a tenderness Coombes had never thought him capable of. “And Auntie Anne not angry with Unka Less’ee. Everybody friends.” He handed Kraft to the girl. “Take him out, Miss Nelson. Give him something nice, and talk to him for a while.”

He waited till she carried the Fuzzy from the room.

“Well, do you know what happened?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. We’ll test the veridicator with a normally mendacious human, but I doubt if there’s anything wrong with it. You know, a veridicator does not actually detect falsification. A veridicator is a machine, and knows nothing about truth or falsehood. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the experiment with the paranoid under veridication?”

“Got that in law-school psychology. Paranoid claimed he was God, and the veridicator confirmed his claim. But why did this veridicator red-light when Kraft was telling the truth?”

“The veridicator only detects the suppression of a statement and the substitution of another. The veridicator here had a subject with two conflicting statements, both of which he had to regard as true. We were insisting that he confess to breaking that ashtray, so, since we said so, it must be true. But he’d seen you break it, so he knew that was also true. He had to suppress one of these true-relative-to-him statements.”

“Well, maybe if he tries it again…”

“No, Mr. Coombes.” Even Frederic Pendarvis ruling on a point of law could not have been more inflexible. “I will not subject this Fuzzy to any more of this. Nor Ebbing. They are both beginning to develop psychoneurotic symptoms, the first I have ever seen in any Fuzzy. We’ll have to get different subjects. How about your defendants, Mr. Coombes?”

“Well, the test-witness isn’t supposed to be a person giving actual testimony. Besides, I don’t want them taught to lie and then have them do it on the stand. How about some of the Fuzzies at Holloway’s?”

“I talked to Mr. Holloway. While he’s aware of the gravity of the situation, he was most hostile to using any of his own family, or Major Lunt’s, or Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s. He uses those Fuzzies as teachers, and lying isn’t something he wants on the curriculum at Fuzzy school.”

“No. I can see that.” Jack wasn’t the type to win battles by losing the war. “Have you no other Fuzzies?”

“Well, certainly Mrs. Hawkwood wouldn’t want the ones I’ve loaned her for the schools trained in prevarication. And the ones I have helping with mental patients at the hospital have been successful mainly because of their complete agreement with reality. I don’t know, Mr. Coombes.”

“Well, we only have three weeks till the trial opens, you know.”