Fuzzies and Other People

CHAPTER NINETEEN

GERD VAN RIEBEEK dropped his cigarette butt and heeled it out. A hundred yards in front of him a blue and white Extee-Three carton stood pin-cushioned with arrows and leaking sand. There were almost as many arrows sticking in the turf around it, most of them very close. The hundred-odd Fuzzies were enthusiastic about it.

“Not good,” he told them. “Half not hit at all.”

“Come close,” one of the Fuzzies protested.

“You hungry, come close not give meat. You not put come-close on stick, put over fire, cook.”

The Fuzzies all laughed; this was a perfectly devastating sally of wit. A bird, about the size of a Terran pigeon, flew across the range halfway to the target. Two arrows hit it at once and it dropped.

“Now that,” he said, “was good! Who did?”

Two of them spoke up; one was his and Ruth’s Superego, and the other was an up-to-now nameless Fuzzy who had come in several weeks ago. Robin Hood would do for him. Then he looked again. No. Maid Marian.

That was with half his mind. The other half was worrying about Jack Holloway. Jack seemed to have stopped giving a damn after he came back from Yellowsand. It if only hadn’t been Little Fuzzy. Any of the others, even one of his own family, he’d just have written off, felt badly about, and gotten over. But Little Fuzzy was something special. He was the first one, and besides that, he had something none of the others had, the something that had brought him into Holloway’s Camp alone to make friends with the strange Big One. Ruth and Pancho and Ernst Mallin hadn’t gotten a dependable IQ-test for Fuzzies developed yet, but they all claimed that Little Fuzzy was a genius. And he was Pappy Jack’s favorite.

And now Jack was drinking, too. Not just a couple before dinner and one or two in the evening. By God, he was drinking as much as Gus Brannhard, and nobody but Gus Brannhard could do that and get away with it. Gerd wished he’d gone along with Jack to Mallorysport, but George Lunt hadn’t been away from here since right after the Fuzzy Trial, and he was entitled to a trip to town; and somebody had to stay and mind the store, so he’d stayed.

Oh, hell, if Jack needed looking after, George could look after him.

“Pappy Gerd! Pappy Gerd!” somebody was calling. He turned to see Jack’s Ko-Ko coming on a run. “Is talk-screen! Mummy Woof say somebody in Big House Place want to make talk.”

“Hokay, I come.” He turned to the Protection Force trooper who was helping him. “Let them go get their arrows. If that carton doesn’t fall apart when they pull them out, let them shoot another course.” Then he started up the slope toward the lab-hut, ahead of Ko-Ko.

It was Juan Jimenez, at Company Science Center. He gave a breath of relief; Jack hadn’t gotten potted and gotten into trouble.

“Hello, Gerd. Nothing more about Little Fuzzy?” he asked.

“No. I don’t think there is anything more. Jack’s in town; did you see him?”

“Yes, at the grand opening of the Fuzzy Club yesterday. Ben and Gus want him to stay over till the convention opens. Gerd, you were asking me about ecological side effects of harpy extermination and wanted me to let you know if anything turned up.”

“Yes. Has anything?”

“I think so. Forests Waters has been after me lately. You know how all those people are; they get little, manageable problems, and never bother consulting anybody, and then when they get big and unmanageable they want me to work miracles. You know where the Squiggle is?”

He did. It was along the inside of the mountain range on the lower western coast. It wasn’t really a badland, but it would do as a reasonable facsimile. Volcanic, geologically recent; a lot of weathered-down lavabeds covered with thin soil; about a thousand little streams twisting every which way and all flowing finally into the main Snake River from the west. Flooded bank-high in rainy season and almost dry in summer, doing little or nothing for the water situation on the cattle ranges at any season. For the last ten years, since the Company had been reforesting it, it had gotten a little better.

“Well, all those young featherleaf trees,” Jimenez said, “they’d been doing fine up to a couple of years ago, holding moisture, stopping erosion, water table going up all over the western half of the cattle country. Then the damned goofers got in among them, and half the young trees are chewed to death now.”

That figured. They’d shot all the harpies out of the southern half of the continent long ago; first chased them out of the cattle country to protect the calves, and then followed them into the upland forests where they’d been feasting on goofers. Now the surplus goofers were being crowded out of the uplands and down into the Squiggle. Up in the north, Fuzzies killed a lot of goofers, but there were no Fuzzies that far south.

But why shouldn’t there be?

“Juan, I have an idea. We have a lot of Fuzzies here who are real sharp with bows and arrows. I was out running an archery class when you called me; you should see them. Say we airlift about fifty of them down to where the goofers are worst, and see what they do.”

“Send them to Chesterville; the chief forester there’ll know where to spot them. How about arrows?”

“Well, how about arrows? How soon do you think you can produce a lot, say a couple of thousand? I’ll send specs when I know where to send them. You can make the shafts out of duralloy, the feathers out of plastic, and the heads out of light steel. They won’t have to shoot through armor-plate, just through goofers.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that; that’s purely a production problem…”

“Then, talk to a production man about it. Is Grego in town? Talk to him; he’ll get your production problems unproblemed.”

“Well, Gerd, thanks a million. That may just be the answer. Airlift them around from place to place and just let them hunt. I’ll bet they’ll get more goofers in a day than five times as many men would get with rifles.”

“Oh, hell, don’t thank me. The Company’s done a lot of things for us. Hokfusine, to put it in one word. Of course, we’ll expect the Company to issue the same rations they’re getting here…”

“Oh, sure. Look, I’ll call Victor. He’ll probably call you back…”