Fuzzies and Other People

CHAPTER FOUR

LESLIE COOMBES LAID his cigarette in the ashtray and picked up his cocktail, sipping slowly. As he did so, he gave an irrationally apprehensive glance at the big globe of the planet floating off the floor on its own contragravity, spotlighted by a simulated sun and rotating slowly, its two satellites, Xerxes and Darius, orbiting about it. Darius still belonged outright to the Company, even after the Pendarvis Decisions. Xerxes never had; it had been reserved by the Federation as a naval base when the old Company had been chartered. The evening shadow-line had just touched the east coast of Alpha Continent and was approaching the spot that represented Mallorysport.

Victor Grego caught the involuntary glance and laughed.

“Still nervous about it, Leslie? It’s had its teeth pulled.”

Yes, after it had been too late, after the Fuzzy Trial, when they had realized that every word spoken in Grego’s private office had been known to Naval Intelligence, and that Henry Stenson, who had built it, had been a Federation undercover agent. There had been a microphone and a midget radio transmitter inside. Stenson had planted a similar set in a bartending robot at the Residency, which was why the former Resident General, Nick Emmert, was now aboard a destroyer bound for Terra, to face malfeasance charges. Coombes wondered how many more of those things Stenson had strewn about Mallorysport; he’d almost dismantled his own apartment looking in vain for one, and he still wasn’t sure.

“It wouldn’t matter, anyhow,” Grego continued. “We’re all friends now. Aren’t we, Diamond?”

The Fuzzy on Grego’s chair-arm snuggled closer to him, pleased at being included in the Big One conversation.

“Tha’s ri’; everybody friend. Pappy Vic, Pappy Jack, Unka Less’ee, Unka Gus, Pappy Ben, Flora, Fauna…” He went on naming all the people, Fuzzies and Big Ones, who were friends. It was a surprising list; only a few months ago nobody but a lunatic would have called Jack Holloway and Bennett Rainsford and Gus Brannhard friends of his and Victor Grego’s. “Everybody friend now. Everything nice.”

“Everything nice,” Coombes agreed. “For the time being, at least. Victor, you’re getting Fuzzyfuzz all over your coat.”

“Who cares? It’s my coat, and it’s my Fuzzy, and besides, I don’t think he’s shedding now.”

“And all bad Big Ones gone to jail-place,” Diamond said. “Not make trouble, anymore. What is like, jail-place? Is like dark dirty place where bad Big Ones put Fuzzies?”

“Something like that,” Grego told the Fuzzy.

The trouble was, they hadn’t put all the bad Big Ones in jail. They hadn’t been able to prove anything against Hugo Ingermann, and that left a bad taste in his mouth. And it reminded him of something.

“Did you find the rest of those sunstones, Victor?”

Grego shook his head. “No. At first I thought the Fuzzies must have lost them in the ventilation system, but we put robo-snoopers through all the ducts and didn’t find anything. Then Harry Steefer thought some of his cops had held out on him, but we questioned everybody under veridication and nobody knew anything. I don’t know where in Nifflheim they are.”

“A quarter-million sols isn’t exactly sparrow-fodder, Victor.”

“Almost. Wait till we get enough men and equipment in at Yellowsand Canyon; we’ll be taking out twice that in a day. My God, Leslie; you ought to see that place! It’s fantastic.”

“All I’d see would be a lot of rock. I’ll take your word for it.”

“There’s this layer of sunstone flint, averaging two hundred feet thick, all along the face of the Divide for eight and a half miles west of the canyon and better than ten miles east of it; it runs back four miles before it tapers out. Of course, there’s a couple of hundred feet of sandstone on top of it that’ll have to be stripped off, but we’ll just shove that down into the canyon. It won’t, really, be as much of a job as draining Big Blackwater was. Are the agreements ready to sign?”

“Yes. The general agreement obligates the Company to continue all the services performed by the old chartered company; in return, the Government agrees to lease us all the unseated public lands declared public domain by the Pendarvis Decisions, except the area north of the Little Blackwater and the north branch of the Snake River, the Fuzzy Reservation. The special agreement gives us a lease on the tract around the Yellowsand Canyon; we pay four-fifty sols for every carat weight of thermofluorescent sunstones we take out, the money to be administered for the Fuzzies by the Government. Both agreements for nine hundred and ninety-nine years.”

“Or until adjudged invalid by the court.”

“Oh, yes; I got that inserted everywhere I could stick it. The only thing I’m worried about now is how much trouble the Terra-side stock-holders of the late Chartered Zarathustra Company may give us.”

“Well, they have an equity of some sort, as individuals,” Grego admitted. “But there simply is no Chartered Zarathustra Company.”

“I can’t be positive. The Chartered Loki Company was dissolved by court order, for violation of Federation law. The stockholders lost completely. The Chartered Uller Company was taken over by the Government after the Uprising, in 526; the Government simply confirmed General von Schlichten as governor-general and payed off the stockholders at face value. And when the Chartered Fenris Company went bankrupt, the planet was taken over by some of the colonists, and the stockholders, I believe, were paid two and a quarter centisols on the sol. Those are the only precedents, and none of them applies here.” He drank some more of his cocktail. “I shall have to go to Terra myself to represent the new Charterless Zarathustra Company, Ltd., of Zarathustra.”

“I’ll hate to see you go.”

“Thank you, Victor. I’m not looking forward to it, myself.” Six months aboard ship would be almost as bad as a jail sentence. And then at least a year on Terra, getting things straightened out and engaging a law firm in Kapstaad or Johannesburg to handle the long litigation that would ensue. “I hope to be back in a couple of years. I doubt if I shall enjoy reaccustoming myself to life on our dear mother planet.” He finished what was in his glass and held it up. “May I have another cocktail, Victor?”

“Why, surely.” Grego finished his own drink. “Diamond, you please go give Unka Less’ee koktel-drinko. Bring koktel-drinko for Pappy Vic, too.”

“Hokay.”

Diamond jumped down from the chair-arm and ran to get the cocktail jug. Leaning forward, Coombes held his glass down where Diamond could reach it; the Fuzzy filled it to the brim without spilling a drop.

“Thank you, Diamond.”

“Welcome, Unka Less’ee,” Diamond replied just as politely, and carried the jug to fill Pappy Vic’s glass.

He didn’t pour a drink for himself. He’d had a drink, once, and had never forgotten the hangover it gave him; he didn’t want another like it. Maybe that was one of the things Ernst Mallin meant when he said Fuzzies were saner than Humans.

GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS BRANNHARD puffed contentedly on his cigar. Behind him, a couple of things more or less like birds twittered among the branches of a tree. In front, the towering buildings of Mallorysport were black against a riot of sunset red and gold and orange. From across the lawn came sounds of Fuzzies — Ben Rainsford’s Flora and Fauna and a couple of their visitors — at play. Ben Rainsford, an elfish little man with a bald head and a straggly red beard, sat hunched forward in his chair, staring into a highball he held in both hands.

“But, Gus,” he was protesting. “Don’t you think Victor Grego can be trusted?”

That was a volte-face for Ben. A couple of months ago he’d been positive that there was no infamous treachery too black for Grego.

“Sure I do.” Gus shifted the cigar to his left hand and picked up his own drink, an old-fashioned glass full of straight whiskey. “You just have to watch him a little, that’s all.” A few drops of whiskey dribbled into his beard; he blotted them with the back of his hand and put the cigar back into his mouth. “Why?”

“Well, all this ‘until adjudged invalid by the court’ stuff in the agreements. You think he’s fixing booby traps for us?”

“No. I know what he’s doing. He’s fixing to bluff the Terra-side stockholders of the old Chartered Company. Make them think he’ll break the agreements and negotiate new ones for himself if they don’t go along with him. He wants to keep control of the new Company himself.”

“Well, I’m with him on that!” Rainsford said vehemently. “Monopoly or no monopoly, I want the Company run on Zarathustra, for the benefit of Zarathustra. But then, why do you want to hold off on signing the agreements?”

“Just till after the election, Ben. We want our delegates elected, and we want our Colonial Constitution adopted. Once we do that, we won’t have any trouble electing the kind of a legislature we want. But there’s going to be opposition to this public-land deal. A lot of people have been expecting to get rich staking claims to the land the Pendarvis Decisions put in public domain, and now it’s being all leased back to the CZC for a thousand years, and that’s longer than any of them want to wait.”

“Gus, a lot more people, and a lot more influential people, are going to be glad the Government won’t have to start levying taxes,” Rainsford replied.

Ben had a point there. There’d never been any kind of taxation on Zarathustra; the Company had footed all the bills for everything. And now there wouldn’t be need for any in the future, not even for the new Native Commission. The Fuzzies would be paying their own way, from sunstone royalties.

“And the would-be land-grabbers aren’t organized, and we are,” Rainsford went on. “The only organized opposition we ever had was from this People’s Prosperity Party of Hugo Ingermann’s, and now Ingermann’s a dead duck.”

That was over optimism, a vice to which Ben wasn’t ordinarily addicted.

“Ben, any time you think Hugo Ingermann’s dead, you want to shoot him again. He’s just playing possum.”

“I wish we could have him shot for real, along with the rest of them.”

“Well, he wasn’t guilty along with the rest of them, that’s why we couldn’t. It’s probably the only thing in his life he hasn’t been guilty of, but he didn’t know anything about that job till they hauled him in and began interrogating him. Why, Nifflheim, we couldn’t even get him disbarred!”

He and Leslie Coombes had tried hard enough, but the Bar Association was made up of lawyers, and lawyers are precedent-minded. Most of them had crooked clients themselves, and most of them had cut corners representing them. They didn’t want Ingermann’s disbarment used as a precedent against them.

“And now he’s defending Thaxter and the Evinses and Novaes,” Rainsford said. “He’ll get them off, too; you watch if he doesn’t.”

“Not while I’m Chief Prosecutor!”

He shifted his cigar again, and had a drink on that. He wished he felt as confident as he’d sounded.

THE DEPUTY-MARSHAL UNLOCKED the door and stood aside for Hugo Ingermann to enter, looking at him as though he’d crawled from under a flat stone. Everybody was looking at him that way around Central Courts now. He smiled sweetly.

“Thank you, deputy,” he said.

“Don’t bother, I get paid for it,” the uniformed deputy said. “All I hope is they draw my name out of the hat when they take your clients out in the jail-yard. Too bad you won’t be going along with them. I’d pay for the privilege of shooting you.”

And if he complained to the Colonial Marshal, Max Fane would say, “Hell, so would I.”

The steel-walled room was small and bare, its only furnishings a table welded to the steel floor and half a dozen straight chairs. It reeked of disinfectant, like the rest of the jail. He got out his cigarettes and lit one, then laid the box and the lighter on the table and looked quickly about. He couldn’t see any screen-pickup — maybe there wasn’t any — but he was sure there was a microphone somewhere. He was still looking when the door opened again.

Three men and a woman entered, in sandals, long robes, and, probably, nothing else. They’d been made to change before being brought here, and would change back after a close physical search before being returned to their cells. Another deputy was with them. He said:

“Two hours maximum. If you’re through before then, use the bell.”

Then the door was closed and locked.

“Don’t say anything,” he warned. “The room’s probably bugged. Sit down; help yourselves to cigarettes.”

He remained standing, looking at them: Conrad Evins, small and usually fussy and precise, now tense and haggard. He had been chief gem-buyer for the Company; the robbery had been his idea originally — his or his wife’s. Rose Evins, having lighted a cigarette, sat looking at it, her hands on the table. She was a dead woman and had accepted her fate; her face was calm with the resignation of hopelessness. Leo Thaxter, beefy and blue-jowled, with black hair and an out-thrust lower lip, was her brother. He had been top man in the loan-shark racket, and banker for the Mallorysport underworld; and he had been the front through whom Ingermann had acquired title to much of the privately owned real estate north of the city. It had been in one of those buildings, a vacant warehouse, that the five Fuzzies captured on Beta Continent had been kept and trained to crawl through ventilation ducts and remove simulated sunstones from cabinets in a mock-up of the Company gem-vault. Phil Novaes, the youngest of the four, was afraid and trying not to show it. He and his partner, Moses Herckerd, former Company survey-scouts, had captured the Fuzzies and brought them to town. Herckerd wasn’t present; he’d stopped too many submachine-gun bullets the night of the attempted robbery.

“Well,” he began when he had their attention, “they have you cold on the larceny and burglary and criminal conspiracy charges. Nobody, not even I, can get you acquitted of them. That’s ten-to-twenty, and don’t expect any minimum sentences, either; they’ll throw the book at all of you. I do not, however, believe that you can be convicted of the two capital charges, enslavement and faginy. Just to make sure, though, I believe it would be wise for you to plead guilty to the larceny and burglary and conspiracy charges if the prosecution will agree to drop the other two.”

The four looked at one another. He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the old one, dropping the butt on the floor and tramping it.

“Twenty years is a hell of a long time,” Thaxter said. “You’re dead a damn sight longer, though. Yes, if you can make a deal, go ahead.”

“What makes you think you can?” Conrad Evins demanded. “You say they’re sure of conviction on the sunstone charges. Why would they take a plea on them and drop the Fuzzy charges? That’s what they really want to convict us on.”

“Want to, yes. But I don’t believe they can, and I think Gus Brannhard doesn’t, either. Enslavement is the reduction of a sapient being to the status of chattel property; purchase or sale of a sapient being so chattelized; and/or compulsory labor or service under restraint. Well, we’ll claim those Fuzzies weren’t slaves but willing accomplices.”

“That’s not the way the Fuzzies tell it,” Rose Evins said indifferently.

“In court, the Fuzzies won’t tell it any way at all,” he told them. “In court, the Fuzzies will not be permitted to testify. Take my word for it; they just won’t.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Thaxter grunted skeptically. “If true. How about the faginy charge?”

Ingermann puffed on his cigarette and blew smoke at the overhead light, then sat down on the edge of the table. “Faginy,” he began, “consists of training minor children to perform criminal and/or immoral acts; and/or compelling minor children to perform such acts; and/or deriving gain or profit from performance of such acts by minor children. According to the Pendarvis Decisions, Fuzzies are legally equivalent to human children of under twelve years of age, so according to the Pendarvis Decisions, what you did when you trained those Fuzzies to crawl through ventilation ducts and remove simulated sunstones from cabinets in a mock-up of the Company gem-vault was faginy; and so was taking them to Company House and having them crawl in and get out the real sunstones; and, according to law, the penalty is death by shooting, mandatory and without discretion of the court.

“Well, I’m attacking this legal fiction that a mature adult Fuzzy is a minor child. No one in this Government-Company axis wants to have to defend the Fuzzies’ minor-child status in court. That’s why they’ll take your pleas on the sunstone charges and drop the Fuzzy charges. As you remarked, Leo, twenty years is a long time, but you’re dead a lot longer.”

An incredulous, almost hopeful, look came into Rose Evins’s eyes, and was instantly extinguished. She wasn’t going to abandon the peace of resignation for the torments of hope.

“Well, yes,” she said softly. “Plead us guilty on those other charges. It won’t make any difference.”

Her husband also agreed, taking his cue from her; Novaes took his from both, simply nodding. Thaxter’s mouth curved down more at the corners, and his lower lip jutted out farther.

“It better not,” he said. “Ingermann, if you plead us guilty on the sunstone charges and then get us shot for faginy or enslavement—”

“Shut up!” Ingermann barked. He was frightened; he knew what Thaxter was going to say next. “You damned fool, didn’t I tell you they have this room bugged?”