Fuzzy Sapiens

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE BEST TIME for telecast political speeches was between 2000 and 2100, when people were relaxing after dinner and before they started going out or before guests began to arrive. That was a little late for Beta Continent and impossibly so for Gamma, but Delta and Epsilon, to the west, could be reached with late night repeats and about eighty percent of the planetary population was concentrated here on Alpha Continent. Of late, Hugo Ingermann had been having trouble getting on the air at that time. The 2000-2100 spot, he was always told, was already booked, and it would usually turn out to be by the Citizen’s Government League which everybody knew but nobody could prove was masterminded by Leslie Coombes and Victor Grego, or it would be Ben Rainsford trying to alibi his Government, or by a lecture on the care and feeding of Fuzzies. But this time, somebody had goofed. This time, he’d been able to get the 2000-2100 spot himself. The voice of the announcer at the telecast station came out of the sound-outlet:

“… an important message, to all the citizens of the Colony, now, by virtue of the Pendarvis Decisions, enjoying, for the first time, the right of democratic self-government. The next voice you will hear will be that of the Honorable Hugo Ingermann, organizer and leader of the Planetary Prosperity Party. Mr. Ingermann.”

The green light came on, and the showback lightened; he lifted his hand in greeting.

“My… friends!” he began.

FREDERIC PENDARVIS WAS growing coldly angry. It wasn’t an organizational abstraction, the Native Adoption Bureau, that was being attacked; it was his wife, Claudette, and he was taking it personally, and a judge should never take anything personally. Why, he had actually been looking at the plump, bland faced man in the screen, his blue eyes wide with counterfeit sincerity, and wondering whom to send to him with a challenge. Dueling wasn’t illegal on Zarathustra, it wasn’t on most of the newer planets, but judges did not duel.

And the worst of it, he thought, was that the next time he had to rule against Ingermann in court, Ingermann would be sure, by some innuendo which couldn’t be established as overt contempt, to create an impression that it was due to personal vindictiveness.

“It is a disgraceful record,” Ingermann was declaring. “A record reeking with favoritism, inequity, class prejudice. In all, twelve hundred applications have been received. Over two hundred have been rejected outright, often on the most frivolous and insulting grounds…”

“Mental or emotional instability, inability to support or care for a Fuzzy, irresponsibility, bad character, undesirable home conditions,” Claudette, who was beginning to become angry herself, mentioned.

Pierrot and Columbine, on the floor, with a big Mobius strip somebody had made from a length of tape, looked up quickly and then, deciding that it was the man in the wall Mummy was mad at, went back to trying to figure out where the other side always went.

“And of the thousand applications, only three hundred and forty-five have been filled, although five hundred and sixty-six Fuzzies have been brought to this city since the Adoption Bureau was opened. One hundred and seventy-two of these applicants have received a Fuzzy each. One hundred and fifty-five have received two Fuzzies each. And eighteen especially favored ones have received a total of eighty-four Fuzzies.

“And almost without exception, all these Fuzzies have gone to socially or politically prominent persons, persons of wealth. You might as well make up your mind to it, a poor man has no chance whatever. Look who all have gotten Fuzzies under the Fuzzy laws, if one may so term the edicts of a bayonet imposed Governor. The first papers of adoption were issued to — guess who now? — Victor Grego, the manager-in-chief of the now Charterless Zarathustra Company. And the next pair went to Mrs. Frederic Pendarvis, and beside being the Chief Justice’s wife, who is she? Why, the head of the Adoption Bureau, of course. And look at the rest of these names! Nine tenths of them are Zarathustra Company executives.” He held up his hands, as though to hush an outburst of righteous indignation. “Now I won’t claim, I won’t even suppose, that there is any actual corruption or any bribery about this…”

“You damned well better hadn’t! If you do, I won’t sue you, I’ll shoot you,” Pendarvis barked.

“I won’t do either,” his wife told him calmly. “But I will answer him. Under veridication, and that’s something Hugo Ingermann would never dare do.”

“Claudette!” He was shocked. “You wouldn’t do that? Not on telecast?”

“On telecast. You can’t ignore this sort of thing. If you do, you just admit it by default. There’s only one answer to slander, and that’s to prove the truth.”

“AND WHO’S PAYING for all this?” Ingermann demanded out of the screen. “The Government? When Space Commodore Napier presented us with this Government, and this Governor, at pistol point, there was exactly half a million sols to the account of the Colony in the Bank of Mallorysport. Since then, Governor Rainsford has borrowed approximately half a billion sols from the Banking Cartel. And how is Ben Rainsford going to repay them? By taking it out of you and me and all of us, as soon as he can get a Colonial Legislature to rubber-stamp his demands for him. And now, do you know what he is spending millions of your money on? On a project to increase the Fuzzy birthrate, so that you’ll have more and more Fuzzies for his friends to make pets of and for you to pay the bills for…”

“He is a God damned unmitigated liar!” Victor Grego said. “Except for a little work Ruth Ortheris and her husband and Pancho Ybarra and Lynne Andrews are doing out at Holloway’s, the Company’s paying for all that infant mortality research, and I’ll have to justify it to the stockholders.”

“How about some publicity on that?” Coombes asked.

“You’re the political expert; what do you think?”

“I think it would help. I think it would help us, and I think it would help Rainsford. Let’s not do it ourselves, though. Suppose I talk to Gus Brannhard, and have him advise Jack Holloway to leak it to the press?”

“Press is going to be after Mrs. Pendarvis for a statement. She knows what the facts are. Let her tell it.”

“He make talk about Fuzzies?” Diamond, who had been watching Hugo Ingermann fascinatedly, inquired.

“Yes. Not like Fuzzies. Bad Big One; tosh-ki Hagga. Pappy Vic not like him.”

“Neither,” Coombes said, “does Unka Leslie.”

Ahmed Khadra blew cigarette smoke insultingly at the face in the screen. Hugo Ingermann was saying:

“Well, if few politicians and Company executives are getting all the Fuzzies, why not make them pay for it, instead of the common people of the planet? Why not charge a fee for adoption papers, say five hundred to a thousand sols? Everybody who’s gotten Fuzzies so far could easily pay that. It wouldn’t begin to meet the cost of maintaining the Native Affairs Commission, but it would be something…”

So that was what the whole thing had been pointed toward. Make it expensive to adopt Fuzzies legally. A black market couldn’t compete with free Fuzzies, but let the Adoption Bureau charge five hundred sols apiece for them…

“So that’s what you’re after, you son of a Khooghra? A competitive market.”