Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper (top ten books to read TXT) 📕

In a few hours, the Company construction men from Red Hill had the new camp set up. Among other things, they brought two more air jeeps.

The two jeeps returned late in the afternoon, everybody excited. Between them, the parties had seen almost a hundred Fuzzies, and had found three camps, two among rocks and one in a hollow pool-ball tree. All three had been spotted by belts of filled-in toilet pits around them; two had been abandoned and the third was still occupied. Kellogg insisted on playing host to Jack and Rainsford for dinner at the camp across the run. The meal, because everything had been brought ready-cooked and only needed warming, was excellent.

Returning to his own camp with Rainsford, Jack found the Fuzzies finished with their evening meal and in the living room, starting a new construction—he could think of no other name for it—with the molecule-model balls and sticks. Goldilocks left the others and came over to him with a couple of balls fastened together, holding them up with one hand while she pulled his trouser leg with the other.

“Yes, I see. It’s very beautiful,” he told her.

She tugged harder and pointed at the thing the others were making. Finally, he understood.

“She wants me to work on it, too,” he said. “Ben, you know where the coffee is; fix us a pot. I’m going to be busy here.”

He sat down on the floor, and was putting sticks and balls together when Ben brought in the coffee. This was more fun than he’d had in a couple of days. He said so while Ben was distributing Extee Three to the Fuzzies.

“Yes, I ought to let you kick me all around the camp for getting this started,” Rainsford said, pouring the coffee. “I could make some excuses, but they’d all sound like ‘I didn’t know it was loaded.’”

“Hell, I didn’t know it was loaded, either.” He rose and took his coffee cup, blowing on it to cool it. “What do you think Kellogg’s up to, anyhow? That whole act he’s been putting on since he came here is phony as a nine-sol bill.”

“What I told you, evening before last,” Rainsford said. “He doesn’t want non-Company people making discoveries on Zarathustra. You notice how hard he and Mallin are straining to talk me out of sending a report back to Terra before he can investigate the Fuzzies? He wants to get his own report in first. Well, the hell with him! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going home, and I’m going to sit up all night getting a report into shape. Tomorrow morning I’m going to give it to George Lunt and let him send it to Mallorysport in the constabulary mail pouch. It’ll be on a ship for Terra before any of this gang knows it’s been sent. Do you have any copies of those movies you can spare?”

“About a mile and a half. I made copies of everything, even the stuff the others took.”

“Good. We’ll send that, too. Let Kellogg read about it in the papers a year from now.” He thought for a moment, then said: “Gerd and Ruth and Juan are bunking at the other camp now; suppose I move in here with you tomorrow. I assume you don’t want to leave the Fuzzies alone while that gang’s here. I can help you keep an eye on them.”

“But, Ben, you don’t want to drop whatever else you’re doing—”

“What I’m doing, now, is learning to be a Fuzzyologist, and this is the only place I can do it. I’ll see you tomorrow, after I stop at the constabulary post.”

The people across the run—Kellogg, Mallin and Borch, and van Riebeek, Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris—were still up when Rainsford went out to his airjeep. After watching him lift out, Jack went back into the house, played with his family in the living room for a while and went to bed. The next morning he watched Kellogg, Ruth and Jimenez leave in one jeep and, shortly after, Mallin and van Riebeek in the other. Kellogg didn’t seem to be willing to let the three who had come to the camp first wander around unchaperoned. He wondered about that.

Ben Rainsford’s airjeep came over the mountains from the south in the late morning and settled onto the grass. Jack helped him inside with his luggage, and then they sat down under the big featherleaf trees to smoke their pipes and watch the Fuzzies playing in the grass. Occasionally they saw Kurt Borch pottering around outside the other camp.

“I sent the report off,” Rainsford said, then looked at his watch. “It ought to be on the mail boat for Mallorysport by now; this time tomorrow it’ll be in hyperspace for Terra. We won’t say anything about it; just sit back and watch Len Kellogg and Ernst Mallin working up a sweat trying to talk us out of sending it.” He chuckled. “I made a definite claim of sapience; by the time I got the report in shape to tape off, I couldn’t see any other alternative.”

“Damned if I can. You hear that, kids?” he asked Mike and Mitzi, who had come over in hope that there might be goodies for them. “Uncle Ben says you’re sapient.”

“Yeek?”

“They want to know if it’s good to eat. What’ll happen now?”

“Nothing, for about a year. Six months from now, when the ship gets in, the Institute will release it to the press, and then they’ll send an investigation team here. So will any of the other universities or scientific institutes that may be interested. I suppose the government’ll send somebody, too. After all, subcivilized natives on colonized planets are wards of the Terran Federation.”

He didn’t know that he liked that. The less he had to do with the government the better, and his Fuzzies were wards of Pappy Jack Holloway. He said as much.

Rainsford picked up Mitzi and stroked her. “Nice fur,” he said. “Fur like that would bring good prices. It will, if we don’t get these people recognized as sapient beings.”

He looked across the run at the new camp and wondered. Maybe Leonard Kellogg saw that, too, and saw profits for the Company in Fuzzy fur.

The airjeeps returned in the middle of the afternoon, first Mallin’s, and then Kellogg’s. Everybody went inside. An hour later, a constabulary car landed in front of the Kellogg camp. George Lunt and Ahmed Khadra got out. Kellogg came outside, spoke with them and then took them into the main living hut. Half an hour later, the lieutenant and the trooper emerged, lifted their car across the run and set it down on the lawn. The Fuzzies ran to meet them, possibly expecting more whistles, and followed them into the living room. Lunt and Khadra took off their berets, but made no move to unbuckle their gun belts.

“We got your package off all right Ben,” Lunt said. He sat down and took Goldilocks on his lap; immediately Cinderella jumped up, also. “Jack, what the hell’s that gang over there up to anyhow?”

“You got that, too?”

“You can smell it on them for a mile, against the wind. In the first place, that Borch. I wish I could get his prints; I’ll bet we have them on file. And the whole gang’s trying to hide something, and what they’re trying to hide is something they’re scared of, like a body in a closet. When we were over there, Kellogg did all the talking; anybody else who tried to say anything got shut up fast. Kellogg doesn’t like you, Jack and he doesn’t like Ben, and he doesn’t like the Fuzzies. Most of all he doesn’t like the Fuzzies.”

“Well, I told you what I thought this morning,” Rainsford said. “They don’t want outsiders discovering things on this planet. It wouldn’t make them look good to the home office on Terra. Remember, it was some non-Company people who discovered the first sunstones, back in ’Forty-eight.”

George Lunt looked thoughtful. On him, it was a scowl.

“I don’t think that’s it, Ben. When we were talking to him, he admitted very freely that you and Jack discovered the Fuzzies. The way he talked, he didn’t seem to think they were worth discovering at all. And he asked a lot of funny questions about you, Jack. The kind of questions I’d ask if I was checking up on somebody’s mental competence.” The scowl became one of anger now. “By God, I wish I had an excuse to question him—with a veridicator!”

Kellogg didn’t want the Fuzzies to be sapient beings. If they weren’t they’d be … fur-bearing animals. Jack thought of some overfed society dowager on Terra or Baldur, wearing the skins of Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Goldilocks wrapped around her adipose carcass. It made him feel sick.

VII

Tuesday dawned hot and windless, a scarlet sun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. The Fuzzies, who were in to wake Pappy Jack with their whistles, didn’t like it; they were edgy and restless. Maybe it would rain today after all. They had breakfast outside on the picnic table, and then Ben decided he’d go back to his camp and pick up a few things he hadn’t brought and now decided he needed.

“My hunting rifle’s one,” he said, “and I think I’ll circle down to the edge of the brush country and see if I can pick off a zebralope. We ought to have some more fresh meat.”

So, after eating, Rainsford got into his jeep and lifted away. Across the run, Kellogg and Mallin were walking back and forth in front of the camp, talking earnestly. When Ruth Ortheris and Gerd van Riebeek came out, they stopped, broke off their conversation and spoke briefly with them. Then Gerd and Ruth crossed the footbridge and came up the path together.

The Fuzzies had scattered, by this time, to hunt prawns. Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Goldilocks ran to meet them; Ruth picked Goldilocks up and carried her, and Ko-Ko and Little Fuzzy ran on ahead. They greeted Jack, declining coffee; Ruth sat down in a chair with Goldilocks, Little Fuzzy jumped up on the table and began looking for goodies, and when Gerd stretched out on his back on the grass Ko-Ko sat down on his chest.

“Goldilocks is my favorite Fuzzy,” Ruth was saying. “She is the sweetest thing. Of course, they’re all pretty nice. I can’t get over how affectionate and trusting they are; the ones we saw out in the woods were so timid.”

“Well, the ones out in the woods don’t have any Pappy Jack to look after them” Gerd said. “I’d imagine they’re very affectionate among themselves, but they have so many things to be afraid of. You know, there’s another prerequisite for sapience. It develops in some small, relatively defenseless, animal surrounded by large and dangerous enemies he can’t outrun or outfight. So, to survive, he has to learn to outthink them. Like our own remote ancestors, or like Little Fuzzy; he had his choice of getting sapient or getting exterminated.”

Ruth seemed troubled. “Gerd, Dr. Mallin has found absolutely nothing about them that indicates true sapience.”

“Oh, Mallin be bloodied; he doesn’t know what sapience is any more than I do. And a good deal less than you do, I’d say. I think he’s trying to prove that the Fuzzies aren’t sapient.”

Ruth looked startled. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s been sticking out all over him ever since he came here. You’re a psychologist; don’t tell me you haven’t seen it. Maybe if the Fuzzies were proven sapient it would invalidate some theory he’s gotten out of a book, and he’d have to do some thinking for himself. He wouldn’t like that. But you have to admit he’s been fighting the idea, intellectually and emotionally, right from the start. Why, they could sit down with pencils and slide rules and start working differential calculus and it wouldn’t convince him.”

“Dr. Mallin’s trying to—” she began