One of the assistants brought a drawer from the cabinet and emptied it on the table — several hundred smooth, translucent pebbles. For a moment they looked like so much gravel. Then, slowly, they began to glow, until they were blazing like burning coals.
Some fifty million years ago, when Zarathustra had been almost completely covered by seas, there had been a marine life-form, not unlike a big jellyfish, and for a million or so years the seas had abounded with them, and as they died they had sunk into the ooze and been covered by sand. Ages of pressure had reduced them to hard little beans of stone, and the ooze to gray flint. Most of them were just pebbles, but by some ancient biochemical quirk, a few were intensely thermofluorescent. Worn as gems, they would glow from the body heat of the wearer, as they were glowing now on the electrically heated tabletop. They were found nowhere in the galaxy but on Zarathustra, and even a modest one was worth a small fortune.
“Just for a quick estimate, in round figures, how much money have we in this room?” he asked Evins.
Evins looked pained. He had the sort of mind which detested expressions like “quick estimate,” and “round figures.”
“Well, of course, the Terra market quotation, as of six months ago, was eleven hundred and twenty-five sols a carat, but that’s just the average price. There are premium-value stones…”
He saw one of those, and picked it up; an almost perfect sphere, an inch in diameter, deep blood-red. It lay burning in his palm; it was beautiful. He wished he owned it himself, but none of this belonged to him. It belonged to an abstraction called the Chartered — no, Charterless Zarathustra Company, which represented thousands of stockholders, including a number of other abstractions called Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines, and Interstellar Explorations, Ltd., and the Banking Cartel. He wondered how Conrad Evins felt, working with these beautiful things, knowing how much each of them was worth, and not owning any of them.
“But I can tell you how little they are worth,” Evins was saying, at the end of a lecture on the Terra gem market. “The stones in this vault are worth not one millisol less than one hundred million sols.”
That sounded like a lot of money, if you said it quickly and didn’t think. The Chartered, even the Charterless, Zarathustra Company was a lot of company, too, and all its operations were fantastically expensive. That wouldn’t be six months’ gross business for the company. They couldn’t let the sunstone business live on its reserve.
“This is new, isn’t it?” he asked, laying the red globe of light back on the heated tabletop.
“Yes, Mr. Grego. We bought that less than two months ago. Shortly before the Trial.” He captitalized the word; the day Pendarvis beat the company down with his gavel would be First Day, Year Zero, on Zarathustra from now on. “It was bought,” he added, “from Jack Holloway.”
CHAPTER TWO
SNAPPING OFF THE shiny new stenomemophone, Jack Holloway relit his pipe and pushed back his chair, looking around what had been the living room of his camp before it had become the office of the Commissioner of Native Affairs for the Class-IV Colonial Planet of Zarathustra. It had been a pleasant room, a place where a man could spread out by himself, or entertain the infrequent visitors who came this far into the wilderness. The hardwood floor was scattered with rugs made from the skins of animals he had shot; the deep armchairs and the couch were covered with smaller pelts. Like the big table at which he worked, he had built them himself. There was a reading screen, a metal-cased library of microbooks; the gunrack reflected soft gleams from polished stocks and barrels. And now look at the damn place!
Two extra viewscreens, another communication screen, a vocowriter, a teleprint machine, all jammed together. An improvised table on trestles at right angles to the one at which he sat, its top littered with plans and blueprints and things; mostly things. And this red-upholstered swivel chair; he hated that worst of all. Forty years ago, he’d left Terra to get the seat of his pants off the seat of a chair like that, and here he was in the evening of life — well, late afternoon, call it around second cocktail time — trapped in one.
It wasn’t just this room, either. Through the open door he could hear what was happening outside. The thud of axes, and the howl of chain-saws; he was going to miss all those big feathered trees from around the house. The machine-gun banging of power-hammers, the clanking and grunting of bulldozers. A sudden warning cry, followed by a falling crash and a multivoiced burst of blasphemy. He hoped none of the Fuzzies had been close enough to whatever had happened to get hurt.
Something tugged gently at his trouser-leg, and a small voice said, “Yeek?” His hands went to his throat, snapping on the ultrasonic hearing-aid and inserting the earplug. Immediately, he began to hear a number of small sounds that had been previously inaudible, and the voice was saying, “Pappy Jack?”
He looked down at the Zarathustran native whose affairs he had been commissioned to administer. He was an erect biped, two feet tall, with a wide-eyed humanoid face, his body covered with soft golden fur. He wore a green canvas pouch lettered TFMC, and a two-inch silver disc on a chain about his neck, and nothing else. The disc was lettered LITTLE FUZZY, and Jack Holloway, Cold Creek Valley, Beta Continent, and the numeral I. He was the first Zarathustra aborigine he or any other Terran human had ever seen.
He reached down and stroked his small friend’s head.
“Hello, Little Fuzzy. You want to visit with Pappy Jack for a while?”
Little Fuzzy pointed to the open door. Five other Fuzzies were peeping bashfully into the room, making comments among themselves.
“Fuzzee no shu do-bizzo do-mitto zat-hakko,” Little Fuzzy informed him. “Heeva so si domitto.”
Some Fuzzies who hadn’t been here before had just come; they wanted to stay. At least, that was what he thought Little Fuzzy was saying; it had only been ten days since he had known that Fuzzies could talk at all. He pressed a button to start the audiovisual recorder; it was adjusted to transform their ultrasonic voices to audible frequencies.
“Make talk.” He picked his way through his hundred-word Fuzzy vocabulary. “Pappy Jack friend. Not hurt, be good to them. Give good things.”
“Josso shoddabag?” Little Fuzzy asked. “Josso shoppo-diggo? Josso t’heet? Estee-fee?”
“Yes. Give shoulder-bags and chopper-diggers and treats,” he said. “Give Extee-Three.”
Friendly natives; distribution of presents to. Function of the Commissioner of Native Affairs. Little Fuzzy began a speech. This was Pappy Jack, the greatest and wisest of all the Big Ones, the Hagga, the friend of all the People, the Gashta, only the Big Ones called the Gashta Fuzzies. He would give wonderful things. Shoddabag, in which things could be carried, leaving the hands free. He displayed his own. And weapons so hard that they never wore out. He ran to the jumbled pile of bedding under the gunrack and came back with a six-inch leaf shaped blade on a twelve-inch shaft. And Pappy Jack would give the Hoksu-Fusso, the Wonderful Food, Estee-fee.
Rising, he went out to what had been his kitchen before it had been crammed with supplies. There were plenty of chopper-diggers; he’d had a couple of hundred made up before he left Mallorysport. Shoulder-bags were in shorter supply. They were all either Navy black or Marine Corps green, first-aid pouches and tool-kit pouches and belt pouches for submachine gun and auto-rifle magazines, all fitted with shoulder straps. He hung five of them over his arm, then unlocked a cupboard and got out two rectangular tins with blue labels marked emergency field ration, extraterrestrial service type three. All Fuzzies were crazy about Extee-Three, which demonstrated that, while sapient beings, they were definitely not human. Only a completely starving human would eat the damn stuff.