“Well, it doesn’t always work,” Jack said, lifting Baby Fuzzy from his shoulder. “It didn’t work in Baby’s case.”
“It works in about nine cases out of ten, apparently. We’ve had ten births so far; one normal and healthy, and the rest premature and defective, stillbirths, or live births that die within hours.”
“But there are exceptions, Baby here, and the one over at the Fuzzy-shelter,” Lynne said. “Can’t we figure out how the exceptions can be encouraged?”
“They’re working on that, in a half-hearted way,” he told her. “Fuzzies have a menstrual cycle and fertility rhythm, the same as Homo s. terra, and apparently the NFM p output is also cyclic, and when the two are out of phase there is a normal viable birth, and not otherwise. And this doesn’t happen often enough, and any correction of it would have to be done individually in the case of each female Fuzzy, and nobody even knows how to find out how it could be done.”
“But, Gerd, the whole thing doesn’t make sense to me,” Pancho objected. “I know, ‘sense’ is nothing but ignorance rationalized, and this isn’t my subject, but if this NFM p thing is a racial characteristic, it must be hereditary, and a hereditary tendency to miscarriages, premature and defective births, and infant mortality, now what kind of sense does that make?”
“Well, on the face of it, not much. But we know nothing at all about the racial history of the Fuzzies, and very little about the history of this planet. Say that fifty thousand years ago there were millions of Fuzzies, and say that fifty thousand years ago environmental conditions were radically different. This NFM p hormone was evolved to meet some environmental survival demand, and something in the environment, some article of diet that has now vanished, kept it from injuriously affecting the unborn Fuzzies. Then the environment changed — glaciation, glacial recession, sea-level fluctuation, I can think of dozens of reasons — and after having adapted to original conditions, they couldn’t re-adapt to the change. We’ve seen it on every planet we’ve ever studied; hundreds of cases on Terra alone. The Fuzzies are just caught in a genetic trap they can’t get out of, and we can’t get them out of it.”
He looked at them; six happy little people, busily fitting many-colored jointed blocks together to make a useless and delightful pretty-thing. Happy in ignorance of their racial doom.
“If we knew how many children the average female has in her lifetime, and how many child bearers there are, we could figure it out mathematically, I suppose. Ten little Fuzzies, nine little Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies, and finally no little Fuzzies.”
Little Fuzzy thought he was being talked about; he looked up inquiringly.
“Well, they won’t all just vanish in the next minute,” Jack said. “I expect this gang’ll attend my funeral, and there’ll be Fuzzies as long as any of you live, and longer. In a couple of million years, there won’t be any more humans, I suppose. Let’s just be as good to the Fuzzies we have as we can, and make them as happy as possible… Yes, Baby; you can sit on Pappy’s head if you want to.”
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?”