“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.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“YOU GOT THIS from one of my laboratory workers,” Jan Christiaan Hoenveld accused. “Charlotte Tresca, wasn’t it?”
He was calling from his private cubical in the corner of the biochemistry lab; through the glass partition behind him Juan Jimenez could see people working at benches, including, he thought, his informant. For the moment, he disregarded the older man’s tone and manner.
“That’s correct, Dr. Hoenveld. I met Miss Tresca at a cocktail party last evening. She and some other Science Center people were discussing the different phases of the Fuzzy research, and she mentioned having found hokfusine, or something very similar to it, in the digestive tracts of land-prawns. That had been a week ago; she had reported her findings to you immediately, and assumed that you had reported them to me. Now, I want to know why you didn’t.”
“Because it wasn’t worth reporting,” Hoenveld snapped. “In the first place, she wasn’t supposed to be working on land-prawns, or hokfusine” — he almost spat the word in contempt — “at all. She was supposed to be looking for NFM p in this mess of guts and tripes you’ve been dumping into my laboratory from all over the planet. And in the second place, it was merely a trace-presence of titanium, with which she had probably contaminated the test herself. The girl is an incurably careless and untidy worker. And finally,” Hoenveld raged, “I want to know by what right you question my laboratory workers behind my back…”
“Oh, you do? Well, they are not your laboratory workers, Dr. Hoenveld; they are employees of the Zarathustra Company, the same as you. Or I. And the biochemistry laboratory is not your private empire. It is a part of Science Center, of which I am division chief, and from where I sit the difference between you and Charlotte Tresca is barely perceptible to the naked eye. Is that clear, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld was looking at him as though a pistol had blown up in his hand. He was, in fact, mildly surprised at himself. A month ago, he wouldn’t have dreamed of talking so to anybody, least of all a man as much older than himself as Hoenveld, and one with Hoenveld’s imposing reputation.
But as division chief, he had to get things done, and there could be only one chief in the division.
“I am quite well aware of your recent and sudden promotion, Dr. Jimenez,” Hoenveld retorted acidly. “Over the heads of a dozen of your seniors.”
“Including yourself; well, you’ve just demonstrated the reason why you were passed over. Now, I want some work done, and if you can’t or won’t do it, I can promote somebody to replace you very easily.”
“What do you think we’ve been doing? Every ranger and hunter on the company payroll has been shooting everything from damnthings and wild veldbeest to ground-mice and dumping the digestive and reproductive tracts in my — I beg your pardon, I mean the Charterless Zarathustra Company’s — laboratory.”
“Have you found any trace of NFMP in any of them?”
“Negative. They don’t have the glands to secrete it; I have that on the authority of the comparative mammalian anatomists.”
“Then stop looking for it; I’ll order the specimen collecting stopped at once. Now, I want analyses of land-prawns made, and I want to know just what Miss Tresca found in them; whether it was really hokfusine, or anything similar to it, or just trace-presences of titanium, and I want to know how it gets into the land-prawns’ systems and where it concentrates there. I would suggest — correction, I direct — that Miss Tresca be put to work on that herself, and that she report directly to me.”
“WHAT’S YOUR OPINION of Chris Hoenveld, Ernst?” Victor Grego asked.
Mallin frowned — his standard think-seriously-and-weigh-every-word frown.
“Dr. Hoenveld is a most distinguished scientist. He has an encyclopedic grasp on his subject, an infallible memory, and an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“No. A computer has all that, to a much higher degree, and a computer couldn’t make an original scientific discovery in a hundred million years. A computer has no imagination, and neither has Hoenveld.”
“Well, he has very little, I’ll admit. Why do you ask about him?”
“Juan Jimenez is having trouble with him.”
“I can believe it,” Mallin said. “Hoenveld has one characteristic a computer lacks. Egotism. Has Jimenez complained to you?”
“Nifflheim, no; he’s running Science Center without yelling to Big Brother for help. I got this off the powder-room and coffee-stand telegraph, to which I have excellent taps. Juan cut him down to size; he’s doing all right.”
“Well, how about the NFM p problem?”
“Nowhere, on hyperdrive. The Fuzzies just manufacture it inside themselves, and nobody knows why. It seems mainly to be associated with the digestive system, and gets from there into the blood-stream, and into the gonads, in both sexes, from there. Thirty-six births, so far; three viable.”