They talked about that, cruising south at five thousand feet, with the foothills of the Divide sliding away under them and the line of sheer mountains drawing closer. They’d have to establish a permanent camp up here; contact these Fuzzies and make friends with them, give them tools and weapons, learn about them.
That was, if the Native Commission budget would permit. They talked about that, too.
Then they argued about whether to stay up here for another few days, or start back to the camp.
“I think we’d better go back,” Jack said, somewhat regretfully. “We’ve been away for a week. I want to see what’s going on, now.”
“They’d screen us if anything was wrong.”
“I know. I still think we’d better go back. Let’s cross the Divide and camp somewhere on the other side, and go on in tomorrow morning.”
“Hokay; bizzo.” He swung the aircar left a trifle. “We’ll follow that river to the source and cross over there.”
The river came down through a wide valley, narrowing and growing more rapid as they ascended it. Finally, they came to where it emerged, a white mountain torrent, from the mouth of a canyon that cut into the main range of the Divide. He took the car down to within a few hundred feet and cut speed, entering the canyon. At first, it was wide, with a sandy beach on either side of the stream and trees back to the mountain face and up the steep talus at the foot of it. Granite at the bottom, and then weathered sandstone, and then, for a couple of hundred feet, gray, almost unweathered flint.
“Gerd,” Jack said, at length, “take her up a little, and get a little closer to the side of the canyon.” He shifted in his seat, and got his binoculars. “I want a close look at that.”
He wondered why, briefly. Then it struck him.
“You think that’s what I think it is?” he asked.
“Yeah. Sunstone-flint.” Jack didn’t seem particularly happy about it. “See that little bench, about halfway up? Set her down there. I’m going to take a look at that.”
The bench, little more than a wide ledge, was covered with thin soil; a few small trees and sparse brush grew on it. A sheer face of gray flint rose for a hundred feet above it. They had no blasting explosives, but there was a microray scanner and a small vibrohammer in the toolkit. They set the aircar down and went to work, cracking and scanning flint, and after two hours they had a couple of sunstones. They were nothing spectacular — an irregular globe seven or eight millimeters in diameter and a small elipsoid not quite twice as big. However, when Jack held them against the hot bowl of his pipe, they began to glow.
“What are they worth, Jack?”
“I don’t know. Some of these freelance gem-buyers would probably give as much as six or eight hundred for the big one. When the Company still had the monopoly, they’d have paid about four-fifty. Be worth twenty-five hundred on Terra. But look around. This layer’s three hundred feet thick; it runs all the way up the canyon, and probably for ten or fifteen miles along the mountain on either side.” He knocked out his pipe, blew through the stem, and pocketed it. “And it all belongs to the Fuzzies.”
He started to laugh at that, and then remembered. This was, by executive decree, the Fuzzy Reservation. The Fuzzies owned it and everything on it, and the Government and the Native Commission were only trustees. Then he began laughing again.
“But, Jack! The Fuzzies can’t mine sunstones, and they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they could.”
“No. But this is their country. They were born here, and they have a right to live here, and beside that, we gave it to them, didn’t we? It belongs to them, sunstones and all.”
“But Jack…” He looked up and down the canyon at the gray flint on either side; as Jack said, it would extend for miles back into the mountain on either side. Even allowing one sunstone to ten cubic feet of flint, and even allowing for the enormous labor of digging them out… “You mean, just let a few Fuzzies scamper around over it and chase goofers, and not do anything with it?” The idea horrified him. “Why, they don’t even know this is the Fuzzy Reservation.”
“They know it’s their home. Gerd, this has happened on other Class-IV planets we’ve moved in on. We give the natives a reservation; we tell them it’ll be theirs forever, Terran’s word of honor. Then we find something valuable on it — gold on Loki, platinum on Thor, vanadium and wolfram on Hathor, nitrates on Yggdrasil, uranium on Gimli. So the natives get shoved off onto another reservation, where there isn’t anything anybody wants, and finally they just get shoved off, period. We aren’t going to do that here, to the Fuzzies.”
“What are you going to do? Try to keep it a secret?” he asked. “If that’s what you want, we’ll just throw those two sunstones in the river and forget about it,” he agreed. “But how long do you think it’ll be before somebody else finds out about it?”
“We can keep other people out of here. That’s what the Fuzzy Reservation’s for, isn’t it?”
“We need people to keep people out; Paine’s Marines, George Lunt’s Protection Force. I think we can trust George. I wouldn’t know about Paine. Anybody below them I wouldn’t trust at all. Sooner or later somebody’ll fly up this canyon and see this, and their it’ll be out. And you know what’ll happen then.” He thought for a moment. “Are you going to tell Ben Rainsford?”
“I wish you hadn’t asked me that, Gerd.” Jack fumbled his pipe and tobacco out of his pocket. “I suppose I’ll have to. Have to give him these stones; they’re Government property. Well, bizzo; we’ll go straight to camp.” He looked up at the sun. “Make it in about three hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to Mallorysport.”
“I’M AFRAID To believe it, Dr. Jimenez,” Ernst Mallin said. “It would be so wonderful if it were true. Can you be certain?”
“We’re all certain, now, that this hormone, NFM p , is what prevents normal embryonic development,” Juan Jimenez, in the screen, replied. “We’re certain, now, that hokfusine combines destructively with NFM p ; even Chris Hoenveld, he’s seen it happen in a test tube, and he has to believe it whether he wants to or not. It appears that hokfusine also has an inhibitory effect on the glands secreting NFM p . But to be certain, we’ll have to wait four more months, until the infants conceived after the mothers began eating Extee-Three are born. Ideally, we should wait until the females we have begun giving daily doses of pure hokfusine conceive and bear children. But if I’m not certain now, I’m confident.”
“What put your people onto this, Dr. Jimenez?”
“A hunch,” the younger man smiled. “A hunch by the girl in Dr. Hoenveld’s lab, Charlotte Tresca.” The smile became an audible laugh. “Hoenveld is simply furious about it. No sound theoretical basis, just a lot of unsupported surmises. You know how he talks. He did have to grant her results; they’ve been duplicated. But he rejects her whole line of reasoning.”
He would; Jan Christiaan Hoenveld’s mind plodded obstinately along, step by step, from A to B to C to D; it wasn’t fair for somebody suddenly to leap to W or X and run from there to Z. For his own part, Ernst Mallin respected hunches; he knew how much mental activity went on below the level of consciousness and with what seemingly irrationality fragments of it rose to the conscious mind. His only regret was that he had so few good hunches, himself.
“Well, what was her reasoning?” he asked. “Or was it pure intuition?”
“Well, she just got the idea that hokfusine would neutralize the NFM p hormone, and worked from there,” Jimenez said. “As she rationalizes it, all Fuzzies have a craving for land-prawn meat, without exception. This is a racial constant with them. Right?”
“Yes, as far as we can tell. I hate to use the word loosely, but I’d say, instinctual.”