“And all Fuzzies, for which read, all studied individuals, have a craving for Extee-Three. Once they taste the stuff, they eat it at every opportunity. This isn’t a learned taste, like our taste for, say, coffee or tobacco or alcohol; every human has to learn to like all three. The Fuzzy’s response to Extee-Three is immediate and automatic. Still with it, Doctor?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve seen quite a few Fuzzies taking their first taste of Extee-Three. It’s just what you call it; a physical response.” He gave that a moment’s thought, adding: “If it’s an instinct, it’s the result of natural selection.”
“Yes. She reasoned that a taste for the titanium-molecule compound present both in land-prawns and Extee-Three contributed to racial survival; that Fuzzies lacking it died out, and Fuzzies having it to a pronounced degree survived and transmitted it. So she went to work over Hoenveld’s vehement objections that she was wasting her time — and showed the effect of hokfusine on the NFM p hormone. Now, the physiologists who had that theory about cyclic production of NFM p getting out of phase with the menstrual cycle and permitting an occasional viable birth are finding that the NFM p fluctuations aren’t cyclic at all but related to hokfusine consumption.”
“Well, you have a fine circumstantial case there. Everything seems to fit together with everything else. As you say, you’ll have to wait about a year before you can really prove a one-to-one relationship between hokfusine and viable births, but if I were inclined to gamble I’d risk a small wager on it.”
Jimenez grinned. “I have, already, with Dr. Hoenveld. I think it’s money in the bank now.”
BENNETT RAINSFORD WARMED the two sunstones between his palms, then rolled them, like a pair of dice, on the desk in front of him. He had been so happy, ever since Victor Grego had called him to tell him what had been discovered at Science Center about the hokfusine and the NFM p hormone. They were on the right track, he was sure of it, and in a few years all the Fuzzy children would be born alive and normal.
And then, just after lunch, Jack Holloway had come dropping out of the sky from Beta Continent with this.
“You can’t keep it a secret, Jack. You can’t keep any discovery a secret, because anything anybody discovers, somebody else can, and will, discover later. Look how the power interests tried to suppress the discovery of direct conversion of nuclear energy to electric current, back in the First Century. Look how they tried to suppress the Abbot Drive.”
“This is different,” Jack Holloway argued, bullheadedly. “This isn’t a scientific principle anybody, anywhere, can discover. This is something at a certain place, and if we can keep people away from it…”
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Then, realizing that Latin was terra incognita to Jack, he translated: “Who’ll watch the watchmen?”
Jack nodded. “That’s what Gerd said. A thing like that would be an awful strain on anybody’s moral fiber. And you know what’ll happen as soon as it gets out.
“There’d be pressure on me to open the Fuzzy Reservation. Hugo Ingermann’s John Doe and Richard Roe and all. I suppose I could stall it off till a legislature was elected, but after that…”
“I wasn’t talking about political pressure. I was talking about a sunstone rush. There’d be twenty thousand men stampeding up there, with everything they could put onto contragravity. And everything they could find to shoot with, too. And the longer it’s stalled off, the worse it’ll be, because in six months the off-planet immigrants’ll start coming in.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He should have; he’d been on other frontier planets where rich deposits of mineral wealth had been discovered. And there was nothing in the Galaxy that concentrated more value in less bulk than sunstones.
“Ben, I’ve been thinking,” Jack continued. “I don’t like the idea, but it’s the only idea I have. Those sunstones are in a little section about fifty miles square on the north side of the Divide. Suppose the Government makes that a sort of reservation-inside-the-reservation, and operates the sunstone mines. You do it before anything leaks out — announce that the Government has discovered sunstones on the Fuzzy Reservation, that the Government claims all the sunstones on Fuzzy land in the name of the Fuzzies, and that the Government is operating all sunstone mines, and it’ll head off the rush, or the worst of it. And the Fuzzies’ll get out of that immediate area; they won’t stay around where there’s underground blasting. And the money the Government gets out of it can go to the Fuzzies in protection and welfare and medical aid and shoppo-diggo and shodda-bag and Estee-fee.”
“Have you any idea what it would cost to start an operation like that, before we could even begin getting out sunstones in paying quantities?”
“Yes. I’ve been digging sunstones as long as anybody knew there were sunstones. But this is a good thing, Ben, and if you have a good thing you can always finance it.”
“It would protect the Fuzzies’ rights, and they’d benefit enormously. But the initial expense…”
“Well, lease the mineral rights to somebody who could finance it. The Government would get a royalty, the Fuzzies would benefit, the Reservation would be kept intact.”
“But who? Who would be able to lease it?”
He knew, even as he asked the question. The Charterless Zarathustra Company; they could operate that mine. Why, that mine would be something on the odd-jobs level, compared to what they’d done on the Big Blackwater Swamp. Lease them the entire mineral rights for the Reservation; that would keep everybody else out.
But it would put the Company back where they’d been before the Pendarvis Decisions; it would give them back their sunstone monopoly; it would… Why, it was unthinkable!
Unthinkable, hell. He was thinking about it now, wasn’t he?
VICTOR GREGO CRUSHED out his cigarette and leaned back in his relaxer-chair, closing his eyes. From the Fuzzy-room, he could hear muted voices, and the frequent popping of shots. Diamond was enjoying a screen-play. He was very good about keeping the volume turned down, so as not to bother Pappy Vic, but he’d get some weird ideas about life among the Hagga from some of those shows. Well, the good Hagga always licked the bad Hagga in the end, that was one thing.
He went back to thinking about bad Hagga, four of them in particular. Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan, Raul Laporte, Leo Thaxter.
Mallorysport was full of bad Hagga, on the lower echelons, but those four were the General Staff. Bowlby was the entertainment business. Beside the telecast show which Diamond was watching at the moment, that included prize-fights, nightclubs, prostitution and, without doubt, dope. Maybe he’d like to get Fuzzies as attractions at his night-spots, and through that part of his business he could make contacts with well to do people who wanted Fuzzies, couldn’t adopt them, and would pay fancy prices for them. If there really were a black market, he’d be in it.
Spike Hennan was gambling; crap-games, numbers racket, bookmaking. On sport-betting, his lines and Bowlby’s would cross with mutual profit. Laporte was racketeering, extortion, plain old-fashioned country-style crime. And stolen goods, of course, and, while there’d been money in it, illicit gem-buying.
Leo Thaxter was the biggest, and the most respectably fronted, of the four. L. Thaxter, Loan Broker Private Financier. He loaned money publicly at a righteously legal seven percent; he also loaned, at much higher rates, to all the shylocks in town, who, in turn, loaned it at six-for-five to people who could not borrow elsewhere, including suckers who went broke in Spike Hennan’s crap-games, and he used Raul Laporte’s hoodlums to do his collecting.