Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there, so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met him as he entered, and they shook hands.
“I thought there might be something I could do to help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are you?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the law,” Holloway said.
“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”
“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”
“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all; she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said. “She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them when they made mistakes.”
“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well, listen to this.”
Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he gave it to any of the others, all they produced was, “Yeek.”
“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone to Mallin.
“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say something.”
Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly. Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or words to that effect.
“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time. You make talk like Big One now.”
“Like this?” Diamond asked.
“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded. “Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”
“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.
“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly for weeks, and we never knew it.”
“Bet he didn’t know it, either,” Jack Holloway said. “Mr. Grego, do you think he could teach other Fuzzies to do that?”
“That would be kind of hard, wouldn’t it?” Mallin asked. “Does he really know, himself, how he does it?”
“Mr. Grego!” the police sergeant, who was still keeping half an eye on the communication screen, broke in. The Chief wants to know if you want to go to the gem-vault and check the contents of that suitcase.”
“Has anybody else checked it?”
“Well, Captain Lansky has, but…”
“Then lock it up in the vault; I don’t have to do that. The Nifflheim with it. I’ll check it tomorrow. I’m busy, now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“YOU THINK FOUR-FIFTY a carat would be all right?” Victor Grego was asking.
Bennett Rainsford picked up the lighter from the table in front of him and carefully relit a pipe that didn’t need relighting. Now that he’d come to know him, he found that he liked Victor Grego. But he still had to watch him. Grego was the Charterless Zarathustra Company, and the company was definitely not a philanthropic institution.
“Sounds all right to me,” Jack Holloway agreed. “You didn’t pay me any more than that when I was prospecting, and I had to dig them myself.”
“But four-fifty, Jack. The Terra market price is over a thousand sols a carat.”
“This isn’t Terra, Ben. Terra’s five hundred light-years, six months ship-time, away. I think Mr. Grego’s making us a good offer. All we need to do is bank the money; the company’ll do the rest.”
“Well, how much do you think the Fuzzies will get out of it, a month?”
Grego shrugged. “I haven’t seen it, myself. I’ll take Jack’s word for it. What do you think?”
“Well, it depends on how much equipment you use, and what kind. If it’s anything like the diggings I used to work, you’ll get about a sunstone to the ton.”
“We can move and process an awful lot of tons of flint in a month, and from Jack’s description I’d say we’ll be working that deposit for longer than any of us’ll be around. You know, Governor, instead of the Fuzzies getting handouts from the Government, they’ll be paying the Government’s bills before long.”
And that would have to be watched, too; it mustn’t be allowed to become a source of political graft. Inside a month, now, the elections for delegates to the Constitutional Convention would be held. Make sure the right men were elected, men who would write a Constitution which would safeguard the Fuzzies’ rights for all time.
Victor Grego, he was beginning to think, could be counted on to help in that.
LESLIE COOMBES HELD his glass while Gus Brannhard poured from the bottle, and said, quickly, “That’s enough, please,” when about fifty or sixty cc of whisky had been added to the ice. He filled the glass the rest of the way with soda, himself.
“And Hugo Ingermann,” he said, disgustedly, “is completely innocent.”
“Well, innocent of the Fuzzy business and the attempt on the company gem-vault,” Brannhard conceded, pouring into his own glass. When Gus mixed a highball, he always left out both the ice and the soda. “It’s probably the only thing he ever was innocent of, in his whole life. But he isn’t getting away scot-free.” Brannhard took a drink from his glass, and Coombes shuddered inwardly; the man must have a collapsium-plated digestive tract. “While we were interrogating this one and that one about the Fuzzy-sunstone business, we got a lot of evidence, all veridicated, to connect him with Thaxter’s shylocking and Bowlby’s call-girl agency and Heenan’s prize-fight fixing and Laporte’s strong-arm mob. I’m after him with a shotgun; I’m just filling the air all around him with indictments, and some of them are sure to hit. And even if I can’t get him convicted of anything, he’ll be disbarred, that’s for sure. And this Planetary Prosperity Party of his is catching fire, leaking radiation, blowing up and falling apart all around. Everybody’s calling it the Fuzzy-Fagin Party, and everybody who had anything to do with it is getting out as fast as he can.”
“If we work together, we’ll get a good Constitution adopted and a good Legislature elected. Or can we expect Governor Rainsford to agree with Victor Grego on what a ‘good’ Constitution and a ‘good’ Legislature are?”
“We can,” Brannhard said. “We only have a few months before the off-planet land-grabbers begin coming in, and Ben Rainsford’s as much worried about that as Victor Grego. Leslie, if you go into court and make claim to all the unseated land the company has mapped and surveyed, I am instructed by the Governor not to oppose you. What does that sound like?”
“That sounds like getting back about everything we lost, with the sunstone lease on top of it. I am going to propose the election of Little Fuzzy as an honorary member of the board of directors, with the title of Company Benefactor Number One.”
LITTLE FUZZY CLIMBED up on Pappy Jack’s lap, squirmed a little, and cuddled himself comfortably. He was happy to be back. He had had so much fun in the Big House Place, he and Mamma Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Syndrome and Id and Ned Kelly and Dr. Crippen and Calamity Jane. They had met so many Fuzzies who had been here and gone away to live with Big Ones of their own, and they had a place where they all met and played together. And he had met the two lovers, now they had names of their own, Pierrot and Columbine, and he had met Diamond, about whom Unka Panko had told him, and Diamond’s Pappy Vic.