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 In here, Mr. Holloway; Mrs. Pendarvis s office. I ll have to get back and
keep that mob in front straightened out. He touched his cap-brim again and
hastened away.
Mrs. Pendarvis sat at a desk, her back to the door, going over a stack of
forms in front of her. Beside her, at a smaller desk, a girl was taking them as
she finished with them, and talking into the whisper-mouthpiece of a
vocowriter. Two more girls sat at another desk, one talking to somebody in a
communication screen. Mrs. Pendarvis said,  Who is it? and turned her head,
then rose, extending her hand.  Oh; Mr. Holloway. Good morning. What s it
like out in the hall, now?
 Well, you see how I had to come in. I d say about five hundred, now.
How are you handling them?
She gestured toward the door to the front office, and he opened it and
looked through. Five girls sat at five desks; each was interviewing applicants.
Another girl was gathering up application-forms and carrying them to a desk
where they were being sorted to be passed on to the back office.
 I arrived at 0830, Mrs. Pendarvis said.  Just after I dropped Pierrot and
Columbine off at Government House. There was a crowd then, and it s been
going on ever since. How many Fuzzies have you, Mr. Holloway?
 Available for adoption? I don t know. Beside mine and Gerd and Ruth
van Riebeek s and the Constabulary Fuzzies, there were forty day before
yesterday. That had gotten up to a hundred and three by last evening.
 We have, to date, three hundred and eleven applications; there are
possibly twenty more that haven t been sent back to me yet. By the time we
close, it ll be five or six hundred. How are we going to handle this, anyhow?
Some of these people want just one Fuzzy, some of them want two, some of
them will take a whole family. And we can t separate Fuzzies who want to stay
together. If you d separate Pierrot and Columbine, they d both grieve
themselves to death. And there are families of five or six who want to stay
together, aren t there?
 Well, not permanently. These groups aren t really families; they re sort of
temporary gangs for mutual assistance. Five or six are about as many as can
make a living together in the woods. They re hunters and food-gatherers, low
Paleolithic economy, and individual small-game hunters at that. When a gang
gets too big to live together, they split up; when one couple meets another,
they team up to hunt together. That s why they have such a well-developed
and uniform language, and I imagine that s how the news about the zatku
spread all over the Fuzzy country as fast as it did. They don t even mate
permanently. Your pair are just young, first mating for both of them. They think
each other are the most wonderful ever. But you will have others that won t
want to be separated; you ll have to let them be adopted together. He thought
for a moment.  You can t begin to furnish Fuzzies for everybody; why don t
you give them out by lot? Each of those applications is numbered, isn t it?
Draw numbers.
 Like a jury-drawing, of course. Let the jury-commissioners handle that,
the Chief Justice s wife said.
 Fair enough. You ll have to investigate each of these applicants, of
course; that ll take a little time, won t it?
 Well, Captain Khadra s taking charge of them. He s borrowed some
people from the schools, and some from the city police juvenile squad and
some from the company personnel division. I ve been getting my staff
together the same way parent-teacher groups, Juvenile Welfare. I m going
to get a paid staff together, as soon as I can. I think they ll come from the
Company s public service division; I m told that Mr. Grego s going to suspend
all those activities in ninety days.
 That s right. That includes the schools, and the hospitals. Why don t you
talk to Ernst Mallin? He ll find you all the people you want. He s joined the
Friends of Little Fuzzy, too, now.
 Well, after we ve allocated Fuzzies to these people, what then? Do they
come out to your camp and pick their own?
 Good Lord, no! We have enough trouble, without having the place
overrun with human people. He hadn t given that thought until now.  What
we ll need will be a place here in Mallorysport where a couple of hundred
Fuzzies can stay and where the people who have been endorsed for foster-
parents can come and select the ones they want.
That would have to be a big place, with a park all around it, that could be
fenced in to keep them from wandering off and getting lost. A nice place,
where they could all have fun together. He didn t know of any such place, and
asked her about it.
 I ll talk to Mr. Urswick, he s the Company Chief of Public Services. He ll
know about something. You know, Mr. Holloway, I didn t have any idea, when
I took this job, that it was going to be so complicated.
 Mrs. Pendarvis, I ve been saying that every hour on the hour since I let
Ben Rainsford talk me into taking the job I have. You re going to have to do
something about information, too Fuzzies, care and feeding of; Fuzzies,
psychology of; language. We ll try to find somebody to prepare booklets and
language-learning tapes. And hearing aids.
The door at the side of the room was marked INVESTIGATION. He found
Ahmed Khadra in the room behind it, talking to somebody in a city police
uniform by screen.
 Well, have you gotten anything from any of them? he was asking.
 Damn little, the city policeman told him.  We ve been pulling them in all
day, everybody in town who has a record. And Hugo Ingermann s been
pulling them away from us as fast as they come in. He had a couple of his
legmen and assistants here with portable radios, and as fast as we bring
some punk in, they call somebody at Central Courts and he gets a writ; order
to show grounds for suspicion. Most of them we can t question at all; it takes
an hour to an hour and a half from the time they re brought in before we can
veridicate those we can. And none of them knows a damn thing when we do.
 Well, how about known associates? Didn t either of them have any
friends?
 Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they ve been cooperating, but
none of them knows anything.
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they blanked
screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a cigarette.
 Well, you heard it, Jack, he said.  They just vanished, and the Fuzzies
with them. I m not surprised we re not getting anything out of their friends in
the Company. They wouldn t know. We searched their rooms; they seem to
have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared. And we can t
get anything from underworld sources. None of the city police stool-pigeons
knows anything.
 You know, Ahmed, I m worried about that. I wonder what s happened to
those Fuzzies . . .  He sat down on the edge of the desk and got out his pipe
and tobacco.  How soon will you be able to start investigating these people
who want Fuzzies?
GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across the table
to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they both ought to. Work
was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away. and Ahmed Khadra
permanently detached from duty at the camp.
 Eighty-seven, Lunt said.  That s not counting yours and mine and
Jack s.
 The Extee-Three s getting low. They d had to start rationing it;
tomorrow, they d not be able to issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The
Fuzzies wouldn t like that.  Jack says he thinks speculators are buying it and
holding it off the market. They ll get big prices for it when the Fuzzies start
coming in to Mallorysport.
There wasn t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept a tin or so in
their aircars, in case of forced landings in the wilderness which was ninety
percent of the planet s land surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it,
the consumption had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]