H Beam Piper Fuzzy 02 Fuzzy Sapiens v2.0 (lit)

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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
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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.
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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 Hennan, 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.
And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo Ingermann,
Mallorysport s unconvicted underworld generalissimo.
Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie Coombes s investigators
had established that all four of them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy
owners behind whom Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had
unwisely sold eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now
dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it was pretty
well established that those four had been the John Doe, Richard Roe, et alii,
who had been represented in court by Ingermann just after the Pendarvis
Decisions.
Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the melodrama was
evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another cigarette, and began going [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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