Fuzzy Sapiens by H. Beam Piper

Author:H. Beam Piper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-09T11:58:22+00:00

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. “Jacks 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 emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on, but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet. And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.

“Personally, I wish there was eighty-seven hundred of them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But wait till they get down in the real farm-country, and among the sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round too.”

“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them for that. But they just don’t understand about what they mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any idea at all of property in the absence of a visible owner.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they won’t understand that somebody’s planted them, they’ll think they’re just there: And I never saw a farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to protect his crops.”

“Education,” Gerd said.

“Recipe for roast turkey—first catch a turkey,” Lunt said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are we going to catch all the other ones?”

“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside Extee Three?”

“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patroling a couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”

“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while.

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