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them . . .
So that s what you re after, you son of a Khooghra? A competitive
market.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
YOU GOT THIS from one of my laboratory workers, Jan Christiaan
Hoenveld accused. Charlotte Tresca, wasn t it?
He was calling from his private cubical in the corner of the biochemistry
lab; through the glass partition behind him Juan Jimenez could see people
working at benches, including, he thought, his informant. For the moment, he
disregarded the older man s tone and manner.
That s correct, Dr. Hoenveld. I met Miss Tresca at a cocktail party last
evening. She and some other Science Center people were discussing the
different phases of the Fuzzy research, and she mentioned having found
hokfusine, or something very similar to it, in the digestive tracts of land-
prawns. That had been a week ago; she had reported her findings to you
immediately, and assumed that you had reported them to me. Now, I want to
know why you didn t.
Because it wasn t worth reporting, Hoenveld snapped. In the first place,
she wasn t supposed to be working on land-prawns, or hokfusine he almost
spat the word in contempt at all. She was supposed to be looking for NFMp
in this mess of guts and tripes you ve been dumping into my laboratory from
all over the planet. And in the second place, it was merely a trace-presence of
titanium, with which she had probably contaminated the test herself. The girl
is an incurably careless and untidy worker. And finally, Hoenveld raged, I
want to know by what right you question my laboratory workers behind my
back . . .
Oh, you do? Well, they are not your laboratory workers, Dr. Hoenveld;
they are employees of the Zarathustra Company, the same as you. Or I. And
the biochemistry laboratory is not your private empire. It is a part of Science
Center, of which I am division chief, and from where I sit the difference
between you and Charlotte Tresca is barely perceptible to the naked eye. Is
that clear, Dr. Hoenveld?
Hoenveld was looking at him as though a pistol had blown up in his hand.
He was, in fact, mildly surprised at himself. A month ago, he wouldn t have
dreamed of talking so to anybody, least of all a man as much older than
himself as Hoenveld, and one with Hoenveld s imposing reputation.
But as division chief, he had to get things done, and there could be only
one chief in the division.
I am quite well aware of your recent and sudden promotion, Dr.
Jimenez, Hoenveld retorted acidly. Over the heads of a dozen of your
seniors.
Including yourself; well, you ve just demonstrated the reason why you
were passed over. Now, I want some work done, and if you can t or won t do
it, I can promote somebody to replace you very easily.
What do you think we ve been doing? Every ranger and hunter on the
company payroll has been shooting everything from damnthings and wild
veldbeest to ground-mice and dumping the digestive and reproductive tracts
in my I beg your pardon, I mean the Charterless Zarathustra Company s
laboratory.
Have you found any trace of NFMp in any of them?
Negative. They don t have the glands to secrete it; I have that on the
authority of the comparative mammalian anatomists.
Then stop looking for it; I ll order the specimen collecting stopped at
once. Now, I want analyses of land-prawns made, and I want to know just
what Miss Tresca found in them; whether it was really hokfusine, or anything
similar to it, or just trace-presences of titanium, and I want to know how it gets
into the land-prawns systems and where it concentrates there. I would
suggest correction, I direct that Miss Tresca be put to work on that herself,
and that she report directly to me.
WHAT S YOUR OPINION of Chris Hoenveld, Ernst? Victor Grego asked.
Mallin frowned his standard think-seriously-and-weigh-every-word
frown.
Dr. Hoenveld is a most distinguished scientist. He has an encyclopedic
grasp on his subject, an infallible memory, and an infinite capacity for taking
pains.
Is that all?
Isn t that enough?
No. A computer has all that, to a much higher degree, and a computer
couldn t make an original scientific discovery in a hundred million years. A
computer has no imagination, and neither has Hoenveld.
Well, he has very little, I ll admit. Why do you ask about him?
Juan Jimenez is having trouble with him.
I can believe it, Mallin said. Hoenveld has one characteristic a
computer lacks. Egotism. Has Jimenez complained to you?
Nifflheim, no; he s running Science Center without yelling to Big Brother
for help. I got this off the powder-room and coffee-stand telegraph, to which I
have excellent taps. Juan cut him down to size; he s doing all right.
Well, how about the NFMp problem?
Nowhere, on hyperdrive. The Fuzzies just manufacture it inside
themselves, and nobody knows why. It seems mainly to be associated with
the digestive system, and gets from there into the blood-stream, and into the
gonads, in both sexes, from there. Thirty-six births, so far; three viable.
From the terrace outside came the happy babble of Fuzzy voices. They
were using their Fuzzyphones to talk to one another; wanted to talk like the
Hagga. Poor little tail-enders of a doomed race.
THE WHOLE DAMNED thing was getting too big for comfort, Jack Holloway
thought. A month ago, there d only been Gerd and Ruth and Lynne Andrews
and Pancho Ybarra, and George Lunt, and the men George had brought
when he d transferred from the Constabulary. They all had cocktails together
before dinner, and ate at one table, and had bull-sessions in the evenings,
and everybody had known what everybody else was doing. And there had
only been forty or fifty Fuzzies, beside his and George s and Gerd s and
Ruth s.
Now Gerd had three assistants, and Ruth had dropped work on Fuzzy
psychology and was helping him with whatever he was doing, and what that
was he wasn t quite sure. He wasn t quite sure what anybody was doing,
anymore. And Pancho was practically commuting to and from Mallorysport,
and Ernst Mallin was out at least once a week. Funny, too; he used to think
Mallin was a solid, three-dimensional bastard, and now he found he rather
liked him. Even Victor Grego was out, one weekend, and everybody liked him.
Lynne had a couple of helpers, too, and a hospital and clinic, and there
was a Fuzzy school, where they were taught Lingua Terra and how to use
Fuzzyphones and about the strange customs of the Hagga. Some old hen
Ruth had kidnapped from the Mallorysport schools was in charge of it, or
thought she was; actually Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Cinderella and Lizzie
Borden and Dillinger were running it.
And he and George Lunt couldn t yell back and forth to each other any
more, because their offices, at opposite ends of the long hut, were partitioned
off and separated by a hundred and twenty feet of middle office, full of desks
and business machines and roboclerks, and humans working with them. And
he had a secretary, now, and she had a secretary, or at least a stenographer,
of her own.
Gerd van Riebeek came in from the outside, tossing his hat on top of a
microbook-case and unbuckling his pistol.
Hi, Jack. Anything new? he asked.
Gerd and Ruth had been away for a little over a week, in the country to
the south. It must have been fun, just the two of them and Complex and
Superego and Dr. Crippen and Calamity Jane, camping in Gerd s airboat and
visiting the posts Lunt had strung out along the edge of the big woods.
I was going to ask you that. Where s Ruth?
She s staying another week, at the Kirtland plantation, with Superego
and Complex; there must be fifty to seventy-five Fuzzies there; she s helping
the Kirtland people with them, teaching them not to destroy young sugarplant
shoots. Kirtland s been taking a lot of damage to his shoots from zatku.
What s the latest from Mallorysport?
Well, nowhere on the NFMp, but they seem to have found something
interesting about the land-prawns.
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