Chapter 9

Jack Holloway saw Little Fuzzy eying the pipe he had laid in the ashtray, and picked it up, putting it in his mouth. Little Fuzzy looked reproachfully at him and started to get down onto the floor. Pappy Jack was mean; didn’t he think a Fuzzy might want to smoke a pipe, too? Well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt him. He picked Little Fuzzy up and set him back on his lap, offering the pipestem. Little Fuzzy took a puff. He didn’t cough over it; evidently he had learned how to avoid inhaling.

“They scheduled the Kellogg trial first,” Gus Brannhard was saying, “and there wasn’t any way I could stop that. You see what the idea is? They’ll try him first, with Leslie Coombes running both the prosecution and the defense, and if they can get him acquitted, it’ll prejudice the sapience evidence we introduce in your trial.”

Mamma Fuzzy made another try at intercepting the drink he was hoisting, but he frustrated that. Baby had stopped trying to sit on his head, and was playing peek-a-boo from behind his whiskers.

“First,” he continued, “they’ll exclude every bit of evidence about the Fuzzies that they can. That won’t be much, but there’ll be a fight to get any of it in. What they can’t exclude, they’ll attack. They’ll attack credibility. Of course, with veridication, they can’t claim anybody’s lying, but they can claim self-deception. You make a statement you believe, true or false, and the veridicator’ll back you up on it. They’ll attack qualifications on expert testimony. They’ll quibble about statements of fact and statements of opinion. And what they can’t exclude or attack, they’ll accept, and then deny that it’s proof of sapience.

“What the hell do they want for proof of sapience?” Gerd demanded. “Nuclear energy and contragravity and hyperdrive?”

“They will have a nice, neat, pedantic definition of sapience, tailored especially to exclude the Fuzzies, and they will present it in court and try to get it accepted, and it’s up to us to guess in advance what that will be, and have a refutation of it ready, and also a definition of our own.”

“Their definition will have to include Khooghras. Gerd, do the Khooghras bury their dead?”

“Hell, no; they eat them. But you have to give them this, they cook them first.”

“Look, we won’t get anywhere arguing about what Fuzzies do and Khooghras don’t do,” Rainsford said. “We’ll have to get a definition of sapience. Remember what Ruth said Saturday night?”

Gerd van Riebeek looked as though he didn’t want to remember what Ruth had said, or even remember Ruth herself. Jack nodded, and repeated it. “I got the impression of non-sapient intelligence shading up to a sharp line, and then sapience shading up from there, maybe a different color, or wavy lines instead of straight ones.”

“That’s a good graphic representation,” Gerd said. “You know, that line’s so sharp I’d be tempted to think of sapience as a result of mutation, except that I can’t quite buy the same mutation happening in the same way on so many different planets.”

Ben Rainsford started to say something, then stopped short when a constabulary siren hooted over the camp. The Fuzzies looked up interestedly. They knew what that was. Pappy Jack’s friends in the blue clothes. Jack went to the door and opened it, putting the outside light on.

The car was landing; George Lunt, two of his men and two men in civilian clothes were getting out. Both the latter were armed, and one of them carried a bundle under his arm.

“Hello, George; come on in.”

“We want to talk to you, Jack.” Lunt’s voice was strained, empty of warmth or friendliness. “At least, these men do.”

“Why, yes. Sure.”

He backed into the room to permit them to enter. Something was wrong; something bad had come up. Khadra came in first, placing himself beside and a little behind him. Lunt followed, glancing quickly around and placing himself between Jack and the gunrack and also the holstered pistols on the table. The third trooper let the two strangers in ahead of him, and then closed the door and put his back against it. He wondered if the court might have cancelled his bond and ordered him into custody. The two strangers--a beefy man with a scrubby black mustache, and a smaller one with a thin, saturnine face--were looking expectantly at Lunt. Rainsford and van Riebeek were on their feet. Gus Brannhard leaned over to refill his glass, but did not rise.

“Let me have the papers,” Lunt said to the beefy stranger.

The other took a folded document and handed it over.

“Jack, this isn’t my idea,” Lunt said. “I don’t want to do it, but I have to. I wouldn’t want to shoot you, either, but you make any resistance and I will. I’m no Kurt Borch; I know you, and I won’t take any chances.”

“If you’re going to serve that paper, serve it,” the bigger of the two strangers said. “Don’t stand yakking all night.”

“Jack,” Lunt said uncomfortably, “this is a court order to impound your Fuzzies as evidence in the Kellogg case. These men are deputy marshals from Central Courts; they’ve been ordered to bring the Fuzzies into Mallorysport.”

“Let me see the order, Jack,” Brannhard said, still remaining seated.

Lunt handed it to Jack, and he handed it across to Brannhard. Gus had been drinking steadily all evening; maybe he was afraid he’d show it if he stood up. He looked at it briefly and nodded.

“Court order, all right, signed by the Chief Justice.” He handed it back. “They have to take the Fuzzies, and that’s all there is to it. Keep that order, though, and make them give you a signed and thumbprinted receipt. Type it up for them now, Jack.”

Gus wanted to busy him with something, so he wouldn’t have to watch what was going on. The smaller of the two deputies had dropped the bundle from under his arm. It was a number of canvas sacks. He sat down at the typewriter, closing his ears to the noises in the room, and wrote the receipt, naming the Fuzzies and describing them, and specifying that they were in good health and uninjured. One of them tried to climb to his lap, yeeking frantically; it clutched his shirt, but it was snatched away. He was finished with his work before the invaders were with theirs. They had three Fuzzies already in sacks. Khadra was catching Cinderella. Ko-Ko and Little Fuzzy had run for the little door in the outside wall, but Lunt was standing with his heels against it, holding it shut; when they saw that, both of them began burrowing in the bedding. The third trooper and the smaller of the two deputies dragged them out and stuffed them into sacks.

He got to his feet, still stunned and only half comprehending, and took the receipt out of the typewriter. There was an argument about it; Lunt told the deputies to sign it or get the hell out without the Fuzzies. They signed, inked their thumbs and printed after their signatures. Jack gave the paper to Gus, trying not to look at the six bulging, writhing sacks, or hear the frightened little sounds.

“George, you’ll let them have some of their things, won’t you?” he asked.

“Sure. What kind of things?”

“Their bedding. Some of their toys.”

“You mean this junk?” The smaller of the two deputies kicked the ball-and-stick construction. “All we got orders to take is the Fuzzies.”

“You heard the gentleman.” Lunt made the word sound worse than son of a Khooghra. He turned to the two deputies. “Well, you have them; what are you waiting for?”

Jack watched from the door as they put the sacks into the aircar, climbed in after them and lifted out. Then he came back and sat down at the table.

“They don’t know anything about court orders,” he said. “They don’t know why I didn’t stop it. They think Pappy Jack let them down.”

“Have they gone, Jack?” Brannhard asked. “Sure?” Then he rose, reaching behind him, and took up a little ball of white fur. Baby Fuzzy caught his beard with both tiny hands, yeeking happily.

“Baby! They didn’t get him!”

Brannhard disengaged the little hands from his beard and handed him over.

“No, and they signed for him, too.” Brannhard downed what was left of his drink, got a cigar out of his pocket and lit it. “Now, we’re going to go to Mallorysport and get the rest of them back.”

“But ... But the Chief Justice signed that order. He won’t give them back just because we ask him to.”

Brannhard made an impolite noise. “I’ll bet everything I own Pendarvis never saw that order. They have stacks of those things, signed in blank, in the Chief of the Court’s office. If they had to wait to get one of the judges to sign an order every time they wanted to subpoena a witness or impound physical evidence, they’d never get anything done. If Ham O’Brien didn’t think this up for himself, Leslie Coombes thought it up for him.”