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anything called a Fuzzy sound menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or
not.
The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at about
twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six Fuzzies, armed
with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged her down and beaten her
severely. Her screams had brought her father, and he had driven the Fuzzies
away.
Police had brought both the girl and her father, Oscar Lurkin, to
headquarters, where they had told their story. City police, Company police and
constab-ulary troopers and parties of armed citizens were combing the eastern
side of the city; Resident General Enimert had acted at once to ofler a reward
of five thousand sols apiece. . . .
'The kid's lying, and if they ever get a veridicator on her, they'll prove
it," he said. "Emmert, or Grego, or
the two of them together, bribed those people to tell that story."
"Oh, I take that for granted," Gerd said. "I know that place. Junktown. Ruth
does a lot of work there for juvenile court." He stopped brielly, pain in his
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eyes, and then continued: "You can hire anybody to do anything over there for
a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in advance."
He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering the Fuzzy hunt
from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies of Junktown were
floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and poking among
them. Once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring at the ground
from it over a machine gun.
"Wooo! Am I glad I'm not in that mess!" Gerd exclaimed. "Any-body sees
something he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang'll massa-cre each other in
ten seconds."
"I hope they do!"
Interworld News was pro-Fuzzy; the commentator in the car was being extremely
sarcastic about the whole thing. Into the middle of one view of a
rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the studio cut a view of the
Fuzzies, taken at the camp, looking up appealingly while waiting for
breakfast. "These," a voice said, "are the terrible monsters against whom all
these brave men are protecting us."
A few moments later, a rifle flash and a bang, and then a fusillade brought
Jack's heart into his throat. The pick-up car jetted toward it; by the time it
reached the spot, the shooting had stopped, and a crowd was gathering around
something white on the ground. He had to force himself to look, then gave a
shuddering breath of relief. It was a zaragoat, a three-horned domesticated
ungulate.
"0h-Oh! Some squatter's milk supply finished." The commentator laughed. "Not
the first one tonight either. Attorney General-former Chief
Prosecutor-O'Brien's going to have quite a few suits against the
administration to defend as a result of this business."
'We's going to have a goddamn thundering big one from Jack Holloway!"
The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on.
"I just talked to Judge Pendarvis," Gus Brarinhard reported out of it. "He's
issuing an order restraining
Emmert from paying any reward except for Fuzzies turned over alive and
uninjured to Marshal Fane.
And he's issuing a warning that until the status of the Fuzzies is
de-termined, anybody killing one will face charges of murder."
"That's fine, Gus! Have you seen the girl or her father yet?"
Brannhard snarled angrily. 'The girl's in the Company hospital, in a private
room. The doctors won't let anybody see her. I think Em-mert's hiding the
father in the Residency. And I haven't seen the two cops who brought them in,
or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the detective lieutenant who
was on duty here. They've all lammed out. Max has a couple of men over in
Junktown, trying to find out who called the cops in the first place. We may
get something out of that."
The Chief Justice's action was announced a few minutes later; it got to the
hunters a few minutes after that and the Fuzzy hunt began falling apart. The
City and Company police dropped out immedi-ately. Most of the civilians,
hoping to grab five thousand sols' worth of live Fuzzy, stayed on for twenty
minutes, and so, apparently to control them, did the constabulary. Then the
reward was cancelled, the airborne floodlights went off and the whole thing
broke up.
Gus Brannhard came in shortly afterward, starting to undress as soon as he
heeled the door shut after him. When he had his jacket and neckcloth off, he
dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler with whisky, gulped half of it
and then began pulling off his boots.
'T that drink has a kid sister, I'll take it," Gerd muttered. "What happened,
Gus?"
Brannhard began to curse. 'The whole thing's a fake; it stinks from here to
Nifilheim. It would stink on
Nifflheim." He picked up a cigar butt he had laid aside when Fane's call had
come in and relighted it. "We found the woman who called the police. Neighbor;
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she says she saw Lurkin come home drunk, and a little later she heard the girl
screaming. She says he beats her up every time he gets drunk, which is about
five times a week, and she'd made up her mind to
stop it the next chance she got. She denied having seen anything that even
looked like a Fuzzy anywhere around."
The excitement of the night before had incubated a new brood of Fuzzy reports;
Jack went to the marshal's office to interview the peo-ple making them. The
first dozen were of a piece with the ones that had come in originally. Then he
talked to a young man who had something of different quality.
"I saw them as plain as I'm seeing you, not more than fifty feet away," he
said. "I had an autocarbine, and
I pulled up on them, but, gosh, I couldn't shoot them. They were just like
little people, Mr. Holloway, and they looked so scared and helpless. So I held
over their heads and let off a two-second burst to scare them away before
anybody else saw them and shot them."
'Yell, son, I'd like to shake your hand for that. You know, you thought you
were throwing away a lot of money there. How many did you see?"
"Well, only four. I'd heard that there were six, but the other two could have
been back in the brush where
I didn't see them."
He pointed out on the map where it had happened. There were three other people
who had actually seen
Fuzzies; none were sure how many, but they were all positive about locations
and times. Plot-ting the reports on the map, it was apparent that the Fuzzies
were moving north and west across the outskirts of the city.
Brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel, still swearing, but half amusedly.
"They've exhumed Ham O'Brien, and they've put him to work harassing us," he
said. "Whole flock of civil suits and dangerous-nuisance complaints and that
sort of thing; idea's to keep me amused with them while
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