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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 thatmess!  Gerd exclaimed.  Anybody sees
something he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang ll massacre 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 againstwhom 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 pickup 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.
 Oh-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.
 He 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 Brannhard 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 determined, 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 Emmert 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 immediately. 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
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and then began pulling off his boots.
 If 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
Nifflheim. It would stinkon 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; 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 people 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.
 Well, 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]