The Fuzzies suddenly stopped what they were doing and turned. Diamond drew his Fuzzyphone. “Pappy Vic!” he called, in delighted surprise. “Come; look what we make!” Flora and Fauna were whooping greetings, too.

He rose, and saw behind him the short, compactly-built man, familiar from news-screen views, whom he had so far avoided meeting personally. Victor Grego greeted the Fuzzies, and then said, “Good evening, Governor. Sorry to intrude, but Miss Glenn has a dinner-and-dancing date, and I told her I’d get Diamond myself.”

“Good evening, Mr. Grego.” Somehow, he didn’t feel the hostility to the man that he had expected. “Could you wait a little while? They have an important project, here, and they want to finish it while there’s still daylight.”

“Well, so I see.” Grego spoke to the Fuzzies in their own language, and listened while they explained what they were doing. “Of course; we can’t interfere with that.”

The Fuzzies went back to their trellis-building. He and Grego sat down in lawn-chairs; Grego lit a cigarette. He watched the CZC manager-in-chief as the latter sat watching the Fuzzies. This couldn’t be Victor Grego; “Victor Grego” was a label for a personification of black-hearted villainy and ruthless selfishness; this was a pleasant-spoken, courteous gentleman who loved Fuzzies, and was considerate of his employees.

“Miss Glenn’s date was with Captain Ahmed Khadra,” Grego was saying, to make conversation. “The fifth in the last two weeks. I’m afraid I’m just before losing a good Fuzzy sitter by marriage.”

“I’m afraid so; they seem quite serious about each other. If so, she’ll be getting a good husband. I’ve known Ahmed for some time; he was at the Constabulary post near my camp, on Beta. It’s too bad,” he added, “that he seems to be getting nowhere on this Herckerd-Novaes investigation. It’s certainly not from lack of trying.”

“My police chief, Harry Steefer, is getting nowhere just as rapidly,” Grego said. “He’s ready to give the whole thing up, and when Harry Steefer gives up, it’s hopeless.”

“Do you think there is anything to this theory that somebody is training those Fuzzies to help catch other Fuzzies?”

Grego shook his head. “You know Fuzzies at least as well as I do, Governor. Almost two months; anything you can train a Fuzzy to do, you can train him to do it in less than that,” he said. “And I don’t see why anybody would try to catch wild Fuzzies, not with the bloodthirsty laws you’ve enacted. Criminals only take chances in proportion to profits, and almost anybody who wants a Fuzzy can get one free.”

That was true. And there was no indication of any black market in Fuzzies here, and Jack’s patrols over northern Beta Continent hadn’t found any evidence that anybody was live trapping Fuzzies there.

“Ahmed had an idea, for a while, that they were going into the export business; catching Fuzzies to smuggle out for sale off-planet.”

“He mentioned that to Harry Steefer. Jack Holloway was talking to me about that, too; wanted to know what could be done to prevent it. I told him it would be impossible to get Fuzzies onto a ship from Darius, or onto Darius from Mallorysport Space Terminal. As long as we keep our ‘flagrant and heinous space-traffic monopoly,’ you can be sure no Fuzzies are going to be shipped off-planet.”

“You think Ingermann really has anything to do with it?” he asked hopefully, recognizing the source of the quotation.

“If there is a black market in Fuzzies, Ingermann’s back of it,” Grego said, as though stating a natural law. “In the six or so years he’s infected this planet, I’ve learned a lot about the soi-disant Honorable Hugo Ingermann, and none of it’s been good.”

“Ahmed Khadra thinks his attacks on the CZC space-monopoly may stem from a desire to get some way around your controls at the ground terminal here and on Darius. Of course, he’s talking about a Government spaceport, and that would be just as tightly controlled…”

Grego hesitated for a moment, then dropped his cigarette to the ground and heeled it out. He leaned toward Rainsford in his chair.

“Governor, you know, yourself, that as things stand you can’t build a second spaceport here,” he said. “Ingermann knows that, too. He’s making that issue to embarrass you and to attack the CZC at the same time. He has no expectation that your Government would build any spaceport facilities here. He certainly hopes not; he wants to do that himself.”

“Where the devil would he get the money?”

“He could get it. Unless I miss my guess, he’s getting it now, or as soon as a ship can get in, on Marduk. There are a number of shipping companies who would like to get in here in competition with Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines, and there are quite a few import-export houses there who would like to trade on Zarathustra in competition with CZC. Inside six months somebody will be trying to put in a spaceport here. If they can get land to set it on. And due to a great error in my judgment eight years ago, the land’s available.”

“Where?”

“Right here on Alpha Continent, less than a hundred miles from where we’re sitting. A wonderful place for a spaceport. You weren’t here, then, were you, Governor?”

“No. I came here, I blush to say, on the same ship that brought Ingermann, six and a half years ago.”

“Well, you got here, and so did he, after it was over, but just before that we had a big immigration boom. At that time, the company wasn’t interested in local business, just offplanet trade in veldbeest meat. A lot of independent concerns started, manufacturing, food production, that sort of thing that we didn’t want to bother with. We sold land north of the city, in mile and two-mile square blocks, about two thousand square miles of it. Then the immigrants stopped coming, and a lot of them moved away. There simply wasn’t employment for them. Most of the companies that had been organized went broke. Some of the factories that were finished operated for a while; most of them were left unfinished. The banks took over some of the land; most of it got into the hands of the shylocks; and since the Fuzzy Trial Ingermann has been acquiring title to a lot of it. Since the Fuzzy Trial, nobody else has been spending money for real-estate; everybody expects to get all the free land they want.”

“Well, he’ll probably make some money out of that, but the people who come in here with the capital will be the ones to control it, won’t they?”

“Of course they will, but that’s honest business; Ingermann isn’t interested. He’s expecting an increase of about two to three hundred percent in the planetary population in the next five years. With eighty percent of the land-surface in public domain, that’s probably an underestimate. Most of them will be voters; Ingermann’s going to try to control that vote.”

And if he did… His own position was secure; Colonial Governors were appointed, and it took something like the military intervention which had put him into office to unseat one. But a Colonial Governor had to govern through and with the consent of a Legislature. He wasn’t looking forward happily to a Legislature controlled by Hugo Ingermann. Neither, he knew, was Grego.

He’d have to be careful, though. Grego wanted to put the company back in its old pre-Fuzzy position of planetary dominance. He was still violently opposed to that.

It was almost dark, now. The Fuzzies had put the final touches to the lacy trellis they had built, and came crowding over, wanting Pappy Ben and Pappy Vic to come look. They went and examined it, and spoke commendation. Grego picked up Diamond; Flora and Fauna were wanting him to go and sit down and furnish them a lap to sit on.

“I’ve been worrying about just that,” he said, when he was back in his chair, with the Fuzzies climbing up onto him. “A lot of the older planets are beginning to overpopulate, and there’s never room enough for everybody on Terra. There’ll be a rush here in about a year. If I can only get things stabilized before then…”