“When’ll the Convention be?”

“Two weeks from Monday. It’ll be at the Hotel Mallory; the Company’s picking up the tab for the whole thing. Starts with a banquet on Sunday evening. I know what it’ll be like. In the mornings they’ll all be nursing hangovers.” Gus was contemptuous; he’d probably never had a hangover in his life. “And in the evenings they’ll be throwing parties all over the hotel. We’ll get a couple of hours work out of them in the afternoons. That may be all to the good.” He looked at his empty glass, then at the bottle. Jack pushed it across the table to him. “You take any hundred and fifty men like this Horace Stannery here, or Abe Lowther at Chesterville, or Bart Hogan in the Big Bend district — I got him acquitted of a cattle-rustling charge a year and a half ago — and every one of them’ll try to show their constituents what statesmen they are by sponsoring some lame-brained amendment nobody else is witless enough to think of. That was a good constitution Leslie Coombes and I wrote. I hate to think of what it’ll be like when it’s adopted.”

He finished his second drink. Before he could start on another, Jack suggested, “Let’s go out and look around till the gang starts collecting.”

They started down the walk toward the run. There were quite a few Fuzzies playing among the buildings, since it was late enough for them to have lost interest in lessons and drifted out of the school-hut. More had crossed the bridge to watch the fascinating things the Big Ones were doing around the vehicle park.

Two, both males, approached. One said, “Heyo, Pappy Jack,” and the other asked, “Pappy Jack, who is Big One with face-fur?”

Gus laughed and squatted down to their level.

“Heyo, Fuzzies. What names you?”

They gave him blank stares. He examined the silver ID-disks at their throats. They were blank except for registration numbers. “What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t they have names?”

“Except the ones who want to stay here, we don’t name them; we let the people who adopt them do that.”

“Well, don’t they have names of their own? Fuzzy names?”

“Not very good ones. Big One and Little One and Other One and like that. In the woods, mostly they call each other You.”

Gus was scratching one on the back of the neck, which all Fuzzies appreciated. The other was trying to get his knife out of the sheath.

“Hey, quit that. Not touch; sharp. You savvy sharp?”

“Sure. Knife for me sharp, too.” He drew it from the sheath on his shoulder bag and showed it: three-inch blade, which would be equivalent to nine-inch for a human. The edge was razor keen; he’d been around here long enough to learn how to keep a knife honed. The other Fuzzy showed his too, and Gus let them look at his. It had a zarabuck-horn grip; they recognized that at once.

“Takku,” one said. “You kill with noise-thing?”

“Big Ones,” the other said reprovingly, “call takku zarabuck. Big Ones call noise-thing gun.”

They tagged along, talking about everything they saw. Gus lifted them, one to each shoulder, and carried them. Taking rides on Big Ones was something all Fuzzies loved. They were still riding on Uncle Gus when they returned to the camp-house, where George Lunt and Pancho Ybarra were mixing cocktails and Ruth van Riebeek and Lynne Andrews were assembling snacks. Usually Fuzzies didn’t hang around at cocktail time; this was when Big Ones wanted to make Big One talk. These two, however, refused to leave Gus, and sat with him on the grass, sipping hokfusinated fruit juice through straws.

“You’re hooked, Gus,” George Lunt told him cheerfully. “You’re Pappy Gus from now on.”

“You mean they want to stay with me?” Gus seemed slightly alarmed. He liked Fuzzies, the way some bachelors like children, as long as they’re somebody else’s. “You mean, all the time?”

“Sure,” he said. “Little Fuzzy’s been spreading the word; all the Fuzzies will have Big Ones of their own. They’ve picked you for their Big One.”

“You be Big One for us?” one of the Fuzzies asked. They both lost interest in their fruit juice and tried to climb onto his back. “We like you.”

“Well, mightn’t be such a bad idea, at that,” Gus considered. “I’m going to get a place of my own, out of town, say ten or fifteen minutes flying-time.” With the kind of aircar he flew, and the way he flew it, that would be four or five hundred miles. “I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.”

“I know.” He looked around Hoksu-Mitto and thought of what Holloway’s Camp had been like. “It used to be that way here.”

The next morning, Gus was still in bed when Holloway went across the run to his office. He got through his paperwork in a couple of hours and then looked in at the school and at Lynne Andrews’s clinic, dispensary and hospital. Lynne had another viable Fuzzy birth to report, and was as proud as though she had accomplished it herself. That would be one of the first wave to get down into the Piedmont and cash in on the land-prawn boom. The Fuzzy gestation period was a little over six months. It would be March or April at the earliest before the hokfusine-babies started coming in. Maybe, in time, they’d have a population explosion to worry about. Give that the Scarlett O’Hara treatment; enough other things to think about today.

He found Gus Brannhard on what passed for the lawn of the camp-house, playing with the two Fuzzies.

“I thought you were going hunting this morning.”

Gus looked up, grinning as sheepishly as his leonine features permitted.

“I thought I was, too. Then I got to playing with the kids here. Maybe I will this afternoon, but I just feel lazy.”

He just felt tired, was what. He’d been pushing himself hard; probably hadn’t had two good nights sleep in a row since People versus Kellogg and Holloway had been scheduled for trial.

“Why don’t you take the kids hunting? I think they’d like it.”

That hadn’t occurred to Gus. “Well, but they might get hurt. Or lost; mind, I’m going five, six hundred miles to hunt.”

“They won’t get lost. When you set your car down, leave the generator on, on neutral. They can hear the vibrations for five or six miles; if you get lost, they’ll lead you back. George Lunt’s boys always do that when they go out with Fuzzies.”

“Suppose I shoot something; won’t that scare them?”

“Nah, they like shooting. They’re always underfoot at the Protection Force target range. And I think you’ll all three have fun.”

“Hear that, kids? You want to go with Unka Gus, hunt takku, hunt… what the hell’s the Fuzzy for zebralope?”

“Kigga-hikso.”

“Zeb’ alope? You shoot zeb’ alope too?” the Fuzzies both asked.

Gus wasn’t back till after the crowd began assembling for cocktails at the camp-house that afternoon; when he came in he set the car down in back of the cookhouse first, then brought it across the run and grounded beside the house. The Fuzzies jumped out at once, shouting, “Kill zeb’alope! Kill zarabuck! Unka Gus kill zeb’alope, two zarabuck!”

Gus came over more slowly, unslinging his rifle, dropping out the magazine and clearing the chamber, picking up the ejected round. He was laughing as he leaned the rifle beside the bench at the kitchen door.

“Give me a drink, somebody. No, not that stuff; isn’t there any unadulterated whiskey around? Thank you, George.” He poured from the bottle Lunt gave him, took a big drink and refilled his glass. “My God, you should have seen those kids! We set down beside a little creek a couple of miles above where it empties into Snake River. First of all, that one over there yelled, ‘Zatku! Zatku!’ and took off with his chopper-digger. The other one started circling around, and in a minute or so he had one. So we hunted zatku — land-prawn; goddamnit, as soon as you learn the native names for things, the natives start talking Lingua Terra. Then, after they killed a couple of them, they were after me, ‘Pappy Gus, now we hunt zeb’alope.’ So we hunted zebralope.