Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The Orzu Problem

Along with the Morzus we’d sent him specimens of Arnicus soil and jungle vegetation, and when he’d gotten a roaring jungle going in his cage, someone turned the Morzus loose there, maybe thinking they would grow up to the size of old Orzu. Those microscopic reptiles disappeared into that four-acre jungle, and the last I heard the zoo personnel were still looking for them. The Director was fired for squandering the tax payers’ money.

I expected a reprimand, and it wasn’t long in coming. Two weeks after I saw the news release about the director, I was knocked from Grade 1 down to Grade 10, fined two years of seniority, and confined to Base for eighteen months.

It was all done without a hearing, as I said, but I knew I deserved it, I didn’t even file an appeal. I considered it worth it, at that price, and when I think of the zoo personnel beating through that Arnicus jungle looking for Morzus, I still get laughing fits.

Then the trial brief arrived, and you could have warped me twice around a comet. It wasn’t the Galaxia Zoo that filed the complaint—it was Scientist Orzu! A balder concoction of lies I have never seen. My party, he said, kept him starving in the jungle for two weeks without bothering to rescue him. We caused irreparable damage to valuable scientific specimens by forcing him to pack his belongings with undue and unnecessary haste. We appropriated to our own use four valuable specimens as the price of getting him off Arnicus at all. We made no effort to salvage his thoroughly smashed space yacht, which was government property. And so it went, through four and a half pages.

My screams of protest could have been heard as far away as Sirius, but it was too late for counteraction. Why, I asked myself. Why? What did I ever do to him, except save his life?

But it proved to be very simple. Orzu had suffered a crushing defeat. He had to take it out on someone, and I’d insulted him. It turned out that another scientist had done some browsing on Arnicus fifty years before, and he found skeletal remains of the same reptile that Orzu wanted to name Orzu. He also had the same idea about getting the big fellow named after himself, and he got his claim in first, by forty-nine years and six months.

So I got demoted and fined for something I didn’t do, and still maintain that I’m innocent. It certainly isn’t my fault that the official name for Orzu’s pet fossil is Smith.