Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

Napier smiled. "That won't be necessary, Connie," he said. "Just pick the one with the most spotless record and highest fitness rating from the qualified Class-A agents on the station."

"Yes, sir," Greibenfeld said. "I '11 get right on it, personally."

Napier chuckled. "Don't look so pained, Connie. You'll find out all about it at the meeting."

"What meeting?" Greibenfeld asked suddenly.

"The one you'll get about an hour's notice on," Napier said, and blanked the screen.

Everett Diehl rolled over in his bunk, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and stretched. That was the only good part about drawing the mid-watch; you could sleep until noon that morning, if you wanted to. Then, Diehl remembered what had happened in the cavern the night before. It seemed like a dream, now.

Quickly, he reached down and scrambled one hand into his right boot, pulling out the sock he had wadded up in it. Carefully, he opened the sock and was relieved to see the half-dozen shiny pebbles inside. He warmed them between his hands. They started to glow softly. It wasn't a dream. What he had seen was true; maybe an acre of cavern roof and walls, thickly embedded with sunstones. "Jim?" he said. "You awake?"

Spelvin's head emerged from under the pillow in the next bunk. "I am now," he said. "What time is it?" "1030,"Diehl said.

"1030?" Spelvin grumped. "Why the Nifflheim did you wake me up if it's only 1030?"

"I can't sleep," Diehl said simply. "Jim? Did you pick some up, too?"

"Some what?" Spelvin asked sleepily. "Sunstones," Diehl said.

Spelvin sat bolt upright in his bunk. "Shhhh!" he hissed, looking over his shoulder.

"It's all right," Diehl said. "There's nobody in the barracks but us. Did you pick some up, too?"

"Yeah," Spelvin said, scratching himself. "A few," he lied. He had nearly half a sock full of the precious gems. The time that Diehl had spent gaping in wonderment, Spelvin had spent gathering up loose sunstones-some undoubtedly spilled from the pockets of the late Mr. Squint-right up to the place where a cataclysmite charge had collapsed the fissure at the rear of the cavern.

"Y'know, Jim," Diehl said, "I been thinkin'. We could sell a couple of these apiece and pay off Laporte, once and for all."

"Sure," Spelvin said scornfully. "Right away he'll start wondering where we got that much money all at once. It oughta take about ten minutes for him to find out that we had sold some sunstones to get the money."

"So?" Diehl said.

"So Raul Laporte is the kind of guy that would beat us to a pulp and pull out our fingernails one at a time till we told him what we know," Spelvin said.

"In the end of it, we'll be out our sunstones, and the information."

"Well, what're we gonna do then?" Diehl whined.

Dense as he was, there was a reason for Spelvin being a junior sergeant while Diehl was a corporal. "We'll tell him what we know in exchange for him wiping out our debt. I think the information is worth that much. Dumb-bell," Spelvin said.

"So what're gonna do with the sunstones?" Diehl asked.

"Nothing," Spelvin said. "If we try to sell 'em on Zarathustra, somebody is going to get nosy about how come two Marines got hold of some sunstones-especially two Marines from this particular battalion."

"You mean we could still wind up gettin' our fingernails pulled out," Diehl said.

"Now you got it," Spelvin said. "We just put 'em away until we get transferred to some other planet. They '11 bring at least three times as much anyplace but Zarathustra, anyway. We sell 'em off one or two at a time and put the money away, see?"

"Yeah," Diehl said dreamily. "It would work out to a whole bunch of sols, all right."

"Then, maybe we can get out of these green suits," Spelvin said, "and start living like human beings. Maybe buy a little business someplace, maybe a little restaurant and tavern."

"Maybe our own little whorehouse, too," Diehl said dreamily.

Gerd van Riebeek laid the binocular loupe and went back into his office. His own observations jibed with the report abstract, but it all seemed a bit odd to him. Well, it would all hinge on whether there was one rockslide or two. He still felt uneasy about the test results. There was something- something he couldn't put his finger on.

"Yet," he said out loud in his empty office. "Not yet we got it. Eventually, though, we will." He thumbed the intercom on his communications screen.

A thin, middle-aged face materialized before him. "Haskins, here," said an efficient-looking man in a white lab coat.

"Bill, how are you doing on the sides analysis of those rock samples?" Gerd asked.

"I've cross-typed and done weathering comparisons with freshly-broken faces,"

Haskins said. "I've still a little double-checking to do, but it looks to me as if it was all one rock-slide. The tape records are quite clear. There's absolutely no overlap of weather aging or solar radiation absorption in sample belt 'B'. It all came down at the same time. I '11 have a final for you this afternoon or early tomorrow." "Thank you, Bill," Gerd said and blanked the screen. He was still drumming his fingers on the console and staring out the window at his pet featherleaf tree when Ruth came in the office with a sheaf of printout in her hand. "Gerd-" she began.

"Have you seen the drawings on the two sets of Fuzzy bones?" he asked her abruptly.

"Why, yes," Ruth said. "I did some of the fractioning analyses myself. Why?"

"Anything strike you as odd about the comparisons?" Gerd asked her.

"Not chemically," she said. "Not until-" "There's something odd there," he interrupted, "but I can't quite put my finger on it."

She sat down and laid the printout on his desk. It was obvious she wasn't going to get a word in about it until Gerd got around to what he was pondering over. "Well," she said, "what is it?"

Gerd leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together on top of his head. ' The Fuzzy bones in the starship are about three hundred years older than the Fuzzy bones from the cave," he said simply. "It doesn't make sense."

"You mean it doesn't make sense to you," Ruth said. "What's so odd about it?"

"That's just it," Gerd said. "I can't put my finger on it. Something to do with Fuzzies burying their dead. The ones that were trapped in the cave; that I can understand. They couldn't 't get at them to bury them. But what about the ones in the ship? Why were they left there?"

"Radiation?" Ruth suggested.

"Did you find any radiation abnormalities in the remains?" Gerd asked her.

"No," she said, "but it could have been short-life radiation. Fuzzies don't know anything about nuclear hazards. If some of them got into the ship and died, the rest would studiously avoid the place, I would think."

"Mmmmm," Gerd said. "I guess that will have to wait for engineering data.

After the Navy is through tearing everything apart, they may be able to decipher what the ship's drive was and tell us something about potentials for radiation leakage."

"And types," she said.

"And types," Gerd agreed. He leaned forward in his chair and began riffling through the stack of printout. "What's this?" he asked.

"This," Ruth said, "is what I came in here about in the first place."

"Which is?" Gerd asked.

"Which is," Ruth said, "what I've been trying to get a word in edgewise about since I got here. Namely, my readouts show that there was a much higher concentration of anti-NFMp in the Fuzzy bones in the wreck than in the Fuzzy bones in the cave."

Gerd carefully and deliberately shook a cigarette out of the pack on his desk, lighted it, and leaned back in his chair once again. "Questions, questions, questions," he said, staring at the ceiling. "Why do we always have more questions than answers?"

"Send him in, Myra," Victor Grego said to the image in the intercom screen.