Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

Into a little house I'll build.' "

Helton was relieved from dealing further with Ben Rainsford's expansive suggestions by the ringing of a ship's bell over the portable public address speakers-ding-ding-ding-ding-and the amplified voice of a Navy Chief Petty Officer. "Four bells and all's shipshape. Those with individual invitations to the briefing should turn to in the ward room-" pause"-I mean-assemble in the

Governor's conference chamber."

1800 hours. The band resumed playing, softly-light classics, mostly: Like Loki is my Home, Buried in the Stars, Hyper space Heaven, Senchant Star-that sort of thing. People were filing into the conference room and taking seats which had small cards taped to the backs with each individual 's name printed on them.

The room had been re-arranged, with the long conference table turned at a right angle across one end of the room. Alex Napier and his principal staff were seated behind it, like judges in a court.

As soon as everyone was comfortably situated and the Marine guards had closed the outer doors to the conference room, Napier rose. "Ladies and gentlemen,"

he said, nodding toward Little Fuzzy, Diamond, and Starwatcher, who were seated in the front row, to indicate that he included them in the appellation,"you may have noticed that there are quite a lot of Marines on Zarathustra." There was a ripple of laughter. "To be more precise," Napier said, "there is a full brigade of them, assigned to Xerxes Base and under the command of Colonel Thomas McGraw." He indicated McGraw, who stood so that everyone might get a good look at him. "I wish to emphasize," Napier continued,"that this military presence in no way indicates that I have again assumed temporary control of the civil government. The Marines-and a contingent of Naval personnel from Xerxes-are here in answer to the specific request by Governor Rainsford for assistance in maintaining law and order during a period of civil unrest. When complete order has been restored, and on the request, again, of Governor Rainsford, we will withdraw."

Jack Hollo way nodded. Ah, he thought to himself, Ben has made a deal with Alex Napier-a deal that will not bring down a Board of Inquiry on either one of them, but will get us all out from under this insurrection business as gracefully as possible.

"The situation is, I must say, quite serious," Napier was saving, "but nothing-in the view of Governor Rainsford, Mr. Victor Grego, or myself-that warrants a declaration of Martial Law."

Oh-ho, Holloway was thinking. All three of them put it together over cocktails last night.

"I will elaborate on this later during the briefing, but it is not the central reason for calling you together.

"As most of you know, there has been discovered-in conjunction with a wrecked hypership of alien design-a certain body of equally alien communications and information storage gear on North Beta. The Navy has impounded this gear under the provisions of Priority One, in order to examine it and decipher as much of the information as our cryptography and psycho-medical personnel could manage.

The results of our investigations will be presented in the briefing by Lieutenant Commander Ybarra, Liaison Officer, and Lieutenant diCenzo, Chief Psychologist-whose portion of the briefing will follow immediately after me.

Gentlemen ..." Napier sat.

Ybarra stood, and Joe diCenzo moved to the projection console.

Pancho Ybarra made the protocol-appropriate preferatory remarks, and began his portion of the briefing. "Basically," he said, "the problem is divided into three parts. First, we had to decipher the Fuzzy language as completely as possible. Working from the vocabulary we accumulated when doing our sapience tests, and from basic number identification, we were able, using computers, to

compile a lexicographical profile of Actual Fuzzy from the keys found in Zarathustran Fuzzy. Secondly, we took phonetics and mated them with sounds to decipher the Fuzzy alphabet. Finally, we continually played side systems in and out of the data present in order to catch the subtleties of nuance and idiom. As a result of this program, we have assembled what we believe to be a fairly clear picture of the history of Fuzzies on Zarathustra."

Slide projections and film strips played across the readout screen, underscoring the technical remarks to which Commander Ybarra referred.

"I won't bore you," Pancho Ybarra said, "with technical details, although I will be available later to answer specific questions by qualified researchers.

"To place the matter in a simple narrative form, the events are as follows.

Very nearly a thousand years ago, a hyper-drive spaceship was wrecked on the northern part of Beta Continent. The passengers and crew were all Fuzzies.

Fuzzies were at that time-and if they have survived on what we will call Fuzzyhome planet, still are-a star-traveling race of intelligent beings. They are, we suspect, more intelligent than Terran Humans, but we are not yet certain of that point.

"In any case, the cracked-up ship came to rest about halfway up Mount Fuzzy in Fuzzy Valley. Some were killed, but most of the Fuzzies survived.

"We don't know where Fuzzyhome is, because no navigational equipment survived the crash, and, as nearly as we can tell the vessel was off course when it crashed-or made its forced landing. In any case, there was some trouble with the drives. The vessel sent out a distress call, and that is logged, but no other Fuzzy vessel ever found them, so the position given must have been wrong.

"At any rate, the surviving Fuzzies were stuck in Fuzzy Valley and on Mount Fuzzy. However, there was a nice cave in the mountain. Geothermal heat kept it warm and it is lighted all the time; the same geothermal heat excites sunstones to thermofluorescence, and the entire interior of the cave is liberally studded with sunstones. I can explain the geology of this phenomenon, but I shan't go into it deeply unless there are specific questions later. Basically, North Beta and South Beta were once separate continents. As the tectonic plates drifted together, they raised up the mountain range to which Mount Fuzzy belongs. The flint layer was on top of a limestone layer; ground water leached away the limestone, over some megacenturies, leaving the cavern roof and its layer of sunstones exposed.

"It was a very nice cave.

"The shipwrecked Fuzzies took as much gear as they could from the ship into the cave, to help them survive. They set up housekeeping for a few generations. They lived from the surrounding countryside, eating what they could catch, and augmenting that with stores salvaged from the ship. They built some huts and suchlike, but mainly they headquartered in this fine cave."

Jack Holloway hadn't heard any of this before. He wasn't upset about being left out, because while this wonderful little social gathering was being put together, he had been very busy in the hospital getting his arm put back together.

Ybarra continued. "The ship-as nearly as we can tell- was a cargo-passenger vessel with a crew we would call paramilitary. This is not an accurate term, because Fuzzies don't think in military terms the same way that Terran Humans

do. The crew, though, was trained to teamwork, whereas the passengers were not.

"At first, the castaways didn't care too much for the lush plants that grew in Fuzzy Valley, but as time went by, they began to taste better and better. The titanium hull of the ship was slowly being eroded away by ground water, which oxidized it and leached titanium salts down into the soil of the valley, where the native plants picked the stuff up.

"Even after all the ship's stores were gone, there was still an abundant supply of a spice shipment the vessel was carrying on its cargo manifest. We might call it a kind of 'titanium pepper,' but, in any case, it made things taste good to Fuzzies, and they sprinkled it on everything they ate.