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V
Victor Grego crushed out his cigarette slowly and deliberately.
 Yes, Leonard, he said patiently.  It s very interesting, and doubtless an
important discovery, but I can t see why you re making such a production of
it. Are you afraid I ll blame you for letting non-Company people beat you to
it? Or do you merely suspect that anything Bennett Rainsford s mixed up in is
necessarily a diabolical plot against the Company and, by consequence, human
civilization?
Leonard Kellogg looked pained.  What I was about to say, Victor, is that both
Rainsford and this man Holloway seem convinced that these things they call
Fuzzies aren t animals at all. They believe them to be sapient beings.
 Well, that s  He bit that off short as the significance of what Kellogg had
just said hit him.  Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I don t
blame you for taking it seriously. Why, that would make Zarathustra a Class-IV
inhabited planet.
 For which the Company holds a Class-III charter, Kellogg added. For an
uninhabited planet.
Automatically void if any race of sapient beings were discovered on
Zarathustra.
 You know what will happen if this is true?
 Well, I should imagine the charter would have to be renegotiated, and now
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that the Colonial Office knows what sort of a planet this is, they ll be
anything but generous with the Company& .
 They won t renegotiate anything, Leonard. The Federation government will
simply take the position that the Company has already made an adequate return
on the original investments, and they ll award us what we can show as in our
actual possession I hope and throw the rest into the public domain.
The vast plains on Beta and Delta continents, with their herds of
veldbeest all open range, and every  beest that didn t carry a Company brand a
maverick. And all the untapped mineral wealth, and the untilled arable land;
it would take years of litigation even to make the Company s claim to Big
Blackwater stick. And Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines would lose their
monopolistic franchise and get sticky about it in the courts, and in any case,
the Company s import-export monopoly would go out the airlock. And the
squatters rushing in and swamping everything
 Why, we won t be any better off than the Yggdrasil Company, squatting on a
guano heap on one continent! he burst out.  Five years from now, they ll be
making more money out of bat dung than we ll be making out of this whole
world!
And the Company s good friend and substantial stockholder, Nick Emmert, would
be out, too, and a Colonial Governor General would move in, with regular army
troops and a complicated bureaucracy. Elections, and a representative
parliament, and every Tom, Dick and Harry with a grudge against the Company
would be trying to get laws passed And, of course, a Native Affairs
Commission, with its nose in everything.
 But they couldn t just leave us without any kind of a charter, Kellogg
insisted. Who was he trying to kid besides himself?  It wouldn t be fair! As
though that clinched it.  It isn t our fault!
He forced more patience into his voice.  Leonard, please try to realize that
the Terran Federation government doesn t give one shrill soprano hoot on
Nifflheim whether it s fair or not, or whose fault what is. The Federation
government s been repenting that charter they gave the Company ever since they
found out what they d chartered away. Why, this planet is a better world than
Terra ever was, even before the Atomic Wars. Now, if they have a chance to get
it back, with improvements, you think they won t take it? And what will stop
them? If those creatures over on Beta Continent are sapient beings, our
charter isn t worth the parchment it s engrossed on, and that s an end of it.
He was silent for a moment.  You heard that tape Rainsford transmitted to
Jimenez. Did either he or Holloway actually claim, in so many words, that
these things really are sapient beings?
 Well, no; not in so many words. Holloway consistently alluded to them as
people, but he s just an ignorant old prospector. Rainsford wouldn t come out
and commithimself one way or another, but he left the door wide open for
anybody else to.
 Accepting their account, could these Fuzzies be sapient?
 Accepting the account, yes, Kellogg said, in distress.  They could be.
They probably were, if Leonard Kellogg couldn t wish the evidence out of
existence.
 Then they ll look sapient to these people of yours who went over to Beta
this morning, and they ll treat it purely as a scientific question and never
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consider the legal aspects. Leonard, you ll have to take charge of the
investigation, before they make any reports everybody ll be sorry for. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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