He decided to let the breakfast dishes go till after lunch. Kurt Borch had
stayed behind at the Kellogg camp, so he kept an eye on the Fuzzies and
brought them back when they started to stray toward the footbridge. Ben
Rainsford hadn't returned by lunchtime, but zebralope hunting took a
little time, even from the air. While he was eating, outside, one of the
rented airjeeps returned from the northeast in a hurry, disgorging Ernst
Mallin, Juan Jimenez and Ruth Ortheris. Kurt Borch came hurrying out; they
talked for a few minutes, and then they all went inside. A little later,
the second jeep came in, even faster, and landed; Kellogg and van Riebeek
hastened into the living hut. There wasn't anything more to see. He
carried the dishes into the kitchen and washed them, and the Fuzzies went
into the bedroom for their nap.
He was sitting at the table in the living room when Gerd van Riebeek
knocked on the open door.
"Jack, can I talk to you for a minute?" he asked.
"Sure. Come in."
Van Riebeek entered, unbuckling his gun belt. He shifted a chair so that
he could see the door from it, and laid the belt on the floor at his feet
when he sat down. Then he began to curse Leonard Kellogg in four or five
languages.
"Well, I agree, in principle; why in particular, though?"
"You know what that son of a Khooghra's doing?" Gerd asked. "He and
that--" He used a couple of Sheshan words, viler than anything in Lingua
Terra. "--that quack headshrinker, Mallin, are preparing a report,
accusing you and Ben Rainsford of perpetrating a deliberate scientific
hoax. You taught the Fuzzies some tricks; you and Rainsford, between you,
made those artifacts yourselves and the two of you are conspiring to foist
the Fuzzies off as sapient beings. Jack, if it weren't so goddamn stinking
contemptible, it would be the biggest joke of the century!"
"I take it they wanted you to sign this report, too?"
"Yes, and I told Kellogg he could--" What Kellogg could do, it seemed, was
both appalling and physiologically impossible. He cursed again, and then
lit a cigarette and got hold of himself. "Here's what happened. Kellogg
and I went up that stream, about twenty miles down Cold Creek, the one
you've been working on, and up onto the high flat to a spring and a stream
that flows down in the opposite direction. Know where I mean? Well, we
found where some Fuzzies had been camping, among a lot of fallen timber.
And we found a little grave, where the Fuzzies had buried one of their
people."
He should have expected something like that, and yet it startled him. "You
mean, they bury their dead? What was the grave like?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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