Little Fuzzy quotes

They got into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. They crawled into machinery, possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They cut into electric insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather pinched, painfully.

Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another land-prawn.

This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and turned, waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack reached for his hip again, then checked the motion. Pistol cartridges cost like crazy;

Why, even some of my people are talking about ecological side-effects. You know what will happen when a story like that gets back to Terra. The conservation fanatics will get hold of it, and the Company’ll be criticized.”

That would hurt Leonard. He identified himself with the Company. It was something bigger and more powerful than he was, like God.

Victor Grego identified the Company with himself. It was something big and powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the controls.

That would hurt Leonard. He identified himself with the Company. It was something bigger and more powerful than he was, like God.

Victor Grego identified the Company with himself. It was something big and powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the controls.

“Leonard, a little criticism won’t hurt the Company,” he said. “Not where it matters, on the dividends. I’m afraid you’re too sensitive to criticism. Where did Emmert get this story anyhow? From your people?”

Nick Emmert had his corps of spies and stool pigeons, and the Terran Federation had people here watching both him and Emmert. Rainsford could be a Federation agent—a roving naturalist would have a wonderful cover occupation. But this Big Blackwater business was so utterly silly.

Nick Emmert had too much graft on his conscience; it was too bad that overloaded consciences couldn’t blow fuses.

“Suppose he is, Leonard. What could he report on us? We are a chartered company, and we have an excellent legal department, which keeps us safely inside our charter. It is a very liberal charter, too. This is a Class-III uninhabited planet;

“You know, you’re a smart Little Fuzzy.” It took a few seconds to realize just how smart.

Little Fuzzy had wondered why you twisted the cap one way to take it off and the other way to put it on, and he had found out.

For pure reasoning ability, that topped anything in the way of animal intelligence he’d ever seen. “I’m going to tell Ben Rainsford about you.”

Each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to call attention to it, sit and look at it for a while, and then take it apart and start a new one.

Little Fuzzy was capable of artistic gratification too. He made useless things, just for the pleasure of making and looking at them.

Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with his other treasures. The new weapon he laid on the blanket beside him when he went to bed.

Rather incredulously, he realized that he had cracked out at least seventy-five thousand sols’ worth of stones today. He put them into the bag and sat sipping the highball and thinking pleasant thoughts until the bell on the stove warned him that dinner was ready.

He ate alone⁠—after all the years he had been doing that contentedly, it had suddenly become intolerable⁠—

and in the evening he dialed through his microfilm library, finding only books he had read and reread a dozen times, or books he kept for reference. Several times he thought he heard the little door open, but each time he was mistaken.

He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself.

Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.

No; he’d have one drink, maybe a little bigger than usual, before he went to bed.

Ruth Ortheris hooted at that.

“That’s like talking about being just slightly dead or just slightly pregnant,” she said. “You either are or you aren’t.”

Gerd van Riebeek was talking at the same time. “This sapience question is just as important in my field as yours, Ruth.

“Why, I didn’t know you knew Len,” van Riebeek said.

“I never saw the individual before. The species is very common and widely distributed.”

He turned to Rainsford. “You think he and this Mallin will be out tomorrow?”

He wouldn’t like that. But you have to admit he’s been fighting the idea, intellectually and emotionally, right from the start.

Why, they could sit down with pencils and slide rules and start working differential calculus and it wouldn’t convince him.

”

There was a widespread belief that that was why Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard was practicing sporadic law out here in the boondocks of a boondock planet, defending gun fighters and veldbeest rustlers. It wasn’t. Nobody on Zarathustra knew the reason, but it wasn’t whisky.

Whisky was only the weapon with which Gus Brannhard fought off the memory of the reason.

He was in the biggest chair in the living room, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard.

Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on his lap. Mike and Mitzi sat one on either knee. The Fuzzies had taken instantly to Gus.

Bet they thought he was a Big Fuzzy.

“Aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle and glass were placed beside him. “Been staying alive for hours hoping for this.”

“Holloway must have done him up pretty badly,” he said.

“I wish Holloway’d killed him!”

He blurted it angrily, and saw the Resident General’s shocked expression.

If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality.

Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.

”

Once he had had something very important he had wanted to ask her. He was glad, now, that he hadn’t gotten around to it.

Hell, she was so married to the Company it’d be bigamy if she married him too.

“No, I don’t want to talk to her at all.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t find any precedent for it either!”

Leslie Coombes should have known better than that; in colonial law, you can find a precedent for almost anything.

“How much do you bet, Leslie?” Brannhard asked, a larcenous gleam in his eye.

He thought of all the deadly places into which they could have wandered. Machinery, dormant and quiet, until somebody threw a switch. Conduits, which could be flooded without warning, or filled with scalding steam or choking gas.

Poor little Fuzzies, they’d think a city was as safe as the woods of home, where there was nothing worse than harpies and damnthings.

Gus Brannhard was out when he went down to the suite; Ben Rainsford was at a reading screen, studying a psychology text, and Gerd was working at a desk that had been brought in.

That had started out a bright red; gradually it faded into purple.

Evidently Piet Dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence definition of truth.

“Who told you about it?”

He had, at that, after he’d decided he couldn’t beat the veridicator. Jack found himself sympathizing with Mallin. He’d disliked the man from the first, but he looked different now—sort of cleaned and washed out inside.

Maybe everybody ought to be veridicated, now and then, to teach them that honesty begins with honesty to self.

“Mr. Coombes?” Mr. Coombes looked as though he never wanted to ask another witness another question as long as he lived. “Mr. Brannhard?”

He got up, with Mamma and Baby, and crossed to where Leslie Coombes was sitting. By this time, somebody was bringing in a coffee urn from the cafeteria.

Fuzzies ought to happen oftener in court.

The gavel tapped slowly. Little Fuzzy scrambled up onto Jack Holloway’s lap. After five days in court, they had all learned that the gavel meant for Fuzzies and other people to be quiet.