colonial marshal max fane was as heavy as gus brannhard and considerably shorter. wedged between them on the back seat of the marshal’s car, jack holloway contemplated the backs of the two uniformed deputies on the front seat and felt a happy smile spread through him. going to get his fuzzies back. little fuzzy, and ko-ko, and mike, and mamma fuzzy, and mitzi, and cinderella; he named them over and imagined them crowding around him, happy to be back with pappy jack.
the car settled onto the top landing stage of the company’s science center, and immediately a company cop came running up. gus opened the door, and jack climbed out after him.
“hey, you can’t land here!” the cop was shouting. “this is for company executives only!”
max fane emerged behind them and stepped forward; the two deputies piled out from in front.
“the hell you say, now,” fane said. “a court order lands anywhere. bring him along, boys; we wouldn’t want him to go and bump himself on a communication screen anywhere.”
the company cop started to protest, then subsided and fell in between the deputies. maybe it was beginning to dawn on him that the federation courts were bigger than the chartered zarathustra company after all. or maybe he just thought there’d been a revolution.
leonard kellogg’s—temporarily ernst mallin’s—office was on the first floor of the penthouse, counting down from the top landing stage. when they stepped from the escalator, the hall was crowded with office people, gabbling excitedly in groups; they all stopped talking as soon as they saw what was coming. in the division chief’s outer office three or four girls jumped to their feet; one of them jumped into the bulk of marshal fane, which had interposed itself between her and the communication screen. they were all shooed out into the hall, and one of the deputies was dropped there with the prisoner. the middle office was empty. fane took his badgeholder in his left hand as he pushed through the door to the inner office.
kellogg’s—temporarily mallin’s—secretary seemed to have preceded them by a few seconds; she was standing in front of the desk sputtering incoherently. mallin, starting to rise from his chair, froze, hunched forward over the desk. juan jimenez, standing in the middle of the room, seemed to have seen them first; he was looking about wildly as though for some way of escape.
fane pushed past the secretary and went up to the desk, showing mallin his badge and then serving the papers. mallin looked at him in bewilderment.
“but we’re keeping those fuzzies for mr. o’brien, the chief prosecutor,” he said. “we can’t turn them over without his authorization.”
“this,” max fane said gently, “is an order of the court, issued by chief justice pendarvis. as for mr. o’brien, i doubt if he’s chief prosecutor any more. in fact, i suspect that he’s in jail. and that,” he shouted, leaning forward as far as his waistline would permit and banging on the desk with his fist, “is where i’m going to stuff you, if you don’t get those fuzzies in here and turn them over immediately!”
if fane had suddenly metamorphosed himself into a damnthing, it couldn’t have shaken mallin more. involuntarily he cringed from the marshal, and that finished him.
“but i can’t,” he protested. “we don’t know exactly where they are at the moment.”
“you don’t know.” fane’s voice sank almost to a whisper. “you admit you’re holding them here, but you … don’t … know … where. now start over again; tell the truth this time!”
at that moment, the communication screen began making a fuss. ruth ortheris, in a light blue tailored costume, appeared in it.
“dr. mallin, what is going on here?” she wanted to know. “i just came in from lunch, and a gang of men are tearing my office up. haven’t you found the fuzzies yet?”
“what’s that?” jack yelled. at the same time, mallin was almost screaming: “ruth! shut up! blank out and get out of the building!”
with surprising speed for a man of his girth, fane whirled and was in front of the screen, holding his badge out.
“i’m colonel marshal fane. now, young woman; i want you up here right away. don’t make me send anybody after you, because i won’t like that and neither will you.”
“right away, marshal.” she blanked the screen.
fane turned to mallin. “now.” he wasn’t bothering with vocal tricks any more. “are you going to tell me the truth, or am i going to run you in and put a veridicator on you? where are those fuzzies?”
“but i don’t know!” mallin wailed. “juan, you tell him; you took charge of them. i haven’t seen them since they were brought here.”
jack managed to fight down the fright that was clutching at him and got control of his voice.
“if anything’s happened to those fuzzies, you two are going to envy kurt borch before i’m through with you,” he said.
“all right, how about it?” fane asked jimenez. “start with when you and ham o’brien picked up the fuzzies at central courts building last night.
“well, we brought them here. i’d gotten some cages fixed up for them, and—”
ruth ortheris came in. she didn’t try to avoid jack’s eyes, nor did she try to brazen it out with him. she merely nodded distantly, as though they’d met on a ship sometime, and sat down.
“what happened, marshal?” she asked. “why are you here with these gentlemen?”
“the court’s ordered the fuzzies returned to mr. holloway.” mallin was in a dither. “he has some kind a writ or something, and we don’t know where they are.”
“oh, no!” ruth’s face, for an instant, was dismay itself. “not when—” then she froze shut.
“i came in about o-seven-hundred,” jimenez was saying, “to give them food and water, and they’d broken out of their cages. the netting was broken loose on one cage and the fuzzy that had been in it had gotten out and let the others out. they got into my office—they made a perfect shambles of it—and got out the door into the hall, and now we don’t know where they are. and i don’t know how they did any of it.”
cages built for something with no hands and almost no brains. ever since kellogg and mallin had come to the camp, mallin had been hypnotizing himself into the just-silly-little-animals doctrine. he must have succeeded; last night he’d acted accordingly.
“we want to see the cages,” jack said.
“yeah.” fane went to the outer door. “miguel.”
the deputy came in, herding the company cop ahead of him.
“you heard what happened?” fane asked.
“yeah. big fuzzy jailbreak. what did they do, make little wooden pistols and bluff their way out?”
“by god, i wouldn’t put it past them. come along. bring chummy along with you; he knows the inside of this place better than we do. piet, call in. we want six more men. tell chang to borrow from the constabulary if he has to.”
“wait a minute,” jack said. he turned to ruth. “what do you know about this?”
“well, not much. i was with dr. mallin here when mr. grego—i mean, mr. o’brien—called to tell us that the fuzzies were going to be kept here till the trial. we were going to fix up a room for them, but till that could be done, juan got some cages to put them in. that was all i knew about it till o-nine-thirty, when i came in and found everything in an uproar and was told that the fuzzies had gotten loose during the night. i knew they couldn’t get out of the building, so i went to my office and lab to start overhauling some equipment we were going to need with the fuzzies. about ten-hundred, i found i couldn’t do anything with it, and my assistant and i loaded it on a pickup truck and took it to henry stenson’s instrument shop. by the time i was through there, i had lunch and then came back here.”
he wondered briefly how a polyencephalographic veridicator would react to some of those statements; might be a good idea if max fane found out.
“i’ll stay here,” gus brannhard was saying, “and see if i can get some more truth out of these people.”
“why don’t you screen the hotel and tell gerd and ben what’s happened?” he asked. “gerd used to work here; maybe he could help us hunt.”
“good idea. piet, tell our re-enforcements to stop at the mallory on the way and pick him up.” fane turned to jimenez. “come along; show us where you had these fuzzies and how they got away.”
“you say one of them broke out of his cage and then released the others,” jack said to jimenez as they were going down on the escalator. “do you know which one it was?”
jimenez shook his head. “we just took them out of the bags and put them into the cages.”
that would be little fuzzy; he’d always been the brains of the family. with his leadership, they might have a chance. the trouble was that this place was full of dangers fuzzies knew nothing about—radiation and poisons and electric wiring and things like that. if they really had escaped. that was a possibility that began worrying jack.
on each floor they passed going down, he could glimpse parties of company employees in the halls, armed with nets and blankets and other catching equipment. when they got off jimenez led them through a big room of glass cases—mounted specimens and articulated skeletons of zarathustran mammals. more people were there, looking around and behind and even into the cases. he began to think that the escape was genuine, and not just a cover-up for the murder of the fuzzies.
jimenez took them down a narrow hall beyond to an open door at the end. inside, the permanent night light made a blue-white glow; a swivel chair stood just inside the door. jimenez pointed to it.
“they must have gotten up on that to work the latch and open the door,” he said.
it was like the doors at the camp, spring latch, with a handle instead of a knob. they’d have learned how to work it from watching him. fane was trying the latch.
“not too stiff,” he said. “your little fellows strong enough to work it?”
he tried it and agreed. “sure. and they’d be smart enough to do it, too. even baby fuzzy, the one your men didn’t get, would be able to figure that out.”
“and look what they did to my office,” jimenez said, putting on the lights.
they’d made quite a mess of it. they hadn’t delayed long to do it, just thrown things around. everything was thrown off the top of the desk. they had dumped the wastebasket, and left it dumped. he saw that and chuckled. the escape had been genuine all right.
“probably hunting for things they could use as weapons, and doing as much damage as they could in the process.” there was evidently a pretty wide streak of vindictiveness in fuzzy character. “i don’t think they like you, juan.”
“wouldn’t blame them,” fane said. “let’s see what kind of a houdini they did on these cages now.”
the cages were in a room—file room, storeroom, junk room—behind jimenez’s office. it had a spring lock, too, and the fuzzies had dragged one of the cages over and stood on it to open the door. the cages themselves were about three feet wide and five feet long, with plywood bottoms, wooden frames and quarter-inch netting on the sides and tops. the tops were hinged, and fastened with hasps, and bolts slipped through the staples with nuts screwed on them. the nuts had been unscrewed from five and the bolts slipped out; the sixth cage had been broken open from the inside, the netting cut away from the frame at one corner and bent back in a triangle big enough for a fuzzy to crawl through.
“i can’t understand that,” jimenez was saying. “why that wire looks as though it had been cut.”
“it was cut. marshal, i’d pull somebody’s belt about this, if i were you. your men aren’t very careful about searching prisoners. one of the fuzzies hid a knife out on them.” he remembered how little fuzzy and ko-ko had burrowed into the bedding in apparently unreasoning panic, and explained about the little spring-steel knives he had made. “i suppose he palmed it and hugged himself into a ball, as though he was scared witless, when they put him in the bag.”
“waited till he was sure he wouldn’t get caught before he used it, too,” the marshal said. “that wire’s soft enough to cut easily.” he turned to jimenez. “you people ought to be glad i’m ineligible for jury duty. why don’t you just throw it in and let kellogg cop a plea?”
gerd van riebeek stopped for a moment in the doorway and looked into what had been leonard kellogg’s office. the last time he’d been here, kellogg had had him on the carpet about that land-prawn business. now ernst mallin was sitting in kellogg’s chair, trying to look unconcerned and not making a very good job of it. gus brannhard sprawled in an armchair, smoking a cigar and looking at mallin as he would look at a river pig when he doubted whether it was worth shooting it or not. a uniformed deputy turned quickly, then went back to studying an elaborate wall chart showing the interrelation of zarathustran mammals—he’d made the original of that chart himself. and ruth ortheris sat apart from the desk and the three men, smoking. she looked up and then, when she saw that he was looking past and away from her, she lowered her eyes.
“you haven’t found them?” he asked brannhard.
the fluffy-bearded lawyer shook his head. “jack has a gang down in the cellar, working up. max is in the psychology lab, putting the company cops who were on duty last night under veridication. they all claim, and the veridicator backs them up, that it was impossible for the fuzzies to get out of the building.”
“they don’t know what’s impossible, for a fuzzy.”
“that’s what i told him. he didn’t give me any argument, either. he’s pretty impressed with how they got out of those cages.”
ruth spoke. “gerd, we didn’t hurt them. we weren’t going to hurt them at all. juan put them in cages because we didn’t have any other place for them, but we were going to fix up a nice room, where they could play together….” then she must have seen that he wasn’t listening, and stopped, crushing out her cigarette and rising. “dr. mallin, if these people haven’t any more questions to ask me, i have a lot of work to do.”
“you want to ask her anything, gerd?” brannhard inquired.
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.”
she started for the door, then hesitated. “gerd, i….” she began. then she went out. gus brannhard looked after her, and dropped the ash of his cigar on leonard kellogg’s—now ernst mallin’s—floor.
gerd detested her, and she wouldn’t have had any respect for him if he didn’t. she ought to have known that something like this would happen. it always did, in the business. a smart girl, in the business, never got involved with any one man; she always got herself four or five boyfriends, on all possible sides, and played them off one against another.
she’d have to get out of the science center right away. marshal fane was questioning people under veridication; she didn’t dare let him get around to her. she didn’t dare go to her office; the veridicator was in the lab across the hall, and that’s where he was working. and she didn’t dare—
yes, she could do that, by screen. she went into an office down the hall; a dozen people recognized her at once and began bombarding her with questions about the fuzzies. she brushed them off and went to a screen, punching a combination. after a slight delay, an elderly man with a thin-lipped, bloodless face appeared. when he recognized her, there was a brief look of annoyance on the thin face.
“mr. stenson,” she began, before he could say anything: “that apparatus i brought to your shop this morning—the sensory-response detector—we’ve made a simply frightful mistake. there’s nothing wrong with it whatever, and if anything’s done with it, it may cause serious damage.”
“i don’t think i understand, dr. ortheris.”
“well, it was a perfectly natural mistake. you see, we’re all at our wits’ end here. mr. holloway and his lawyer and the colonial marshal are here with an order from judge pendarvis for the return of those fuzzies. none of us know what we’re doing at all. why the whole trouble with the apparatus was the fault of the operator. we’ll have to have it back immediately, all of it.”
“i see, dr. ortheris.” the old instrument maker looked worried. “but i’m afraid the apparatus has already gone to the workroom. mr. stephenson has it now, and i can’t get in touch with him at present. if the mistake can be corrected, what do you want done?”
“just hold it; i’ll call or send for it.”
she blanked the screen. old johnson, the chief data synthesist, tried to detain her with some question.
“i’m sorry, mr. johnson. i can’t stop now. i have to go over to company house right away.”
the suite at the hotel mallory was crowded when jack holloway returned with gerd van riebeek; it was noisy with voices, and the ventilators were laboring to get rid of the tobacco smoke. gus brannhard, ben rainsford and baby fuzzy were meeting the press.
“oh, mr. holloway!” somebody shouted as he entered. “have you found them yet?”
“no; we’ve been all over science center from top to bottom. we know they went down a few floors from where they’d been caged, but that’s all. i don’t think they could have gotten outside; the only exit on the ground level’s through a vestibule where a company policeman was on duty, and there’s no way for them to have climbed down from any of the terraces or landing stages.”
“well, mr. holloway, i hate to suggest this,” somebody else said, “but have you eliminated the possibility that they may have hidden in a trash bin and been dumped into the mass-energy converter?”
“we thought of that. the converter’s underground, in a vault that can be entered only by one door, and that was locked. no trash was disposed of between the time they were brought there and the time the search started, and everything that’s been sent to the converter since has been checked piece by piece.”
“well, i’m glad to hear that, mr. holloway, and i know that everybody hearing this will be glad, too. i take it you’ve not given up looking for them?”
“are we on the air now? no, i have not; i’m staying here in mallorysport until i either find them or am convinced that they aren’t in the city. and i am offering a reward of two thousand sols apiece for their return to me. if you’ll wait a moment, i’ll have descriptions ready for you….”
victor grego unstoppered the refrigerated cocktail jug. “more?” he asked leslie coombes.
“yes, thank you.” coombes held his glass until it was filled. “as you say, victor, you made the decision, but you made it on my advice, and the advice was bad.”
he couldn’t disagree, even politely, with that. he hoped it hadn’t been ruinously bad. one thing, leslie wasn’t trying to pass the buck, and considering how ham o’brien had mishandled his end of it, he could have done so quite plausibly.
“i used bad judgment,” coombes said dispassionately, as though discussing some mistake hitler had made, or napoleon. “i thought o’brien wouldn’t try to use one of those presigned writs, and i didn’t think pendarvis would admit, publicly, that he signed court orders in blank. he’s been severely criticized by the press about that.”
he hadn’t thought brannhard and holloway would try to fight a court order either. that was one of the consequences of being too long in a seemingly irresistible position; you didn’t expect resistance. kellogg hadn’t expected jack holloway to order him off his land grant. kurt borch had thought all he needed to do with a gun was pull it and wave it around. and jimenez had expected the fuzzies to just sit in their cages.
“i wonder where they got to,” coombes was saying. “i understand they couldn’t be found at all in the building.”
“ruth ortheris has an idea. she got away from science center before fane could get hold of her and veridicate her. it seems she and an assistant took some apparatus out, about ten o’clock, in a truck. she thinks the fuzzies hitched a ride with her. i know that sounds rather improbable, but hell, everything else sounds impossible. i’ll have it followed up. maybe we can find them before holloway does. they’re not inside science center, that’s sure.” his own glass was empty; he debated a refill and voted against it. “o’brien’s definitely out, i take it?”
“completely. pendarvis gave him his choice of resigning or facing malfeasance charges.”
“they couldn’t really convict him of malfeasance for that, could they? misfeasance, maybe, but—”
“they could charge him. and then they could interrogate him under veridication about his whole conduct in office, and you know what they would bring out,” coombes said. “he almost broke an arm signing his resignation. he’s still attorney general of the colony, of course; nick issued a statement supporting him. that hasn’t done nick as much harm as o’brien could do spilling what he knows about residency affairs.
“now brannhard is talking about bringing suit against the company, and he’s furnishing copies of all the fuzzy films holloway has to the news services. interworld news is going hog-wild with it, and even the services we control can’t play it down too much. i don’t know who’s going to be prosecuting these cases; but whoever it is, he won’t dare pull any punches. and the whole thing’s made pendarvis hostile to us. i know, the law and the evidence and nothing but the law and the evidence, but the evidence is going to filter into his conscious mind through this hostility. he’s called a conference with brannhard and myself for tomorrow afternoon; i don’t know what that’s going to be like.”
