"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