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