ught he was going.

"With you. I've got to find them before some dumb son of a Khooghra shoots
them."

"You stay here," Gus ordered. "Stay by the communication screen, and keep
the viewscreen on for news. But don't stop putting your boots on; you may
have to get out of here fast if I call you and tell you they've been
located. I'll call you as soon as I get anything definite."

Gerd had the screen on for news, and was getting Planetwide, openly owned
and operated by the Company. The newscaster was wrought up about the
brutal attack on the innocent child, but he was having trouble focusing
the blame. After all, who'd let the Fuzzies escape in the first place? And
even a skilled semanticist had trouble in making anything called a Fuzzy
sound menacing. At least he gave particulars, true or not.

The child, Lolita Lurkin, had been playing outside her home at about
twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by six Fuzzies,
armed with clubs. Without provocation, they had dragged her down and
beaten her severely. Her screams had brought her father, and he had driven
the Fuzzies away. Police had brought both the girl and her father, Oscar
Lurkin, to headquarters, where they had told their story. City police,
Company police and constabulary troopers and parties of armed citizens
were combing the eastern side of the city; Resident General Emmert had
acted at once to offer a reward of five thousand sols apiece....

"The kid's lying, and if they ever get a veridicator on her, they'll prove
it", he said. "Emmert, or Grego, or the two of them together, bribed those
people to tell that story."

"Oh, I take that for granted," Gerd said. "I know that place. Junktown.
Ruth does a lot of work there for juvenile court." He stopped briefly,
pain in his eyes, and then continued: "You can hire anybody to do anything
over there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in
advance."

He shifted to the Interworld News frequency; they were covering the Fuzzy
hunt from an aircar. The shanties and parked airjalopies of Junktown were
floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and poking
among them. Once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring at
the ground from it over a machine gun.

"Wooo! Am I glad I'm not in that mess!" Gerd exclaimed. "Anybody sees
something he thinks is a Fuzzy and half that gang'll massacre each other
in ten seconds."

"I hope they do!"

Interworld News was pr