creen. The four strange Fuzzies dashed for this immediately and turned it
on, yeeking in delight as they watched landing craft coming down and
lifting out at the municipal spaceport. They found it very interesting. It
only bored the kitten.

With some misgivings, Jack brought Baby down and introduced him. They were
delighted with Baby, and Baby thought the kitten was the most wonderful
thing he had ever seen. When it was time to feed them, Jack had his own
dinner brought in, and ate with them. Gus and Gerd came down and joined
him later.

"We got the Lurkin kid and her father," Gus said, and then falsettoed:
"'Naw, Pop gimme a beatin', and the cops told me to say it was the
Fuzzies.'"

"She say that?"

"Under veridication, with the screen blue as a sapphire, in front of half
a dozen witnesses and with audiovisuals on. Interworld's putting it on the
air this evening. Her father admitted it, too; named Woller and the desk
sergeant. We're still looking for them; till we get them, we aren't any
closer to Emmert or Grego. We did pick up the two car cops, but they don't
know anything on anybody but Woller."

That was good enough, as far as it went, Brannhard thought, but it didn't
go far enough. There were those four strange Fuzzies showing up out of
nowhere, right in the middle of Nick Emmert's drive-hunt. They'd been kept
somewhere by somebody--that was how they'd learned to eat Extee Three and
found out about viewscreens. Their appearance was too well synchronized to
be accidental. The whole thing smelled to him of a booby trap.

One good thing had happened. Judge Pendarvis had decided that it would be
next to impossible, in view of the widespread public interest in the case
and the influence of the Zarathustra Company, to get an impartial jury,
and had proposed a judicial trial by a panel of three judges, himself one
of them. Even Leslie Coombes had felt forced to agree to that.

He told Jack about the decision. Jack listened with apparent
attentiveness, and then said:

"You know, Gus, I'll always be glad I let Little Fuzzy smoke my pipe when
he wanted to, that night out at camp."

The way he was feeling, he wouldn't have cared less if the case was going
to be tried by a panel of three zaragoats.

Ben Rainsford, his two Fuzzies, and George Lunt, Ahmed Khadra and the
other constabulary witnesses and their family, arrived shortly before noon
on Saturday. The Fuzzies were quartered in the stripped-out banquet room