?" he asked Lunt.

"I have a good job."

"This'll be a better one. Rank of major, eighteen thousand a year.
Commandant, Native Protection Force. And you won't lose seniority in the
constabulary; Colonel Ferguson'll give you indefinite leave."

"Well, cripes, Jack, I'd like to, but I don't want to leave the kids. And
I can't take them away from the rest of the gang."

"Bring the rest of the gang along. I'm authorized to borrow twenty men
from the constabulary as a training cadre, and you only have sixteen. Your
sergeants'll get commissions, and all your men will be sergeants. I'm
going to have a force of a hundred and fifty for a start."

"You must think the Fuzzies are going to need a lot of protection."

"They will. The whole country between the Cordilleras and the West Coast
Range will be Fuzzy Reservation and that'll have to be policed. Then the
Fuzzies outside that will have to be protected. You know what's going to
happen. Everybody wants Fuzzies; why, even Judge Pendarvis approached me
about getting a pair for his wife. There'll be gangs hunting them to sell,
using stun-bombs and sleepgas and everything. I'm going to have to set up
an adoption bureau; Ruth will be in charge of that. And that'll mean a lot
of investigators--"

Oh, it was going to be one hell of a job! Fifty thousand a year would be
chicken feed to what he'd lose by not working his diggings. But somebody
would have to do it, and the Fuzzies were his responsibility.

Hadn't he gone to law to prove their sapience?

* * * * *

They were going home, home to the Wonderful Place. They had seen many
wonderful places, since the night they had been put in the bags: the place
where everything had been light and they had been able to jump so high and
land so gently, and the place where they had met all the others of their
people and had so much fun. But now they were going back to the old
Wonderful Place in the woods, where it had all started.

And they had met so many Big Ones, too. Some Big Ones were bad, but only a
few; most Big Ones were good. Even the one who had done the killing had
felt sorry for what he had done; they were all sure of that. And the other
Big Ones had taken him away, and they had never seen him again.

He had talked about that with the others--with Flora and Fauna, and Dr.
Crippen, and Complex, and Superego, and Dillinger and Lizzie Borden. Now
that they were all going to live with the Big Ones