“Five, three males and two females. They call them Dr. Crippen, Dillinger, Ned Kelly, Lizzie Borden and Calamity Jane.”
Wouldn’t it be just like a bunch of cops to hang names like that on innocent Fuzzies?
“Why don’t you call the post and say hello to them?” Ben asked.
“Baby likes them; he’d think it was fun to talk to them again.”
He let himself be urged into it, and punched out the combination. They were nice Fuzzies; almost, but of course not quite, as nice as his own.
“If your family doesn’t turn up in time for the trial, have Gus subpoena ours,” Lunt told him. “You ought to have some to produce in court. Two weeks from now, this mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things. You ought to see them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon.”
He said he hoped he’d have his own by then; he realized that he was saying it without much conviction.
They had a drink when Gus came in. He was delighted with the offer from Lunt. Another one who didn’t expect to see Pappy Jack’s Fuzzies alive again.
“I’m not doing a damn thing here,” Rainsford said. “I’m going back to Beta till the trial. Maybe I can pick up some ideas from George Lunt’s Fuzzies. I’m damned if I’m getting away from this crap!” He gestured at the reading screen. “All I have is a vocabulary, and I don’t know what half the words mean.” He snapped it off. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Jimenez mightn’t have been right and Ruth Ortheris is wrong. Maybe you can be just a little bit sapient.”
“Maybe it’s possible to be sapient and not know it,” Gus said. “Like the character in the old French play who didn’t know he was talking prose.”