His own Fuzzies, whom he would never see again. The full realization didn’t hit him until he and Gerd were in the car again. There had been no trace of his Fuzzies from the time they had broken out of their cages at Science Center. This quartet had appeared the night the city police had manufactured the story of the attack on the Lurkin girl, and from the moment they had been seen by the youth who couldn’t bring himself to fire on them, they had left a trail that he had been able to pick up at once and follow. Why hadn’t his own Fuzzies attracted as much notice in the three weeks since they had vanished?
Because his own Fuzzies didn’t exist any more. They had never gotten out of Science Center alive. Somebody Max Fane hadn’t been able to question under veridication had murdered them. There was no use, any more, trying to convince himself differently.
“We’ll stop at their camp and pick up the blanket and the cushions and the rest of the things. I’ll send the people who lost them checks,” he said. “The Fuzzies ought to have those things.”
XIII
The management of the Hotel Mallory appeared to have undergone a change of heart, or of policy, toward Fuzzies. It might have been Gus Brannhard’s threats of action for racial discrimination and the possibility that the Fuzzies might turn out to be a race instead of an animal species after all. The manager might have been shamed by the way the Lurkin story had crumbled into discredit, and influenced by the revived public sympathy for the Fuzzies. Or maybe he just decided that the chartered Zarathustra Company wasn’t as omnipotent as he’d believed. At any rate, a large room, usually used for banquets, was made available for the Fuzzies George Lunt and Ben Rainsford were bringing in for the trial, and the four strangers and their black-and-white kitten were installed there. There were a lot of toys of different sorts, courtesy of the management, and a big view screen. 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.