“All right, how about it?” Fane asked Jimenez. “Start with when you and Ham O’Brien picked up the Fuzzies at Central Courts Building last night.
“Well, we brought them here. I’d gotten some cages fixed up for them, and—”
Ruth Ortheris came in. She didn’t try to avoid Jack’s eyes, nor did she try to brazen it out with him. She merely nodded distantly, as though they’d met on a ship sometime, and sat down.
“What happened, Marshal?” she asked. “Why are you here with these gentlemen?”
“The court’s ordered the Fuzzies returned to Mr. Holloway.” Mallin was in a dither. “He has some kind a writ or something, and we don’t know where they are.”
“Oh, no!” Ruth’s face, for an instant, was dismay itself. “Not when—” Then she froze shut.
“I came in about o-seven-hundred,” Jimenez was saying, “to give them food and water, and they’d broken out of their cages. The netting was broken loose on one cage and the Fuzzy that had been in it had gotten out and let the others out. They got into my office—they made a perfect shambles of it—and got out the door into the hall, and now we don’t know where they are. And I don’t know how they did any of it.”
Cages built for something with no hands and almost no brains. Ever since Kellogg and Mallin had come to the camp, Mallin had been hypnotizing himself into the just-silly-little-animals doctrine. He must have succeeded; last night he’d acted accordingly.
“We want to see the cages,” Jack said.
“Yeah.” Fane went to the outer door. “Miguel.”