“They don’t know what’s impossible, for a Fuzzy.”
“That’s what I told him. He didn’t give me any argument, either. He’s pretty impressed with how they got out of those cages.”
Ruth spoke. “Gerd, we didn’t hurt them. We weren’t going to hurt them at all. Juan put them in cages because we didn’t have any other place for them, but we were going to fix up a nice room, where they could play together….” Then she must have seen that he wasn’t listening, and stopped, crushing out her cigarette and rising. “Dr. Mallin, if these people haven’t any more questions to ask me, I have a lot of work to do.”
“You want to ask her anything, Gerd?” Brannhard inquired.
Once he had had something very important he had wanted to ask her. He was glad, now, that he hadn’t gotten around to it. Hell, she was so married to the Company it’d be bigamy if she married him too.
“No, I don’t want to talk to her at all.”
She started for the door, then hesitated. “Gerd, I….” she began. Then she went out. Gus Brannhard looked after her, and dropped the ash of his cigar on Leonard Kellogg’s—now Ernst Mallin’s—floor.
Gerd detested her, and she wouldn’t have had any respect for him if he didn’t. She ought to have known that something like this would happen. It always did, in the business. A smart girl, in the business, never got involved with any one man; she always got herself four or five boyfriends, on all possible sides, and played them off one against another.
She’d have to get out of the Science Center right away. Marshal Fane was questioning people under veridication; she didn’t dare let him get around to her. She didn’t dare go to her office; the veridicator was in the lab across the hall, and that’s where he was working. And she didn’t dare—
Yes, she could do that, by screen. She went into an office down the hall; a dozen people recognized her at once and began bombarding her with questions about the Fuzzies. She brushed them off and went to a screen, punching a combination. After a slight delay, an elderly man with a thin-lipped, bloodless face appeared. When he recognized her, there was a brief look of annoyance on the thin face.