They went through the door, and, inside, it was immediately evident that the security regulation book had gone out the airlock. The portcullis was raised, though a couple of submachine-gunners loitered watchfully in front of it. Half a dozen men, all carrying sono-stunners, short carbines with flaring muzzles like ancient blunderbusses, fell in behind them. The door at the end of the short hall was open, too, and nobody was bothering with identity checks.
Nobody was supposed to be within sight of him when he opened the vault, but he ignored that, too. Lansky, Eggers, the man who was carrying the two tins of Extee-Three, and the men with the stunners all crowded down the stairway after him. Quickly he punched the nonsense sentence out on the keyboard. Ten seconds later the door receded and slid aside.
Inside, the lights were on, as always; bright as they were, they could not dim the many colored glow on the black velvet tabletop, where two Fuzzies were playing concentratedly with a thousand or so sunstones. A little rope ladder, just big enough for a Fuzzy, dangled past the light-shade from the air-outlet above.
Both Fuzzies looked up, startled. One said in accusing complaint, “You not say stones make shine; you say just stones, like always.” His companion looked at them for a moment, and then cried: “Not know these Big Ones! How come this place?”
Lansky, who had been holding Diamond while he had been using the keyboard, followed him in. Diamond saw the two on the table and jabbered in excited recognition. He took Diamond and set him on the table with the others.
“Not be afraid,” he said. “I not hurt. He friend; show him pretty things.”
Recognition was mutual; the other Fuzzies were hugging Diamond and talking rapidly. Lansky had gone to a communication screen and was punching a call-number.
“You get away from bad Big Ones, too?” Diamond was asking. “How you come this place?”
“Big Ones bring us. Make us go through long little hole. Tell us, get stones, like at other place.”
What other place, he wondered. The other strange Fuzzy was saying:
“All-time, Big Ones make us go through long little holes, get stones. We get stones, Big Ones give us good things to eat. Not get stones, Big Ones angry. Make hurt, put us in dark place, not give anything to eat, make us do again.”
“Who has the Extee-Three?” he asked. “Open a tin for me.”
“Estee-fee!” Diamond, hearing him, repeated. “Pappy Vic give Estee-fee; hoksu-fusso.”
Lansky had Hurtado in the screen; he was standing aside to allow the latter to see what was going on in the gem-vault. Hurtado was swearing.
“Now, we gotta make everything in the building Fuzzy-proof,” he was saying. “The Chief’s just come in.” He turned. “Hey, Chief, come and look at this!”
Eggers had the Extee-Three; he got the tin open. Taking the cake from him, he broke it in three, then shoved a couple of million sols in sunstones out of the way and gave a piece to each of the Fuzzies. The two little jewel-thieves knew just what it was, and began eating at once. Telling Eggers to keep an eye on them, he went to the screen. In it, Harry Steefer was cursing even more fluently than Hurtado. He broke off and greeted:
“Hello, Mr. Grego. Beside what’s on the table, are there any sunstones left?”
“I haven’t checked, yet.”
He looked around. All the drawers had been pulled out of the cabinet; the Fuzzies had evidently gotten at the upper rows by stacking and standing on the ones from below. Lansky was examining a couple of small canvas rucksacks he had found.
“What’s it look like, Captain?”
“Don’t come around the table, anybody,” Lansky warned. “The floor’s all over stones, here.”
“Then we have some left. Has Conrad Evins come in yet?”
“We’re still trying to contact him,” Steefer said. “Dr. Mallin’s here, and Captain Khadra and Miss Glenn are on the way here. I’m going over to operation-command room, now; I’ll leave somebody here.”
“Suppose you leave the Fuzzy in your office, too. I’ll bring this pair up, and Diamond can help question them all.”
Steefer assented, then excused himself to talk to somebody in the room with him. One of the detectives, who had gone out, returned with a broom and dustpan; he held the pan while Lansky swept the scattered sunstones up. There were more than he had expected, perhaps as many as half of them. He poured them into drawers, regardless of size or grade; they could be sorted out later. All the Fuzzies protested strenuously when he began gathering up the ones on the table; even Diamond wanted to play with them. He consoled them with the other cake of Extee-Three, and assured Diamond, who assured his friends, that Pappy Vic would provide other pretties.
“Captain, you and Lieutenant Eggers and a couple of men stay here,” he said. “I think we have two more Fuzzies, and they may be back for more stones. Catch them by hand if you can, stun them if you have to. Try not to hurt them, but get them, and bring them to the Chief’s office. That’s where I’m going now.”
“CHRIST, I WISH they’d hurry! What do you think’s keeping them?”
That was the tenth or twelfth time Phil Novaes had said that in the last twenty minutes. Phil was getting on edge. Been on edge ever since they’d come here, and getting edgier every minute. Moses Herckerd was beginning to worry just a little about that. Losing your nerve was the surest way to disaster in a spot like this, and it would be disaster to both of them. Phil had been a little overconfident, at the beginning; that had been bad, too.
Getting the car hidden, on the unoccupied ninth level down, had been easy enough; they’d stowed it in one of the unfinished main office rooms close to where they’d kept the Fuzzies, two months ago. He knew the company police had started patrolling the unoccupied levels after that one damned Fuzzy had gotten away from them and, of all places, into Victor Grego’s own apartment. Still, the place where they’d left the car was safe enough.
The long descent, nearly a thousand feet, among the water mains and ventilation mains to the fifteenth level down, had been hard and dangerous, clinging to the contragravity lifter with the Fuzzies jostling about in the box. Once this was over, he hoped he’d never see another damned Fuzzy as long as he lived. Phil had been all right then; he’d had to keep his mind on what he was doing, keep the lifter from swinging out and carrying them away from the hand-holds. It had been after they had gotten onto this ledge at the ventilation duct outlet that Phil’s nerves had begun to get away from him.
“Take it easy, Phil,” he whispered. “They have half a mile, coming and going, through those ducts. And they have to fill their packs in the vault, and they always poke around doing that. Never can teach the buggers to hurry.”
“Well, something could have happened. Maybe they took a wrong turn and got lost. That place is a lot more complicated than the practice setup.”
“Oh, they’ll get out all right. They all made three trips already without anything going wrong, didn’t they?” he said. “And don’t talk so damned loud.”
That was what he was worried about, as much as anything. The whole company police force was concentrated around the place where he and Novaes were waiting. They were outside the actual police zone, but all the other emergency services — fire protection, radiation safety, the first-aid dispensaries and the ambulance hangars — were all around them, and sound carried an incredible distance through these shafts and air ducts and conduits.
“We have enough, now,” Phil said. “Let’s just pick up and go, now. Why, we must have fifty million already.”
“Bug out and leave the Fuzzies?”
“Hell with the Fuzzies,” Phil said.
“Hell with the Fuzzies, hell! Haven’t you found out yet that Fuzzies can talk? We’ve spent two months, now, cooped up indoors, because that Fuzzy Grego found put the finger on us. We’ve got to get all five back, and we’ve got to finish them off. If we don’t and the police get hold of them, they’ll finish us.”