Phil, who was stooping by the rectangular outlet, looked up.
“I hear something. A couple of them, talking.”
He turned on his hearing aid and put his head to the opening beside Phil’s. Yes, a couple of Fuzzies talking; arguing about how far it was yet.
“As soon as they come out, let’s just shove them into the chute,” Phil argued, nodding toward the access-port to the trash-chute, that went seven hundred feet down to the mass-energy converters.
That was where the Fuzzies would go, all of them, when the sunstones were all out of the vault. But the sunstones weren’t all out. He doubted if they had more than half of them, yet.
“No, not yet. Here they come; grab the first one.”
Novaes caught the Fuzzy as he came out. He caught the second. They were both carrying loaded packs. He slipped the straps down over the Fuzzy’s arms and gave him to Novaes to hold, then loosened the drawstrings, emptying the stones into the open suitcase along with the other gems. Then he put the rucksack onto the Fuzzy’s back.
“All right. In with you. Go get stones.”
The Fuzzy said something, he wasn’t sure what, in a complaining tone. Fusso; that meant food, or eat. Important word to a Fuzzy.
“No. You get stone; then I give fusso.” He shoved the Fuzzy back into the ventilation duct. “Let’s unload yours and send him back. As long as there’s sunstones in there, we want them.”
A UNIFORMED SERGEANT was holding down Chief Steefer’s desk, smoking what was probably one of the Chief’s cigars and talking to a girl in another screen. Across the room, Ernst Mallin, Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn were talking to a Fuzzy who sat on the edge of a table, contentedly munching Extee-Three. Khadra was in evening clothes, and Sandra was wearing something glamorous with a lot of black lace. She was also wearing a sunstone which he hadn’t noticed before, on the third finger of her left hand. Wanted, Fuzzy-Sitter. Apply Victor Grego.
They set Diamond and his friends on the floor; he thanked and dismissed the men who had helped him with them. As soon as they saw the Fuzzy on the table, they raised an outcry and ran forward; the Fuzzy on the table dropped to the floor and hurried to meet them.
“What did you get from him?” he asked.
“Herckerd and Novaes, natch,” Khadra said, disgustedly. “All the time I was looking for a black market that wasn’t there, they were right here in town somewhere, being taught to steal sunstones. Fagin-racket, by God!”
“Herckerd and Novaes and who else?”
“Two other men, and one woman. And just the five Fuzzies Herekerd and Novaes brought in along with Diamond. They were somewhere not more than fifteen minutes by air from Company House all the time. This gang taught them to go through ventilator ducts, and open the screen-covers on the inlets, and use rope ladders and get stones out of cabinets. They must have had a mockup of the gem-vault and the ventilation system. They had to practice all the time. If they cleaned out the cabinets and brought the stones, river-gravel, I suppose, out, they got Extee-Three. If they goofed, they were punished, electric shock, I suppose, and shoved in a dungeon with nothing to eat. You know, they could be shot for that.”
“They oughtn’t to be shot; they ought to be burned at the stake!” Sandra cried angrily.
Gentler sex, indeed! “Well, I’ll settle for shooting, if we can catch them. Done anything in aid of that yet?”
“Not too much,” Mallin regretted. “His vocabulary is limited, and he hasn’t words for much that he experienced. We’ve been trying to learn his route through the ventilation system. He knows how he went in to the gem-vault, but he simply can’t verbalize it.”
“Diamond; you help Pappy Vic. Make talk for Unka Ernst, Unka Ahmed, Auntie Sandra; help other Fuzzies make talk about bad Big Ones, about place where were, about what make do, about how go through long little holes.” He turned to Khadra. “Has he seen Herckerd and Novaes on screen?”
“Not yet; we’ve just been talking to him, so far.”
“Better let all three of them see those audiovisuals; get identifications made. And keep on about the ventilation ducts. See if any of them can tell which way they went toward the gem vault, and what kind of a place they went in at.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CROSSING THE HALL, he found the operation-command room busy, in a quiet and almost leisurely manner. Everybody knew what to do, and was getting it done with a minimum of fuss. A group of men, policemen and engineers, were huddled at a big table, going over plans, on big sheets and on photoprint screens. More men, police and maintenance people, gathered around a big solidigraph model of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth levels, projected in a tri-di screen. The thing was transparent, and looked almost anatomical; well, Company House was an organism of a sort. Respiratory system; the ventilation, in which everybody was interested. Circulatory system; the water-lines. Excretory system; sewage disposal.
And now it had been invaded by a couple of inimical microbes, named Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd, whom the police leucocytes were seeking to neutralize.
He looked at it for a while, then strolled on to the banks of viewscreens. Views of halls and vehicle-ways, mostly empty, patrolled here and there by police or hastily mobilized and armed maintenance workers. Views of landing stages, occupied by police and observed from aircars. A view from a car a thousand feet over the building, in which a few Constabulary and city police vehicles circled slowly, blockading the building from outside. He nodded in satisfaction; they couldn’t get out of the building, and as soon as enough of the fifty-odd widely scattered locations from which they might be operating could be eliminated, the police would close in on them.
In one screen from a pickup installed over the door in the gem-vault, he could see Morgan Lansky, Bert Eggers and two detectives, coatless and perspiring, around the electrically warmed tabletop, staring at the little rope ladder that dangled down around the light-shade. In another screen, from a high pickup in a corner of Harry Steefer’s office, the uniformed sergeant at the desk watched Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra fussing with a screen, while Sandra Glenn sat on the floor talking to Diamond and his three friends.
Harry Steefer sat alone at the command desk, keeping track of everything at once. He went over and sat down beside him.
“Mr. Grego. We don’t seem to be making too much progress,” the Chief said. “Everything’s secure so far, though.”
“Have the news services gotten hold of it yet?”
“I don’t believe so. Planetwide News called the city police to find out what all the cars were doing around Company House; somebody told them that it was a shipment of valuables being taken under guard to the space terminal. They seemed to accept that.”
“We can’t sit on it indefinitely.”
“I hope we can till we catch these people.”
“Have you contacted Conrad Evins yet?”
“No. He’s not at home; here, I’ll show you.”
Steefer punched out a call on one of his communication screens. When it lighted, the chief gem buyer’s wide-browed, narrow chinned face looked out of it.
“This is a recording, made at 2100, Conrad Evins speaking. Mrs. Evins and I are going out; we will not be home until after midnight,” Evins’s voice said. Then the screen flickered, and the recording began again.
“I could put out an emergency call for him, but I don’t want to,” Steefer said. “We don’t know how many people outside the building are involved in this, and we don’t want to alarm them.”