Then he laughed mirthlessly. If anybody needed a checkup, it was the company psychologist himself. Poor Ernst; he’d had a pretty shattering time of it, and now he probably thought he was being blamed for everything.
He wasn’t, of course. Mallin had done the best anybody could have done, in an impossible situation. The Fuzzies had been sapient beings, and that was all there’d been to it, and that wasn’t Mallin’s fault. That Mallin had been forced so to testify in court had been the fault of his immediate subordinate, Dr. Ruth Ortheris, who had also, it developed, been Lieutenant j.g. Ortheris, TFN Intelligence. She’d been the one who’d tipped Navy Intelligence about the Fuzzies in the first place. She’d been the one who’d smuggled Jack Holloway’s Fuzzy family out of Science Center after Leslie Coombes had gotten hold of them on a bogus court order. And she’d been the one who’d insisted on live-trapping that other Fuzzy family and exposing Mallin to them.
That had been a beautiful piece of work. He’d watched the trial by screen; he could still see poor Mallin on the stand, trying to insist that Fuzzies were just silly little animals, with the red-blazing globe of the veridicator calling him a liar every time he opened his mouth. Why, she’d made the company defeat itself with its own witness.
He ought to hate her for that. He didn’t; he admired her for it, as he admired anybody who had a job to do and did it competently. He had too damned few people like that in his own organization.
Have to do something nice for Ernst, though. He couldn’t stay in charge at Science Center, but he’d have to be promoted out of it. Probably have to invent a job for him.
Finally, he decided that he could go to sleep, now. He took the brandy bottle back to the cellaret, gathered up the garments he had thrown down, and went into the bedroom, putting on the lights.
Then he looked at the bed and saw the golden-furred shape snuggled against the pillows. He swore. One of those life-size Fuzzy dolls that had been on sale ever since the Fuzzies had gotten into the news. If this was somebody’s idea of a joke…
Then the thing he had taken for a doll sat up, blinked, and said, “Yeek?”
“Why, the damn thing’s alive!” he yelled. “It’s a real Fuzzy!” The Fuzzy was afraid; watching him and at the same time seeking an avenue of escape. “Don’t be scared, kid,” he soothed. “I won’t hurt you. How’d you get in here, anyhow?”
One thing, the puzzle of the empty bowl was solved; the contents were now inside the Fuzzy. This, however, posed the question of how the Fuzzy got there. When he had thought this was a joke, he had been angry. Now he doubted that it was a joke, and he was on the edge of being worried.
The Fuzzy, who had been regarding him warily, had evidently decided that he was not hostile and might even be friendly. He got to his feet, tried to walk on the yielding pneumatic mattress, and tumbled heels-over-head. Instantly he was on his feet again, leaping twice his height into the air, bouncing, and yeeking happily. He caught him on the second bounce and sat down on the bed with him.
“Are you hungry, kid?” That bowl of nibblements wasn’t much of a meal, even for a Fuzzy. The stuff was all heavily salted, too. “Bet you’re thirsty.” What was it Jack Holloway’s Fuzzies called him? Pappy Jack. “Well, Pappy Vic’ll get you something.”
In the kitchenette-breakfast room, the uninvited guest drank two small aperitif-glasses of water and part of a third, while his host wondered about what he’d like to eat. Jack Holloway gave his Fuzzies Extee-Three, but he didn’t have… Oh, yes; maybe he did.
He went into the bedroom and opened one of the closets, where his field equipment was kept, rifles, sleeping-bag, cameras and binoculars, and a couple of rectangular steel cases to be carried in an aircar, full of camping paraphernalia. He opened one, which contained mess-gear he’d brought with him from Terra and used on field trips ever since, and sure enough, there were a couple of tins of Extee-Three.
The Fuzzy, who had been watching beside him, yeeked excitedly when he saw the blue labels, and ran ahead of him to the kitchenette. He could hardly wait till the tin was open. Somebody had given him Extee-Three before.
He made a sandwich for himself and sat down at the table while the Fuzzy ate, and he was still worried. There were only four doors into Company House from the ground, and all of them were constantly guarded. There were no windows less than sixty feet from the ground. While no bet on what Fuzzies couldn’t do was really safe, he doubted that they had learned to pilot aircars just yet. So somebody had brought this Fuzzy here, and beside How, which would be by aircar, the question branched out into When and Who and Why.
Why was what worried him most. Fuzzies, as he didn’t need to remind himself, were people, and wards of the Terran Federation, and all sort of crimes could be committed against them. Leonard Kellogg would have been executed for killing one of them, if he hadn’t done the job for himself in his cell at the jail. And beside murder, there was abduction, and illegal restraint. Maybe somebody was trying to frame him.
He put on the communication screen and punched the call combination of the Chief’s office at company police headquarters. He got Captain Morgan Lansky, who held down Chief Steefer’s desk from midnight to six. As soon as Lansky saw who was calling, he got rid of his cigar, zipped up his tunic, and tried to look alert, wide awake and busy.
“Why, Mr. Grego! Is anything wrong?”
“That’s what I want to know, Captain. I have a Fuzzy up here in my apartment. I want to know how he got here.”
“A Fuzzy? Are you sure, Mr. Grego?”
He stooped and picked up his visitor, setting him on the table. The Fuzzy was clutching half a cake of Extee-Three. He saw Lansky looking out of the wall at him and yeeked in astonishment.
“What is your opinion, Captain?”
Captain Lansky’s opinion was that he’d be damned. “How did he get in, Mr. Grego?”
Grego prayed silently for patience. “That is precisely what I want to know. To begin with, have you any idea how he got in the building?”
“Somebody,” the captain decided, after deliberation, “must have brought him in. In an aircar,” he added, after more cogitation.
“I had gotten that far, myself. Would you have any idea when?”
Lansky began to shake his head. Then he was smitten with an idea.
“Hey, Mr. Grego! The pilfering!”
“What pilfering?”
“Why, the pilfering. Pilfering, and ransacking; in offices and like that. And somebody’s been getting into supply rooms at some of the cafeterias, and where they keep the candy and stuff for the vending robots. The first musta been the night of the sixteenth.” That would be three days ago. “The first report came in day before yesterday morning, after the 0600-1200 shift came on. It’s been like that ever since; every morning, places being ransacked and candy and stuff like that taken. You think that Fuzzy’s been doing all of it?”
He could see no reason why not. Fuzzies were small people, able to make themselves very inconspicuous when they wanted to. Hadn’t they survived for oomphty-thousand years in the woods, dodging harpies and bush-goblins? And Company House was full of hiding places. It had been built twelve years ago, three years after he came to Zarathustra, and it had been built big. It wasn’t going to be like the buildings they ran up on Terra, to be torn down in a couple of decades; it was meant to be the headquarters of the Chartered Zarathustra Company for a couple of centuries. Eighteen levels, six to eight floors to a level; more than half of them were empty and many unfinished, waiting for the CZC to grow into them.
“The ones Dr. Jimenez trapped for Dr. Mallin,” Lansky said. “Maybe this is one of them.”