He meant it. He was a different Ernst Mallin now; ready to learn, to conquer his own ignorance instead of denying it. But what he wanted was out of the question.

“I’m sorry, believe me I am. But if I gave you the Fuzzy, Leslie Coombes would have a fit, and that’s nothing to what Ben Rainsford would have; he’d bring prosecutions against the lot of us. If I do keep him, you’ll have opportunity to study him, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

He brought the conversation to a close, and blanked the screen. The noise had stopped in operation center; the work probably had, too. He didn’t want to get rid of the Fuzzy. He was a nice little fellow. But…

CHAPTER SIX

HE WASN’T ABLE to get Juan Jimenez immediately. Juan was doing something at the zoo, and the zoo was spread over too much area to track him down. He left word to call him as soon as possible, and went back to his own work, and finally had his lunch brought in and ate it at the desk. The outside office got noisy again, for a while. The girls seemed to be feeding the Fuzzy, and he wondered apprehensively on what. Some of the things those girls ate would give a billygoat indigestion. About an hour afterward, Jimenez was on the screen.

The chief mammalogist was a young man, with one of those cheerful, alert, agreeable, sincere and accommodating faces you saw everywhere on the upper echelons of big corporations or institutions. He might or might not be a good scientist, but he was a real two-hundred-proof Company man.

“Hello, Juan; calling from Science Center?”

“Yes, Mr. Grego. I was at the zoo; they have some new panzer pigs from Gamma. When I got back, they told me you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes. When you came back, just before the trial, from Beta, did you bring any Fuzzies along with you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Jimenez was startled. “I got the impression that we needed Fuzzies like we needed a hole in the head. I got the impression that the one was about equal to the other.”

“Just like Ernst Mallin: the more you saw of them, the more sapient they looked. Well, dammit, what else were they? What were you doing on Beta?”

“Well, as I told you, Mr. Grego, we had a camp and we’d attracted about a dozen of them around it with Extee-Three, and we were photographing them and studying behavior, but we never made any attempt to capture any, after the first four.”

“Beside yourself, who were ‘we’?”

“The two men helping me, a couple of rangers from Survey Division; their names were Herckerd and Novaes. They helped me live-trap the four I gave to Dr. Mallin, and they helped with the camp work, and with photographing and so on.”

“Well, here’s the situation.” He went into it again, realizing why witnesses in court who have been taken a dozen times over their stories by the police and the prosecuting attorney’s people always sounded so glib. “So, you see, I want to find out what this is. It may be something quite innocent, but I want to be sure.”

“Well, I didn’t bring him in, and Herckerd and Novaes came in along with me; they didn’t.”

“I wish you, or they, had brought him; then I’d know what this is all about. Oh, another thing, Juan. As you know, Dr. Mallin was only in temporary charge at Science Center after Kellogg was arrested. He’s going back to what’s left of his original job, most happily, I might add. Do you think you could handle it? If you do, you can have it.”

One thing you had to give Jimenez, he wasn’t a hypocrite. He didn’t pretend to be overcome with the honor, and he didn’t question his own fitness. “Why, thank you, Mr. Grego!” Then he went into a little speech of acceptance which sounded suspiciously premeditated. Yes; he would definitely accept. So Grego made a little speech of his own, ending:

“I suggest you contact Dr. Mallin at once. He knows of my decision to appoint you, and you’ll find him quite pleased to turn over to you. Oh, suppose we have lunch together tomorrow; by that time you should know what you have, and we can talk over future plans.”

As soon as he had Jimenez off the screen he got Harry Steefer onto it.

“Mallin says he knows nothing about it, and so does Juan Jimenez. I have the names of two men who were helping Jimenez on Beta…”

Steefer grinned. “Phil Novaes and Moses Herckerd; they both worked for the Survey Division. Herckerd’s a geologist, and Novaes is a hunter and wildlife man. They came in along with Jimenez the day before the trial, and then they vanished. A company aircar vanished along with them. My guess is they either went prospecting or down into the veldbeest country to do a little rustling. Want me to put out a wanted for them?”

“Yes, do that, Chief, about the car. Too many company vehicles have been vanishing along with employees since this turned into a Class-IV planet. And I still want to know who brought that Fuzzy here — and why.”

“We’re working on it,” Steefer said. “There are close to a hundred people in half a dozen divisions who might have been over on Beta, in Fuzzy country, and picked up a Fuzzy for a pet. Then, say the Fuzzy got away here in Company House. Whoever was responsible would keep quiet about it afterward. I’m trying to find out, but you said you wanted it done discreetly.”

“As discreetly as possible; I want it done, though. And you might start a search on some of the unoccupied floors on the eighth and ninth levels down, for evidence of where the Fuzzy was kept before he got away.”

Steefer nodded. “We haven’t any more men than we need,” he mentioned. “Well, I’ll do the best I can.”

On past performance, Harry Steefer’s best was likely to be pretty good. He nodded, satisfied, and went back to work, trying to figure what sort of a cargo could be scraped up for the Terra-Baldur-Marduk liner City of Kapstaad, which would be getting in, in a week. He was still at it, calculating values on the Terra market against cubic feet of hold-space, when the door from the computer room opened behind him.

He turned, to see Sandra Glenn in the doorway. Her red hair and lipstick and her green eyes were vivid against a face that was white as paper.

“Mr. Grego.” It was a barely audible whisper, shocked and frightened. “Were you doing anything with the board?”

“Good God, no!” He shoved his chair back and came to his feet. “I keep my ignorant fingers off that. What’s been done to it?”

She stepped forward and aside and pointed. When he looked he saw the middle of the board a blaze of many-colored lights; not the random-looking pattern that would make sense only to a computer or a computerman, but a studied design, symmetrical and harmonious. A beautiful design. But God, Allah to Zeus, take your pick — only knew what gibbering nonsense it was putting into the trusting innards of that computer. Sandra was close to the screaming meemies; she had some idea of what kind of a computation would emerge.

“That,” he said, “was our little friend Fuzzy fuzzy holloway. He came in here and saw the lights and found out they could be pulled out and shifted around, and he decided to make a real pretty thing. Weren’t you, or any of the other girls, watching him?”

“Well, I had some work, and Gertrude was watching him, and then he lay down for a nap after lunch, and somebody called Gertrude to the screen…”

“All right. You’re not the first one to be fooled by a Fuzzy, and neither’s Gertrude. They fooled a guy named Grego pretty badly a few times. Has anything been done about this?”

“No; I just saw it a moment ago…”

“All right. Call Joe Verganno. No; I’ll do it, his screen girl won’t try to argue with me. You go find that Fuzzy.”

He crossed in two long steps to the communication screen and punched a combination from the card taped up beside it. The girl who answered started to say, “Master computerman’s office,” and then saw who she had on screen. “Why, Mr. Grego!”