He started for the kitchen to get a drink, and checked himself.  Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.  No; he’d have one drink, maybe a little bigger than usual, before he went to bed.

III

He started awake, rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock.  Past twenty-two hundred; now it really was time for a drink, and then to bed.  He rose stiffly and went out to the kitchen, pouring the whisky and bringing it in to the table desk, where he sat down and got out his diary.  He was almost finished with the day’s entry when the little door behind him opened and a small voice said, “Yeeek.”  He turned quickly.

“Little Fuzzy?”

The small sound was repeated, impatiently.  Little Fuzzy was holding the door open, and there was an answer from outside.  Then another Fuzzy came in, and another; four of them, one carrying a tiny, squirming ball of white fur in her arms.  They all had prawn-killers like the one in the drawer, and they stopped just inside the room and gaped about them in bewilderment.  Then, laying down his weapon, Little Fuzzy ran to him; stooping from the chair, he caught him and then sat down on the floor with him.

“So that’s why you ran off and worried Pappy Jack?  You wanted your family here, too!”

The others piled the things they were carrying with Little Fuzzy’s steel weapon and approached hesitantly.  He talked to them, and so did Little Fuzzy—­at least it sounded like that—­and finally one came over and fingered his shirt, and then reached up and pulled his mustache.  Soon all of them were climbing onto him, even the female with the baby.  It was small enough to sit on his palm, but in a minute it had climbed to his shoulder, and then it was sitting on his head.

“You people want dinner?” he asked.

Little Fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that was a word he recognized.  He took them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast veldbeest and yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while they were eating from a couple of big pans, he went back to the living room to examine the things they had brought with them.  Two of the prawn-killers were wood, like the one Little Fuzzy had discarded in the shed.  A third was of horn, beautifully polished, and the fourth looked as though it had been made from the shoulder bone of something like a zebralope.  Then there was a small coup de poing ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the shape of a slice of orange and about five inches along the straight edge.  For a hand the size of his own, he would have called it a scraper.  He puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge was serrated, and decided that it was a saw.  And there were three very good flake knives, and some shells, evidently drinking vessels.