“Oh, Ruth, you know I didn’t mean anything like that.  Please don’t misunderstand me,” Kellogg begged.  “But this is highly specialized work—­”

“Yes; how many Fuzzy specialists have you at Science Center, Leonard?” Rainsford wanted to know.  “The only one I can think of is Jack Holloway, here.”

“Well, I’d thought of Dr. Mallin, the Company’s head psychologist.”

“He can come too, just as long as he understands that he’ll have to have my permission for anything he wants to do with the Fuzzies,” Jack said.  “When can we expect you?”

Kellogg thought some time late the next afternoon.  He didn’t have to ask how to get to the camp.  He made a few efforts to restore the conversation to its original note of cordiality, gave that up as a bad job and blanked out.  There was a brief silence in the living room.  Then Jimenez said reproachfully: 

“You certainly weren’t very gracious to Dr. Kellogg, Jack.  Maybe you don’t realize it, but he is a very important man.”

“He isn’t important to me, and I wasn’t gracious to him at all.  It doesn’t pay to be gracious to people like that.  If you are, they always try to take advantage of it.”

“Why, I didn’t know you knew Len,” van Riebeek said.

“I never saw the individual before.  The species is very common and widely distributed.”  He turned to Rainsford.  “You think he and this Mallin will be out tomorrow?”

“Of course they will.  This is a little too big for underlings and non-Company people to be allowed to monkey with.  You know, we’ll have to watch out or in a year we’ll be hearing from Terra about the discovery of a sapient race on Zarathustra; Fuzzy fuzzy Kellogg.  As Juan says, Dr. Kellogg is a very important man.  That’s how he got important.”

VI

The recorded voice ceased; for a moment the record player hummed voicelessly.  Loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a double click, opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another at the opposite side of the dome.  Space Commodore Alex Napier glanced up from his desk and out at the harshly angular landscape of Xerxes and the blackness of airless space beyond the disquietingly close horizon.  Then he picked up his pipe and knocked the heel out into the ashtray.  Nobody said anything.  He began packing tobacco into the bowl.

“Well, gentlemen?” He invited comment.

“Pancho?” Captain Conrad Greibenfeld, the Exec., turned to Lieutenant Ybarra, the chief psychologist.

“How reliable is this stuff?” Ybarra asked.

“Well, I knew Jack Holloway thirty years ago, on Fenris, when I was just an ensign.  He must be past seventy now,” he parenthesized.  “If he says he saw anything, I’ll believe it.  And Bennett Rainsford’s absolutely reliable, of course.”

“How about the agent?” Ybarra insisted.

He and Stephen Aelborg, the Intelligence officer, exchanged glances.  He nodded, and Aelborg said: