If Fane had suddenly metamorphosed himself into a damnthing, it couldn’t have shaken Mallin more.  Involuntarily he cringed from the marshal, and that finished him.

“But I can’t,” he protested.  “We don’t know exactly where they are at the moment.”

“You don’t know.”  Fane’s voice sank almost to a whisper.  “You admit you’re holding them here, but you ... don’t ... know ... where. Now start over again; tell the truth this time!”

At that moment, the communication screen began making a fuss.  Ruth Ortheris, in a light blue tailored costume, appeared in it.

“Dr. Mallin, what is going on here?” she wanted to know.  “I just came in from lunch, and a gang of men are tearing my office up.  Haven’t you found the Fuzzies yet?”

“What’s that?” Jack yelled.  At the same time, Mallin was almost screaming:  “Ruth!  Shut up!  Blank out and get out of the building!”

With surprising speed for a man of his girth, Fane whirled and was in front of the screen, holding his badge out.

“I’m Colonel Marshal Fane.  Now, young woman; I want you up here right away.  Don’t make me send anybody after you, because I won’t like that and neither will you.”

“Right away, Marshal.”  She blanked the screen.

Fane turned to Mallin.  “Now.”  He wasn’t bothering with vocal tricks any more.  “Are you going to tell me the truth, or am I going to run you in and put a veridicator on you?  Where are those Fuzzies?”

“But I don’t know!” Mallin wailed.  “Juan, you tell him; you took charge of them.  I haven’t seen them since they were brought here.”

Jack managed to fight down the fright that was clutching at him and got control of his voice.

“If anything’s happened to those Fuzzies, you two are going to envy Kurt Borch before I’m through with you,” he said.

“All right, how about it?” Fane asked Jimenez.  “Start with when you and Ham O’Brien picked up the Fuzzies at Central Courts Building last night.

“Well, we brought them here.  I’d gotten some cages fixed up for them, and—­”

Ruth Ortheris came in.  She didn’t try to avoid Jack’s eyes, nor did she try to brazen it out with him.  She merely nodded distantly, as though they’d met on a ship sometime, and sat down.

“What happened, Marshal?” she asked.  “Why are you here with these gentlemen?”

“The court’s ordered the Fuzzies returned to Mr. Holloway.”  Mallin was in a dither.  “He has some kind a writ or something, and we don’t know where they are.”

“Oh, no!” Ruth’s face, for an instant, was dismay itself.  “Not when—­” Then she froze shut.

“I came in about o-seven-hundred,” Jimenez was saying, “to give them food and water, and they’d broken out of their cages.  The netting was broken loose on one cage and the Fuzzy that had been in it had gotten out and let the others out.  They got into my office—­they made a perfect shambles of it—­and got out the door into the hall, and now we don’t know where they are.  And I don’t know how they did any of it.”