Cages built for something with no hands and almost no brains.  Ever since Kellogg and Mallin had come to the camp, Mallin had been hypnotizing himself into the just-silly-little-animals doctrine.  He must have succeeded; last night he’d acted accordingly.

“We want to see the cages,” Jack said.

“Yeah.”  Fane went to the outer door.  “Miguel.”

The deputy came in, herding the Company cop ahead of him.

“You heard what happened?” Fane asked.

“Yeah.  Big Fuzzy jailbreak.  What did they do, make little wooden pistols and bluff their way out?”

“By God, I wouldn’t put it past them.  Come along.  Bring Chummy along with you; he knows the inside of this place better than we do.  Piet, call in.  We want six more men.  Tell Chang to borrow from the constabulary if he has to.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said.  He turned to Ruth.  “What do you know about this?”

“Well, not much.  I was with Dr. Mallin here when Mr. Grego—­I mean, Mr. O’Brien—­called to tell us that the Fuzzies were going to be kept here till the trial.  We were going to fix up a room for them, but till that could be done, Juan got some cages to put them in.  That was all I knew about it till o-nine-thirty, when I came in and found everything in an uproar and was told that the Fuzzies had gotten loose during the night.  I knew they couldn’t get out of the building, so I went to my office and lab to start overhauling some equipment we were going to need with the Fuzzies.  About ten-hundred, I found I couldn’t do anything with it, and my assistant and I loaded it on a pickup truck and took it to Henry Stenson’s instrument shop.  By the time I was through there, I had lunch and then came back here.”

He wondered briefly how a polyencephalographic veridicator would react to some of those statements; might be a good idea if Max Fane found out.

“I’ll stay here,” Gus Brannhard was saying, “and see if I can get some more truth out of these people.”

“Why don’t you screen the hotel and tell Gerd and Ben what’s happened?” he asked.  “Gerd used to work here; maybe he could help us hunt.”

“Good idea.  Piet, tell our re-enforcements to stop at the Mallory on the way and pick him up.”  Fane turned to Jimenez.  “Come along; show us where you had these Fuzzies and how they got away.”

* * * * *

“You say one of them broke out of his cage and then released the others,” Jack said to Jimenez as they were going down on the escalator.  “Do you know which one it was?”

Jimenez shook his head.  “We just took them out of the bags and put them into the cages.”

That would be Little Fuzzy; he’d always been the brains of the family.  With his leadership, they might have a chance.  The trouble was that this place was full of dangers Fuzzies knew nothing about—­radiation and poisons and electric wiring and things like that.  If they really had escaped.  That was a possibility that began worrying Jack.