On each floor they passed going down, he could glimpse parties of Company employees in the halls, armed with nets and blankets and other catching equipment.  When they got off Jimenez led them through a big room of glass cases—­mounted specimens and articulated skeletons of Zarathustran mammals.  More people were there, looking around and behind and even into the cases.  He began to think that the escape was genuine, and not just a cover-up for the murder of the Fuzzies.

Jimenez took them down a narrow hall beyond to an open door at the end.  Inside, the permanent night light made a blue-white glow; a swivel chair stood just inside the door.  Jimenez pointed to it.

“They must have gotten up on that to work the latch and open the door,” he said.

It was like the doors at the camp, spring latch, with a handle instead of a knob.  They’d have learned how to work it from watching him.  Fane was trying the latch.

“Not too stiff,” he said.  “Your little fellows strong enough to work it?”

He tried it and agreed.  “Sure.  And they’d be smart enough to do it, too.  Even Baby Fuzzy, the one your men didn’t get, would be able to figure that out.”

“And look what they did to my office,” Jimenez said, putting on the lights.

They’d made quite a mess of it.  They hadn’t delayed long to do it, just thrown things around.  Everything was thrown off the top of the desk.  They had dumped the wastebasket, and left it dumped.  He saw that and chuckled.  The escape had been genuine all right.

“Probably hunting for things they could use as weapons, and doing as much damage as they could in the process.”  There was evidently a pretty wide streak of vindictiveness in Fuzzy character.  “I don’t think they like you, Juan.”

“Wouldn’t blame them,” Fane said.  “Let’s see what kind of a houdini they did on these cages now.”

The cages were in a room—­file room, storeroom, junk room—­behind Jimenez’s office.  It had a spring lock, too, and the Fuzzies had dragged one of the cages over and stood on it to open the door.  The cages themselves were about three feet wide and five feet long, with plywood bottoms, wooden frames and quarter-inch netting on the sides and tops.  The tops were hinged, and fastened with hasps, and bolts slipped through the staples with nuts screwed on them.  The nuts had been unscrewed from five and the bolts slipped out; the sixth cage had been broken open from the inside, the netting cut away from the frame at one corner and bent back in a triangle big enough for a Fuzzy to crawl through.

“I can’t understand that,” Jimenez was saying.  “Why that wire looks as though it had been cut.”

“It was cut.  Marshal, I’d pull somebody’s belt about this, if I were you.  Your men aren’t very careful about searching prisoners.  One of the Fuzzies hid a knife out on them.”  He remembered how Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko had burrowed into the bedding in apparently unreasoning panic, and explained about the little spring-steel knives he had made.  “I suppose he palmed it and hugged himself into a ball, as though he was scared witless, when they put him in the bag.”