"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." 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."