"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.
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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