Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper [ebook reader computer txt] 📗

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 oh-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 reinforcements 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.”

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.”

“Waited till he was sure he wouldn’t get