“Well, how about known associates? Didn’t either of them have any friends?”

“Yes. All middle-salary Company people; they’ve been cooperating, but none of them knows anything.”

The conversation went on for a few more minutes, then they blanked screens. Khadra turned in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“Well, you heard it, Jack,” he said. “They just vanished, and the Fuzzies with them. I’m not surprised we’re not getting anything out of their friends in the Company. They wouldn’t know. We searched their rooms; they seem to have cleaned out everything they had when they disappeared. And we can’t get anything from underworld sources. None of the city police stool-pigeons knows anything.”

“You know, Ahmed, I’m worried about that. I wonder what’s happened to those Fuzzies…” He sat down on the edge of the desk and got out his pipe and tobacco. “How soon will you be able to start investigating these people who want Fuzzies?”

GERD VAN RIEBEEK refilled his cup and shoved the coffee across the table to George Lunt. He ought to be getting back to work; they both ought to. Work was piling up, with both Jack and Pancho away. and Ahmed Khadra permanently detached from duty at the camp.

“Eighty-seven,” Lunt said. “That’s not counting yours and mine and Jack’s.”

“The Extee-Three’s getting low.” They’d had to start rationing it; tomorrow, they’d not be able to issue any, or on alternate days thereafter. The Fuzzies wouldn’t like that. “Jack says he thinks speculators are buying it and holding it off the market. They’ll get big prices for it when the Fuzzies start coming in to Mallorysport.”

There wasn’t much Extee-Three on Zarathustra. People kept a tin or so in their aircars, in case of forced landings in the wilderness which was ninety percent of the planet’s land surface, but until the Fuzzies found out about it, the consumption had been practically zero. There was a supply on Xerxes, for emergency ships’ stores, individual survival kits and so on, but that wouldn’t last. It was on order, but it would be four months till any could get in from the nearest Federation planet. And the supply on hand wouldn’t last that long.

“Personally, I wish there were eighty-seven hundred of them,” Lunt said. “No, I’m not crazy, and I mean it. The ones we have here aren’t getting into deviltry down in the farming country. So far, I haven’t heard of any of them getting that far, except that one family that’s moved in on that backwoods farm, and they’re behaving themselves. But wait till they get down in the real farm country, and among the sugar plantations. You know, Jack and I thought, at first, that our big job was going to be protecting Fuzzies from humans. It looks to me, now, like it’s going to be the other way round too.”

“That’s right. They won’t mean any harm; the only malicious thing I ever heard of Fuzzies doing was the time Jack’s family wrecked Juan Jimenez’s office, after they broke out of the cages he put them in, and I don’t blame them for that. But they just don’t understand about what they mustn’t do among humans. They don’t seem to have any idea at all of property in the absence of a visible owner.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Crops; they won’t understand that somebody’s planted them, they’ll think they’re just there. And I never saw a farmer that wouldn’t shoot first and argue afterward to protect his crops.”

“Education,” Gerd said.

“Recipe for roast turkey — first catch a turkey,” Lunt said. “We’re educating this crowd. How in Nifflheim are we going to catch all the other ones?”

“Educate the farmers. What do Fuzzies eat, beside Extee-Three?”

“Zatku, and they’ve cleaned all of them out around the camp. That’s why we have to have one car patrolling a couple of miles out to shoot harpies off.”

“And do you know any kind of crops land-prawns don’t destroy? I was making a study of them, for a while. I don’t. That’s what I mean by educating the farmers. A Fuzzy does X-much damage to crops. He kills half a dozen land-prawns a day, and among them they do about X-times-ten damage.”

“Write up a script about it, and we’ll put it on the air this evening. ‘Be good to Fuzzies; Fuzzies are the farmer’s best friend.’ Maybe that’ll help some.”

Gerd nodded. “Eighty-seven, we have now. How many little ones?”

“Beside Baby Fuzzy? Four. Why?”

“And we think we have five pregnancies. That’s all Lynne Andrews is sure of; the only way she can tell is listening with a stethoscope for fetal movements. They seem to be too small to make any conspicuous visible difference. This is out of eighty seven. What kind of a birthrate do you call that, George?”

George Lunt poured more coffee into his cup and blew on it automatically. Somewhere, maybe Constabulary School, the coffee had always been too hot to drink right away. Across the messhall, half a dozen Fuzzies tagged behind a robot, watching it clear the tables.

“It sure to Nifflheim isn’t any population explosion,” he said.

“Race extinction, George. I don’t know what the normal life expectancy is in the woods, but I’d say four out of five of them die by violence. When the birthrate curve drops below the deathrate curve, a race is dying out.”

“A hundred and two Fuzzies, and four children. Hey, you said five of the girls were pregnant, didn’t you? And you admit that’s not complete, if Doc Andrews has to use a stethoscope for a pregnancy test.”

“I wondered if you’d notice that. That’s not a bad ratio, for females who have a monthly cycle instead of an annual mating season. And these four children; we don’t know anything about the maturation period, but in the three months we’ve been checking on him, Baby Fuzzy’s only gained six ounces and an inch. I’d make it about fifteen years, ten at very least.”

“Then,” Lunt said, “it isn’t birthrate at all. It’s infant mortality. They just don’t live.”

“That’s it, George. That’s what I’m worried about. And Ruth and Lynne, too. If we don’t find out what causes it, and how to stop it, there won’t be any Fuzzies after a while.”

“THIS IS LIKE old times, Victor,” Coombes said, stretching in one of the chairs. “Nobody here but us humans.”

“That’s right.” He brought the jug and the two glasses over and put them on the low table, careful not to disturb a pattern of colored tiles laid on one end of it. “That thing there is a Fuzzy work of art. It is unfinished, but just see the deep symbolic significance.”

“You see it. I can’t.” Coombes accepted his glass with mechanical thanks and sipped. “Where is everybody?”

“Diamond is a guest, at a place where I’m not welcome. Government House. He and Flora and Fauna are meeting Pierrot and Columbine, Judge and Mrs. Pendarvis’s Fuzzies. Sandra is chaperoning the affair, and Ernst is conferring with Mrs. Pendarvis about quarters for a couple of hundred Fuzzies who are coming to town in about a week to be adopted.”

“I’ll say this: your Fuzzy and Fuzzyologists are getting in with the right people. Did you hear Hugo Ingermann’s telecast this afternoon?”

“I did not. I pay people to do that kind of work for me. I went over a semantically correct summary, with a symbolic-logic study. As nearly as I can interpret it, it reduces to the propositions that, A) Ben Rainsford is a bigger crook than Victor Grego, and, B) Victor Grego is a bigger crook than Ben Rainsford, and, C) between them, they are conspiring to rob and enslave everybody on the planet, Fuzzies included.”

“I listened to it very carefully, and recorded it, in the hope that he might forget himself and say something actionable. He didn’t; he’s lawyer enough to know what’s libel and what isn’t. Sometimes I dream of being able to sue that bastard for something, so that I can get him in the stand under veridication, but…” He shrugged.

“I noticed one thing. He’s attacking the Company, and he’s attacking Rainsford, but at the same time he’s trying to drive wedges between us, so we don’t gang up on him.”