“Yes. We’re taking a building, intended for a mental ward; about a half square mile of park around it, with a good fence, so the Fuzzies won’t stray off and get lost. We could put five-six hundred Fuzzies in there, and they wouldn’t be crowded a bit. And it’ll be some time before we get that many there at one time. I expect there’ll be about a hundred to a hundred and fifty this time next week.”

“There were precisely eight hundred and seventy-two applications in when the office closed this evening,” Khadra said. “When are you going back, Jack?”

“Day after tomorrow. I want to make sure the work’s started on the reception center, and I’m still trying to locate some Extee-Three. I think a bunch of damn speculators have cornered the market and are holding it for high prices.”

The Fuzzies had pushed the ball into some shrubbery and were having trouble dislodging it. Sandra Glenn started off to help them, Ben Rainsford walking along with her. Khadra said:

“That’ll probably be some of Hugo Ingermann’s crowd, too.”

“Speaking about Ingermann; how are you making out about Herckerd and Novaes?” he asked. “And the five Fuzzies.”

“Jack, I swear. I’m beginning to think Herckerd and Novaes and those Fuzzies all walked into a mass-energy converter together. That’s how completely all of them have vanished.”

“They hadn’t sold them before Ben’s telecast, evening before last. After that, with the Adoption Bureau opening all that talk about kidnapping and enslavement and so on, nobody would buy a bootleg Fuzzy. So they couldn’t sell them, so they got rid of them.” How? That was what bothered him. If they’d used sense, they’d have flown them back to Beta and turned them loose. He was afraid, though, that they’d killed them. By this time everybody knew that live Fuzzies could tell tales. “I think those Fuzzies are dead.”

“I don’t know. Eight hundred and seventy-two applications, and a hundred and fifty Fuzzies at most,” Khadra said. “There’ll be a market for bootleg Fuzzies. Jack, you know what I think? I think those Fuzzies weren’t brought in for sale. I think this gang — Herckerd and Novaes and whoever else is in with them — are training those Fuzzies to help catch other Fuzzies. Do you think a Fuzzy could be trained to do that?”

“Sure. To all intents and purposes, that’s what our Fuzzies are doing out at the camp. You know how Fuzzies think? Big Ones are a Good Thing. Any Fuzzy who has a Big One doesn’t need to worry about anything. All Fuzzies ought to have Big Ones. That’s what Little Fuzzy has been telling the ones from the woods, out at camp. Ahmed, I think you have something.”

“I thought of something else, too. If this gang can make a deal with some tramp freighter captain, they could ship Fuzzies off-planet and make terrific profits on it. You wait till the news about the Fuzzies gets around. There’ll be a sale for them everywhere — Terra, Odin, Freya, Marduk, Aton, Baldur, planets like that. Anybody can bring a ship into orbit on this planet, now, if he has his own landing-craft and doesn’t use the CZC spaceport. In a month, word will have gotten to Gimli, that’s the nearest planet, and in two more months a ship can get here from there.”

“Spaceport. That could be why Ingermann’s been harping on this nefarious CZC space terminal monopoly. If he had a little spaceport of his own, now…”

“Any kind of smuggling you can think of,” Khadra said. “Hot sunstones. Narcotics. Or Fuzzies.”

Rainsford and Sandra Glenn were approaching; Sandra carried Diamond, Pierrot and Columbine ran beside her, and Flora and Fauna were trundling the ball ahead of them. He wanted to talk to Rainsford about this. They needed more laws, to prohibit shipping Fuzzies off-planet; nobody’d thought of that possibility before. And talk to Grego; the Company controlled the only existing egress from the planet.

LYNNE ANDREWS STRAIGHTENED and removed the binocular loop and laid it down, blinking. The others, four men and two women in lab-smocks, were pushing aside the spotlights and magnifiers and cameras on their swinging arms and laying down instruments.

“That thing wouldn’t have lived thirty seconds, even if it hadn’t been premature,” one man said. “And it doesn’t add a thing to what we don’t know about Fuzzy embryology.” He was an embryologist, human-type, himself. “I have dissected over five hundred aborted fetuses and I never saw one in worse shape than that.”

“It was so tiny,” one of the women said. She was an obstetrician. “I can’t believe that that’s human six-months equivalent.”

“Well, I can,” somebody else said. “I know what a young Fuzzy looks like; I spent a lot of time with Jack Holloway’s Baby Fuzzy, during the trial. And I don’t suppose a fertilized Fuzzy ovum is much different from one of ours. Between the two, there has to be a regular progressive development. I say this one is two-thirds developed. Misdeveloped, I should say.”

“Misdeveloped is correct, Doctor. Have you any idea why this one misdeveloped as it did?”

“No, Doctor, I haven’t.”

“They come from northern Beta; that country’s never been more than air-scouted. Does anybody know what radioactivity conditions are, up there? I’ve seen pictures of worse things than this from nuclear bomb radiations on Terra during and after the Third and Fourth World Wars, at the beginning of the First Federation.”

“The country hasn’t been explored, but it’s been scanned. Any natural radioactivity strong enough to do that would be detectable from Xerxes.”

“Oh, Nifflheim; that fetus could have been conceived on a patch of pitchblende no bigger than this table…”

“Well, couldn’t it be chemical? Something in the pregnant female’s diet?” the other woman asked.

“The Thaladomide Babies!” somebody exclaimed. “First Century, between the Second and Third World Wars. That was due to chemicals taken orally by pregnant women.”

“All right; let’s get the biochemists in on this, then.”

“Chris Hoenveld,” somebody else said. “It’s not too late to call him now.”

FUZZIES DIDN’T HAVE Cocktail Hour; that was for the Big Ones, to sit together and make Big One talk. Fuzzies just came stringing in before dinner, more or less interested in food depending on how the hunting had been, and after they ate they romped and played until they were tired, and then sat in groups, talking idly until they became sleepy.

In the woods, it had not been like that. When the sun began to go to bed, they had found safe places, where the big animals couldn’t get at them, and they had snuggled together and slept, one staying awake all the time. But here the Big Ones kept the animals away, and killed them with thunder-things when they came too close, and it was safe. And the Big Ones had things that made light even when the sky was dark, and there were places where it was always bright as day. So here, there was more fun, because there was less danger, and many new things to talk about. This was the Hoksu-Mitto, the Wonderful Place.

And today, they were even happier, because today Pappy Jack had come back.

Little Fuzzy got out his pipe, the new one Pappy Jack had brought from the Big House Place, and stuffed it with tobacco, and got out the little fire-maker. Some of the Fuzzies around him, who had just come in from the woods, were frightened. They were not used to fire; when fire happened in the woods, it was bad. That was wild fire, though. The Big Ones had tamed fire, and if a person were careful not to touch it or let it get loose, fire was nothing to be afraid of.

“We go other places, and all have Big Ones, tomorrow?” one asked. “Big Ones for us, like Pappy Jack for you?”

“Not tomorrow. Not next day. Day after that.” He held up three fingers.

“Then go in high-up-thing, to place like this. Big Ones come, make talk. You like Big One, Big One like you, you go with Big One, you live in Big One place.”