“It has occurred to me that Fuzzies must have a sense of taste that would shame the most famous wine-taster in the Galaxy. But I question if it is more accurate than your chemical analysis. If those Fuzzies tasted a difference between our Extee-Three and Argentine SynthoFood’s, the difference must be detectable. I don’t know anybody better able to detect it than you, Doctor; that’s why I’m asking you to find out what it is.”

Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld said, “Hunnh!” ungraciously. Flattered, and didn’t want to show it.

“Well, I’ll do what I can, Mr. Grego…”

I MUST BE very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin. I must be… Ruth van Riebeek repeated it silently, as though writing it a hundred times on a mental blackboard, as an airboat lost altitude and came slanting down across the city, past the high crag of Company House, with the lower, broader, butte of Central Courts Building in the distance to the left. Ahead, the sanatorium area drew closer, wide parklands scattered with low white buildings. She hadn’t seen Mallin since the trial, and even then she had avoided speaking to him as much as possible. Part of it was because of the things he had done with the four Fuzzies; Pancho Ybarra said she also had a guilt-complex because of the way she’d fifth colunmed the company. Rubbish! That had been intelligence work; that had been why she’d taken a job with the CZC in the first place. She had nothing at all to feel guilty about…

“I must be very nice to Dr. Ernst Mallin,” she said, aloud. “And I’m going to have one Nifflheim of a time doing it.”

“So am I,” her husband, standing beside her, said. “He’ll have to make an effort to be nice to us, too. He’ll still remember my pistol shoved into his back out at Holloway’s the day Goldilocks was killed. I wonder if he knows how little it would have taken to make me squeeze the trigger.”

“Pancho says he is a reformed character.”

“Pancho’s seen him since we have. He could be right. Anyhow, he’s helping us, and we need all the help we can get. And he won’t hurt the Fuzzies, not with Ahmed Khadra and Mrs. Pendarvis keeping an eye on him.”

The Fuzzies, crowded on the cargo-deck below, were becoming excited. There was a forward view screen rigged where they could see it, and they could probably sense as well as see that the boat was descending. And this place ahead must be the place Pappy Jack and Pappy Gerd and Unka Panko and Little Fuzzy had been telling them about, where the Big Ones would come and take them away to nice places of their own.

She hoped too many of them wouldn’t be too badly disappointed. She hoped this adoption deal wouldn’t be too much of a failure.

The airboat grounded on the vitrified stone apron beside the building. It looked like a good place; Jack said it had been intended for but never used as a mental ward-unit; four stories high, each with its own terrace, and a flat garden-planted roof. High mesh fences around each level; the Fuzzies wouldn’t fall off. Plenty of trees and bushes; the Fuzzies would like that.

They got the Fuzzies off and into the building, helped by the small crowd who were waiting for them. Mrs. Pendarvis; she and the Chief Justice’s wife were old friends. And a tall, red haired girl, Grego’s Fuzzy-sitter, Sandra Glenn. And Ahmed Khadra, in a new suit of civvies but bulging slightly under the left arm. And half a dozen other people whom she had met now and then — school department and company public health section. And Ernst Mallin, pompous and black-suited and pedantic-looking. I must be very nice… She extended a hand to him.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Mallin.”

Maybe Gerd was right; maybe she did feel guilty about the way she’d tricked him. She was, she found, being counter-offensively defensive.

“Good afternoon, Ruth. Dr. van Riebeek,” he corrected himself. “Can you bring your people down this way?” he asked, nodding to the hundred and fifty Fuzzies milling about in the hall, yeeking excitedly. People, he called them. He must be making an effort, too. “We have refreshments for them. Extee-Three. And things for them to play with.”

“Where do you get the Extee-Three?” she asked. “We haven’t been able to get any for almost a week, now.”

Mallin gave one of his little secretive smiles, the sort he gave when he was one up on somebody.

“We got it from Xerxes. The Company’s started producing it, but unfortunately, the Fuzzies don’t like it. We still can’t find out why; it’s made on exactly the same formula. And as it’s entirely up to Government specifications, Mr. Grego was able to talk Commodore Napier into accepting it in exchange for what he has on hand. We have about five tons of it. How much do you need at Holloway’s Camp? Will a couple of tons help you any?”

Would a couple of tons help them any? “Why, I don’t know how to thank you, Dr. Mallin! Of course it will; we’ve been giving it to our Fuzzies, a quarter-cake apiece on alternate days.” I muust be very, VERY, nice to Dr Mallin! “Why don’t they like the stuff you people have been making? What’s wrong with it?”

“We don’t know. Mr. Grego has been raging at everybody to find out; it’s made in exactly the same way…”

WHEN MALCOLM DUNBAR lighted his screen, Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld appeared in it. He didn’t waste time on greetings or other superfluities.

“I think we have something, Mr. Dunbar. There is a component in both the Odin Dietetics and the Argentine Syntho-Foods products that is absent from our own product. It is not one of the synthetic nutrient or vitamin or hormone compounds which are part of the field-ration formula; it is not a compound regularly synthesized, either commercially or experimentally in any laboratory I know of. It’s a rather complicated long-chain organic molecule; most of it seems to be oxygen-hydrogen-carbon, but there are a few atoms of titanium in it. If that’s what the Fuzzies find lacking in our products, all I can say is that they have the keenest taste perception of any creature, sapient or nonsapient, that I have ever heard of.”

“All right, then; they have. I saw them reject our Extee-Three in disgust, and then Mr. Grego gave them a little of the Argentine stuff, and they ate it with the greatest pleasure. How much of this unknown compound is there in Extee-Three?”

“About one part in ten thousand,” Hoenveld said.

“And the titanium?”

“Five atoms out of sixty-four in the molecule.”

“That’s pretty keen tasting.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose it’s in the wheat; the rest of that stuff is synthesized.”

“Well, naturally, Mr. Dunbar. That would seem to be the inescapable conclusion,” Hoenveld said, patronizingly.

“We have quite a bit of metallic titanium, imported in fabricated form before we got our own steel-mills working. Do you think you could synthesize that molecule, Dr. Hoenveld?”

Hoenveld gave him a look of undisguised contempt. “Certainly, Mr. Dunbar. In about a year and a half to two years. As I understand, the object of manufacturing the stuff here is to supply a temporary shortage which will be relieved in about six months, when imported Extee-Three begins coming in from Marduk. Unless I am directly and specifically ordered to do so by Mr. Grego, I will not waste my time on trying.”

OF COURSE, IT was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or introduced something that would ferment to produce C ₂ H ₅ OH and around 1730-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller thought it was a religious observance.