And, notoriously but unprovably, behind them stood Hugo Ingermann, Mallorysport’s unconvicted underworld generalissimo.

Maybe they were just before proving it, now. Leslie Coombes’s investigators had established that all four of them, and especially Thaxter, were the dummy owners behind whom Ingermann controlled most of the land the company had unwisely sold eight years ago, the section north of Mallorysport that was now dotted with abandoned factories and commercial buildings. And it was pretty well established that those four had been the John Doe, Richard Roe, et alii, who had been represented in court by Ingermann just after the Pendarvis Decisions.

Strains of music were now coming from the Fuzzy-room; the melodrama was evidently over. He opened his eyes, lit another cigarette, and began going over what he knew about Ingermann’s four chief henchmen. Thaxter; he’d come to Zarathustra a few years before Ingermann. Small-time racketeer, at first, and then he’d tried to organize labor unions, but labor unions organized by outsiders had been frowned upon by the company, and he’d been shown the wisdom of stopping that. Then he’d organized an independent planters’ marketing cooperative, and from that he’d gotten into shylocking. There’d been some woman with him, at first, wife or reasonable facsimile. Maybe she was still around; have Coombes look into that. She might be willing to talk.

Diamond strolled in from the Fuzzy-room.

“Pappy Vic! Make talk with Diamond, plis. “

LIEUTENANT FITZ MORTLAKE, acting-in-charge of company detective bureau for the 1800-2400 shift, yawned. Twenty more minutes; less than that if Bert Eggers got in early to relieve him. He riffled through the stack of complaint sheet copies on the desk and put a paperweight on them. In the squadroom outside the mechanical noises of card-machines and teleprinters and the occasional howl of a sixty-speed audiovisual transmission were being replaced by human sounds, voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs, as the midnight-to-six shift began filtering in. He was wondering whether to go home and read till he became sleepy, or drift around the bars to see if he could pick up a girl, when Bert Eggers pushed past a couple of sergeants at the door and entered.

“Hi, Fitz; how’s it going?”

“Oh, quiet. We found out where Jayser hid that stuff; we have all of it, now. And Millman and Nogahara caught those kids who were stealing engine parts out of Warehouse Ten. We have them in detention; we haven’t questioned them yet.”

“We’ll take care of that. They work for the Company?”

“Two of them do. The third is just a kid, seventeen. Juvenile Court can have him. We think they were selling the stuff to Honest Hymie.”

“Uhuh. I’ll suspect anybody they all call Honest Anybody or anything,” Eggers said, sitting down as he vacated the chair.

He took off his coat, pulled his shoulder holster and pistol from the bottom drawer and put it on, resuming the coat. He gathered up his lighter and tobacco pouch, and then discovered that his pipe was missing, and hunted the desk-top for it, unearthing it from under some teleprinted photographs.

“What are these?” Eggers asked, looking at them.

“Herckerd and Novaes, false alarm number ’steen thousand. A couple of woods-tramps who turned up on Epsilon.”

Eggers made a sour face. “Those damn Fuzzies have made more work for us,” he began. “And now, my kids are after me to get them one. So’s my wife. You know what? Fuzzies are a status-symbol, now. If you don’t have a Fuzzy, you might as well move to Junktown with the rest of the bums.”

“I don’t have a Fuzzy, and I haven’t moved to Junktown yet.”

“You don’t have kids in high school.”

“No, thank God!”

“Bet he doesn’t have finance-company trouble, either,” one of the sergeants in the doorway said.

Bert was going to make some retort to that. Before he could, another voice spoke up:

“Yeeek! “

“Speak of the devil,” somebody said.

“You have that Fuzzy in here, Fitz?” Eggers demanded. “Where the hell… ?”

“There he is,” one of the men in the doorway said, pointing.

The Fuzzy, who had been behind the desk-chair, came out into view. He pulled the bottom of Eggers’s coat, yeeking again. He looked like a hunchback Fuzzy.

“What’s he got on his back?” Eggers reached down. “Whatta you got there, anyhow?”

It was a little rucksack, with leather shoulder-straps and a drawstring top. As soon as Eggers displayed an interest in it, the Fuzzy climbed out of it as though glad to be rid of it. Mortlake picked it up and put it on the desk; over ten pounds, must weigh almost as much as the Fuzzy. Eggers opened the drawstrings and put his hand into it.

“It’s full of gravel,” he said, and brought out a handful.

The gravel was glowing faintly. Eggers let go of it as though it were as hot as it looked.

“Holy God!” It was the first time he ever heard anybody screaming in baritone. “The damn things are sunstones!”

“BUT WHAT FOR?” Diamond was insisting. “What for Big Ones first, bang, bang, make dead? Not good. What for not make friend, make help, have fun?”

“Well, some Big Ones bad, make trouble. Other Big Ones fight to stop trouble.”

“But what for Big Ones be bad? Why not everybody make friend, have fun, make help, be good?”

Now how in Nifflheim could you answer a question like that? Maybe that was what Ernst Mallin meant when he said Fuzzies were the sanest people he’d ever seen. Maybe they were too sane to be bad, and how could a non-sane human explain to them?

“Pappy Vic not know. Maybe Unka Ernst, Unka Panko, know.”

The bell of the private communication screen began its slow tolling. Diamond looked around; this was something that didn’t happen often. He rose, taking Diamond from his lap and setting him on the chair, then went to the wall and put the screen on. It was Captain Morgan Lansky, at Chief Steefer’s desk. He looked as though a planet buster had just dropped in front of him and hadn’t exploded yet.

“Mr. Grego; the gem-vault! Fuzzies in it, robbing it!”

He conquered the impulse to ask Lansky if he were drunk or crazy. Lansky was neither; he was just frightened.

“Take it easy, Morgan. Tell me about it. First, what you know’s happened, and then what you think is happening.”

“Yes, sir.” Lansky got hold of himself; for an instant he was silent. “Ten minutes ago, in the captain’s office at detective bureau; the shifts were changing, and both lieutenants were there. A Fuzzy came out of a storeroom in back of the office; he had a little knapsack on his back, with about twelve pounds of sunstones in it. The Fuzzy’s here now, so are the sunstones. Do you want to see them?”

“Later; go ahead.” Then, before Lansky could speak, he asked: “Sure he came out of this storeroom?”

“Yes, sir. There was five-six men in the doorway to the squadroom, he couldn’t of come through that way. And the only way he could of got into this storeroom was out a ventilation duct there. The grating over it was open.”

“That sounds reasonable. He could have gotten into the gem-vault through the ventilation system too.”

The entrance to the gem-vault stairway was on the same floor as the detective bureau. The inlet and outlet screens were hinged, and the latch worked from either side to allow any outlet screen to be put on anywhere. And the sunstones couldn’t have come from anywhere else; just yesterday he’d had to go down and let Evins in to put away what had accumulated in his office safe.

“Ten minutes; what’s been done since?”

“Carlos Hurtado’s here, he hadn’t gone home. He’s staying, and so are most of the pre-midnight men. We put out a quiet alert to all the police in the building. We’re blocking off everything from the top of the fourteenth level down, and a second block around the fifteenth. I called the Chief; he’s coming in. Hurtado’s calling the Constabulary and the Mallorysport police for men and vehicles to blockade the building from the outside. I’ve sent calls out for Dr. Mallin, and for Mr. E. Evins, and I’ve sent out for as many hearing aids as I can get.”