“Captain, you and Lieutenant Eggers and a couple of men stay here,” he said. “I think we have two more Fuzzies, and they may be back for more stones. Catch them by hand if you can, stun them if you have to. Try not to hurt them, but get them, and bring them to the Chief’s office. That’s where I’m going now.”

“CHRIST, I WISH they’d hurry! What do you think’s keeping them?”

That was the tenth or twelfth time Phil Novaes had said that in the last twenty minutes. Phil was getting on edge. Been on edge ever since they’d come here, and getting edgier every minute. Moses Herckerd was beginning to worry just a little about that. Losing your nerve was the surest way to disaster in a spot like this, and it would be disaster to both of them. Phil had been a little overconfident, at the beginning; that had been bad, too.

Getting the car hidden, on the unoccupied ninth level down, had been easy enough; they’d stowed it in one of the unfinished main office rooms close to where they’d kept the Fuzzies, two months ago. He knew the company police had started patrolling the unoccupied levels after that one damned Fuzzy had gotten away from them and, of all places, into Victor Grego’s own apartment. Still, the place where they’d left the car was safe enough.

The long descent, nearly a thousand feet, among the water mains and ventilation mains to the fifteenth level down, had been hard and dangerous, clinging to the contragravity lifter with the Fuzzies jostling about in the box. Once this was over, he hoped he’d never see another damned Fuzzy as long as he lived. Phil had been all right then; he’d had to keep his mind on what he was doing, keep the lifter from swinging out and carrying them away from the hand-holds. It had been after they had gotten onto this ledge at the ventilation duct outlet that Phil’s nerves had begun to get away from him.

“Take it easy, Phil,” he whispered. “They have half a mile, coming and going, through those ducts. And they have to fill their packs in the vault, and they always poke around doing that. Never can teach the buggers to hurry.”

“Well, something could have happened. Maybe they took a wrong turn and got lost. That place is a lot more complicated than the practice setup.”

“Oh, they’ll get out all right. They all made three trips already without anything going wrong, didn’t they?” he said. “And don’t talk so damned loud.”

That was what he was worried about, as much as anything. The whole company police force was concentrated around the place where he and Novaes were waiting. They were outside the actual police zone, but all the other emergency services — fire protection, radiation safety, the first-aid dispensaries and the ambulance hangars — were all around them, and sound carried an incredible distance through these shafts and air ducts and conduits.

“We have enough, now,” Phil said. “Let’s just pick up and go, now. Why, we must have fifty million already.”

“Bug out and leave the Fuzzies?”

“Hell with the Fuzzies,” Phil said.

“Hell with the Fuzzies, hell! Haven’t you found out yet that Fuzzies can talk? We’ve spent two months, now, cooped up indoors, because that Fuzzy Grego found put the finger on us. We’ve got to get all five back, and we’ve got to finish them off. If we don’t and the police get hold of them, they’ll finish us.”

Phil, who was stooping by the rectangular outlet, looked up.

“I hear something. A couple of them, talking.”

He turned on his hearing aid and put his head to the opening beside Phil’s. Yes, a couple of Fuzzies talking; arguing about how far it was yet.

“As soon as they come out, let’s just shove them into the chute,” Phil argued, nodding toward the access-port to the trash-chute, that went seven hundred feet down to the mass-energy converters.

That was where the Fuzzies would go, all of them, when the sunstones were all out of the vault. But the sunstones weren’t all out. He doubted if they had more than half of them, yet.

“No, not yet. Here they come; grab the first one.”

Novaes caught the Fuzzy as he came out. He caught the second. They were both carrying loaded packs. He slipped the straps down over the Fuzzy’s arms and gave him to Novaes to hold, then loosened the drawstrings, emptying the stones into the open suitcase along with the other gems. Then he put the rucksack onto the Fuzzy’s back.

“All right. In with you. Go get stones.”

The Fuzzy said something, he wasn’t sure what, in a complaining tone. Fusso; that meant food, or eat. Important word to a Fuzzy.

“No. You get stone; then I give fusso.” He shoved the Fuzzy back into the ventilation duct. “Let’s unload yours and send him back. As long as there’s sunstones in there, we want them.”

A UNIFORMED SERGEANT was holding down Chief Steefer’s desk, smoking what was probably one of the Chief’s cigars and talking to a girl in another screen. Across the room, Ernst Mallin, Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn were talking to a Fuzzy who sat on the edge of a table, contentedly munching Extee-Three. Khadra was in evening clothes, and Sandra was wearing something glamorous with a lot of black lace. She was also wearing a sunstone which he hadn’t noticed before, on the third finger of her left hand. Wanted, Fuzzy-Sitter. Apply Victor Grego.

They set Diamond and his friends on the floor; he thanked and dismissed the men who had helped him with them. As soon as they saw the Fuzzy on the table, they raised an outcry and ran forward; the Fuzzy on the table dropped to the floor and hurried to meet them.

“What did you get from him?” he asked.

“Herckerd and Novaes, natch,” Khadra said, disgustedly. “All the time I was looking for a black market that wasn’t there, they were right here in town somewhere, being taught to steal sunstones. Fagin-racket, by God!”

“Herckerd and Novaes and who else?”

“Two other men, and one woman. And just the five Fuzzies Herekerd and Novaes brought in along with Diamond. They were somewhere not more than fifteen minutes by air from Company House all the time. This gang taught them to go through ventilator ducts, and open the screen-covers on the inlets, and use rope ladders and get stones out of cabinets. They must have had a mockup of the gem-vault and the ventilation system. They had to practice all the time. If they cleaned out the cabinets and brought the stones, river-gravel, I suppose, out, they got Extee-Three. If they goofed, they were punished, electric shock, I suppose, and shoved in a dungeon with nothing to eat. You know, they could be shot for that.”

“They oughtn’t to be shot; they ought to be burned at the stake!” Sandra cried angrily.

Gentler sex, indeed! “Well, I’ll settle for shooting, if we can catch them. Done anything in aid of that yet?”

“Not too much,” Mallin regretted. “His vocabulary is limited, and he hasn’t words for much that he experienced. We’ve been trying to learn his route through the ventilation system. He knows how he went in to the gem-vault, but he simply can’t verbalize it.”

“Diamond; you help Pappy Vic. Make talk for Unka Ernst, Unka Ahmed, Auntie Sandra; help other Fuzzies make talk about bad Big Ones, about place where were, about what make do, about how go through long little holes.” He turned to Khadra. “Has he seen Herckerd and Novaes on screen?”

“Not yet; we’ve just been talking to him, so far.”

“Better let all three of them see those audiovisuals; get identifications made. And keep on about the ventilation ducts. See if any of them can tell which way they went toward the gem vault, and what kind of a place they went in at.”