to the cubicle.
He hasn't even budged."

"But he's _gone_," Dal panted. "Something's happened to him. I _know_
it."

"How do you know?"

"I--I just know. I can feel it."

"All right, then let's find him," Tiger said. "He's got to be somewhere
on the ship. If he's in trouble, we're wasting time fighting."

Tiger let go, and Jack brushed off his shirt, his face very white. "I
saw him just a little while ago," he said. "He was sitting up on that
silly perch watching us, and then swinging back and forth and swinging
over to that cabinet and back."

"Well, let's get started looking," Tiger said.

They fanned out, with Jack still muttering to himself, and searched the
control room inch by inch. There was no sign of Fuzzy. Dal had control
of himself now, but he searched with a frantic intensity. "He's not in
here," he said at last, "he must have gone out somewhere."

"There was only one door open," Tiger said. "The one you just came
through, from the rear corridor. Dal, you search the computer room.
Jack, check the lab and I'll go back to the reactors."

They started searching the compartments off the rear corridor. For ten
minutes there was no sound in the ship but the occasional slamming of a
hatch, the grate of a desk drawer, the bang of a cabinet door. Dal
worked through the maze of cubby-holes in the computer room with growing
hopelessness. The frightening sense of loneliness and loss in his mind
was overwhelming; he was almost physically ill. The warm, comfortable
feeling of _contact_ that he had always had before with Fuzzy was gone.
As the minutes passed, hopelessness gave way to despair.

Then Jack gave a hoarse cry from the lab. Dal tripped and stumbled in
his haste to get down the corridor, and almost collided with Tiger at
the lab door.

"I think we're too late," Jack said. "He's gotten into the formalin."

He lifted one of the glass beakers down from the shelf to the work
bench. It was obvious what had happened. Fuzzy had gone exploring and
had found the laboratory a fascinating place. Several of the reagents
bottles had been knocked over as if he had been sampling them. The glass
lid to the beaker of formalin which was kept for tissue specimens had
been pushed aside just enough to admit the little creature's two-inch
girth. Now Fuzzy lay in the bottom of the beaker, immersed in formalin,
a formless, shapeless blob of sickly gray jelly.

"Are you sure it's formalin?" Dal asked.

Jack poured off t