showing through, and the angular
buttes of tall buildings rising above. The streetless contragravity city
of a new planet that had never known ground traffic. The Fuzzies could be
hiding anywhere among those trees--or they could all be dead in some
man-made trap. He thought of all the deadly places into which they could
have wandered. Machinery, dormant and quiet, until somebody threw a
switch. Conduits, which could be flooded without warning, or filled with
scalding steam or choking gas. Poor little Fuzzies, they'd think a city
was as safe as the woods of home, where there was nothing worse than
harpies and damnthings.

Gus Brannhard was out when he went down to the suite; Ben Rainsford was at
a reading screen, studying a psychology text, and Gerd was working at a
desk that had been brought in. Baby was playing on the floor with the
bright new toys they had gotten for him. When Pappy Jack came in, he
dropped them and ran to be picked up and held.

"George called," Gerd said. "They have a family of Fuzzies at the post
now."

"Well, that's great." He tried to make it sound enthusiastic. "How many?"

"Five, three males and two females. They call them Dr. Crippen, Dillinger,
Ned Kelly, Lizzie Borden and Calamity Jane."

Wouldn't it be just like a bunch of cops to hang names like that on
innocent Fuzzies?

"Why don't you call the post and say hello to them?" Ben asked.

"Baby likes them; he'd think it was fun to talk to them again."

He let himself be urged into it, and punched out the combination. They
were nice Fuzzies; almost, but of course not quite, as nice as his own.

"If your family doesn't turn up in time for the trial, have Gus subpoena
ours," Lunt told him. "You ought to have some to produce in court. Two
weeks from now, this mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things. You
ought to see them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon."

He said he hoped he'd have his own by then; he realized that he was saying
it without much conviction.

They had a drink when Gus came in. He was delighted with the offer from
Lunt. Another one who didn't expect to see Pappy Jack's Fuzzies alive
again.

"I'm not doing a damn thing here," Rainsford said. "I'm going back to Beta
till the trial. Maybe I can pick up some ideas from George Lunt's Fuzzies.
I'm damned if I'm getting away from this crap!" He gestured at the reading
screen. "All I have is a vocabulary, and I don't know what half the words
mean." He snap