The Fuzzies took the manipulator quite calmly the next morning. That
wasn't any horrible monster, that was just something Pappy Jack took rides
in. He found one rather indifferent sunstone in the morning and two good
ones in the afternoon. He came home early and found the family in the
living room; they had dumped the wastebasket and were putting things back
into it. Another land-prawn seemed to have gotten into the house; its
picked shell was with the other rubbish in the basket. They had dinner
early, and he loaded the lot of them into the airjeep and took them for a
long ride to the south and west.
The following day, he located the flint vein on the other side of the
gorge and spent most of the morning blasting away the sandstone above it.
The next time he went into Mallorysport, he decided, he was going to shop
around for a good power-shovel. He had to blast a channel to keep the
little stream from damming up on him. He didn't get any flint cracked at
all that day. There was another harpy circling around the camp when he got
back; he chased it with the manipulator and shot it down with his pistol.
Harpies probably found Fuzzies as tasty as Fuzzies found land-prawns. The
family were all sitting under the gunrack when he entered the living room.
The next day he cracked flint, and found three more stones. It really
looked as though he had found the Dying Place of the Jellyfish at that. He
knocked off early that afternoon, and when he came in sight of the camp,
he saw an airjeep grounded on the lawn and a small man with a red beard in
a faded Khaki bush-jacket sitting on the bench by the kitchen door,
surrounded by Fuzzies. There was a camera and some other equipment laid up
where the Fuzzies couldn't get at it. Baby Fuzzy, of course, was sitting
on his head. He looked up and waved, and then handed Baby to his mother
and rose to his feet.
"Well, what do you think of them, Ben?" Jack called down, as he grounded
the manipulator.
"My God, don't start me on that now!" Ben Rainsford replied, and then
laughed. "I stopped at the constabulary post on the way home. I thought
George Lunt had turned into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. Then I
went home, and found your call on the recorder, so I came over here."
"Been waiting long?"
The Fuzzies had all abandoned Rainsford and come trooping over as soon as
the manipulator was off contragravity. He climbed down among them, and
they followed him across the grass, catching at his trouser legs and
yeeking happily.
"Not so long." Rainsford looked at his watch. "Good Lord, three and half
hours is all. Well, the time passed quickly. You know, your little fellows
have good ears. They heard you coming a long time before I did."
"Did you see them killing any prawns?"
"I should say! I got a lot of movies of it." He shook his head slowly.
"Jack, this is almost incredible."
"You're staying for dinner, of course?"
"You try and chase me away. I want to hear all about this. Want you to
make a tape about them, if you're willing."
"Glad to. We'll do that after we eat." He sat down on the bench, and the
Fuzzies began climbing upon and beside him. "This is the original, Little
Fuzzy. He brought the rest in a couple of days later. Mamma Fuzzy, and
Baby Fuzzy. And these are Mike and Mitzi. I call this one Ko-Ko, because
of the ceremonious way he beheads land-prawns."
"George says you call them all Fuzzies. Want that for the official
designation?"
"Sure. That's what they are, isn't it?"
"Well, let's call the order Hollowayans," Rainsford said. "Family,
Fuzzies; genus, Fuzzy. Species, Holloway's Fuzzy--_Fuzzy fuzzy holloway_.
How'll that be?"
That would be all right, he supposed. At least, they didn't try to
Latinize things in extraterrestrial zoology any more.
"I suppose our bumper crop of land-prawns is what brought them into this
section?"
"Yes, of course. George was telling me you thought they'd come down from
the north; about the only place they could have come from. This is
probably just the advance guard; we'll be having Fuzzies all over the
place before long. I wonder how fast they breed."
"Not very fast. Three males and two females in this crowd, and only one
young one." He set Mike and Mitzi off his lap and got to his feet. "I'll
go start dinner now. While I'm doing that, you can look at the stuff they
brought in with them."
When he had placed the dinner in the oven and taken a couple of highballs
into the living room, Rainsford was still sitting at the desk, looking at
the artifacts. He accepted his drink and sipped it absently, then raised
his head.
"Jack, this stuff is absolutely amazing," he said.
"It's better than that. It's unique. Only collection of native weapons and
implements on Zarathustra."
Ben Rainsford looked up sharply. "You mean what I think you mean?" he
asked. "Yes; you do." He drank some of his highball, set down the glass
and picked up the polished-horn prawn-killer. "Anything--pardon,
anybody--who does this kind of work is good enough native for me." He
hesitated briefly. "Why, Jack this tape you said you'd make. Can I
transmit a copy to Juan Jimenez? He's chief mammalogist with the Company
science division; we exchange information. And there's another Company man
I'd like to have hear it. Gerd van Riebeek. He's a general
xeno-naturalist, like me, but he's especially interested in animal
evolution."
"Why not? The Fuzzies are a scientific discovery. Discoveries ought to be
reported."
Little Fuzzy, Mike and Mitzi strolled in from the kitchen. Little Fuzzy
jumped up on the armchair and switched on the viewscreen. Fiddling with
the selector, he got the Big Blackwater woods-burning. Mike and Mitzi
shrieked delightedly, like a couple of kids watching a horror show. They
knew, by now, that nothing in the screen could get out and hurt them.
"Would you mind if they came out here and saw the Fuzzies?"
"Why, the Fuzzies would love that. They like company."
Mamma and Baby and Ko-Ko came in, seemed to approve what was on the screen
and sat down to watch it. When the bell on the stove rang, they all got
up, and Ko-Ko jumped onto the chair and snapped the screen off. Ben
Rainsford looked at him for a moment.
"You know, I have married friends with children who have a hell of a time
teaching eight-year-olds to turn off screens when they're through watching
them," he commented.
* * * * *
It took an hour, after dinner, to get the whole story, from the first
little yeek in the shower stall, on tape. When he had finished, Ben
Rainsford made a few remarks and shut off the recorder, then looked at his
watch.
"Twenty hundred; it'll be seventeen hundred in Mallorysport," he said. "I
could catch Jimenez at Science Center if I called now. He usually works a
little late."
"Go ahead. Want to show him some Fuzzies?" He moved his pistol and some
other impedimenta off the table and set Little Fuzzy and Mamma Fuzzy and
Baby upon it, then drew up a chair beside it, in range of the
communication screen, and sat down with Mike and Mitzi and Ko-Ko.
Rainsford punched out a wavelength combination. Then he picked up Baby
Fuzzy and set him on his head.
In a moment, the screen flickered and cleared, and a young man looked out
of it, with the momentary upward glance of one who wants to make sure his
public face is on straight. It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted,
group-integrated sort of face--the face turned out in thousands of copies
every year by the educational production lines on Terra.
"Why, Bennett, this is a pleasant surprise," he began. "I never expec--"
Then he choked; at least, he emitted a sound of surprise. "What in the
name of Dai-Butsu are those things on the table in front of you?" he
demanded. "I never saw anything--_And what is that on your head?_"
"Family group of Fuzzies," Rainsford said. "Mature male, mature female,
immature male." He lifted Baby Fuzzy down and put him in Mamma's arms.
"Species _Fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra_. The gentleman on my left is
Jack Holloway, the sunstone operator, who is the original discoverer.
Jack, Juan Jimenez."
They shook their own hands at one another in the ancient Terran-Chinese
gesture that was used on communication screens, and assured each
other--Jimenez rather absently--that it was a pleasure. He couldn't take
his eyes off the Fuzzies.
"Where did they come from?" he wanted to know. "Are you sure they're
indigenous?"
"They're not quite up to spaceships, yet, Dr. Jimenez. Fairly early
Paleolithic, I'd say."
Jimenez thought he was joking, and laughed. The sort of a laugh that could
be turned on and off, like a light. Rainsford assured him that the Fuzzies
were really indigenous.
"We have everything that's known about them on tape," he said. "About an
hour of it. Can you take sixty-speed?" He was making adjustments on the
recorder as he spoke. "All right, set and we'll transmit to you. And can
you get hold of Gerd van Riebeek? I'd like him to hear it too; it's as
much up his alley as anybody's."
When Jimenez was ready, Rainsford pressed the play-off button, and for a
minute the recorder gave a high, wavering squeak. The Fuzzies all looked
startled. Then it ended.
"I think, when you hear this, that you and Gerd will both want to come out
and see these little people. If you can, bring somebody who's a qualified
psychologist, somebody capable of evaluating the Fuzzies' mentation. Jack
wasn't kidding about early Paleolithic. If they're not sapient, they only
miss it by about one atomic diameter."
Jimenez looked almost as startled as the Fuzzies had. "You surely don't
mean that?" He looked from Rainsford to Jack Holloway and back. "Well,
I'll call you back, when we've both heard the tape. You're three time
zones west of us, aren't you? Then we'll try to make it before your
midnight--that'll be twenty-one hundred."
He called back half an hour short of that. This time, it was from the
living room of an apartment instead of an office. There was a portable
record player in the foreground and a low table with snacks and drinks,
and two other people were with him. One was a man of about Jimenez's age
with a good-humored, non-life-adjusted, non-group-integrated and slightly
weather-beaten face. The other was a woman with glossy black hair and a
Mona Lisa-ish smile. The Fuzzies had gotten sleepy, and had been bribed
with Extee Three to stay up a little longer. Immediately, they registered
interest. This was more fun than the viewscreen.
Jimenez introduced his companions as Gerd van Riebeek and Ruth Ortheris.
"Ruth is with Dr. Mallin's section; she's been working with the school
department and the juvenile court. She can probably do as well with your
Fuzzies as a regular xeno-psychologist."
"Well, I have worked with extraterrestrials," the woman said. "I've been
on Loki and Thor and Shesha."
Jack nodded. "Been on the same planets myself. Are you people coming out
here?"
"Oh, yes," van Riebeek said. "We'll be out by noon tomorrow. We may stay a
couple of days, but that won't put you to any trouble; I have a boat
that's big enough for the three of us to camp on. Now, how do we get to
your place?"
Jack told him, and gave map coordinates. Van Riebeek noted them down.
"There's one thing, though, I'm going to have to get firm about. I don't
want to have to speak about it again. These little people are to be
treated with consideration, and not as laboratory animals. You will not
hurt them, or annoy them, or force them to do anything they don't want to
do."
"We understand that. We won't do anything with the Fuzzies without your
approval. Is there anything you'd want us to bring out?"
"Yes. A few things for the camp that I'm short of; I'll pay you for them
when you get here. And about three cases of Extee Three. And some toys.
Dr. Ortheris, you heard the tape, didn't you? Well, just think what you'd
like to have if you were a Fuzzy, and bring it."
V
Victor Grego crushed out his cigarette slowly and deliberately.
"Yes, Leonard," he said patiently. "It's very interesting, and doubtless
an important discovery, but I can't see why you're making such a
production of it. Are you afraid I'll blame you for letting non-Company
people beat you to it? Or do you merely suspect that anything Bennett
Rainsford's mixed up in is necessarily a diabolical plot against the
Company and, by consequence, human civilization?"
Leonard Kellogg looked pained. "What I was about to say, Victor, is that
both Rainsford and this man Holloway seem convinced that these things they
call Fuzzies aren't animals at all. They believe them to be sapient
beings."
"Well, that's--" He bit that off short as the significance of what Kellogg
had just said hit him. "Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I
don't blame you for taking it seriously. Why, that would make Zarathustra
a Class-IV inhabited planet."
"For which the Company holds a Class-III charter," Kellogg added. "For an
uninhabited planet."
Automatically void if any race of sapient beings were discovered on
Zarathustra.
"You know what will happen if this is true?"
"Well, I should imagine the charter would have to be renegotiated, and now
that the Colonial Office knows what sort of a planet this is, they'll be
anything but generous with the Company...."
"They won't renegotiate anything, Leonard. The Federation government will
simply take the position that the Company has already made an adequate
return on the original investments, and they'll award us what we can show
as in our actual possession--I hope--and throw the rest into the public
domain."
The vast plains on Beta and Delta continents, with their herds of
veldbeest--all open range, and every 'beest that didn't carry a Company
brand a maverick. And all the untapped mineral wealth, and the untilled
arable land; it would take years of litigation even to make the Company's
claim to Big Blackwater stick. And Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines would
lose their monopolistic franchise and get sticky about it in the courts,
and in any case, the Company's import-export monopoly would go out the
airlock. And the squatters rushing in and swamping everything--
"Why, we won't be any better off than the Yggdrasil Company, squatting on
a guano heap on one continent!" he burst out. "Five years from now,
they'll be making more money out of bat dung than we'll be making out of
this whole world!"
And the Company's good friend and substantial stockholder, Nick Emmert,
would be out, too, and a Colonial Governor General would move in, with
regular army troops and a complicated bureaucracy. Elections, and a
representative parliament, and every Tom, Dick and Harry with a grudge
against the Company would be trying to get laws passed--And, of course, a
Native Affairs Commission, with its nose in everything.
"But they couldn't just leave us without any kind of a charter," Kellogg
insisted. Who was he trying to kid--besides himself? "It wouldn't be
fair!" As though that clinched it. "It isn't our fault!"
He forced more patience into his voice. "Leonard, please try to realize
that the Terran Federation government doesn't give one shrill soprano hoot
on Nifflheim whether it's fair or not, or whose fault what is. The
Federation government's been repenting that charter they gave the Company
ever since they found out what they'd chartered away. Why, this planet is
a better world than Terra ever was, even before the Atomic Wars. Now, if
they have a chance to get it back, with improvements, you think they won't
take it? And what will stop them? If those creatures over on Beta
Continent are sapient beings, our charter isn't worth the parchment it's
engrossed on, and that's an end of it." He was silent for a moment. "You
heard that tape Rainsford transmitted to Jimenez. Did either he or
Holloway actually claim, in so many words, that these things really are
sapient beings?"
"Well, no; not in so many words. Holloway consistently alluded to them as
people, but he's just an ignorant old prospector. Rainsford wouldn't come
out and commit himself one way or another, but he left the door wide open
for anybody else to."
"Accepting their account, could these Fuzzies be sapient?"
"Accepting the account, yes," Kellogg said, in distress. "They could be."
They probably were, if Leonard Kellogg couldn't wish the evidence out of
existence.
"Then they'll look sapient to these people of yours who went over to Beta
this morning, and they'll treat it purely as a scientific question and
never consider the legal aspects. Leonard, you'll have to take charge of
the investigation, before they make any reports everybody'll be sorry
for."
Kellogg didn't seem to like that. It would mean having to exercise
authority and getting tough with people, and he hated anything like that.
He nodded very reluctantly.
"Yes. I suppose I will. Let me think about it for a moment, Victor."
One thing about Leonard; you handed him something he couldn't delegate or
dodge and he'd go to work on it. Maybe not cheerfully, but
conscientiously.
"I'll take Ernst Mallin along," he said at length. "This man Rainsford has
no grounding whatever in any of the psychosciences. He may be able to
impose on Ruth Ortheris, but not on Ernst Mallin. Not after I've talked to
Mallin first." He thought some more. "We'll have to get these Fuzzies away
from this man Holloway. Then we'll issue a report of discovery, being
careful to give full credit to both Rainsford and Holloway--we'll even
accept the designation they've coined for them--but we'll make it very
clear that while highly intelligent, the Fuzzies are not a race of sapient
beings. If Rainsford persists in making any such claim, we will brand it
as a deliberate hoax."
"Do you think he's gotten any report off to the Institute of Xeno-Sciences
yet?"
Kellogg shook his head. "I think he wants to trick some of our people into
supporting his sapience claims; at least, corroborating his and Holloway's
alleged observations. That's why I'll have to get over to Beta as soon as
possible."
By now, Kellogg had managed to convince himself that going over to Beta
had been his idea all along. Probably also convincing himself that
Rainsford's report was nothing but a pack of lies. Well, if he could work
better that way, that was his business.
"He will, before long, if he isn't stopped. And a year from now, there'll
be a small army of investigators here from Terra. By that time, you should
have both Rainsford and Holloway thoroughly discredited. Leonard, you get
those Fuzzies away from Holloway and I'll personally guarantee they won't
be available for investigation by then. Fuzzies," he said reflectively.
"Fur-bearing animals, I take it?"
"Holloway spoke, on the tape, of their soft and silky fur."
"Good. Emphasize that in your report. As soon as it's published, the
Company will offer two thousand sols apiece for Fuzzy pelts. By the time
Rainsford's report brings anybody here from Terra, we may have them all
trapped out."
Kellogg began to look worried.
"But, Victor, that's genocide!"
"Nonsense! Genocide is defined as the extermination of a race of sapient
beings. These are fur-bearing animals. It's up to you and Ernst Mallin to
prove that."
* * * * *
The Fuzzies, playing on the lawn in front of the camp, froze into
immobility, their faces turned to the west. Then they all ran to the bench
by the kitchen door and scrambled up onto it.
"Now what?" Jack Holloway wondered.
"They hear the airboat," Rainsford told him. "That's the way they acted
yesterday when you were coming in with your machine." He looked at the
picnic table they had been spreading under the featherleaf trees.
"Everything ready?"
"Everything but lunch; that won't be cooked for an hour yet. I see them
now."
"You have better eyes than I do, Jack. Oh, I see it. I hope the kids put
on a good show for them," he said anxiously.
He'd been jittery ever since he arrived, shortly after breakfast. It
wasn't that these people from Mallorysport were so important themselves;
Ben had a bigger name in scientific circles than any of this Company
crowd. He was just excited about the Fuzzies.
The airboat grew from a barely visible speck, and came spiraling down to
land in the clearing. When it was grounded and off contragravity, they
started across the grass toward it, and the Fuzzies all jumped down from
the bench and ran along with them.
The three visitors climbed down. Ruth Ortheris wore slacks and a sweater,
but the slacks were bloused over a pair of ankle boots. Gerd van Riebeek
had evidently done a lot of field work: his boots were stout, and he wore
old, faded khakis and a serviceable-looking sidearm that showed he knew
what to expect up here in the Piedmont. Juan Jimenez was in the same
sports casuals in which he had appeared on screen last evening. All of
them carried photographic equipment. They shook hands all around and
exchanged greetings, and then the Fuzzies began clamoring to be noticed.
Finally all of them, Fuzzies and other people, drifted over to the table
under the trees.
Ruth Ortheris sat down on the grass with Mamma and Baby. Immediately Baby
became interested in a silver charm which she wore on a chain around her
neck which tinkled fascinatingly. Then he tried to sit on her head. She
spent some time gently but firmly discouraging this. Juan Jimenez was
squatting between Mike and Mitzi, examining them alternately and talking
into a miniature recorder phone on his breast, mostly in Latin. Gerd van
Riebeek dropped himself into a folding chair and took Little Fuzzy on his
lap.
"You know, this is kind of surprising," he said. "Not only finding
something like this, after twenty-five years, but finding something as
unique as this. Look, he doesn't have the least vestige of a tail, and
there isn't another tailless mammal on the planet. Fact, there isn't
another mammal on this planet that has the slightest kinship to him. Take
ourselves; we belong to a pretty big family, about fifty-odd genera of
primates. But this little fellow hasn't any relatives at all."
"Yeek?"
"And he couldn't care less, could he?" Van Riebeek pummeled Little Fuzzy
gently. "One thing, you have the smallest humanoid known; that's one
record you can claim. Oh-oh, what goes on?"
Ko-Ko, who had climbed upon Rainsford's lap, jumped suddenly to the
ground, grabbed the chopper-digger he had left beside the chair and
started across the grass. Everybody got to their feet, the visitors
getting cameras out. The Fuzzies seemed perplexed by all the excitement.
It was only another land-prawn, wasn't it?
Ko-Ko got in front of it, poked it on the nose to stop it and then struck
a dramatic pose, flourishing his weapon and bringing it down on the
prawn's neck. Then, after flopping it over, he looked at it almost in
sorrow and hit it a couple of whacks with the flat. He began pulling it
apart and eating it.
"I see why you call him Ko-Ko," Ruth said, aiming her camera, "Don't the
others do it that way?"
"Well, Little Fuzzy runs along beside them and pivots and gives them a
quick chop. Mike and Mitzi flop theirs over first and behead them on their
backs. And Mamma takes a swipe at their legs first. But beheading and
breaking the undershell, they all do that."
"Uh-huh; that's basic," she said. "Instinctive. The technique is either
self-learned or copied. When Baby begins killing his own prawns, see if he
doesn't do it the way Mamma does!"
"Hey, look!" Jimenez cried. "He's making a lobster pick for himself!"
Through lunch, they talked exclusively about Fuzzies. The subjects of the
discussion nibbled things that were given to them, and yeeked among
themselves. Gerd van Riebeek suggested that they were discussing the odd
habits of human-type people. Juan Jimenez looked at him, slightly
disturbed, as though wondering just how seriously he meant it.
"You know, what impressed me most in the taped account was the incident of
the damnthing," said Ruth Ortheris. "Any animal associating with man will
try to attract attention if something's wrong, but I never heard of one,
not even a Freyan kholph or a Terran chimpanzee, that would use
descriptive pantomime. Little Fuzzy was actually making a symbolic
representation, by abstracting the distinguishing characteristic of the
damnthing."
"Think that stiff-arm gesture and bark might have been intended to
represent a rifle?" Gerd van Riebeek asked. "He'd seen you shooting
before, hadn't he?"
"I don't think it was anything else. He was telling me, 'Big nasty
damnthing outside; shoot it like you did the harpy.' And if he hadn't run
past me and pointed back, that damnthing would have killed me."
Jimenez, hesitantly, said, "I know I'm speaking from ignorance. You're the
Fuzzy expert. But isn't it possible that you're overanthropomorphizing?
Endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?"
"Juan, I'm not going to answer that right now. I don't think I'll answer
at all. You wait till you've been around these Fuzzies a little longer,
and then ask it again, only ask yourself."
* * * * *
"So you see, Ernst, that's the problem."
Leonard Kellogg laid the words like a paperweight on the other words he
had been saying, and waited. Ernst Mallin sat motionless, his elbows on
the desk and his chin in his hands. A little pair of wrinkles, like
parentheses, appeared at the corners of his mouth.
"Yes. I'm not a lawyer, of course, but...."
"It's not a legal question. It's a question for a psychologist."
That left it back with Ernst Mallin, and he knew it.
"I'd have to see them myself before I could express an opinion. You have
that tape of Holloway's with you?" When Kellogg nodded, Mallin continued:
"Did either of them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?"
He answered it as he had when Victor Grego had asked the same question,
adding:
"The account consists almost entirely of Holloway's uncorroborated
statements concerning things to which he claims to have been the sole
witness."
"Ah." Mallin permitted himself a tight little smile. "And he's not a
qualified observer. Neither, for that matter, is Rainsford. Regardless of
his position as a xeno-naturalist, he is a complete layman in the
psychosciences. He's just taken this other man's statements uncritically.
As for what he claims to have observed for himself, how do we know he
isn't including a lot of erroneous inferences with his descriptive
statements?"
"How do we know he's not perpetrating a deliberate hoax?"
"But, Leonard, that's a pretty serious accusation."
"It's happened before. That fellow who carved a Late Upland Martian
inscription in that cave in Kenya, for instance. Or Hellermann's claim to
have cross-bred Terran mice with Thoran tilbras. Or the Piltdown Man, back
in the first century Pre-Atomic?"
Mallin nodded. "None of us like to think of a thing like that, but, as you
say, it's happened. You know, this man Rainsford is just the type to do
something like that, too. Fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badly
adjusted personality type. Say he wants to make some sensational discovery
which will assure him the position in the scientific world to which he
believes himself entitled. He finds this lonely old prospector, into whose
isolated camp some little animals have strayed. The old man has made pets
of them, taught them a few tricks, finally so projected his own
personality onto them that he has convinced himself that they are people
like himself. This is Rainsford's great opportunity; he will present
himself as the discoverer of a new sapient race and bring the whole
learned world to his feet." Mallin smiled again. "Yes, Leonard, it is
altogether possible."
"Then it's our plain duty to stop this thing before it develops into
another major scientific scandal like Hellermann's hybrids."
"First we must go over this tape recording and see what we have on our
hands. Then we must make a thorough, unbiased study of these animals, and
show Rainsford and his accomplice that they cannot hope to foist these
ridiculous claims on the scientific world with impunity. If we can't
convince them privately, there'll be nothing to do but expose them
publicly."
"I've heard the tape already, but let's play if off now. We want to
analyze these tricks this man Holloway has taught these animals, and see
what they show."
"Yes, of course. We must do that at once," Mallin said. "Then we'll have
to consider what sort of statement we must issue, and what sort of
evidence we will need to support it."
* * * * *
After dinner was romptime for Fuzzies on the lawn, but when the dusk came
creeping into the ravine, they all went inside and were given one of their
new toys from Mallorysport--a big box of many-colored balls and short
sticks of transparent plastic. They didn't know that it was a
molecule-model kit, but they soon found that the sticks would go into
holes in the balls, and that they could be built into three-dimensional
designs.
This was much more fun than the colored stones. They made a few
experimental shapes, then dismantled them and began on a single large
design. Several times they tore it down, entirely or in part, and began
over again, usually with considerable yeeking and gesticulation.
"They have artistic sense," Van Riebeek said. "I've seen lots of abstract
sculpture that wasn't half as good as that job they're doing."
"Good engineering, too," Jack said. "They understand balance and
center-of-gravity. They're bracing it well, and not making it top-heavy."
"Jack, I've been thinking about that question I was supposed to ask
myself," Jimenez said. "You know, I came out here loaded with suspicion.
Not that I doubted your honesty; I just thought you'd let your obvious
affection for the Fuzzies lead you into giving them credit for more
intelligence than they possess. Now I think you've consistently
understated it. Short of actual sapience, I've never seen anything like
them."
"Why short of it?" van Riebeek asked. "Ruth, you've been pretty quiet this
evening. What do you think?"
Ruth Ortheris looked uncomfortable. "Gerd, it's too early to form opinions
like that. I know the way they're working together looks like cooperation
on an agreed-upon purpose, but I simply can't make speech out of that
yeek-yeek-yeek."
"Let's keep the talk-and-build-a-fire rule out of it," van Riebeek said.
"If they're working together on a common project, they must be
communicating somehow."
"It isn't communication, it's symbolization. You simply can't think
sapiently except in verbal symbols. Try it. Not something like changing
the spools on a recorder or field-stripping a pistol; they're just learned
tricks. I mean ideas."
"How about Helen Keller?" Rainsford asked. "Mean to say she only started
thinking sapiently after Anna Sullivan taught her what words were?"
"No, of course not. She thought sapiently--And she only thought in
sense-imagery limited to feeling." She looked at Rainsford reproachfully;
he'd knocked a breach in one of her fundamental postulates. "Of course,
she had inherited the cerebroneural equipment for sapient thinking." She
let that trail off, before somebody asked her how she knew that the
Fuzzies hadn't.
"I'll suggest, just to keep the argument going, that speech couldn't have
been invented without pre-existing sapience," Jack said.
Ruth laughed. "Now you're taking me back to college. That used to be one
of the burning questions in first-year psych students' bull sessions. By
the time we got to be sophomores, we'd realized that it was only an
egg-and-chicken argument and dropped it."
"That's a pity," Ben Rainsford said. "It's a good question."
"It would be if it could be answered."
"Maybe it can be," Gerd said. "There's a clue to it, right there. I'll say
that those fellows are on the edge of sapience, and it's an even-money bet
which side."
"I'll bet every sunstone in my bag they're over."
"Well, maybe they're just slightly sapient," Jimenez suggested.
Ruth Ortheris hooted at that. "That's like talking about being just
slightly dead or just slightly pregnant," she said. "You either are or you
aren't."
Gerd van Riebeek was talking at the same time. "This sapience question is
just as important in my field as yours, Ruth. Sapience is the result of
evolution by natural selection, just as much as a physical characteristic,
and it's the most important step in the evolution of any species, our own
included."
"Wait a minute, Gerd," Rainsford said. "Ruth, what do you mean by that?
Aren't there degrees of sapience?"
"No. There are degrees of mentation--intelligence, if you prefer--just as
there are degrees of temperature. When psychology becomes an exact science
like physics, we'll be able to calibrate mentation like temperature. But
sapience is qualitatively different from nonsapience. It's more than just
a higher degree of mental temperature. You might call it a sort of mental
boiling point."
"I think that's a damn good analogy," Rainsford said. "But what happens
when the boiling point is reached?"
"That's what we have to find out," van Riebeek told him. "That's what I
was talking about a moment ago. We don't know any more about how sapience
appeared today than we did in the year zero, or in the year 654 Pre-Atomic
for that matter."
"Wait a minute," Jack interrupted. "Before we go any deeper, let's agree
on a definition of sapience."
Van Riebeek laughed. "Ever try to get a definition of life from a
biologist?" he asked. "Or a definition of number from a mathematician?"
"That's about it." Ruth looked at the Fuzzies, who were looking at their
colored-ball construction as though wondering if they could add anything
more without spoiling the design. "I'd say: a level of mentation
qualitatively different from nonsapience in that it includes ability to
symbolize ideas and store and transmit them, ability to generalize and
ability to form abstract ideas. There; I didn't say a word about
talk-and-build-a-fire, did I?"
"Little Fuzzy symbolizes and generalizes," Jack said. "He symbolizes a
damnthing by three horns, and he symbolizes a rifle by a long thing that
points and makes noises. Rifles kill animals. Harpies and damnthings are
both animals. If a rifle will kill a harpy, it'll kill a damnthing too."
Juan Jimenez had been frowning in thought; he looked up and asked, "What's
the lowest known sapient race?"
"Yggdrasil Khooghras," Gerd van Riebeek said promptly. "Any of you ever
been on Yggdrasil?"
"I saw a man shot once on Mimir, for calling another man a son of a
Khooghra," Jack said. "The man who shot him had been on Yggdrasil and knew
what he was being called."
"I spent a couple of years among them," Gerd said. "They do build fires;
I'll give them that. They char points on sticks to make spears. And they
talk. I learned their language, all eighty-two words of it. I taught a few
of the intelligentsia how to use machetes without maiming themselves, and
there was one mental giant I could trust to carry some of my equipment, if
I kept an eye on him, but I never let him touch my rifle or my camera."
"Can they generalize?" Ruth asked.
"Honey, they can't do nothin' else but! Every word in their language is a
high-order generalization. _Hroosha_, live-thing. _Noosha_, bad-thing.
_Dhishta_, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine
more of them."
Before anybody could stop him, the communication screen got itself into an
uproar. The Fuzzies all ran over in front of it, and Jack switched it on.
The caller was a man in gray semiformals; he had wavy gray hair and a face
that looked like Juan Jimenez's twenty years from now.
"Good evening; Holloway here."
"Oh, Mr. Holloway, good evening." The caller shook hands with himself,
turning on a dazzling smile. "I'm Leonard Kellogg, chief of the Company's
science division. I just heard the tape you made about the--the Fuzzies?"
He looked down at the floor. "Are these some of the animals?"
"These are the Fuzzies." He hoped it sounded like the correction it was
intended to be. "Dr. Bennett Rainsford's here with me now, and so are Dr.
Jimenez, Dr. van Riebeek and Dr. Ortheris." Out of the corner of his eye
he could see Jimenez squirming as though afflicted with ants, van Riebeek
getting his poker face battened down and Ben Rainsford suppressing a grin.
"Some of us are out of screen range, and I'm sure you'll want to ask a lot
of questions. Pardon us a moment, while we close in."
He ignored Kellogg's genial protest that that wouldn't be necessary until
the chairs were placed facing the screen. As an afterthought, he handed
Fuzzies around, giving Little Fuzzy to Ben, Ko-Ko to Gerd, Mitzi to Ruth,
Mike to Jimenez and taking Mamma and Baby on his own lap.
Baby immediately started to climb up onto his head, as expected. It seemed
to disconcert Kellogg, also as expected. He decided to teach Baby to thumb
his nose when given some unobtrusive signal.
"Now, about that tape I recorded last evening," he began.
"Yes, Mr. Holloway." Kellogg's smile was getting more mechanical every
minute. He was having trouble keeping his eyes off Baby. "I must say, I
was simply astounded at the high order of intelligence claimed for these
creatures."
"And you wanted to see how big a liar I was. I don't blame you; I had
trouble believing it myself at first."
Kellogg gave a musically blithe laugh, showing even more dental equipment.
"Oh, no. Mr. Holloway; please don't misunderstand me. I never thought
anything like that."
"I hope not," Ben Rainsford said, not too pleasantly. "I vouched for Mr.
Holloway's statements, if you'll recall."
"Of course, Bennett; that goes without saying. Permit me to congratulate
you upon a most remarkable scientific discovery. An entirely new order of
mammals--"
"Which may be the ninth extrasolar sapient race," Rainsford added.
"Good heavens, Bennett!" Kellogg jettisoned his smile and slid on a look
of shocked surprise. "You surely can't be serious?" He looked again at the
Fuzzies, pulled the smile back on and gave a light laugh.
"I thought you'd heard that tape," Rainsford said.
"Of course, and the things reported were most remarkable. But sapiences!
Just because they've been taught a few tricks, and use sticks and stones
for weapons--" He got rid of the smile again, and quick-changed to
seriousness. "Such an extreme claim must only be made after careful
study."
"Well, I won't claim they're sapient," Ruth Ortheris told him. "Not till
day after tomorrow, at the earliest. But they very easily could be. They
have learning and reasoning capacity equal to that of any eight-year-old
Terran Human child, and well above that of the adults of some recognizedly
sapient races. And they have not been taught tricks; they have learned by
observation and reasoning."
"Well, Dr. Kellogg, mentation levels isn't my subject," Jimenez took it
up, "but they do have all the physical characteristics shared by other
sapient races--lower limbs specialized for locomotion and upper limbs for
manipulation, erect posture, stereoscopic vision, color perception,
hand with opposing thumb--all the characteristics we consider as
prerequisite to the development of sapience."
"I think they're sapient, myself," Gerd van Riebeek said, "but that's not
as important as the fact that they're on the very threshold of sapience.
This is the first race of this mental level anybody's ever seen. I believe
that study of the Fuzzies will help us solve the problem of how sapience
developed in any race."
Kellogg had been laboring to pump up a head of enthusiasm; now he was
ready to valve it off.
"But this is amazing! This will make scientific history! Now, of course,
you all realize how pricelessly valuable these Fuzzies are. They must be
brought at once to Mallorysport, where they can be studied under
laboratory conditions by qualified psychologists, and--"
"No."
Jack lifted Baby Fuzzy off his head and handed him to Mamma, and set Mamma
on the floor. That was reflex; the thinking part of his brain knew he
didn't need to clear for action when arguing with the electronic image of
a man twenty-five hundred miles away.
"Just forget that part of it and start over," he advised.
Kellogg ignored him. "Gerd, you have your airboat; fix up some nice
comfortable cages--"
_"Kellogg!_"
The man in the screen stopped talking and stared in amazed indignation. It
was the first time in years he had been addressed by his naked patronymic,
and possibly the first time in his life he had been shouted at.
"Didn't you hear me the first time Kellogg? Then stop gibbering about
cages. These Fuzzies aren't being taken anywhere."
"But Mr. Holloway! Don't you realize that these little beings must be
carefully studied? Don't you want them given their rightful place in the
hierarchy of nature?"
"If you want to study them, come out here and do it. That's so long as you
don't annoy them, or me. As far as study's concerned, they're being
studied now. Dr. Rainsford's studying them, and so are three of your
people, and when it comes to that, I'm studying them myself."
"And I'd like you to clarify that remark about qualified psychologists,"
Ruth Ortheris added, in a voice approaching zero-Kelvin. "You wouldn't be
challenging my professional qualifications, would you?"
"Oh, Ruth, you know I didn't mean anything like that. Please don't
misunderstand me," Kellogg begged. "But this is highly specialized work--"
"Yes; how many Fuzzy specialists have you at Science Center, Leonard?"
Rainsford wanted to know. "The only one I can think of is Jack Holloway,
here."
"Well, I'd thought of Dr. Mallin, the Company's head psychologist."
"He can come too, just as long as he understands that he'll have to have
my permission for anything he wants to do with the Fuzzies," Jack said.
"When can we expect you?"
Kellogg thought some time late the next afternoon. He didn't have to ask
how to get to the camp. He made a few efforts to restore the conversation
to its original note of cordiality, gave that up as a bad job and blanked
out. There was a brief silence in the living room. Then Jimenez said
reproachfully:
"You certainly weren't very gracious to Dr. Kellogg, Jack. Maybe you don't
realize it, but he is a very important man."
"He isn't important to me, and I wasn't gracious to him at all. It doesn't
pay to be gracious to people like that. If you are, they always try to
take advantage of it."
"Why, I didn't know you knew Len," van Riebeek said.
"I never saw the individual before. The species is very common and widely
distributed." He turned to Rainsford. "You think he and this Mallin will
be out tomorrow?"
"Of course they will. This is a little too big for underlings and
non-Company people to be allowed to monkey with. You know, we'll have to
watch out or in a year we'll be hearing from Terra about the discovery of
a sapient race on Zarathustra; _Fuzzy fuzzy Kellogg_. As Juan says, Dr.
Kellogg is a very important man. That's how he got important."