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little fuzzy by h. beam piper chapter i jack holloway found himself squinting, theorange sun full in his eyes. he raised a hand to push his hat forward, then lowered it tothe controls to alter the pulse rate of the contragravity-field generators and lift themanipulator another hundred feet. for a moment he sat, puffing on the short pipe that hadyellowed the corners of his white mustache, and looked down at the red rag tied to a bushagainst the rock face of the gorge five hundred yards away. he was smiling in anticipation. “this’ll be a good one,” he told himselfaloud, in the manner of men who have long

been their own and only company. “i wantto see this one go up.” he always did. he could remember at leasta thousand blast-shots he had fired back along the years and on more planets than he couldname at the moment, including a few thermonuclears, but they were all different and they werealways something to watch, even a little one like this. flipping the switch, his thumbfound the discharger button and sent out a radio impulse; the red rag vanished in anupsurge of smoke and dust that mounted out of the gorge and turned to copper when thesunlight touched it. the big manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently;falling debris pelted the trees and splashed in the little stream.

he waited till the machine stabilized, thenglided it down to where he had ripped a gash in the cliff with the charge of cataclysmite.good shot: brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked the vein of flint and hadn’t thrownit around too much. a lot of big slabs were loose. extending the forward claw-arms, hepulled and tugged, and then used the underside grapples to pick up a chunk and drop it onthe flat ground between the cliff and the stream. he dropped another chunk on it, breakingboth of them, and then another and another, until he had all he could work over the restof the day. then he set down, got the toolbox and the long-handled contragravity lifter,and climbed to the ground where he opened the box, put on gloves and an eyescreen andgot out a microray scanner and a vibrohammer.

the first chunk he cracked off had nothingin it; the scanner gave the uninterrupted pattern of homogenous structure. picking itup with the lifter, he swung it and threw it into the stream. on the fifteenth chunk,he got an interruption pattern that told him that a sunstone—or something, probably something—wasinside. some fifty million years ago, when the planetthat had been called zarathustra (for the last twenty-five million) was young, therehad existed a marine life form, something like a jellyfish. as these died, they hadsunk into the sea-bottom ooze; sand had covered the ooze and pressed it tighter and tighter,until it had become glassy flint, and the entombed jellyfish little beans of dense stone.some of them, by some ancient biochemical

quirk, were intensely thermofluorescent; wornas gems, they glowed from the wearer’s body heat. on terra or baldur or freya or ishtar, a singlecut of polished sunstone was worth a small fortune. even here, they brought respectableprices from the zarathustra company’s gem buyers. keeping his point of expectation safelylow, he got a smaller vibrohammer from the toolbox and began chipping cautiously aroundthe foreign object, until the flint split open and revealed a smooth yellow ellipsoid,half an inch long. “worth a thousand sols—if it’s worthanything,” he commented. a deft tap here, another there, and the yellow bean came loosefrom the flint. picking it up, he rubbed it

between gloved palms. “i don’t think itis.” he rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of his pipe. it still didn’trespond. he dropped it. “another jellyfish that didn’t live right.” behind him, something moved in the brush witha dry rustling. he dropped the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching towardhis hip. then he saw what had made the noise—a hard-shelled thing a foot in length, withtwelve legs, long antennae and two pairs of clawed mandibles. he stopped and picked upa shard of flint, throwing it with an oath. another damned infernal land-prawn. he detested land-prawns. they were horriblethings, which, of course, wasn’t their fault.

more to the point, they were destructive.they got into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. they crawled into machinery,possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. they cut into electric insulation.and they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather pinched, painfully. nobody loved aland-prawn, not even another land-prawn. this one dodged the thrown flint, scuttledoff a few feet and turned, waving its antennae in what looked like derision. jack reachedfor his hip again, then checked the motion. pistol cartridges cost like crazy; they weren’tto be wasted in fits of childish pique. then he reflected that no cartridge fired at atarget is really wasted, and that he hadn’t done any shooting recently. stooping again,he picked up another stone and tossed it a

foot short and to the left of the prawn. assoon as it was out of his fingers, his hand went for the butt of the long automatic. itwas out and the safety off before the flint landed; as the prawn fled, he fired from thehip. the quasi-crustacean disintegrated. he nodded pleasantly. “ol’ man holloway’s still hitting thingshe shoots at.” was a time, not so long ago, when he tookhis abilities for granted. now he was getting old enough to have to verify them. he thumbedon the safety and holstered the pistol, then picked up the glove and put it on again. never saw so blasted many land-prawns as thissummer. they’d been bad last year, but nothing

like this. even the oldtimers who’d beenon zarathustra since the first colonization said so. there’d be some simple explanation,of course; something that would amaze him at his own obtuseness for not having seenit at once. maybe the abnormally dry weather had something to do with it. or increase ofsomething they ate, or decrease of natural enemies. he’d heard that land-prawns had no naturalenemies; he questioned that. something killed them. he’d seen crushed prawn shells, someof them close to his camp. maybe stamped on by something with hoofs, and then picked cleanby insects. he’d ask ben rainsford; ben ought to know.

half an hour later, the scanner gave him anotherinterruption pattern. he laid it aside and took up the small vibrohammer. this time itwas a large bean, light pink in color, he separated it from its matrix of flint andrubbed it, and instantly it began glowing. “ahhh! this is something like it, now!” he rubbed harder; warmed further on his pipebowl, it fairly blazed. better than a thousand sols, he told himself. good color, too. gettinghis gloves off, he drew out the little leather bag from under his shirt, loosening the drawstringsby which it hung around his neck. there were a dozen and a half stones inside, all brightas live coals. he looked at them for a moment, and dropped the new sunstone in among them,chuckling happily.

victor grego, listening to his own recordedvoice, rubbed the sunstone on his left finger with the heel of his right palm and watchedit brighten. there was, he noticed, a boastful ring to his voice—not the suave, unemphatictone considered proper on a message-tape. well, if anybody wondered why, when they playedthat tape off six months from now in johannesburg on terra, they could look in the cargo holdsof the ship that had brought it across five hundred light-years of space. ingots of goldand platinum and gadolinium. furs and biochemicals and brandy. perfumes that defied syntheticimitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. spices. and the steel coffer full of sunstones.almost all luxury goods, the only really dependable commodities in interstellar trade.

and he had spoken of other things. veldbeestmeat, up seven per cent from last month, twenty per cent from last year, still in demand ona dozen planets unable to produce terran-type foodstuffs. grain, leather, lumber. and hehad added a dozen more items to the lengthening list of what zarathustra could now producein adequate quantities and no longer needed to import. not fishhooks and boot buckles,either—blasting explosives and propellants, contragravity-field generator parts, powertools, pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. the company didn’t need to carry zarathustraany more; zarathustra could carry the company, and itself. fifteen years ago, when the zarathustra companyhad sent him here, there had been a cluster

of log and prefab huts beside an improvisedlanding field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now stood. today, mallorysport was a cityof seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it wasstill growing. there were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction plants and machineworks. they produced all their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a littlerefined plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding. the recorded voice stopped. he ran back thespool, set for sixty-speed, and transmitted it to the radio office. in twenty minutes,a copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for terra that night. while he wasfinishing, his communication screen buzzed.

“dr. kellogg’s screening you, mr. grego,”the girl in the outside office told him. he nodded. her hands moved, and she vanishedin a polychromatic explosion; when it cleared, the chief of the division of scientific studyand research was looking out of the screen instead. looking slightly upward at the showbackover his own screen, victor was getting his warm, sympathetic, sincere and slightly tootoothy smile on straight. “hello, leonard. everything going all right?” it either was and leonard kellogg wanted morecredit than he deserved or it wasn’t and he was trying to get somebody else blamedfor it before anybody could blame him. “good afternoon, victor.” just the rightshade of deference about using the first name—big

wheel to bigger wheel. “has nick emmertbeen talking to you about the big blackwater project today?” nick was the federation’s resident-general;on zarathustra he was, to all intents and purposes, the terran federation government.he was also a large stockholder in the chartered zarathustra company. “no. is he likely to?” “well, i wondered, victor. he was on myscreen just now. he says there’s some adverse talk about the effect on the rainfall in thepiedmont area of beta continent. he was worried about it.”

“well, it would affect the rainfall. afterall, we drained half a million square miles of swamp, and the prevailing winds are fromthe west. there’d be less atmospheric moisture to the east of it. who’s talking adverselyabout it, and what worries nick?” “well, nick’s afraid of the effect onpublic opinion on terra. you know how strong conservation sentiment is; everybody’s verymuch opposed to any sort of destructive exploitation.” “good lord! the man doesn’t call the creationof five hundred thousand square miles of new farmland destructive exploitation, does he?” “well, no, nick doesn’t call it that;of course not. but he’s concerned about some garbled story getting to terra aboutour upsetting the ecological balance and causing

droughts. fact is, i’m rather concernedmyself.” he knew what was worrying both of them. emmertwas afraid the federation colonial office would blame him for drawing fire on them fromthe conservationists. kellogg was afraid he’d be blamed for not predicting the effects beforehis division endorsed the project. as a division chief, he had advanced as far as he wouldin the company hierarchy; now he was on a red queen’s racetrack, running like hellto stay in the same place. “the rainfall’s dropped ten per cent fromlast year, and fifteen per cent from the year before that,” kellogg was saying. “andsome non-company people have gotten hold of it, and so had interworld news. why, evensome of my people are talking about ecological

side-effects. you know what will happen whena story like that gets back to terra. the conservation fanatics will get hold of it,and the company’ll be criticized.” that would hurt leonard. he identified himselfwith the company. it was something bigger and more powerful than he was, like god. victor grego identified the company with himself.it was something big and powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the controls. “leonard, a little criticism won’t hurtthe company,” he said. “not where it matters, on the dividends. i’m afraid you’re toosensitive to criticism. where did emmert get this story anyhow? from your people?”

“no, absolutely not, victor. that’s whatworries him. it was this man rainsford who started it.” “rainsford?” “dr. bennett rainsford, the naturalist.institute of zeno-sciences. i never trusted any of those people; they always poke theirnoses into things, and the institute always reports their findings to the colonial office.” “i know who you mean now; little fellowwith red whiskers, always looks as though he’d been sleeping in his clothes. why,of course the zeno-sciences people poke their noses into things, and of course they reporttheir findings to the government.” he was

beginning to lose patience. “i don’t seewhat all this is about, leonard. this man rainsford just made a routine observationof meteorological effects. i suggest you have your meteorologists check it, and if it’scorrect pass it on to the news services along with your other scientific findings.” “nick emmert thinks rainsford is a federationundercover agent.” that made him laugh. of course there wereundercover agents on zarathustra, hundreds of them. the company had people here checkingon him; he knew and accepted that. so did the big stockholders, like interstellar explorationsand the banking cartel and terra baldur-marduk spacelines. nick emmert had his corps of spiesand stool pigeons, and the terran federation

had people here watching both him and emmert.rainsford could be a federation agent—a roving naturalist would have a wonderful coveroccupation. but this big blackwater business was so utterly silly. nick emmert had toomuch graft on his conscience; it was too bad that overloaded consciences couldn’t blowfuses. “suppose he is, leonard. what could he reporton us? we are a chartered company, and we have an excellent legal department, whichkeeps us safely inside our charter. it is a very liberal charter, too. this is a class-iiiuninhabited planet; the company owns the whole thing outright. we can do anything we wantas long as we don’t violate colonial law or the federation constitution. as long aswe don’t do that, nick emmert hasn’t anything

to worry about. now forget this whole damnedbusiness, leonard!” he was beginning to speak sharply, and kellogg was looking hurt.“i know you were concerned about injurious reports getting back to terra, and that wasquite commendable, but….” by the time he got through, kellogg was happyagain. victor blanked the screen, leaned back in his chair and began laughing. in a moment,the screen buzzed again. when he snapped it on, his screen-girl said: “mr. henry stenson’s on, mr. grego.” “well, put him on.” he caught himselfjust before adding that it would be a welcome change to talk to somebody with sense.

the face that appeared was elderly and thin;the mouth was tight, and there were squint-wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. “well, mr. stenson. good of you to call.how are you?” “very well, thank you. and you?” whenhe also admitted to good health, the caller continued: “how is the globe running? stillin synchronization?” victor looked across the office at his mostprized possession, the big globe of zarathustra that henry stenson had built for him, supportedsix feet from the floor on its own contragravity unit, spotlighted in orange to represent theko sun, its two satellites circling about it as it revolved slowly.

“the globe itself is keeping perfect time,and darius is all right, xerxes is a few seconds of longitude ahead of true position.” “that’s dreadful, mr. grego!” stensonwas deeply shocked. “i must adjust that the first thing tomorrow. i should have calledto check on it long ago, but you know how it is. so many things to do, and so littletime.” “i find the same trouble myself, mr. stenson.”they chatted for a while, and then stenson apologized for taking up so much of mr. grego’svaluable time. what he meant was that his own time, just as valuable to him, was wasting.after the screen blanked, grego sat looking at it for a moment, wishing he had a hundredmen like henry stenson in his own organization.

just men with stenson’s brains and character;wishing for a hundred instrument makers with stenson’s skills would have been unreasonable,even for wishing. there was only one henry stenson, just as there had been only one antoniostradivari. why a man like that worked in a little shop on a frontier planet like zarathustra…. then he looked, pridefully, at the globe.alpha continent had moved slowly to the right, with the little speck that represented mallorysporttwinkling in the orange light. darius, the inner moon, where the terra-baldur-mardukspacelines had their leased terminal, was almost directly over it, and the other moon,xerxes, was edging into sight. xerxes was the one thing about zarathustra that the companydidn’t own; the terran federation had retained

that as a naval base. it was the one reminderthat there was something bigger and more powerful than the company. gerd van riebeek saw ruth ortheris leave theescalator, step aside and stand looking around the cocktail lounge. he set his glass, withits inch of tepid highball, on the bar; when her eyes shifted in his direction, he wavedto her, saw her brighten and wave back and then went to meet her. she gave him a quickkiss on the cheek, dodged when he reached for her and took his arm. “drink before we eat?” he asked. “oh, lord, yes! i’ve just about had itfor today.”

he guided her toward one of the bartendingmachines, inserted his credit key, and put a four-portion jug under the spout, dialingthe cocktail they always had when they drank together. as he did, he noticed what she waswearing: short black jacket, lavender neckerchief, light gray skirt. not her usual vacation get-up. “school department drag you back?” heasked as the jug filled. “juvenile court.” she got a couple ofglasses from the shelf under the machine as he picked up the jug. “a fifteen-year-oldburglar.” they found a table at the rear of the room,out of the worst of the cocktail-hour uproar. as soon as he filled her glass, she drankhalf of it, then lit a cigarette.

“junktown?” he asked. she nodded. “only twenty-five years sincethis planet was discovered, and we have slums already. i was over there most of the afternoon,with a pair of city police.” she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. “what wereyou doing today?” “ruth, you ought to ask doc mallin to dropin on leonard kellogg sometime, and give him an unobstusive going over.” “you haven’t been having trouble withhim again?” she asked anxiously. he made a face, and then tasted his drink.“it’s trouble just being around that character. ruth, to use one of those expressions yourprofession deplores, len kellogg is just plain

nuts!” he drank some more of his cocktailand helped himself to one of her cigarettes. “here,” he continued, after lighting it.“a couple of days ago, he told me he’d been getting inquiries about this plague ofland-prawns they’re having over on beta. he wanted me to set up a research projectto find out why and what to do about it.” “well?” “i did. i made two screen calls, and theni wrote a report and sent it up to him. that was where i jerked my trigger; i ought tohave taken a couple of weeks and made a real production out of it.” “what did you tell him?”

“the facts. the limiting factor on land-prawnincrease is the weather. the eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig their way outin the spring. if there’s been a lot of rain, most of them drown in their holes oras soon as they emerge. according to growth rings on trees, last spring was the driestin the beta piedmont in centuries, so most of them survived, and as they’re parthenogeneticfemales, they all laid eggs. this spring, it was even drier, so now they have land prawnsall over central beta. and i don’t know that anything can be done about them.” “well, did he think you were just guessing?” he shook his head in exasperation. “i don’tknow what he thinks. you’re the psychologist,

you try to figure it. i sent him that reportyesterday morning. he seemed quite satisfied with it at the time. today, just after noon,he sent for me and told me it wouldn’t do at all. tried to insist that the rainfallon beta had been normal. that was silly; i referred him to his meteorologists and climatologists,where i’d gotten my information. he complained that the news services were after him foran explanation. i told him i’d given him the only explanation there was. he said hesimply couldn’t use it. there had to be some other explanation.” “if you don’t like the facts, you ignorethem, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like,” she said. “that’s typicalrejection of reality. not psychotic, not even

psychoneurotic. but certainly not sane.”she had finished her first drink and was sipping slowly at her second. “you know, this isinteresting. does he have some theory that would disqualify yours?” “not that i know of. i got the impressionthat he just didn’t want the subject of rainfall on beta discussed at all.” “that is odd. has anything else peculiarbeen happening over on beta lately?” “no. not that i know of,” he repeated.“of course, that swamp-drainage project over there was what caused the dry weather,last year and this year, but i don’t see….” his own glass was empty, and when he tiltedthe jug over it, a few drops trickled out.

he looked at his watch. “think we couldhave another cocktail before dinner?” he asked. chapter ii jack holloway landed the manipulator in frontof the cluster of prefab huts. for a moment he sat still, realizing that he was tired,and then he climbed down from the control cabin and crossed the open grass to the doorof the main living hut, opening it and reaching in to turn on the lights. then he hesitated,looking up at darius. there was a wide ring around it, and he rememberednoticing the wisps of cirrus clouds gathering overhead through the afternoon. maybe it wouldrain tonight. this dry weather couldn’t

last forever. he’d been letting the manipulatorstand out overnight lately. he decided to put it in the hangar. he went and opened thedoor of the vehicle shed, got back onto the machine and floated it inside. when he cameback to the living hut, he saw that he had left the door wide open. “damn fool!” he rebuked himself. “placecould be crawling with prawns by now.” he looked quickly around the living room—underthe big combination desk and library table, under the gunrack, under the chairs, backof the communication screen and the viewscreen, beyond the metal cabinet of the microfilmlibrary—and saw nothing. then he hung up his hat, took off his pistol and laid it onthe table, and went back to the bathroom to

wash his hands. as soon as he put on the light, somethinginside the shower stall said, “yeeeek!” in a startled voice. he turned quickly to see two wide eyes staringup at him out of a ball of golden fur. whatever it was, it had a round head and big ears anda vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. it was sitting on its haunches, andin that position it was about a foot high. it had two tiny hands with opposing thumbs.he squatted to have a better look at it. “hello there, little fellow,” he greetedit. “i never saw anything like you before. what are you anyhow?”

the small creature looked at him seriouslyand said, “yeek,” in a timid voice. “why, sure; you’re a little fuzzy, that’swhat you are.” he moved closer, careful to make no alarminglysudden movements, and kept on talking to it. “bet you slipped in while i left the dooropen. well, if a little fuzzy finds a door open, i’d like to know why he shouldn’tcome in and look around.” he touched it gently. it started to draw back,then reached out a little hand and felt the material of his shirt-sleeve. he stroked it,and told it that it had the softest, silkiest fur ever. then he took it on his lap. it yeekedin pleasure, and stretched an arm up around his neck.

“why, sure; we’re going to be good friends,aren’t we? would you like something to eat? well, suppose you and i go see what we canfind.” he put one hand under it, to support it likea baby—at least, he seemed to recall having seen babies supported in that way; babieswere things he didn’t fool with if he could help it—and straightened. it weighed betweenfifteen and twenty pounds. at first, it struggled in panic, then quieted and seemed to enjoybeing carried. in the living room he sat down in his favorite armchair, under a standinglamp, and examined his new acquaintance. it was a mammal—there was a fairly largemammalian class on zarathustra—but beyond that he was stumped. it wasn’t a primate,in the terran sense. it wasn’t like anything

terran, or anything else on zarathustra. beinga biped put it in a class by itself for this planet. it was just a little fuzzy, and thatwas the best he could do. that sort of nomenclature was the best anybodycould do on a class-iii planet. on a class-iv planet, say loki, or shesha, or thor, naminganimals was a cinch. you pointed to something and asked a native, and he’d gargle a mouthfulof syllables at you, which might only mean, “whaddaya wanna know for?” and you tookit down in phonetic alphabet and the whatzit had a name. but on zarathustra, there wereno natives to ask. so this was a little fuzzy. “what would you like to eat, little fuzzy?”he asked. “open your mouth, and let pappy jack see what you have to chew with.”

little fuzzy’s dental equipment, allowingfor the fact that his jaw was rounder, was very much like his own. “you’re probably omnivorous. how wouldyou like some nice terran federation space forces emergency ration, extraterrestrial,type three?” he asked. little fuzzy made what sounded like an expressionof willingness to try it. it would be safe enough; extee three had been fed to a numberof zarathustran mammals without ill effects. he carried little fuzzy out into the kitchenand put him on the floor, then got out a tin of the field ration and opened it, breakingoff a small piece and handing it down. little fuzzy took the piece of golden-brown cake,sniffed at it, gave a delighted yeek and crammed

the whole piece in his mouth. “you never had to live on that stuff andnothing else for a month, that’s for sure!” he broke the cake in half and broke one halfinto manageable pieces and put it down on a saucer. maybe little fuzzy would want adrink, too. he started to fill a pan with water, as he would for a dog, then lookedat his visitor sitting on his haunches eating with both hands and changed his mind. he rinseda plastic cup cap from an empty whisky bottle and put it down beside a deep bowl of water.little fuzzy was thirsty, and he didn’t have to be shown what the cup was for. it was too late to get himself anything elaborate;he found some leftovers in the refrigerator

and combined them into a stew. while it washeating, he sat down at the kitchen table and lit his pipe. the spurt of flame fromthe lighter opened little fuzzy’s eyes, but what really awed him was pappy jack blowingsmoke. he sat watching this phenomenon, until, a few minutes later, the stew was hot andthe pipe was laid aside; then little fuzzy went back to nibbling extee three. suddenly he gave a yeek of petulance and scamperedinto the living room. in a moment, he was back with something elongated and metallicwhich he laid on the floor beside him. “what have you got there, little fuzzy?let pappy jack see?” then he recognized it as his own one-inchwood chisel. he remembered leaving it in the

outside shed after doing some work about aweek ago, and not being able to find it when he had gone to look for it. that had worriedhim; people who got absent-minded about equipment didn’t last long in the wilderness. afterhe finished eating and took the dishes to the sink, he went over and squatted besidehis new friend. “let pappy jack look at it, little fuzzy,”he said. “oh, i’m not going to take it away from you. i just want to see it.” the edge was dulled and nicked; it had beenused for a lot of things wood chisels oughtn’t to be used for. digging, and prying, and mostlikely, it had been used as a weapon. it was a handy-sized, all-purpose tool for a littlefuzzy. he laid it on the floor where he had

gotten it and started washing the dishes. little fuzzy watched him with interest fora while, and then he began investigating the kitchen. some of the things he wanted to investigatehad to be taken away from him; at first that angered him, but he soon learned that therewere things he wasn’t supposed to have. eventually, the dishes got washed. there were more things to investigate in theliving room. one of them was the wastebasket. he found that it could be dumped, and promptlydumped it, pulling out everything that hadn’t fallen out. he bit a corner off a sheet ofpaper, chewed on it and spat it out in disgust. then he found that crumpled paper could beflattened out and so he flattened a few sheets,

and then discovered that it could also befolded. then he got himself gleefully tangled in a snarl of wornout recording tape. finallyhe lost interest and started away. jack caught him and brought him back. “no, little fuzzy,” he said. “you donot dump wastebaskets and then walk away from them. you put things back in.” he touchedthe container and said, slowly and distinctly, “waste … basket.” then he righted it,doing it as little fuzzy would have to, and picked up a piece of paper, tossing it infrom little fuzzy’s shoulder height. then he handed little fuzzy a wad of paper andrepeated, “waste … basket.” little fuzzy looked at him and said somethingthat sounded as though it might be: “what’s

the matter with you, pappy; you crazy or something?”after a couple more tries, however, he got it, and began throwing things in. in a fewminutes, he had everything back in except a brightly colored plastic cartridge box anda wide-mouthed bottle with a screw cap. he held these up and said, “yeek?” “yes, you can have them. here; let pappyjack show you something.” he showed little fuzzy how the box could beopened and shut. then, holding it where little fuzzy could watch, he unscrewed the cap andthen screwed it on again. “there, now. you try it.” little fuzzy looked up inquiringly, then tookthe bottle, sitting down and holding it between

his knees. unfortunately, he tried twistingit the wrong way and only screwed the cap on tighter. he yeeked plaintively. “no, go ahead. you can do it.” little fuzzy looked at the bottle again. thenhe tried twisting the cap the other way, and it loosened. he gave a yeek that couldn’tpossibly be anything but “eureka!” and promptly took it off, holding it up. afterbeing commended, he examined both the bottle and the cap, feeling the threads, and thenscrewed the cap back on again. “you know, you’re a smart little fuzzy.”it took a few seconds to realize just how smart. little fuzzy had wondered why you twistedthe cap one way to take it off and the other

way to put it on, and he had found out. forpure reasoning ability, that topped anything in the way of animal intelligence he’d everseen. “i’m going to tell ben rainsford about you.” going to the communication screen, he punchedout the wave-length combination of the naturalist’s camp, seventy miles down snake river fromthe mouth of cold creek. rainsford’s screen must have been on automatic; it lit as soonas he was through punching. there was a card set up in front of it, lettered: away on trip,back the fifteenth. recorder on. “ben, jack holloway,” he said. “i justran into something interesting.” he explained briefly what it was. “i hope he stays aroundtill you get back. he’s totally unlike anything

i’ve ever seen on this planet.” little fuzzy was disappointed when jack turnedoff the screen; that had been interesting. he picked him up and carried him over to thearmchair, taking him on his lap. “now,” he said, reaching for the controlpanel of the viewscreen. “watch this; we’re going to see something nice.” when he put on the screen, at random, he gota view, from close up, of the great fires that were raging where the company peoplewere burning off the dead forests on what used to be big blackwater swamp. little fuzzycried out in alarm, flung his arms around pappy jack’s neck and buried his face inthe bosom of his shirt. well, forest fires

started from lightning sometimes, and they’dbe bad things for a little fuzzy. he worked the selector and got another pickup, thistime on the top of company house in mallorysport, three time zones west, with the city spreadout below and the sunset blazing in the west. little fuzzy stared at it in wonder. it waspretty impressive for a little fellow who’d spent all his life in the big woods. so was the spaceport, and a lot of other thingshe saw, though a view of the planet as a whole from darius puzzled him considerably. then,in the middle of a symphony orchestra concert from mallorysport opera house, he wriggledloose, dropped to the floor and caught up his wood chisel, swinging it back over hisshoulder like a two-handed sword.

“what the devil? oh-oh!” a land-prawn, which must have gotten in whilethe door was open, was crossing the living room. little fuzzy ran after and past it,pivoted and brought the corner of the chisel edge down on the prawn’s neck, neatly beheadingit. he looked at his victim for a moment, then slid the chisel under it and floppedit over on its back, slapping it twice with the flat and cracking the undershell. thehe began pulling the dead prawn apart, tearing out pieces of meat and eating them delicately.after disposing of the larger chunks, he used the chisel to chop off one of the prawn’smandibles to use as a pick to get at the less accessible morsels. when he had finished,he licked his fingers clean and started back

to the armchair. “no.” jack pointed at the prawn shell.“wastebasket.” “yeek?” “wastebasket.” little fuzzy gathered up the bits of shell,putting them where they belonged. then he came back and climbed up on pappy jack’slap, and looked at things in the screen until he fell asleep. jack lifted him carefully and put him downon the warm chair seat without wakening him, then went to the kitchen, poured himself adrink and brought it in to the big table,

where he lit his pipe and began writing uphis diary for the day. after a while, little fuzzy woke, found that the lap he had goneto sleep on had vanished, and yeeked disconsolately. a folded blanket in one corner of the bedroommade a satisfactory bed, once little fuzzy had assured himself that there were no bugsin it. he brought in his bottle and his plastic box and put them on the floor beside it. thenhe ran to the front door in the living room and yeeked to be let out. going about twentyfeet from the house, he used the chisel to dig a small hole, and after it had servedits purpose he filled it in carefully and came running back. well, maybe fuzzies were naturally gregarious,and were homemakers—den-holes, or nests,

or something like that. nobody wants messesmade in the house, and when the young ones did it, their parents would bang them aroundto teach them better manners. this was little fuzzy’s home now; he knew how he ought tobehave in it. the next morning at daylight, he was up onthe bed, trying to dig pappy jack out from under the blankets. besides being a most efficientland-prawn eradicator, he made a first rate alarm clock. but best of all, he was pappyjack’s little fuzzy. he wanted out; this time jack took his movie camera and got thewhole operation on film. one thing, there’d have to be a little door, with a spring tohold it shut, that little fuzzy could operate himself. that was designed during breakfast.it only took a couple of hours to make and

install it; little fuzzy got the idea as soonas he saw it, and figured out how to work it for himself. jack went back to the workshop, built a fireon the hand forge and forged a pointed and rather broad blade, four inches long, on theend of a foot of quarter-inch round tool-steel. it was too point-heavy when finished, so hewelded a knob on the other end to balance it. little fuzzy knew what that was for rightaway; running outside, he dug a couple of practice holes with it, and then began castingabout in the grass for land-prawns. jack followed him with the camera and gotmovies of a couple of prawn killings, accomplished with smooth, by-the-numbers precision. littlefuzzy hadn’t learned that chop-clap-clap

routine in the week since he had found thewood chisel. going into the shed, he hunted for somethingwithout more than a general idea of what it would look like, and found it where littlefuzzy had discarded it when he found the chisel. it was a stock of hardwood a foot long, rubbeddown and polished smooth, apparently with sandstone. there was a paddle at one end,with enough of an edge to behead a prawn, and the other end had been worked to a point.he took it into the living hut and sat down at the desk to examine it with a magnifyingglass. bits of soil embedded in the sharp end—that had been used as a pick. the paddleend had been used as a shovel, beheader and shell-cracker. little fuzzy had known exactlywhat he wanted when he’d started making

that thing, he’d kept on until it was asperfect as possible, and had stopped short of spoiling it by overrefinement. finally, jack put it away in the top drawerof the desk. he was thinking about what to get for lunch when little fuzzy burst intothe living room, clutching his new weapon and yeeking excitedly. “what’s the matter, kid? you got troubles?”he rose and went to the gunrack, picking down a rifle and checking the chamber. “showpappy jack what it is.” little fuzzy followed him to the big doorfor human-type people, ready to bolt back inside if necessary.

the trouble was a harpy—a thing about thesize and general design of a terran jurassic pterodactyl, big enough to take a little fuzzyat one mouthful. it must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling back foranother. it ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward loop and dropped likea stone. little fuzzy made a very surprised remark,looked at the dead harpy for a moment and then spotted the ejected empty cartridge.he grabbed it and held it up, asking if he could have it. when told that he could, heran back to the bedroom with it. when he returned, pappy jack picked him up and carried him tothe hangar and up into the control cabin of the manipulator.

the throbbing of the contragravity-field generatorand the sense of rising worried him at first, but after they had picked up the harpy withthe grapples and risen to five hundred feet he began to enjoy the ride. they dropped theharpy a couple of miles up what the latest maps were designating as holloway’s run,and then made a wide circle back over the mountains. little fuzzy thought it was fun. after lunch, little fuzzy had a nap on pappyjack’s bed. jack took the manipulator up to the diggings, put off a couple more shots,uncovered more flint and found another sunstone. it wasn’t often that he found stones ontwo successive days. when he returned to the camp, little fuzzy was picking another land-prawnapart in front of the living hut.

after dinner—little fuzzy liked cooked food,too, if it wasn’t too hot—they went into the living room. he remembered having seena bolt and nut in the desk drawer when he had been putting the wooden prawn-killer away,and he got it out, showing it to little fuzzy. little fuzzy studied it for a moment, thenran into the bedroom and came back with his screw-top bottle. he took the top off, putit on again and then screwed the nut off the bolt, holding it up. “see, pappy?” or yeeks to that effect.“nothing to it.” then he unscrewed the bottle top, droppedthe bolt inside after replacing the nut and screwed the cap on again.

“yeek,” he said, with considerable self-satisfaction. he had a right to be satisfied with himself.what he’d been doing had been generalizing. bottle tops and nuts belonged to the generalclass of things-that-screwed-onto-things. to take them off, you turned left; to putthem on again, you turned right, after making sure that the threads engaged. and since hecould conceive of right- and left-handedness, that might mean that he could think of propertiesapart from objects, and that was forming abstract ideas. maybe that was going a little far,but…. “you know, pappy jack’s got himself amighty smart little fuzzy. are you a grown-up little fuzzy, or are you just a baby littlefuzzy? shucks, i’ll bet you’re professor

doctor fuzzy.” he wondered what to give the professor, ifthat was what he was, to work on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him toomuch about taking things apart, just at present. sometime he might come home and find somethingimportant taken apart, or, worse, taken apart and put together incorrectly. finally, hewent to a closet, rummaging in it until he found a tin canister. by the time he returned,little fuzzy had gotten up on the chair, found his pipe in the ashtray and was puffing onit and coughing. “hey, i don’t think that’s good foryou!” he recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on hisshirt-sleeve and put it in his mouth, then

placed the canister on the floor, and putlittle fuzzy on the floor beside it. there were about ten pounds of stones in it. whenhe had first settled here, he had made a collection of the local minerals, and, after learningwhat he’d wanted to, he had thrown them out, all but twenty or thirty of the prettiestspecimens. he was glad, now, that he had kept these. little fuzzy looked the can over, decidedthat the lid was a member of the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got itoff. the inside of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a little thought to discoverthat what he saw in it was only himself. he yeeked about that, and looked into the can.this, he decided, belonged to the class of

things-that-can-be-dumped, like wastebaskets,so he dumped it on the floor. then he began examining the stones and sorting them by color. except for an interest in colorful views onthe screen, this was the first real evidence that fuzzies possessed color perception. heproceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, incorrect spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red stone. well, maybe he’dseen rainbows. maybe he’d lived near a big misty waterfall, where there was always arainbow when the sun was shining. or maybe that was just his natural way of seeing colors. then, when he saw what he had to work with,he began making arrangements with them, laying

them out in odd circular and spiral patterns.each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to call attention to it, sitand look at it for a while, and then take it apart and start a new one. little fuzzywas capable of artistic gratification too. he made useless things, just for the pleasureof making and looking at them. finally, he put the stones back into the tin,put the lid on and rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with hisother treasures. the new weapon he laid on the blanket beside him when he went to bed. the next morning, jack broke up a whole cakeof extee three and put it down, filled the bowl with water, and, after making sure hehad left nothing lying around that little

fuzzy could damage or on which he might hurthimself, took the manipulator up to the diggings. he worked all morning, cracking nearly a tonand a half of flint, and found nothing. then he set off a string of shots, brought downan avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball treeto eat his lunch. half an hour after he went back to work, hefound the fossil of some jellyfish that hadn’t eaten the right things in the right combinations,but a little later, he found four nodules, one after another, and two of them were sunstones;four or five chunks later, he found a third. why, this must be the dying place of the jellyfish!by late afternoon, when he had cleaned up all his loose flint, he had nine, includingone deep red monster an inch in diameter.

there must have been some convection currentin the ancient ocean that had swirled them all into this one place. he considered settingoff some more shots, decided that it was too late and returned to camp. “little fuzzy!” he called, opening theliving-room door. “where are you, little fuzzy? pappy jack’s rich; we’re goingto celebrate!” silence. he called again; still no reply orscamper of feet. probably cleaned up all the prawns around the camp and went hunting fartherout into the woods, thought jack. unbuckling his gun and dropping it onto the table, hewent out to the kitchen. most of the extee three was gone. in the bedroom, he found thatlittle fuzzy had dumped the stones out of

the biscuit tin and made an arrangement, andlaid the wood chisel in a neat diagonal across the blanket. after getting dinner assembled and in theoven, he went out and called for a while, then mixed a highball and took it into theliving room, sitting down with it to go over his day’s findings. rather incredulously,he realized that he had cracked out at least seventy-five thousand sols’ worth of stonestoday. he put them into the bag and sat sipping the highball and thinking pleasant thoughtsuntil the bell on the stove warned him that dinner was ready. he ate alone—after all the years he hadbeen doing that contentedly, it had suddenly

become intolerable—and in the evening hedialed through his micro-film library, finding only books he had read and reread a dozentimes, or books he kept for reference. several times he thought he heard the little dooropen, but each time he was mistaken. finally he went to bed. as soon as he woke, he looked across at thefolded blanket, but the wood chisel was still lying athwart it. he put down more extee threeand changed the water in the bowl before leaving for the diggings. that day he found threemore sunstones, and put them in the bag mechanically and without pleasure. he quit work early andspent over an hour spiraling around the camp, but saw nothing. the extee three in the kitchenwas untouched.

maybe the little fellow ran into somethingtoo big for him, even with his fine new weapon—a hobthrush, or a bush-goblin, or another harpy.or maybe he’d just gotten tired staying in one place, and had moved on. no; he’d liked it here. he’d had fun,and been happy. he shook his head sadly. once he, too, had lived in a pleasant place, wherehe’d had fun, and could have been happy if he hadn’t thought there was somethinghe’d had to do. so he had gone away, leaving grieved people behind him. maybe that washow it was with little fuzzy. maybe he didn’t realize how much of a place he had made forhimself here, or how empty he was leaving it.

he started for the kitchen to get a drink,and checked himself. take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pitiesyou and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks allaround. no; he’d have one drink, maybe a little bigger than usual, before he went tobed. chapter iii he started awake, rubbed his eyes and lookedat the clock. past twenty-two hundred; now it really was time for a drink, and then tobed. he rose stiffly and went out to the kitchen, pouring the whisky and bringing it in to thetable desk, where he sat down and got out his diary. he was almost finished with theday’s entry when the little door behind

him opened and a small voice said, “yeeek.”he turned quickly. “little fuzzy?” the small sound was repeated, impatiently.little fuzzy was holding the door open, and there was an answer from outside. then anotherfuzzy came in, and another; four of them, one carrying a tiny, squirming ball of whitefur in her arms. they all had prawn-killers like the one in the drawer, and they stoppedjust inside the room and gaped about them in bewilderment. then, laying down his weapon,little fuzzy ran to him; stooping from the chair, he caught him and then sat down onthe floor with him. “so that’s why you ran off and worriedpappy jack? you wanted your family here, too!”

the others piled the things they were carryingwith little fuzzy’s steel weapon and approached hesitantly. he talked to them, and so didlittle fuzzy—at least it sounded like that—and finally one came over and fingered his shirt,and then reached up and pulled his mustache. soon all of them were climbing onto him, eventhe female with the baby. it was small enough to sit on his palm, but in a minute it hadclimbed to his shoulder, and then it was sitting on his head. “you people want dinner?” he asked. little fuzzy yeeked emphatically; that wasa word he recognized. he took them all into the kitchen and tried them on cold roast veldbeestand yummiyams and fried pool-ball fruit; while

they were eating from a couple of big pans,he went back to the living room to examine the things they had brought with them. twoof the prawn-killers were wood, like the one little fuzzy had discarded in the shed. athird was of horn, beautifully polished, and the fourth looked as though it had been madefrom the shoulder bone of something like a zebralope. then there was a small coup depoing ax, rather low paleolithic, and a chipped implement of flint the shape of a slice oforange and about five inches along the straight edge. for a hand the size of his own, he wouldhave called it a scraper. he puzzled over it for a while, noticed that the edge wasserrated, and decided that it was a saw. and there were three very good flake knives, andsome shells, evidently drinking vessels.

mamma fuzzy came in while he was finishingthe examination. she seemed suspicious, until she saw that none of the family property hadbeen taken or damaged. baby fuzzy was clinging to her fur with one hand and holding a sliceof pool-ball fruit, on which he was munching, with the other. he crammed what was left ofthe fruit into his mouth, climbed up on jack and sat down on his head again. have to dosomething to break him of that. one of these days, he’d be getting too big for it. in a few minutes, the rest of the family camein, chasing and pummeling each other and yeeking happily. mamma jumped off his lap and joinedthe free-for-all, and then baby took off from his head and landed on mamma’s back. andhe thought he’d lost his little fuzzy, and,

gosh, here he had five fuzzies and a babyfuzzy. when they were tired romping, he made beds for them in the living room, and broughtout little fuzzy’s bedding and his treasures. one little fuzzy in the bedroom was just fine;five and a baby fuzzy were a little too much of a good thing. they were swarming over the bed, baby andall, to waken him the next morning. the next morning he made a steel chopper-diggerfor each of them, and half a dozen extras for replacements in case more fuzzies showedup. he also made a miniature ax with a hardwood handle, a handsaw out of a piece of brokenpower-saw blade and half a dozen little knives forged in one piece from quarter-inch coil-springmaterial. he had less trouble trading the

fuzzies’ own things away from them thanhe had expected. they had a very keen property sense, but they knew a good deal when onewas offered. he put the wooden and horn and bone and stone artifacts away in the deskdrawer. start of the holloway collection of zarathustran fuzzy weapons and implements.maybe he’d will it to the federation institute of xeno-sciences. of course, the family had to try out the newchopper-diggers on land-prawns, and he followed them around with the movie camera. they killeda dozen and a half that morning, and there was very little interest in lunch, thoughthey did sit around nibbling, just to be doing what he was doing. as soon as they finished,they all went in for a nap on his bed. he

spent the afternoon pottering about camp doingodd jobs that he had been postponing for months. the fuzzies all emerged in the late afternoonfor a romp in the grass outside. he was in the kitchen, getting dinner, whenthey all came pelting in through the little door into the living room, making an excitedoutcry. little fuzzy and one of the other males came into the kitchen. little fuzzysquatted, put one hand on his lower jaw, with thumb and little finger extended, and theother on his forehead, first finger upright. then he thrust out his right arm stiffly andmade a barking noise of a sort he had never made before. he had to do it a second timebefore jack got it. there was a large and unpleasant carnivore,called a damnthing—another example of zoological

nomenclature on uninhabited planets—whichhad a single horn on its forehead and one on either side of the lower jaw. it was somethingfor fuzzies, and even for human-type people, to get excited about. he laid down the paringknife and the yummiyam he had been peeling, wiped his hands and went into the living room,taking a quick nose count and satisfying himself that none of the family were missing as hecrossed to the gunrack. this time, instead of the 6-mm he had usedon the harpy, he lifted down a big 12.7 double express, making sure that it was loaded andpocketing a few spare rounds. little fuzzy followed him outside, pointing around theliving hut to the left. the rest of the family stayed indoors.

stepping out about twenty feet, he startedaround counter-clockwise. there was no damnthing on the north side, and he was about to goaround to the east side when little fuzzy came dashing past him, pointing to the rear.he whirled, to see the damnthing charging him from behind, head down, and middle hornlowered. he should have thought of that; damnthings would double and hunt their hunters. he lined the sights instinctively and squeezed.the big rifle roared and banged his shoulder, and the bullet caught the damnthing and hurledall half-ton of it backward. the second shot caught it just below one of the fungoid-lookingears, and the beast gave a spasmodic all-over twitch and was still. he reloaded mechanically,but there was no need for a third shot. the

damnthing was as dead as he would have beenexcept for little fuzzy’s warning. he mentioned that to little fuzzy, who wascalmly retrieving the empty cartridges. then, rubbing his shoulder where the big rifle hadpounded him, he went in and returned the weapon to the rack. he used the manipulator to carrythe damnthing away from the camp and drop it into a treetop, where it would furnisha welcome if puzzling treat for the harpies. there was another alarm in the evening afterdinner. the family had come in from their sunset romp and were gathered in the livingroom, where little fuzzy was demonstrating the principle of things-that-screwed-onto-thingswith the wide-mouthed bottle and the bolt and nut, when something huge began hootingdirectly overhead. they all froze, looking

up at the ceiling, and then ran over and gotunder the gunrack. this must be something far more serious than a damnthing, and whatpappy jack would do about it would be nothing short of catastrophic. they were startledto see pappy jack merely go to the door, open it and step outside. after all, none of themhad ever heard a constabulary aircar klaxon before. the car settled onto the grass in front ofthe camp, gave a slight lurch and went off contragravity. two men in uniform got out,and in the moonlight he recognized both of them: lieutenant george lunt and his driver,ahmed khadra. he called a greeting to them. “anything wrong?” he asked.

“no; just thought we’d drop in and seehow you were making out,” lunt told him. “we don’t get up this way often. haven’thad any trouble lately, have you?” “not since the last time.” the last timehad been a couple of woods tramps, out-of-work veldbeest herders from the south, who hadheard about the little bag he carried around his neck. all the constabulary had neededto do was remove the bodies and write up a report. “come on in and hang up your gunsawhile. i have something i want to show you.” little fuzzy had come out and was pullingat his trouser leg; he stooped and picked him up, setting him on his shoulder. the restof the family, deciding that it must be safe, had come to the door and were looking out.

“hey! what the devil are those things?”lunt asked, stopping short halfway from the car. “fuzzies. mean to tell me you’ve neverseen fuzzies before?” “no, i haven’t. what are they?” the two constabulary men came closer, andjack stepped back into the house, shooing the fuzzies out of the way. lunt and khadrastopped inside the door. “i just told you. they’re fuzzies. that’sall the name i know for them.” a couple of fuzzies came over and looked upat lieutenant lunt; one of them said, “yeek?” “they want to know what you are, so thatmakes it mutual.”

lunt hesitated for a moment, then took offhis belt and holster and hung it on one of the pegs inside the door, putting his beretover it. khadra followed his example promptly. that meant that they considered themselvestemporarily off duty and would accept a drink if one were offered. a fuzzy was pulling atahmed khadra’s trouser leg and asking to be noticed, and mamma fuzzy was holding babyup to show to lunt. khadra, rather hesitantly, picked up the fuzzy who was trying to attracthis attention. “never saw anything like them before, jack,”he said. “where did they come from?” “ahmed; you don’t know anything aboutthose things,” lunt reproved. “they won’t hurt me, lieutenant; theyhaven’t hurt jack, have they?” he sat

down on the floor, and a couple more cameto him. “why don’t you get acquainted with them? they’re cute.” george lunt wouldn’t let one of his mendo anything he was afraid to do; he sat down on the floor, too, and mamma brought her babyto him. immediately, the baby jumped onto his shoulder and tried to get onto his head. “relax, george,” jack told him, “they’rejust fuzzies; they want to make friends with you.” “i’m always worried about strange lifeforms,” lunt said. “you’ve been around enough to know some of the things that havehappened—”

“they are not a strange life form; theyare zarathustran mammals. the same life form you’ve had for dinner every day since youcame here. their biochemistry’s identical with ours. think they’ll give you the polka-dotplague, or something?” he put little fuzzy down on the floor with the others. “we’vebeen exploring this planet for twenty-five years, and nobody’s found anything likethat here.” “you said it yourself, lieutenant,” khadraput in. “jack’s been around enough to know.” “well…. they are cute little fellows.”lunt lifted baby down off his head and gave him back to mamma. little fuzzy had gottenhold of the chain of his whistle and was trying

to find out what was on the other end. “betthey’re a lot of company for you.” “you just get acquainted with them. makeyourselves at home; i’ll go rustle up some refreshments.” while he was in the kitchen, filling a sodasiphon and getting ice out of the refrigerator, a police whistle began shrilling in the livingroom. he was opening a bottle of whisky when little fuzzy came dashing out, blowing onit, a couple more of the family pursuing him and trying to get it away from him. he openeda tin of extee three for the fuzzies, as he did, another whistle in the living room beganblowing. “we have a whole shoebox full of them atthe post,” lunt yelled to him above the

din. “we’ll just write these two off asexpended in service.” “well, that’s real nice of you, george.i want to tell you that the fuzzies appreciate that. ahmed, suppose you do the bartendingwhile i give the kids their candy.” by the time khadra had the drinks mixed andhe had distributed the extee three to the fuzzies, lunt had gotten into the easy chair,and the fuzzies were sitting on the floor in front of him, still looking him over curiously.at least the extee three had taken their minds off the whistles for a while. “what i want to know, jack, is where theycame from,” lunt said, taking his drink. “i’ve been up here for five years, andi never saw anything like them before.”

“i’ve been here five years longer, andi never saw them before, either. i think they came down from the north, from the countrybetween the cordilleras and the west coast range. outside of an air survey at ten thousandfeet and a few spot landings here and there, none of that country has been explored. forall anybody knows, it could be full of fuzzies.” he began with his first encounter with littlefuzzy, and by the time he had gotten as far as the wood chisel and the killing of theland-prawn, lunt and khadra were looking at each other in amazement. “that’s it!” khadra said. “i’vefound prawn-shells cracked open and the meat picked out, just the way you describe it.i always wondered what did that. but they

don’t all have wood chisels. what do yousuppose they used ordinarily?” “ah!” he pulled the drawer open and begangetting things out. “here’s the one little fuzzy discarded when he found my chisel. therest of this stuff the others brought in when they came.” lunt and khadra rose and came over to lookat the things. lunt tried to argue that the fuzzies couldn’t have made that stuff. hewasn’t even able to convince himself. having finished their extee three, the fuzzies werelooking expectantly at the viewscreen, and it occurred to him that none of them exceptlittle fuzzy had ever seen it on. then little fuzzy jumped up on the chair lunt had vacated,reached over to the control-panel and switched

it on. what he got was an empty stretch ofmoonlit plain to the south, from a pickup on one of the steel towers the veldbeest herdersused. that wasn’t very interesting; he twiddled the selector and finally got a night soccergame at mallorysport. that was just fine; he jumped down and joined the others in frontof the screen. “i’ve seen terran monkeys and freyan kholphsthat liked to watch screens and could turn them on and work the selector,” lunt said.it sounded like the token last salvo before the surrender. “kholphs are smart,” khadra agreed. “theyuse tools.” “do they make tools? or tools to make toolswith, like that saw?” there was no argument

on that. “no. nobody does that except peoplelike us and the fuzzies.” it was the first time he had come right outand said that; the first time he had even consciously thought it. he realized that hehad been convinced of it all along, though. it startled the constabulary lieutenant andtrooper. “you mean you think—?” lunt began. “they don’t talk, and they don’t buildfires,” ahmed khadra said, as though that settled it. “ahmed, you know better than that. thattalk-and-build-a-fire rule isn’t any scientific test at all.”

“it’s a legal test.” lunt supportedhis subordinate. “it’s a rule-of-thumb that was set upso that settlers on new planets couldn’t get away with murdering and enslaving thenatives by claiming they thought they were only hunting and domesticating wild animals,”he said. “anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes. that’s thelaw. but that doesn’t mean that anything that doesn’t isn’t. i haven’t seen anyof this gang building fires, and as i don’t want to come home sometime and find myselfburned out, i’m not going to teach them. but i’m sure they have means of communicationamong themselves.” “has ben rainsford seen them yet?” luntasked.

“ben’s off on a trip somewhere. i calledhim as soon as little fuzzy, over there, showed up here. he won’t be back till friday.” “yes, that’s right; i did know that.”lunt was still looking dubiously at the fuzzies. “i’d like to hear what he thinks aboutthem.” if ben said they were safe, lunt would acceptthat. ben was an expert, and lunt respected expert testimony. until then, he wasn’tsure. he’d probably order a medical check-up for himself and khadra the first thing tomorrow,to make sure they hadn’t picked up some kind of bug. chapter iv

the fuzzies took the manipulator quite calmlythe next morning. that wasn’t any horrible monster, that was just something pappy jacktook rides in. he found one rather indifferent sunstone in the morning and two good onesin the afternoon. he came home early and found the family in the living room; they had dumpedthe wastebasket and were putting things back into it. another land-prawn seemed to havegotten into the house; its picked shell was with the other rubbish in the basket. theyhad dinner early, and he loaded the lot of them into the airjeep and took them for along ride to the south and west. the following day, he located the flint veinon the other side of the gorge and spent most of the morning blasting away the sandstoneabove it. the next time he went into mallorysport,

he decided, he was going to shop around fora good power-shovel. he had to blast a channel to keep the little stream from damming upon him. he didn’t get any flint cracked at all that day. there was another harpy circlingaround the camp when he got back; he chased it with the manipulator and shot it down withhis pistol. harpies probably found fuzzies as tasty as fuzzies found land-prawns. thefamily were all sitting under the gunrack when he entered the living room. the next day he cracked flint, and found threemore stones. it really looked as though he had found the dying place of the jellyfishat that. he knocked off early that afternoon, and when he came in sight of the camp, hesaw an airjeep grounded on the lawn and a

small man with a red beard in a faded khakibush-jacket sitting on the bench by the kitchen door, surrounded by fuzzies. there was a cameraand 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 hismother 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 wayhome. i thought george lunt had turned into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. theni went home, and found your call on the recorder, so i came over here.”

“been waiting long?” the fuzzies had all abandoned rainsford andcome trooping over as soon as the manipulator was off contragravity. he climbed down amongthem, and they followed him across the grass, catching at his trouser legs and yeeking happily. “not so long.” rainsford looked at hiswatch. “good lord, three and half hours is all. well, the time passed quickly. youknow, your little fellows have good ears. they heard you coming a long time before idid.” “did you see them killing any prawns?” “i should say! i got a lot of movies ofit.” 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 hearall 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. “thisis the original, little fuzzy. he brought the rest in a couple of days later. mammafuzzy, and baby fuzzy. and these are mike and mitzi. i call this one ko-ko, becauseof 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—fuzzyfuzzy 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-prawnsis what brought them into this section?” “yes, of course. george was telling me youthought they’d come down from the north; about the only place they could have comefrom. this is probably just the advance guard; we’ll be having fuzzies all over the placebefore long. i wonder how fast they breed.”

“not very fast. three males and two femalesin this crowd, and only one young one.” he set mike and mitzi off his lap and gotto his feet. “i’ll go start dinner now. while i’m doing that, you can look at thestuff they brought in with them.” when he had placed the dinner in the ovenand 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 raisedhis 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 meanwhat 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—whodoes this kind of work is good enough native for me.” he hesitated briefly. “why, jackthis tape you said you’d make. can i transmit a copy to juan jimenez? he’s chief mammalogistwith the company science division; we exchange information. and there’s another companyman 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 fromthe kitchen. little fuzzy jumped up on the armchair and switched on the viewscreen. fiddlingwith 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 screencould get out and hurt them. “would you mind if they came out here andsaw the fuzzies?” “why, the fuzzies would love that. theylike company.” mamma and baby and ko-ko came in, seemed toapprove 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 rainsfordlooked at him for a moment.

“you know, i have married friends with childrenwho have a hell of a time teaching eight-year-olds to turn off screens when they’re throughwatching them,” he commented. it took an hour, after dinner, to get thewhole 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 hundredin 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 mammafuzzy 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 tomake 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 theeducational 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?” hedemanded. “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’sarms. “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 anotherin the ancient terran-chinese gesture that was used on communication screens, and assuredeach other—jimenez rather absently—that it was a pleasure. he couldn’t take hiseyes off the fuzzies.

“where did they come from?” he wantedto 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 himthat the fuzzies were really indigenous. “we have everything that’s known aboutthem on tape,” he said. “about an hour of it. can you take sixty-speed?” he wasmaking adjustments on the recorder as he spoke. “all right, set and we’ll transmit toyou. and can you get hold of gerd van riebeek? i’d like him to hear it too; it’s as muchup his alley as anybody’s.”

when jimenez was ready, rainsford pressedthe play-off button, and for a minute the recorder gave a high, wavering squeak. thefuzzies all looked startled. then it ended. “i think, when you hear this, that you andgerd will both want to come out and see these little people. if you can, bring somebodywho’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 itby about one atomic diameter.” jimenez looked almost as startled as the fuzzieshad. “you surely don’t mean that?” he looked from rainsford to jack holloway andback. “well, i’ll call you back, when we’ve both heard the tape. you’re threetime zones west of us, aren’t you? then

we’ll try to make it before your midnight—that’llbe 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 wasa portable record player in the foreground and a low table with snacks and drinks, andtwo 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 wasa 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 registeredinterest. this was more fun than the viewscreen. jimenez introduced his companions as gerdvan riebeek and ruth ortheris. “ruth is

with dr. mallin’s section; she’s beenworking with the school department and the juvenile court. she can probably do as wellwith 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’llbe 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 getto your place?” jack told him, and gave map coordinates. vanriebeek noted them down.

“there’s one thing, though, i’m goingto have to get firm about. i don’t want to have to speak about it again. these littlepeople are to be treated with consideration, and not as laboratory animals. you will nothurt them, or annoy them, or force them to do anything they don’t want to do.” “we understand that. we won’t do anythingwith the fuzzies without your approval. is there anything you’d want us to bring out?” “yes. a few things for the camp that i’mshort 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 whatyou’d like to have if you were a fuzzy,

and bring it.” chapter v victor grego crushed out his cigarette slowlyand deliberately. “yes, leonard,” he said patiently. “it’svery interesting, and doubtless an important discovery, but i can’t see why you’remaking such a production of it. are you afraid i’ll blame you for letting non-company peoplebeat you to it? or do you merely suspect that anything bennett rainsford’s mixed up inis necessarily a diabolical plot against the company and, by consequence, human civilization?” leonard kellogg looked pained. “what i wasabout to say, victor, is that both rainsford

and this man holloway seem convinced thatthese things they call fuzzies aren’t animals at all. they believe them to be sapient beings.” “well, that’s—” he bit that off shortas the significance of what kellogg had just said hit him. “good god, leonard! i begyour pardon abjectly; i don’t blame you for taking it seriously. why, that would makezarathustra a class-iv inhabited planet.” “for which the company holds a class-iiicharter,” kellogg added. “for an uninhabited planet.” automatically void if any race of sapientbeings were discovered on zarathustra. “you know what will happen if this is true?”

“well, i should imagine the charter wouldhave to be renegotiated, and now that the colonial office knows what sort of a planetthis 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 alreadymade an adequate return on the original investments, and they’ll award us what we can show asin 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 companybrand a maverick. and all the untapped mineral

wealth, and the untilled arable land; it wouldtake 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 stickyabout it in the courts, and in any case, the company’s import-export monopoly would goout the airlock. and the squatters rushing in and swamping everything— “why, we won’t be any better off thanthe yggdrasil company, squatting on a guano heap on one continent!” he burst out. “fiveyears from now, they’ll be making more money out of bat dung than we’ll be making outof this whole world!” and the company’s good friend and substantialstockholder, nick emmert, would be out, too,

and a colonial governor general would movein, with regular army troops and a complicated bureaucracy. elections, and a representativeparliament, and every tom, dick and harry with a grudge against the company would betrying to get laws passed—and, of course, a native affairs commission, with its nosein everything. “but they couldn’t just leave us withoutany 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 sopranohoot on nifflheim whether it’s fair or not,

or whose fault what is. the federation government’sbeen repenting that charter they gave the company ever since they found out what they’dchartered away. why, this planet is a better world than terra ever was, even before theatomic wars. now, if they have a chance to get it back, with improvements, you thinkthey won’t take it? and what will stop them? if those creatures over on beta continentare sapient beings, our charter isn’t worth the parchment it’s engrossed on, and that’san end of it.” he was silent for a moment. “you heard that tape rainsford transmittedto jimenez. did either he or holloway actually claim, in so many words, that these thingsreally are sapient beings?” “well, no; not in so many words. hollowayconsistently alluded to them as people, but

he’s just an ignorant old prospector. rainsfordwouldn’t come out and commit himself one way or another, but he left the door wideopen for anybody else to.” “accepting their account, could these fuzziesbe sapient?” “accepting the account, yes,” kelloggsaid, in distress. “they could be.” they probably were, if leonard kellogg couldn’twish the evidence out of existence. “then they’ll look sapient to these peopleof yours who went over to beta this morning, and they’ll treat it purely as a scientificquestion and never consider the legal aspects. leonard, you’ll have to take charge of theinvestigation, before they make any reports everybody’ll be sorry for.”

kellogg didn’t seem to like that. it wouldmean having to exercise authority and getting tough with people, and he hated anything likethat. he nodded very reluctantly. “yes. i suppose i will. let me think aboutit for a moment, victor.” one thing about leonard; you handed him somethinghe couldn’t delegate or dodge and he’d go to work on it. maybe not cheerfully, butconscientiously. “i’ll take ernst mallin along,” he saidat length. “this man rainsford has no grounding whatever in any of the psychosciences. hemay be able to impose on ruth ortheris, but not on ernst mallin. not after i’ve talkedto mallin first.” he thought some more. “we’ll have to get these fuzzies awayfrom this man holloway. then we’ll issue

a report of discovery, being careful to givefull credit to both rainsford and holloway—we’ll even accept the designation they’ve coinedfor them—but we’ll make it very clear that while highly intelligent, the fuzziesare not a race of sapient beings. if rainsford persists in making any such claim, we willbrand it as a deliberate hoax.” “do you think he’s gotten any report offto the institute of xeno-sciences yet?” kellogg shook his head. “i think he wantsto trick some of our people into supporting his sapience claims; at least, corroboratinghis and holloway’s alleged observations. that’s why i’ll have to get over to betaas soon as possible.” by now, kellogg had managed to convince himselfthat going over to beta had been his idea

all along. probably also convincing himselfthat rainsford’s report was nothing but a pack of lies. well, if he could work betterthat 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. bythat 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 beavailable for investigation by then. fuzzies,” he said reflectively. “fur-bearing animals,i take it?” “holloway spoke, on the tape, of their softand silky fur.” “good. emphasize that in your report. assoon 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 trappedout.” kellogg began to look worried. “but, victor, that’s genocide!” “nonsense! genocide is defined as the exterminationof a race of sapient beings. these are fur-bearing animals. it’s up to you and ernst mallinto prove that.” the fuzzies, playing on the lawn in frontof the camp, froze into immobility, their faces turned to the west. then they all ranto the bench by the kitchen door and scrambled up onto it.

“now what?” jack holloway wondered. “they hear the airboat,” rainsford toldhim. “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. “everythingready?” “everything but lunch; that won’t be cookedfor 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 importantthemselves; ben had a bigger name in scientific

circles than any of this company crowd. hewas 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 benchand ran along with them. the three visitors climbed down. ruth ortheriswore slacks and a sweater, but the slacks were bloused over a pair of ankle boots. gerdvan 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 herein the piedmont. juan jimenez was in the same sports casuals in which he had appeared onscreen last evening. all of them carried photographic

equipment. they shook hands all around andexchanged greetings, and then the fuzzies began clamoring to be noticed. finally allof them, fuzzies and other people, drifted over to the table under the trees. ruth ortheris sat down on the grass with mammaand baby. immediately baby became interested in a silver charm which she wore on a chainaround her neck which tinkled fascinatingly. then he tried to sit on her head. she spentsome time gently but firmly discouraging this. juan jimenez was squatting between mike andmitzi, 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 littlefuzzy on his lap.

“you know, this is kind of surprising,”he said. “not only finding something like this, after twenty-five years, but findingsomething as unique as this. look, he doesn’t have the least vestige of a tail, and thereisn’t another tailless mammal on the planet. fact, there isn’t another mammal on thisplanet that has the slightest kinship to him. take ourselves; we belong to a pretty bigfamily, about fifty-odd genera of primates. but this little fellow hasn’t any relativesat all.” “and he couldn’t care less, could he?”van riebeek pummeled little fuzzy gently. “one thing, you have the smallest humanoidknown; that’s one record you can claim. oh-oh, what goes on?”

ko-ko, who had climbed upon rainsford’slap, jumped suddenly to the ground, grabbed the chopper-digger he had left beside thechair and started across the grass. everybody got to their feet, the visitors getting camerasout. 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 thenose to stop it and then struck a dramatic pose, flourishing his weapon and bringingit down on the prawn’s neck. then, after flopping it over, he looked at it almost insorrow and hit it a couple of whacks with the flat. he began pulling it apart and eatingit. “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 themand pivots and gives them a quick chop. mike and mitzi flop theirs over first and beheadthem on their backs. and mamma takes a swipe at their legs first. but beheading and breakingthe 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, seeif he doesn’t do it the way mamma does!” “hey, look!” jimenez cried. “he’smaking a lobster pick for himself!” through lunch, they talked exclusively aboutfuzzies. the subjects of the discussion nibbled things that were given to them, and yeekedamong themselves. gerd van riebeek suggested

that they were discussing the odd habits ofhuman-type people. juan jimenez looked at him, slightly disturbed, as though wonderingjust how seriously he meant it. “you know, what impressed me most in thetaped account was the incident of the damnthing,” said ruth ortheris. “any animal associatingwith man will try to attract attention if something’s wrong, but i never heard ofone, 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 distinguishingcharacteristic of the damnthing.” “think that stiff-arm gesture and bark mighthave been intended to represent a rifle?” gerd van riebeek asked. “he’d seen youshooting before, hadn’t he?”

“i don’t think it was anything else. hewas telling me, ‘big nasty damnthing outside; shoot it like you did the harpy.’ and ifhe hadn’t run past me and pointed back, that damnthing would have killed me.” jimenez, hesitantly, said, “i know i’mspeaking from ignorance. you’re the fuzzy expert. but isn’t it possible that you’reoveranthropomorphizing? endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?” “juan, i’m not going to answer that rightnow. i don’t think i’ll answer at all. you wait till you’ve been around these fuzziesa 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 paperweighton the other words he had been saying, and waited. ernst mallin sat motionless, his elbowson the desk and his chin in his hands. a little pair of wrinkles, like parentheses, appearedat the corners of his mouth. “yes. i’m not a lawyer, of course, but….” “it’s not a legal question. it’s a questionfor a psychologist.” that left it back with ernst mallin, and heknew it. “i’d have to see them myself before icould express an opinion. you have that tape of holloway’s with you?” when kelloggnodded, mallin continued: “did either of

them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?” he answered it as he had when victor gregohad asked the same question, adding: “the account consists almost entirely ofholloway’s uncorroborated statements concerning things to which he claims to have been thesole witness.” “ah.” mallin permitted himself a tightlittle 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 haveobserved for himself, how do we know he isn’t including a lot of erroneous inferences withhis descriptive statements?”

“how do we know he’s not perpetratinga deliberate hoax?” “but, leonard, that’s a pretty seriousaccusation.” “it’s happened before. that fellow whocarved a late upland martian inscription in that cave in kenya, for instance. or hellermann’sclaim to have cross-bred terran mice with thoran tilbras. or the piltdown man, backin the first century pre-atomic?” mallin nodded. “none of us like to thinkof a thing like that, but, as you say, it’s happened. you know, this man rainsford isjust the type to do something like that, too. fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badlyadjusted personality type. say he wants to make some sensational discovery which willassure 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 havestrayed. the old man has made pets of them, taught them a few tricks, finally so projectedhis own personality onto them that he has convinced himself that they are people likehimself. this is rainsford’s great opportunity; he will present himself as the discovererof a new sapient race and bring the whole learned world to his feet.” mallin smiledagain. “yes, leonard, it is altogether possible.” “then it’s our plain duty to stop thisthing before it develops into another major scientific scandal like hellermann’s hybrids.” “first we must go over this tape recordingand see what we have on our hands. then we

must make a thorough, unbiased study of theseanimals, and show rainsford and his accomplice that they cannot hope to foist these ridiculousclaims on the scientific world with impunity. if we can’t convince them privately, there’llbe nothing to do but expose them publicly.” “i’ve heard the tape already, but let’splay if off now. we want to analyze these tricks this man holloway has taught theseanimals, 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, andwhat sort of evidence we will need to support it.” after dinner was romptime for fuzzies on thelawn, but when the dusk came creeping into

the ravine, they all went inside and weregiven one of their new toys from mallorysport—a big box of many-colored balls and short sticksof transparent plastic. they didn’t know that it was a molecule-model kit, but theysoon found that the sticks would go into holes in the balls, and that they could be builtinto 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 largedesign. several times they tore it down, entirely or in part, and began over again, usuallywith considerable yeeking and gesticulation. “they have artistic sense,” van riebeeksaid. “i’ve seen lots of abstract sculpture that wasn’t half as good as that job they’redoing.”

“good engineering, too,” jack said. “theyunderstand balance and center-of-gravity. they’re bracing it well, and not makingit top-heavy.” “jack, i’ve been thinking about that questioni 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 thefuzzies lead you into giving them credit for more intelligence than they possess. now ithink you’ve consistently understated it. short of actual sapience, i’ve never seenanything 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 togetherlooks like cooperation on an agreed-upon purpose, but i simply can’t make speech out of thatyeek-yeek-yeek.” “let’s keep the talk-and-build-a-firerule 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 likechanging the spools on a recorder or field-stripping a pistol; they’re just learned tricks. imean ideas.” “how about helen keller?” rainsford asked.“mean to say she only started thinking sapiently

after anna sullivan taught her what wordswere?” “no, of course not. she thought sapiently—andshe 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 inheritedthe cerebroneural equipment for sapient thinking.” she let that trail off, before somebody askedher how she knew that the fuzzies hadn’t. “i’ll suggest, just to keep the argumentgoing, that speech couldn’t have been invented without pre-existing sapience,” jack said. ruth laughed. “now you’re taking me backto 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-chickenargument 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’sa 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’reover.” “well, maybe they’re just slightly sapient,”jimenez suggested. ruth ortheris hooted at that. “that’slike talking about being just slightly dead or just slightly pregnant,” she said. “youeither 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 theresult 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 anexact science like physics, we’ll be able to calibrate mentation like temperature. butsapience is qualitatively different from nonsapience.

it’s more than just a higher degree of mentaltemperature. 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,” vanriebeek told him. “that’s what i was talking about a moment ago. we don’t know any moreabout how sapience appeared today than we did in the year zero, or in the year 654 pre-atomicfor that matter.” “wait a minute,” jack interrupted. “beforewe go any deeper, let’s agree on a definition of sapience.”

van riebeek laughed. “ever try to get adefinition of life from a biologist?” he asked. “or a definition of number from amathematician?” “that’s about it.” ruth looked at thefuzzies, who were looking at their colored-ball construction as though wondering if they couldadd anything more without spoiling the design. “i’d say: a level of mentation qualitativelydifferent from nonsapience in that it includes ability to symbolize ideas and store and transmitthem, ability to generalize and ability to form abstract ideas. there; i didn’t saya 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 bya long thing that points and makes noises.

rifles kill animals. harpies and damnthingsare 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 riebeeksaid promptly. “any of you ever been on yggdrasil?” “i saw a man shot once on mimir, for callinganother man a son of a khooghra,” jack said. “the man who shot him had been on yggdrasiland 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 sticksto make spears. and they talk. i learned their language, all eighty-two words of it. i taughta few of the intelligentsia how to use machetes without maiming themselves, and there wasone 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 moreof them.” before anybody could stop him, the communicationscreen got itself into an uproar. the fuzzies

all ran over in front of it, and jack switchedit on. the caller was a man in gray semiformals; he had wavy gray hair and a face that lookedlike juan jimenez’s twenty years from now. “good evening; holloway here.” “oh, mr. holloway, good evening.” thecaller 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—thefuzzies?” he looked down at the floor. “are these some of the animals?” “these are the fuzzies.” he hoped it soundedlike the correction it was intended to be. “dr. bennett rainsford’s here with menow, and so are dr. jimenez, dr. van riebeek

and dr. ortheris.” out of the corner ofhis eye he could see jimenez squirming as though afflicted with ants, van riebeek gettinghis poker face battened down and ben rainsford suppressing a grin. “some of us are outof 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 thatthat 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, miketo jimenez and taking mamma and baby on his own lap. baby immediately started to climb up ontohis head, as expected. it seemed to disconcert

kellogg, also as expected. he decided to teachbaby to thumb his nose when given some unobtrusive signal. “now, about that tape i recorded last evening,”he began. “yes, mr. holloway.” kellogg’s smilewas getting more mechanical every minute. he was having trouble keeping his eyes offbaby. “i must say, i was simply astounded at the high order of intelligence claimedfor these creatures.” “and you wanted to see how big a liar iwas. i don’t blame you; i had trouble believing it myself at first.” kellogg gave a musically blithe laugh, showingeven more dental equipment.

“oh, no. mr. holloway; please don’t misunderstandme. i never thought anything like that.” “i hope not,” ben rainsford said, nottoo 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 entirelynew order of mammals—” “which may be the ninth extrasolar sapientrace,” rainsford added. “good heavens, bennett!” kellogg jettisonedhis smile and slid on a look of shocked surprise. “you surely can’t be serious?” he lookedagain at the fuzzies, pulled the smile back on and gave a light laugh.

“i thought you’d heard that tape,” rainsfordsaid. “of course, and the things reported weremost remarkable. but sapiences! just because they’ve been taught a few tricks, and usesticks and stones for weapons—” he got rid of the smile again, and quick-changedto 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 easilycould be. they have learning and reasoning capacity equal to that of any eight-year-oldterran 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’tmy subject,” jimenez took it up, “but they do have all the physical characteristicsshared by other sapient races—lower limbs specialized for locomotion and upper limbsfor manipulation, erect posture, stereoscopic vision, color perception, hand with opposingthumb—all the characteristics we consider as prerequisite to the development of sapience.” “i think they’re sapient, myself,” gerdvan riebeek said, “but that’s not as important as the fact that they’re on the very thresholdof sapience. this is the first race of this mental level anybody’s ever seen. i believethat study of the fuzzies will help us solve

the problem of how sapience developed in anyrace.” kellogg had been laboring to pump up a headof enthusiasm; now he was ready to valve it off. “but this is amazing! this will make scientifichistory! now, of course, you all realize how pricelessly valuable these fuzzies are. theymust be brought at once to mallorysport, where they can be studied under laboratory conditionsby qualified psychologists, and—” “no.” jack lifted baby fuzzy off his head and handedhim to mamma, and set mamma on the floor. that was reflex; the thinking part of hisbrain knew he didn’t need to clear for action

when arguing with the electronic image ofa man twenty-five hundred miles away. “just forget that part of it and start over,”he advised. kellogg ignored him. “gerd, you have yourairboat; fix up some nice comfortable cages—” “kellogg!” the man in the screen stopped talking andstared in amazed indignation. it was the first time in years he had been addressed by hisnaked 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 thatthese little beings must be carefully studied? don’t you want them given their rightfulplace in the hierarchy of nature?” “if you want to study them, come out hereand 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 remarkabout 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 anythinglike that. please don’t misunderstand me,” kellogg begged. “but this is highly specializedwork—” “yes; how many fuzzy specialists have youat science center, leonard?” rainsford wanted to know. “the only one i can think of isjack holloway, here.” “well, i’d thought of dr. mallin, thecompany’s head psychologist.” “he can come too, just as long as he understandsthat 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 theconversation 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 todr. kellogg, jack. maybe you don’t realize it, but he is a very important man.” “he isn’t important to me, and i wasn’tgracious 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,” vanriebeek said. “i never saw the individual before. thespecies is very common and widely distributed.” he turned to rainsford. “you think he andthis mallin will be out tomorrow?”

“of course they will. this is a little toobig for underlings and non-company people to be allowed to monkey with. you know, we’llhave to watch out or in a year we’ll be hearing from terra about the discovery ofa sapient race on zarathustra; fuzzy fuzzy kellogg. as juan says, dr. kellogg is a veryimportant man. that’s how he got important.” chapter vi the recorded voice ceased; for a moment therecord player hummed voicelessly. loud in the silence, a photocell acted with a doubleclick, opening one segment of the sun shielding and closing another at the opposite side ofthe dome. space commodore alex napier glanced up from his desk and out at the harshly angularlandscape of xerxes and the blackness of airless

space beyond the disquietingly close horizon.then he picked up his pipe and knocked the heel out into the ashtray. nobody said anything.he began packing tobacco into the bowl. “well, gentlemen?” he invited comment. “pancho?” captain conrad greibenfeld,the exec., turned to lieutenant ybarra, the chief psychologist. “how reliable is this stuff?” ybarra asked. “well, i knew jack holloway thirty yearsago, on fenris, when i was just an ensign. he must be past seventy now,” he parenthesized.“if he says he saw anything, i’ll believe it. and bennett rainsford’s absolutely reliable,of course.”

“how about the agent?” ybarra insisted. he and stephen aelborg, the intelligence officer,exchanged glances. he nodded, and aelborg said: “one of the best. one of our own, lieutenantj.g., naval reserve. you don’t need to worry about credibility, pancho.” “they sound sapient to me,” ybarra said.“you know, this is something i’ve always been half hoping and half afraid would happen.” “you mean an excuse to intervene in thatmess down there?” greibenfeld asked. ybarra looked blankly at him for a moment.“no. no, i meant a case of borderline sapience;

something our sacred talk-and-build-a-firerule won’t cover. just how did this come to our attention, stephen?” “well, it was transmitted to us from contactcenter in mallorysport late friday night. there seem to be a number of copies of thistape around; our agent got hold of one of them and transmitted it to contact center,and it was relayed on to us, with the agent’s comments,” aelborg said. “contact centerordered a routine surveillance inside company house and, to play safe, at the residency.at the time, there seemed no reason to give the thing any beat-to-quarters-and-man-gunstreatment, but we got a report on saturday afternoon—mallorysport time, that is—thatleonard kellogg had played off the copy of

the tape that juan jimenez had made for file,and had alerted victor grego immediately. “of course, grego saw the implications atonce. he sent kellogg and the chief company psychologist, ernst mallin, out to beta continentwith orders to brand rainsford’s and holloway’s claims as a deliberate hoax. then the companyintends to encourage the trapping of fuzzies for their fur, in hopes that the whole specieswill be exterminated before anybody can get out from terra to check on rainsford’s story.” “i hadn’t heard that last detail before.” “well, we can prove it,” aelborg assuredhim. it sounded like a victor grego idea. he lithis pipe slowly. damnit, he didn’t want

to have to intervene. no space navy c.o. did.justifying intervention on a colonial planet was too much bother—always a board of inquiry,often a courtmartial. and supersession of civil authority was completely against servicedoctrine. of course, there were other and more important tenets of service doctrine.the sovereignty of the terran federation for one, and the inviolability of the federationconstitution. and the rights of extraterrestrials, too. conrad greibenfeld, too, seemed to havebeen thinking about that. “if those fuzzies are sapient beings, thatwhole setup down there is illegal. company, colonial administration and all,” he said.“zarathustra’s a class-iv planet, and that’s all you can make out of it.”

“we won’t intervene unless we’re forcedto. pancho, i think the decision will be largely up to you.” pancho ybarra was horrified. “good god, alex! you can’t mean that.who am i? a nobody. all i have is an ordinary m.d., and a psych.d. why, the best psychologicalbrains in the federation—” “aren’t on zarathustra, pancho. they’reon terra, five hundred light-years, six months’ ship voyage each way. intervention, of course,is my responsibility, but the sapience question is yours. i don’t envy you, but i can’trelieve you of it.” gerd van riebeek’s suggestion that all threeof the visitors sleep aboard the airboat hadn’t

been treated seriously at all. gerd himselfwas accommodated in the spare room of the living hut. juan jimenez went with ben rainsfordto his camp for the night. ruth ortheris had the cabin of the boat to herself. rainsfordwas on the screen the next morning, while jack and gerd and ruth and the fuzzies werehaving breakfast; he and jimenez had decided to take his airjeep and work down from thehead of cold creek in the belief that there must be more fuzzies around in the woods. both gerd and ruth decided to spend the morningat the camp and get acquainted with the fuzzies on hand. the family had had enough breakfastto leave them neutral on the subject of land-prawns, and they were given another of the new toys,a big colored ball. they rolled it around

in the grass for a while, decided to saveit for their evening romp and took it into the house. then they began playing aimlesslyamong some junk in the shed outside the workshop. once in a while one of them would drift awayto look for a prawn, more for sport than food. ruth and gerd and jack were sitting at thebreakfast table on the grass, talking idly and trying to think of excuses for not washingthe dishes. mamma fuzzy and baby were poking about in the tall grass. suddenly mamma gavea shrill cry and started back for the shed, chasing baby ahead of her and slapping himon the bottom with the flat of her chopper-digger to hurry him along. jack started for the house at a run. gerdgrabbed his camera and jumped up on the table.

it was ruth who saw the cause of the disturbance. “jack! look, over there!” she pointedto the edge of the clearing. “two strange fuzzies!” he kept on running, but instead of the riflehe had been going for, he collected his movie camera, two of the spare chopper-diggers andsome extee three. when he emerged again, the two fuzzies had come into the clearing andstood side by side, looking around. both were females, and they both carried wooden prawn-killers. “you have plenty of film?” he asked gerd.“here, ruth; take this.” he handed her his own camera. “keep far enough away fromme to get what i’m doing and what they’re

doing. i’m going to try to trade with them.” he went forward, the steel weapons in hiship pocket and the extee three in his hand, talking softly and soothingly to the newcomers.when he was as close to them as he could get without stampeding them, he stopped. “our gang’s coming up behind you,” gerdtold him. “regular skirmish line; choppers at high port. now they’ve stopped, aboutthirty feet behind you.” he broke off a piece of extee three, put itin his mouth and ate it. then he broke off two more pieces and held them out. the twofuzzies were tempted, but not to the point of rashness. he threw both pieces within afew feet of them. one darted forward, threw

a piece to her companion and then snatchedthe other piece and ran back with it. they stood together, nibbling and making soft delightednoises. his own family seemed to disapprove strenuouslyof this lavishing of delicacies upon outsiders. however, the two strangers decided that itwould be safe to come closer, and soon he had them taking bits of field ration fromhis hand. then he took the two steel chopper-diggers out of his pocket, and managed to convey theidea that he wanted to trade. the two strange fuzzies were incredulously delighted. thiswas too much for his own tribe; they came up yeeking angrily. the two strange females retreated a few steps,their new weapon ready. everybody seemed to

expect a fight, and nobody wanted one. fromwhat he could remember of old terran history, this was a situation which could develop intoserious trouble. then ko-ko advanced, dragging his chopper-digger in an obviously pacificmanner, and approached the two females, yeeking softly and touching first one and then theother. then he laid his weapon down and put his foot on it. the two females began strokingand caressing him. immediately the crisis evaporated. the othersof the family came forward, stuck their weapons in the ground and began fondling the strangers.then they all sat in a circle, swaying their bodies rhythmically and making soft noises.finally ko-ko and the two females rose, picked up their weapons and started for the woods.

“jack, stop them,” ruth called out. “they’regoing away.” “if they want to go, i have no right tostop them.” when they were almost at the edge of the woods,ko-ko stopped, drove the point of his weapon into the ground and came running back to pappyjack, throwing his arms around the human knees and yeeking. jack stooped and stroked him,but didn’t try to pick him up. one of the two females pulled his chopper-digger out,and they both came back slowly. at the same time, little fuzzy, mamma fuzzy, mike andmitzi came running back. for a while, all the fuzzies embraced one another, yeekinghappily. then they all trooped across the grass and went into the house.

“get that all, gerd?” he asked. “on film, yes. that’s the only way i did,though. what happened?” “you have just made the first film of intertribalsocial and mating customs, zarathustran fuzzy. this is the family’s home; they don’twant any strange fuzzies hanging around. they were going to run the girls off. then ko-kodecided he liked their looks, and he decided he’d team up with them. that made everythingdifferent; the family sat down with them to tell them what a fine husband they were gettingand to tell ko-ko good-bye. then ko-ko remembered that he hadn’t told me good-bye, and hecame back. the family decided that two more fuzzies wouldn’t be in excess of the carryingcapacity of this habitat, seeing what a good

provider pappy jack is, so now i should imaginethey’re showing the girls the family treasures. you know, they married into a mighty well-to-dofamily.” the girls were named goldilocks and cinderella.when lunch was ready, they were all in the living room, with the viewscreen on; afterlunch, the whole gang went into the bedroom for a nap on pappy jack’s bed. he spentthe afternoon developing movie film, while gerd and ruth wrote up the notes they hadmade the day before and collaborated on an account of the adoption. by late afternoon,when they were finished, the fuzzies came out for a frolic and prawn hunt. they all heard the aircar before any of thehuman people did, and they all ran over and

climbed up on the bench beside the kitchendoor. it was a constabulary cruise car; it landed, and a couple of troopers got out,saying that they’d stopped to see the fuzzies. they wanted to know where the extras had comefrom, and when jack told them, they looked at one another. “next gang that comes along, call us andkeep them entertained till we can get here,” one of them said. “we want some at the post,for prawns if nothing else.” “what’s george’s attitude?” he asked.“the other night, when he was here, he seemed half scared of them.” “aah, he’s got over that,” one of thetroopers said. “he called ben rainsford;

ben said they were perfectly safe. hey, bensays they’re not animals; they’re people.” he started to tell them about some of thethings the fuzzies did. he was still talking when the fuzzies heard another aircar andcalled attention to it. this time, it was ben rainsford and juan jimenez. they piledout as soon as they were off contragravity, dragging cameras after them. “jack, there are fuzzies all over the placeup there,” rainsford began, while he was getting out. “all headed down this way;regular volkerwanderung. we saw over fifty of them—four families, and individuals andpairs. i’m sure we missed ten for every one we saw.”

“we better get up there with a car tomorrow,”one of the troopers said. “ben, just where were you?” “i’ll show you on the map.” then hesaw goldilocks and cinderella. “hey! where’d you two girls come from? i never saw you aroundhere before.” there was another clearing across the stream,with a log footbridge and a path to the camp. jack guided the big airboat down onto it,and put his airjeep alongside with the canopy up. there were two men on the forward deckof the boat, kellogg and another man who would be ernst mallin. a third man came out of thecontrol cabin after the boat was off contragravity. jack didn’t like mallin. he had a tight,secretive face, with arrogance and bigotry

showing underneath. the third man was younger.his face didn’t show anything much, but his coat showed a bulge under the left arm.after being introduced by kellogg, mallin introduced him as kurt borch, his assistant. mallin had to introduce borch again at thecamp, not only to ben rainsford but also to van riebeek, to jimenez and even to ruth ortheris,which seemed a little odd. ruth seemed to think so, too, and mallin hastened to tellher that borch was with personnel, giving some kind of tests. that appeared to puzzleher even more. none of the three seemed happy about the presence of the constabulary troopers,either; they were all relieved when the cruise car lifted out.

kellogg became interested in the fuzzies immediately,squatting to examine them. he said something to mallin, who compressed his lips and shookhis head, saying: “we simply cannot assume sapience untilwe find something in their behavior which cannot be explained under any other hypothesis.we would be much safer to assume nonsapience and proceed to test that assumption.” that seemed to establish the keynote. kelloggstraightened, and he and mallin started one of those “of course i agree, doctor, butdon’t you find, on the other hand, that you must agree” sort of arguments, aboutthe difference between scientific evidence and scientific proof. jimenez got into itto the extent of agreeing with everything

kellogg said, and differing politely witheverything mallin said that he thought kellogg would differ with. borch said nothing; hejust stood and looked at the fuzzies with ill-concealed hostility. gerd and ruth decidedto help getting dinner. they ate outside on the picnic table, withthe fuzzies watching them interestedly. kellogg and mallin carefully avoided discussing them.it wasn’t until after dusk, when the fuzzies brought their ball inside and everybody wasin the living room, that kellogg, adopting a presiding-officer manner, got the conversationonto the subject. for some time, without giving anyone else an opportunity to say anything,he gushed about what an important discovery the fuzzies were. the fuzzies themselves ignoredhim and began dismantling the stick-and-ball

construction. for a while goldilocks and cinderellawatched interestedly, and then they began assisting. “unfortunately,” kellogg continued, “somuch of our data is in the form of uncorroborated statements by mr. holloway. now, please don’tmisunderstand me. i don’t, myself, doubt for a moment anything mr. holloway said onthat tape, but you must realize that professional scientists are most reluctant to accept theunsubstantiated reports of what, if you’ll pardon me, they think of as nonqualified observers.” “oh, rubbish, leonard!” rainsford brokein impatiently. “i’m a professional scientist, of a good many more years’ standing thanyou, and i accept jack holloway’s statements.

a frontiersman like jack is a very carefuland exact observer. people who aren’t don’t live long on frontier planets.” “now, please don’t misunderstand me,”kellogg reiterated. “i don’t doubt mr. holloway’s statements. i was just thinkingof how they would be received on terra.” “i shouldn’t worry about that, leonard.the institute accepts my reports, and i’m vouching for jack’s reliability. i can substantiatemost of what he told me from personal observation.” “yes, and there’s more than just verbalstatements,” gerd van riebeek chimed in. “a camera is not a nonqualified observer.we have quite a bit of film of the fuzzies.” “oh, yes; there was some mention of movies,”mallin said. “you don’t have any of them

developed yet, do you?” “quite a lot. everything except what wastaken out in the woods this afternoon. we can run them off right now.” he pulled down the screen in front of thegunrack, got the film and loaded his projector. the fuzzies, who had begun on a new stick-and-ballconstruction, were irritated when the lights went out, then wildly excited when littlefuzzy, digging a toilet pit with the wood chisel, appeared. little fuzzy in particularwas excited about that; if he didn’t recognize himself, he recognized the chisel. then therewere pictures of little fuzzy killing and eating land-prawns, little fuzzy taking thenut off the bolt and putting it on again,

and pictures of the others, after they hadcome in, hunting and at play. finally, there was the film of the adoption of goldilocksand cinderella. “what juan and i got this afternoon, upin the woods, isn’t so good, i’m afraid,” rainsford said when the show was over andthe lights were on again. “mostly it’s rear views disappearing into the brush. itwas very hard to get close to them in the jeep. their hearing is remarkably acute. buti’m sure the pictures we took this afternoon will show the things they were carrying—woodenprawn-killers like the two that were traded from the new ones in that last film.” mallin and kellogg looked at one another inwhat seemed oddly like consternation.

“you didn’t tell us there were more ofthem around,” mallin said, as though it were an accusation of duplicity. he turnedto kellogg. “this alters the situation.” “yes, indeed, ernst,” kellogg burbleddelightedly. “this is a wonderful opportunity. mr. holloway, i understand that all this countryup here is your property, by landgrant purchase. that’s right, isn’t it? well, would youallow us to camp on that clearing across the run, where our boat is now? we’ll get prefabhuts—red hill’s the nearest town, isn’t it?—and have a company construction gangset them up for us, and we won’t be any bother at all to you. we had only intendedstaying tonight on our boat, and returning to mallorysport in the morning, but with allthese fuzzies swarming around in the woods,

we can’t think of leaving now. you don’thave any objection, do you?” he had lots of objections. the whole businesswas rapidly developing into an acute pain in the neck for him. but if he didn’t letkellogg camp across the run, the three of them could move seventy or eighty miles inany direction and be off his land. he knew what they’d do then. they’d live-trapor sleep-gas fuzzies; they’d put them in cages, and torment them with maze and electric-shockexperiments, and kill a few for dissection, or maybe not bother killing them first. onhis own land, if they did anything like that, he could do something about it. “not at all. i’ll have to remind you again,though, that you’re to treat these little

people with consideration.” “oh, we won’t do anything to your fuzzies,”mallin said. “you won’t hurt any fuzzies. not morethan once, anyhow.” the next morning, during breakfast, kelloggand kurt borch put in an appearance, borch wearing old clothes and field boots and carryinghis pistol on his belt. they had a list of things they thought they would need for theircamp. neither of them seemed to have more than the foggiest notion of camp requirements.jack made some suggestions which they accepted. there was a lot of scientific equipment onthe list, including an x-ray machine. he promptly ran a pencil line through that.

“we don’t know what these fuzzies’ levelof radiation tolerance is. we’re not going to find out by overdosing one of my fuzzies.” somewhat to his surprise, neither of themgave him any argument. gerd and ruth and kellogg borrowed his airjeep and started north; heand borch went across the run to make measurements after rainsford and jimenez arrived and pickedup mallin. borch took off soon after with the boat for red hill. left alone, he loafedaround the camp, and developed the rest of the movie film, making three copies of everything.toward noon, borch brought the boat back, followed by a couple of scowlike farmboats.in a few hours, the company construction men from red hill had the new camp set up. amongother things, they brought two more air jeeps.

the two jeeps returned late in the afternoon,everybody excited. between them, the parties had seen almost a hundred fuzzies, and hadfound three camps, two among rocks and one in a hollow pool-ball tree. all three hadbeen spotted by belts of filled-in toilet pits around them; two had been abandoned andthe third was still occupied. kellogg insisted on playing host to jack and rainsford fordinner at the camp across the run. the meal, because everything had been brought ready-cookedand only needed warming, was excellent. returning to his own camp with rainsford,jack found the fuzzies finished with their evening meal and in the living room, startinga new construction—he could think of no other name for it—with the molecule-modelballs and sticks. goldilocks left the others

and came over to him with a couple of ballsfastened together, holding them up with one hand while she pulled his trouser leg withthe other. “yes, i see. it’s very beautiful,” hetold her. she tugged harder and pointed at the thingthe others were making. finally, he understood. “she wants me to work on it, too,” hesaid. “ben, you know where the coffee is; fix us a pot. i’m going to be busy here.” he sat down on the floor, and was puttingsticks and balls together when ben brought in the coffee. this was more fun than he’dhad in a couple of days. he said so while ben was distributing extee three to the fuzzies.

“yes, i ought to let you kick me all aroundthe camp for getting this started,” rainsford said, pouring the coffee. “i could makesome excuses, but they’d all sound like ‘i didn’t know it was loaded.’” “hell, i didn’t know it was loaded, either.”he rose and took his coffee cup, blowing on it to cool it. “what do you think kellogg’sup to, anyhow? that whole act he’s been putting on since he came here is phony asa nine-sol bill.” “what i told you, evening before last,”rainsford said. “he doesn’t want non-company people making discoveries on zarathustra.you notice how hard he and mallin are straining to talk me out of sending a report back toterra before he can investigate the fuzzies?

he wants to get his own report in first. well,the hell with him! you know what i’m going to do? i’m going home, and i’m going tosit up all night getting a report into shape. tomorrow morning i’m going to give it togeorge lunt and let him send it to mallorysport in the constabulary mail pouch. it’ll beon a ship for terra before any of this gang knows it’s been sent. do you have any copiesof those movies you can spare?” “about a mile and a half. i made copiesof everything, even the stuff the others took.” “good. we’ll send that, too. let kelloggread about it in the papers a year from now.” he thought for a moment, then said: “gerdand ruth and juan are bunking at the other camp now; suppose i move in here with youtomorrow. i assume you don’t want to leave

the fuzzies alone while that gang’s here.i can help you keep an eye on them.” “but, ben, you don’t want to drop whateverelse you’re doing—” “what i’m doing, now, is learning to bea fuzzyologist, and this is the only place i can do it. i’ll see you tomorrow, afteri stop at the constabulary post.” the people across the run—kellogg, mallinand borch, and van riebeek, jimenez and ruth ortheris—were still up when rainsford wentout to his airjeep. after watching him lift out, jack went back into the house, playedwith his family in the living room for a while and went to bed. the next morning he watchedkellogg, ruth and jimenez leave in one jeep and, shortly after, mallin and van riebeekin the other. kellogg didn’t seem to be

willing to let the three who had come to thecamp first wander around unchaperoned. he wondered about that. ben rainsford’s airjeep came over the mountainsfrom the south in the late morning and settled onto the grass. jack helped him inside withhis luggage, and then they sat down under the big featherleaf trees to smoke their pipesand watch the fuzzies playing in the grass. occasionally they saw kurt borch potteringaround outside the other camp. “i sent the report off,” rainsford said,then looked at his watch. “it ought to be on the mail boat for mallorysport by now;this time tomorrow it’ll be in hyperspace for terra. we won’t say anything about it;just sit back and watch len kellogg and ernst

mallin working up a sweat trying to talk usout of sending it.” he chuckled. “i made a definite claim of sapience; by the timei got the report in shape to tape off, i couldn’t see any other alternative.” “damned if i can. you hear that, kids?”he asked mike and mitzi, who had come over in hope that there might be goodies for them.“uncle ben says you’re sapient.” “they want to know if it’s good to eat.what’ll happen now?” “nothing, for about a year. six months fromnow, when the ship gets in, the institute will release it to the press, and then they’llsend an investigation team here. so will any of the other universities or scientific institutesthat may be interested. i suppose the government’ll

send somebody, too. after all, subcivilizednatives on colonized planets are wards of the terran federation.” he didn’t know that he liked that. the lesshe had to do with the government the better, and his fuzzies were wards of pappy jack holloway.he said as much. rainsford picked up mitzi and stroked her.“nice fur,” he said. “fur like that would bring good prices. it will, if we don’tget these people recognized as sapient beings.” he looked across the run at the new camp andwondered. maybe leonard kellogg saw that, too, and saw profits for the company in fuzzyfur. the airjeeps returned in the middle of theafternoon, first mallin’s, and then kellogg’s.

everybody went inside. an hour later, a constabularycar landed in front of the kellogg camp. george lunt and ahmed khadra got out. kellogg cameoutside, spoke with them and then took them into the main living hut. half an hour later,the lieutenant and the trooper emerged, lifted their car across the run and set it down onthe lawn. the fuzzies ran to meet them, possibly expecting more whistles, and followed theminto the living room. lunt and khadra took off their berets, but made no move to unbuckletheir gun belts. “we got your package off all right ben,”lunt said. he sat down and took goldilocks on his lap; immediately cinderella jumpedup, also. “jack, what the hell’s that gang over there up to anyhow?”

“you got that, too?” “you can smell it on them for a mile, againstthe wind. in the first place, that borch. i wish i could get his prints; i’ll betwe have them on file. and the whole gang’s trying to hide something, and what they’retrying to hide is something they’re scared of, like a body in a closet. when we wereover there, kellogg did all the talking; anybody else who tried to say anything got shut upfast. kellogg doesn’t like you, jack and he doesn’t like ben, and he doesn’t likethe fuzzies. most of all he doesn’t like the fuzzies.” “well, i told you what i thought this morning,”rainsford said. “they don’t want outsiders

discovering things on this planet. it wouldn’tmake them look good to the home office on terra. remember, it was some non-company peoplewho discovered the first sunstones, back in ’forty-eight.” george lunt looked thoughtful. on him, itwas a scowl. “i don’t think that’s it, ben. whenwe were talking to him, he admitted very freely that you and jack discovered the fuzzies.the way he talked, he didn’t seem to think they were worth discovering at all. and heasked a lot of funny questions about you, jack. the kind of questions i’d ask if iwas checking up on somebody’s mental competence.” the scowl became one of anger now. “by god,i wish i had an excuse to question him—with

a veridicator!” kellogg didn’t want the fuzzies to be sapientbeings. if they weren’t they’d be … fur-bearing animals. jack thought of some overfed societydowager on terra or baldur, wearing the skins of little fuzzy and mamma fuzzy and mike andmitzi and ko-ko and cinderella and goldilocks wrapped around her adipose carcass. it madehim feel sick. chapter vii tuesday dawned hot and windless, a scarletsun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. the fuzzies, who were in to wake pappy jack with theirwhistles, didn’t like it; they were edgy and restless. maybe it would rain today afterall. they had breakfast outside on the picnic

table, and then ben decided he’d go backto his camp and pick up a few things he hadn’t brought and now decided he needed. “my hunting rifle’s one,” he said, “andi think i’ll circle down to the edge of the brush country and see if i can pick offa zebralope. we ought to have some more fresh meat.” so, after eating, rainsford got into his jeepand lifted away. across the run, kellogg and mallin were walking back and forth in frontof the camp, talking earnestly. when ruth ortheris and gerd van riebeek came out, theystopped, broke off their conversation and spoke briefly with them. then gerd and ruthcrossed the footbridge and came up the path

together. the fuzzies had scattered, by this time, tohunt prawns. little fuzzy and ko-ko and goldilocks ran to meet them; ruth picked goldilocks upand carried her, and ko-ko and little fuzzy ran on ahead. they greeted jack, decliningcoffee; ruth sat down in a chair with goldilocks, little fuzzy jumped up on the table and beganlooking for goodies, and when gerd stretched out on his back on the grass ko-ko sat downon his chest. “goldilocks is my favorite fuzzy,” ruthwas saying. “she is the sweetest thing. of course, they’re all pretty nice. i can’tget over how affectionate and trusting they are; the ones we saw out in the woods wereso timid.”

“well, the ones out in the woods don’thave any pappy jack to look after them” gerd said. “i’d imagine they’re veryaffectionate among themselves, but they have so many things to be afraid of. you know,there’s another prerequisite for sapience. it develops in some small, relatively defenseless,animal surrounded by large and dangerous enemies he can’t outrun or outfight. so, to survive,he has to learn to outthink them. like our own remote ancestors, or like little fuzzy;he had his choice of getting sapient or getting exterminated.” ruth seemed troubled. “gerd, dr. mallinhas found absolutely nothing about them that indicates true sapience.”

“oh, mallin be bloodied; he doesn’t knowwhat sapience is any more than i do. and a good deal less than you do, i’d say. i thinkhe’s trying to prove that the fuzzies aren’t sapient.” ruth looked startled. “what makes you saythat?” “it’s been sticking out all over him eversince he came here. you’re a psychologist; don’t tell me you haven’t seen it. maybeif the fuzzies were proven sapient it would invalidate some theory he’s gotten out ofa book, and he’d have to do some thinking for himself. he wouldn’t like that. butyou have to admit he’s been fighting the idea, intellectually and emotionally, rightfrom the start. why, they could sit down with

pencils and slide rules and start workingdifferential calculus and it wouldn’t convince him.” “dr. mallin’s trying to—” she beganangrily. then she broke it off. “jack, excuse us. we didn’t really come over here to havea fight. we came to meet some fuzzies. didn’t we, goldilocks?” goldilocks was playing with the silver charmon the chain around her neck, holding it to her ear and shaking it to make it tinkle,making small delighted sounds. finally she held it up and said, “yeek?” “yes, sweetie-pie, you can have it.” ruthtook the chain from around her neck and put

it over goldilocks’ head; she had to loopit three times before it would fit. “there now; that’s your very own.” “oh, you mustn’t give her things likethat.” “why not. it’s just cheap trade-junk.you’ve been on loki, jack, you know what it is.” he did; he’d traded stuff likethat to the natives himself. “some of the girls at the hospital there gave it to mefor a joke. i only wear it because i have it. goldilocks likes it a lot better thani do.” an airjeep rose from the other side and floatedacross. juan jimenez was piloting it; ernst mallin stuck his head out the window on theright, asked her if she were ready and told

gerd that kellogg would pick him up in a fewminutes. after she had gotten into the jeep and it had lifted out, gerd put ko-ko offhis chest and sat up, getting cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “i don’t know what the devil’s gotteninto her,” he said, watching the jeep vanish. “oh, yes, i do. she’s gotten the wordfrom on high. kellogg hath spoken. fuzzies are just silly little animals,” he saidbitterly. “you work for kellogg, too, don’t you?” “yes. he doesn’t dictate my professionalopinion, though. you know, i thought, in the evil hour when i took this job—” he roseto his feet, hitching his belt to balance

the weight of the pistol on the right againstthe camera-binoculars on the left, and changed the subject abruptly. “jack, has ben rainsfordsent a report on the fuzzies to the institute yet?” he asked. “why?” “if he hasn’t, tell him to hurry up andget one in.” there wasn’t time to go into that further.kellogg’s jeep was rising from the camp across the run and approaching. he decided to let the breakfast dishes gotill after lunch. kurt borch had stayed behind at the kellogg camp, so he kept an eye onthe fuzzies and brought them back when they

started to stray toward the footbridge. benrainsford hadn’t returned by lunchtime, but zebralope hunting took a little time,even from the air. while he was eating, outside, one of the rented airjeeps returned from thenortheast in a hurry, disgorging ernst mallin, juan jimenez and ruth ortheris. kurt borchcame hurrying out; they talked for a few minutes, and then they all went inside. a little later,the second jeep came in, even faster, and landed; kellogg and van riebeek hastened intothe living hut. there wasn’t anything more to see. he carried the dishes into the kitchenand washed them, and the fuzzies went into the bedroom for their nap. he was sitting at the table in the livingroom when gerd van riebeek knocked on the

open door. “jack, can i talk to you for a minute?”he asked. “sure. come in.” van riebeek entered, unbuckling his gun belt.he shifted a chair so that he could see the door from it, and laid the belt on the floorat his feet when he sat down. then he began to curse leonard kellogg in four or five languages. “well, i agree, in principle; why in particular,though?” “you know what that son of a khooghra’sdoing?” gerd asked. “he and that—” he used a couple of sheshan words, viler thananything in lingua terra. “—that quack

headshrinker, mallin, are preparing a report,accusing you and ben rainsford of perpetrating a deliberate scientific hoax. you taught thefuzzies some tricks; you and rainsford, between you, made those artifacts yourselves and thetwo of you are conspiring to foist the fuzzies off as sapient beings. jack, if it weren’tso goddamn stinking contemptible, it would be the biggest joke of the century!” “i take it they wanted you to sign thisreport, too?” “yes, and i told kellogg he could—”what kellogg could do, it seemed, was both appalling and physiologically impossible.he cursed again, and then lit a cigarette and got hold of himself. “here’s whathappened. kellogg and i went up that stream,

about twenty miles down cold creek, the oneyou’ve been working on, and up onto the high flat to a spring and a stream that flowsdown in the opposite direction. know where i mean? well, we found where some fuzzieshad been camping, among a lot of fallen timber. and we found a little grave, where the fuzzieshad buried one of their people.” he should have expected something like that,and yet it startled him. “you mean, they bury their dead? what was the grave like?” “a little stone cairn, about a foot anda half by three, a foot high. kellogg said it was just a big toilet pit, but i was sureof what it was. i opened it. stones under the cairn, and then filled-in earth, and thena dead fuzzy wrapped in grass. a female; she’d

been mangled by something, maybe a bush-goblin.and get this jack; they’d buried her prawn-stick with her.” “they bury their dead! what was kelloggdoing, while you were opening the grave?” “dithering around having ants. i’d beentaking snaps of the grave, and i was burbling away like an ass about how important thiswas and how it was positive proof of sapience, and he was insisting that we get back to campat once. he called the other jeep and told mallin to get to camp immediately, and mallinand ruth and juan were there when we got in. as soon as kellogg told them what we’d found,mallin turned fish-belly white and wanted to know how we were going to suppress it.i asked him if he was nuts, and then kellogg

came out with it. they don’t dare let thefuzzies be proven sapient.” “because the company wants to sell fuzzyfurs?” van riebeek looked at him in surprise. “inever thought of that. i doubt if they did, either. no. because if the fuzzies are sapientbeings, the company’s charter is automatically void.” this time jack cursed, not kellogg but himself. “i am a senile old dotard! good lord, iknow colonial law; i’ve been skating on the edge of it on more planets than you’reyears old. and i never thought of that; why, of course it would. where are you now, withthe company, by the way?”

“out, but i couldn’t care less. i haveenough in the bank for the trip back to terra, not counting what i can raise on my boat andsome other things. xeno-naturalists don’t need to worry about finding jobs. there’sben’s outfit, for instance. and, brother, when i get back to terra, what i’ll spillabout this deal!” “if you get back. if you don’t have anaccident before you get on the ship.” he thought for a moment. “know anything aboutgeology?” “why, some; i have to work with fossils.i’m as much a paleontologist as a zoologist. why?” “how’d you like to stay here with me andhunt fossil jellyfish for a while? we won’t

make twice as much, together, as i’m makingnow, but you can look one way while i’m looking the other, and we may both stay alivelonger that way.” “you mean that, jack?” “i said it, didn’t i?” van riebeek rose and held out his hand; jackcame around the table and shook it. then he reached back and picked up his belt, puttingit on. “better put yours on, too, partner. borchis probably the only one we’ll need a gun for, but—” van riebeek buckled on his belt, then drewhis pistol and worked the slide to load the

chamber. “what are we going to do?” heasked. “well, we’re going to try to handle itlegally. fact is, i’m even going to call the cops.” he punched out a combination on the communicationscreen. it lighted and opened a window into the constabulary post. the sergeant who lookedout of it recognized him and grinned. “hi, jack. how’s the family?” he asked.“i’m coming up, one of these evenings, to see them.” “you can see some now.” ko-ko and goldilocksand cinderella were coming out of the hall from the bedroom; he gathered them up andput them on the table. the sergeant was fascinated.

then he must have noticed that both jack andgerd were wearing their guns in the house. his eyes narrowed slightly. “you got problems, jack?” he asked. “little ones; they may grow, though. i havesome guests here who have outstayed their welcome. for the record, better make it thati have squatters i want evicted. if there were a couple of blue uniforms around, maybeit might save me the price of a few cartridges.” “i read you. george was mentioning thatyou might regret inviting that gang to camp on you.” he picked up a handphone. “calderonto car three,” he said. “do you read me, three? well, jack holloway’s got a littlesquatter trouble. yeah; that’s it. he’s

ordering them off his grant, and he thinksthey might try to give him an argument. yeah, sure, peace lovin’ jack holloway, that’shim. well, go chase his squatters for him, and if they give you anything about beingcompany big wheels, we don’t care what kind of wheels they are, just so’s they startrolling.” he replaced the phone. “look for them in about an hour, jack.” “why, thanks, phil. drop in some eveningwhen you can hang up your gun and stay awhile.” he blanked the screen and began punching again.this time he got a girl, and then the company construction boss at red hill. “oh, hello, jack; is dr. kellogg comfortable?”

“not very. he’s moving out this afternoon.i wish you’d have your gang come up with those scows and get that stuff out of my backyard.” “well, he told us he was staying for a coupleof weeks.” “he got his mind changed for him. he’sto be off my land by sunset.” the company man looked troubled. “jack,you haven’t been having trouble with dr. kellogg, have you?” he asked. “he’sa big man with the company.” “that’s what he tells me. you’ll stillhave to come and get that stuff, though.” he blanked the screen. “you know,” hesaid, “i think it would be no more than fair to let kellogg in on this. what’s hisscreen combination?”

gerd supplied it, and he punched it out. oneof those tricky special company combinations. kurt borch appeared in the screen immediately. “i want to talk to kellogg.” “doctor kellogg is very busy, at present.” “he’s going to be a damned sight busier;this is moving day. the whole gang of you have till eighteen hundred to get off my grant.” borch was shoved aside, and kellogg appeared.“what’s this nonsense?” he demanded angrily. “you’re ordered to move. you want to knowwhy? i can let gerd van riebeek talk to you;

i think there are a few things he’s forgottento call you.” “you can’t order us out like this. why,you gave us permission—” “permission cancelled. i’ve called mikehennen in red hill; he’s sending his scows back for the stuff he brought here. lieutenantlunt will have a couple of troopers here, too. i’ll expect you to have your personalthings aboard your airboat when they arrive.” he blanked the screen while kellogg was tryingto tell him that it was all a misunderstanding. “i think that’s everything. it’s quitea while till sundown,” he added, “but i move for suspension of rules while we poura small libation to sprinkle our new partnership. then we can go outside and observe the enemy.”

there was no observable enemy action whenthey went out and sat down on the bench by the kitchen door. kellogg would be screeningmike hennen and the constabulary post for verification, and there would be a lot ofgathering up and packing to do. finally, kurt borch emerged with a contragravity lifterpiled with boxes and luggage, and jimenez walking beside to steady the load. jimenezclimbed up onto the airboat and borch floated the load up to him and then went back intothe huts. this was repeated several times. in the meantime, kellogg and mallin seemedto be having some sort of exchange of recriminations in front. ruth ortheris came out, carryinga briefcase, and sat down on the edge of a table under the awning.

neither of them had been watching the fuzzies,until they saw one of them start down the path toward the footbridge, a glint of silverat the throat identifying goldilocks. “look at that fool kid; you stay put, gerd,and i’ll bring her back.” he started down the path; by the time he hadreached the bridge, goldilocks was across and had vanished behind one of the airjeepsparked in front of the kellogg camp. when he was across and within twenty feet of thevehicle, he heard a sound across and within twenty feet of the vehicle, he heard a soundhe had never heard before—a shrill, thin shriek, like a file on saw teeth. at the sametime, ruth’s voice screamed. “don’t! leonard, stop that!”

as he ran around the jeep, the shrieking brokeoff suddenly. goldilocks was on the ground, her fur reddened. kellogg stood over her,one foot raised. he was wearing white shoes, and they were both spotted with blood. hestamped the foot down on the little bleeding body, and then jack was within reach of him,and something crunched under the fist he drove into kellogg’s face. kellogg staggered andtried to raise his hands; he made a strangled noise, and for an instant the idiotic thoughtcrossed jack’s mind that he was trying to say, “now, please don’t misunderstandme.” he caught kellogg’s shirt front in his left hand, and punched him again in theface, and again, and again. he didn’t know how many times he punched kellogg before heheard ruth ortheris’ voice:

“jack! watch out! behind you!” he let go of kellogg’s shirt and jumpedaside, turning and reaching for his gun. kurt borch, twenty feet away, had a pistol drawnand pointed at him. his first shot went off as soon as the pistolwas clear of the holster. he fired the second while it was still recoiling; there was aspot of red on borch’s shirt that gave him an aiming point for the third. borch droppedthe pistol he hadn’t been able to fire, and started folding at the knees and thenat the waist. he went down in a heap on his face. behind him, gerd van riebeek’s voice wassaying, “hold it, all of you; get your hands

up. you, too, kellogg.” kellogg, who had fallen, pushed himself erect.blood was gushing from his nose, and he tried to stanch it on the sleeve of his jacket.as he stumbled toward his companions, he blundered into ruth ortheris, who pushed him angrilyaway from her. then she went to the little crushed body, dropping to her knees besideit and touching it. the silver charm bell on the neck chain jingled faintly. ruth beganto cry. juan jimenez had climbed down from the airboat;he was looking at the body of kurt borch in horror. “you killed him!” he accused. a momentlater, he changed that to “murdered.”

then he started to run toward the living hut. gerd van riebeek fired a bullet into the groundahead of him, bringing him up short. “you’ll stop the next one, juan,” hesaid. “go help dr. kellogg; he got himself hurt.” “call the constabulary,” mallin was saying.“ruth, you go; they won’t shoot at you.” “don’t bother. i called them. remember?” jimenez had gotten a wad of handkerchief tissueout of his pocket and was trying to stop his superior’s nosebleed. through it, kelloggwas trying to tell mallin that he hadn’t been able to help it.

“the little beast attacked me; it cut mewith that spear it was carrying.” ruth ortheris looked up. the other fuzzieswere with her by the body of goldilocks; they must have come as soon as they had heard thescreaming. “she came up to him and pulled at his trouserleg, the way they all do when they want to attract your attention,” she said. “shewanted him to look at her new jingle.” her voice broke, and it was a moment before shecould recover it. “and he kicked her, and then stamped her to death.” “ruth, keep your mouth shut!” mallin ordered.“the thing attacked leonard; it might have given him a serious wound.”

“it did!” still holding the wad of tissueto his nose with one hand, kellogg pulled up his trouser leg with the other and showeda scar on his shin. it looked like a briar scratch. “you saw it yourself.” “yes, i saw it. i saw you kick her and jumpon her. and all she wanted was to show you her new jingle.” jack was beginning to regret that he hadn’tshot kellogg as soon as he saw what was going on. the other fuzzies had been trying to getgoldilocks onto her feet. when they realized that it was no use, they let the body downagain and crouched in a circle around it, making soft, lamenting sounds.

“well, when the constabulary get here, youkeep quiet,” mallin was saying. “let me do the talking.” “intimidating witnesses, mallin?” gerdinquired. “don’t you know everybody’ll have to testify at the constabulary post underveridication? and you’re drawing pay for being a psychologist, too.” then he sawsome of the fuzzies raise their heads and look toward the southeastern horizon. “herecome the cops, now.” however, it was ben rainsford’s airjeep,with a zebralope carcass lashed along one side. it circled the kellogg camp and thenlet down quickly; rainsford jumped out as soon as it was grounded, his pistol drawn.

“what happened, jack?” he asked, thenglanced around, from goldilocks to kellogg to borch to the pistol beside borch’s body.“i get it. last time anybody pulled a gun on you, they called it suicide.” “that’s what this was, more or less. youhave a movie camera in your jeep? well, get some shots of borch, and some of goldilocks.then stand by, and if the fuzzies start doing anything different, get it all. i don’tthink you’ll be disappointed.” rainsford looked puzzled, but he holsteredhis pistol and went back to his jeep, returning with a camera. mallin began insisting that,as a licensed m.d., he had a right to treat kellogg’s injuries. gerd van riebeek followedhim into the living hut for a first-aid kit.

they were just emerging, van riebeek’s automaticin the small of mallin’s back, when a constabulary car grounded beside rainsford’s airjeep.it wasn’t car three. george lunt jumped out, unsnapping the flap of his holster, whileahmed khadra was talking into the radio. “what’s happened, jack? why didn’t youwait till we got here?” “this maniac assaulted me and murdered thatman over there!” kellogg began vociferating. “is your name jack too?” lunt demanded. “my name’s leonard kellogg, and i’ma chief of division with the company—” “then keep quiet till i ask you something.ahmed, call the post; get knabber and yorimitsu, with investigative equipment, and find outwhat’s tying up car three.”

mallin had opened the first-aid kit by now;gerd, on seeing the constabulary, had holstered his pistol. kellogg, still holding the soddentissues to his nose, was wanting to know what there was to investigate. “there’s the murderer; you have him red-handed.why don’t you arrest him?” “jack, let’s get over where we can watchthese people without having to listen to them,” lunt said. he glanced toward the body of goldilocks.“that happen first?” “watch out, lieutenant! he still has hispistol!” mallin shouted warningly. they went over and sat down on the contragravity-fieldgenerator housing of one of the rented airjeeps. jack started with gerd van riebeek’s visitimmediately after noon.

“yes, i thought of that angle myself,”lunt said disgustedly. “i didn’t think of it till this morning, though, and i didn’tthink things would blow up as fast as this. hell, i just didn’t think! well, go on.” he interrupted a little later to ask: “kelloggwas stamping on the fuzzy when you hit him. you were trying to stop him?” “that’s right. you can veridicate me onthat if you want to.” “i will; i’ll veridicate this whole damngang. and this guy borch had his heater out when you turned around? nothing to it, jack.we’ll have to have some kind of a hearing, but it’s just plain self-defense. thinkany of this gang will tell the truth here,

without taking them in and putting them underveridication?” “ruth ortheris will, i think.” “send her over here, will you.” she was still with the fuzzies, and ben rainsfordwas standing beside her, his camera ready. the fuzzies were still swaying and yeekingplaintively. she nodded and rose without speaking, going over to where lunt waited. “just what did happen, jack?” rainsfordwanted to know. “and whose side is he on?” he nodded toward van riebeek, standing guardover kellogg and mallin, his thumbs in his pistol belt.

“ours. he’s quit the company.” just as he was finishing, car three put inan appearance; he had to tell the same story over again. the area in front of the kelloggcamp was getting congested; he hoped mike hennen’s labor gang would stay away fora while. lunt talked to van riebeek when he had finished with ruth, and then with jimenezand mallin and kellogg. then he and one of the men from car three came over to wherejack and rainsford were standing. gerd van riebeek joined them just as lunt was saying: “jack, kellogg’s made a murder complaintagainst you. i told him it was self-defense, but he wouldn’t listen. so, according tothe book, i have to arrest you.”

“all right.” he unbuckled his gun andhanded it over. “now, george, i herewith make complaint and accusation against leonardkellogg, charging him with the unlawful and unjustified killing of a sapient being, towit, an aboriginal native of the planet of zarathustra commonly known as goldilocks.” lunt looked at the small battered body andthe six mourners around it. “but, jack, they aren’t legally sapientbeings.” “there is no such thing. a sapient beingis a being on the mental level of sapience, not a being that has been declared sapient.” “fuzzies are sapient beings,” rainsfordsaid. “that’s the opinion of a qualified

xeno-naturalist.” “two of them,” gerd van riebeek said.“that is the body of a sapient being. there’s the man who killed her. go ahead, lieutenant,make your pinch.” “hey! wait a minute!” the fuzzies were rising, sliding their chopper-diggersunder the body of goldilocks and lifting it on the steel shafts. ben rainsford was aiminghis camera as cinderella picked up her sister’s weapon and followed, carrying it; the otherscarried the body toward the far corner of the clearing, away from the camp. rainsfordkept just behind them, pausing to photograph and then hurrying to keep up with them.

they set the body down. mike and mitzi andcinderella began digging; the others scattered to hunt for stones. coming up behind them,george lunt took off his beret and stood holding it in both hands; he bowed his head as thegrass-wrapped body was placed in the little grave and covered. then, when the cairn was finished, he replacedit, drew his pistol and checked the chamber. “that does it, jack,” he said. “i amnow going to arrest leonard kellogg for the murder of a sapient being.” chapter viii jack holloway had been out on bail before,but never for quite so much. it was almost

worth it, though, to see leslie coombes’seyes widen and mohammed ali o’brien’s jaw drop when he dumped the bag of sunstones,blazing with the heat of the day and of his body, on george lunt’s magisterial benchand invited george to pick out twenty-five thousand sols’ worth. especially after theproduction coombes had made of posting kellogg’s bail with one of those precertified companychecks. he looked at the whisky bottle in his hand,and then reached into the cupboard for another one. one for gus brannhard, and one for therest of them. there was a widespread belief that that was why gustavus adolphus brannhardwas practicing sporadic law out here in the boondocks of a boondock planet, defendinggun fighters and veldbeest rustlers. it wasn’t.

nobody on zarathustra knew the reason, butit wasn’t whisky. whisky was only the weapon with which gus brannhard fought off the memoryof the reason. he was in the biggest chair in the livingroom, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brownhair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. he wore a faded and grimybush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirtover a shag of gray-brown chest hair. between the bottoms of his shorts and the tops ofhis ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with hair. baby fuzzy was sittingon his head, and mamma fuzzy was on his lap. mike and mitzi sat one on either knee. thefuzzies had taken instantly to gus. bet they

thought he was a big fuzzy. “aaaah!” he rumbled, as the bottle andglass were placed beside him. “been staying alive for hours hoping for this.” “well, don’t let any of the kids get atit. little fuzzy trying to smoke pipes is bad enough; i don’t want any dipsos in thefamily, too.” gus filled the glass. to be on the safe side,he promptly emptied it into himself. “you got a nice family, jack. make a wonderfulimpression in court—as long as baby doesn’t try to sit on the judge’s head. any jurythat sees them and hears that ortheris girl’s story will acquit you from the box, with avote of censure for not shooting kellogg,

too.” “i’m not worried about that. what i wantis kellogg convicted.” “you better worry, jack,” rainsford said.“you saw the combination against us at the hearing.” leslie coombes, the company’s top attorney,had come out from mallorysport in a yacht rated at mach 6, and he must have crowdedit to the limit all the way. with him, almost on a leash, had come mohammed ali o’brien,the colonial attorney general, who doubled as chief prosecutor. they had both tried toget the whole thing dismissed—self-defense for holloway, and killing an unprotected wildanimal for kellogg. when that had failed,

they had teamed in flagrant collusion to fightthe inclusion of any evidence about the fuzzies. after all it was only a complaint court; lieutenantlunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited powers. “you saw how far they got, didn’t you?” “i hope we don’t wish they’d succeeded,”rainsford said gloomily. “what do you mean, ben?” brannhard asked.“what do you think they’ll do?” “i don’t know. that’s what worries me.we’re threatening the zarathustra company, and the company’s too big to be threatenedsafely,” rainsford replied. “they’ll try to frame something on jack.”

“with veridication? that’s ridiculous,ben.” “don’t you think we can prove sapience?”gerd van riebeek demanded. “who’s going to define sapience? and how?”rainsford asked. “why, between them, coombes and o’brien can even agree to accept thetalk-and-build-a-fire rule.” “huh-uh!” brannhard was positive. “courtruling on that, about forty years ago, on vishnu. infanticide case, woman charged withmurder in the death of her infant child. her lawyer moved for dismissal on the groundsthat murder is defined as the killing of a sapient being, a sapient being is definedas one that can talk and build a fire, and a newborn infant can do neither. motion denied;the court ruled that while ability to speak

and produce fire is positive proof of sapience,inability to do either or both does not constitute legal proof of nonsapience. if o’brien doesn’tknow that, and i doubt if he does, coombes will.” brannhard poured another drink andgulped it before the sapient beings around him could get at it. “you know what? i willmake a small wager, and i will even give odds, that the first thing ham o’brien does whenhe gets back to mallorysport will be to enter nolle prosequi on both charges. what i’dlike would be for him to nol. pros. kellogg and let the charge against jack go to court.he would be dumb enough to do that himself, but leslie coombes wouldn’t let him.” “but if he throws out the kellogg case,that’s it,” gerd van riebeek said. “when

jack comes to trial, nobody’ll say a mumblin’word about sapience.” “i will, and i will not mumble it. you allknow colonial law on homicide. in the case of any person killed while in commission ofa felony, no prosecution may be brought in any degree, against anybody. i’m going tocontend that leonard kellogg was murdering a sapient being, that jack holloway actedlawfully in attempting to stop it and that when kurt borch attempted to come to kellogg’sassistance he, himself, was guilty of felony, and consequently any prosecution against jackholloway is illegal. and to make that contention stick, i shall have to say a great many words,and produce a great deal of testimony, about the sapience of fuzzies.”

“it’ll have to be expert testimony,”rainsford said. “the testimony of psychologists. i suppose you know that the only psychologistson this planet are employed by the chartered zarathustra company.” he drank what wasleft of his highball, looked at the bits of ice in the bottom of his glass and then roseto mix another one. “i’d have done the same as you did, jack, but i still wish thishadn’t happened.” “huh!” mamma fuzzy looked up, startledby the exclamation. “what do you think victor grego’s wishing, right now?” victor grego replaced the hand-phone. “leslie,on the yacht,” he said. “they’re coming in now. they’ll stop at the hospital todrop kellogg, and then they’re coming here.”

nick emmert nibbled a canape. he had reddishhair, pale eyes and a wide, bovine face. “holloway must have done him up pretty badly,”he said. “i wish holloway’d killed him!” he blurtedit angrily, and saw the resident general’s shocked expression. “you don’t really mean that, victor?” “the devil i don’t!” he gestured atthe recorder-player, which had just finished the tape of the hearing, transmitted fromthe yacht at sixty-speed. “that’s only a teaser to what’ll come out at the trial.you know what the company’s epitaph will be? kicked to death, along with a fuzzy, byleonard kellogg.”

everything would have worked out perfectlyif kellogg had only kept his head and avoided collision with holloway. why, even the killingof the fuzzy and the shooting of borch, inexcusable as that had been, wouldn’t have been sobad if it hadn’t been for that asinine murder complaint. that was what had provoked holloway’scounter-complaint, which was what had done the damage. and, now that he thought of it, it had beenone of kellogg’s people, van riebeek, who had touched off the explosion in the firstplace. he didn’t know van riebeek himself, but kellogg should have, and he had handledhim the wrong way. he should have known what van riebeek would go along with and what hewouldn’t.

“but, victor, they won’t convict leonardof murder,” emmert was saying. “not for killing one of those little things.” “‘murder shall consist of the deliberateand unjustified killing of any sapient being, of any race,’” he quoted. “that’sthe law. if they can prove in court that the fuzzies are sapient beings….” then, some morning, a couple of deputy marshalswould take leonard kellogg out in the jail yard and put a bullet through the back ofhis head, which, in itself, would be no loss. the trouble was, they would also be shootingan irreparable hole in the zarathustra company’s charter. maybe kellogg could be kept out ofcourt, at that. there wasn’t a ship blasted

off from darius without a couple of drunkenspacemen being hustled aboard at the last moment; with the job holloway must have done,kellogg should look just right as a drunken spaceman. the twenty-five thousand sols’bond could be written off; that was pennies to the company. no, that would still leavethem stuck with the holloway trial. “you want me out of here when the otherscome, victor?” emmert asked, popping another canape into his mouth. “no, no; sit still. this will be the lastchance we’ll have to get everybody together; after this, we’ll have to avoid anythingthat’ll look like collusion.” “well, anything i can do to help; you knowthat, victor,” emmert said.

yes, he knew that. if worst came to utterworst and the company charter were invalidated, he could still hang on here, doing what hecould to salvage something out of the wreckage—if not for the company, then for victor grego.but if zarathustra were reclassified, nick would be finished. his title, his social position,his sinecure, his grafts and perquisites, his alias-shrouded company expense account—allout the airlock. nick would be counted upon to do anything he could—however much thatwould be. he looked across the room at the levitatedglobe, revolving imperceptibly in the orange spotlight. it was full dark on beta continentnow, where leonard kellogg had killed a fuzzy named goldilocks and jack holloway had killeda gunman named kurt borch. that angered him,

too; hell of a gunman! clear shot at the broadof a man’s back, and still got himself killed. borch hadn’t been any better choice thankellogg himself. what was the matter with him; couldn’t he pick men for jobs any more?and ham o’brien! no, he didn’t have to blame himself for o’brien. o’brien wasone of nick emmert’s boys. and he hadn’t picked nick, either. the squawk-box on the desk made a premonitorynoise, and a feminine voice advised him that mr. coombes and his party had arrived. “all right; show them in.” coombes entered first, tall suavely elegant,with a calm, untroubled face. leslie coombes

would wear the same serene expression in themidst of a bombardment or an earthquake. he had chosen coombes for chief attorney, andthinking of that made him feel better. mohammed ali o’brien was neither tall, elegant norcalm. his skin was almost black—he’d been born on agni, under a hot b3 sun. his baldhead glistened, and a big nose peeped over the ambuscade of a bushy white mustache. whatwas it they said about him? only man on zarathustra who could strut sitting down. and behind them,the remnant of the expedition to beta continent—ernst mallin, juan jimenez and ruth ortheris. mallinwas saying that it was a pity dr. kellogg wasn’t with them. “i question that. well, please be seated.we have a great deal to discuss, i’m afraid.”

mr. chief justice frederic pendarvis movedthe ashtray a few inches to the right and the slender vase with the spray of starflowersa few inches to the left. he set the framed photograph of the gentle-faced, white-hairedwoman directly in front of him. then he took a thin cigar from the silver box, carefullypunctured the end and lit it. then, unable to think of further delaying tactics, he drewthe two bulky loose-leaf books toward him and opened the red one, the criminal-casedocket. something would have to be done about this;he always told himself so at this hour. shoveling all this stuff onto central courts had beenall right when mallorysport had had a population of less than five thousand and nothing elseon the planet had had more than five hundred,

but that time was ten years past. the chiefjustice of a planetary colony shouldn’t have to wade through all this to see who hadbeen accused of blotting the brand on a veldbeest calf or who’d taken a shot at whom in abarroom. well, at least he’d managed to get a few misdemeanor and small-claims courtsestablished; that was something. the first case, of course, was a homicide.it usually was. from beta, constabulary fifteen, lieutenant george lunt. jack holloway—soold jack had cut another notch on his gun—cold creek valley, federation citizen, race terranhuman; willful killing of a sapient being, to wit kurt borch, mallorysport, federationcitizen, race terran human. complainant, leonard kellogg, the same. attorney of record forthe defendant, gustavus adolphus brannhard.

the last time jack holloway had killed anybody,it had been a couple of thugs who’d tried to steal his sunstones; it hadn’t even gotteninto complaint court. this time he might be in trouble. kellogg was a company executive.he decided he’d better try the case himself. the company might try to exert pressure. the next charge was also homicide, from constabulary,beta fifteen. he read it and blinked. leonard kellogg, willful killing of a sapient being,to wit, jane doe alias goldilocks, aborigine, race zarathustran fuzzy, complainant, jackholloway, defendant’s attorney of record, leslie coombes. in spite of the outrageousfrivolity of the charge, he began to laugh. it was obviously an attempt to ridicule kellogg’sown complaint out of court. every judicial

jurisdiction ought to have at least one gusbrannhard to liven things up a little. race zarathustran fuzzy! then he stopped laughing suddenly and becamedeadly serious, like an engineer who finds a cataclysmite cartridge lying around primedand connected to a discharger. he reached out to the screen panel and began punchinga combination. a spectacled young man appeared and greeted him deferentially. “good morning, mr. wilkins,” he replied.“a couple of homicides at the head of this morning’s docket—holloway and kellogg,both from beta fifteen. what is known about them?”

the young man began to laugh. “oh, yourhonor, they’re both a lot of nonsense. dr. kellogg killed some pet belonging to old jackholloway, the sunstone digger, and in the ensuing unpleasantness—holloway can be veryunpleasant, if he feels he has to—this man borch, who seems to have been kellogg’sbodyguard, made the suicidal error of trying to draw a gun on holloway. i’m surprisedat lieutenant lunt for letting either of those charges get past hearing court. mr. o’brienhas entered nolle prosequi on both of them, so the whole thing can be disregarded.” mohammed o’brien knew a charge of cataclysmitewhen he saw one, too. his impulse had been to pull the detonator. well, maybe this chargeought to be shot, just to see what it would

bring down. “i haven’t approved the nolle prosequiyet, mr. wilkins,” he mentioned gently. “would you please transmit to me the hearingtapes on these cases, at sixty-speed? i’ll take them on the recorder of this screen.thank you.” he reached out and made the necessary adjustments.wilkins, the clerk of the courts, left the screen, and returned. there was a waveringscream for a minute and a half. going to take more time than he had expected. well.… there wasn’t enough ice in the glass, andleonard kellogg put more in. then there was too much, and he added more brandy. he shouldn’thave started drinking this early, be drunk

by dinnertime if he kept it up, but what elsewas there to do? he couldn’t go out, not with his face like this. in any case, he wasn’tsure he wanted to. they were all down on him. ernst mallin, andruth ortheris, and even juan jimenez. at the constabulary post, coombes and o’brien hadtreated him like an idiot child who has to be hushed in front of company and coming backto mallorysport they had ignored him completely. he drank quickly, and then there was too muchice in the glass again. victor grego had told him he’d better take a vacation till thetrial was over, and put mallin in charge of the division. said he oughtn’t to be incharge while the division was working on defense evidence. well, maybe; it looked like thefirst step toward shoving him completely out

of the company. he dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette.it tasted badly, and after a few puffs he crushed it out. well, what else could he havedone? after they’d found that little grave, he had to make gerd understand what it wouldmean to the company. juan and ruth had been all right, but gerd—the things gerd hadcalled him; the things he’d said about the company. and then that call from holloway,and the humiliation of being ordered out like a tramp. and then that disgusting little beast hadcome pulling at his clothes, and he had pushed it away—well, kicked it maybe—and it hadstruck at him with the little spear it was

carrying. nobody but a lunatic would givea thing like that to an animal anyhow. and he had kicked it again, and it had screamed…. the communication screen in the next roomwas buzzing. maybe that was victor. he gulped the brandy left in the glass and hurried toit. it was leslie coombes, his face remotely expressionless. “oh, hello, leslie.” “good afternoon, dr. kellogg.” the formalityof address was studiously rebuking. “the chief prosecutor just called me; judge pendarvishas denied the nolle prosequi he entered in your case and in mr. holloway’s, and orderedboth cases to trial.”

“you mean they’re actually taking thisseriously?” “it is serious. if you’re convicted, thecompany’s charter will be almost automatically voided. and, although this is important onlyto you personally, you might, very probably, be sentenced to be shot.” he shrugged thatoff, and continued: “now, i’ll want to talk to you about your defense, for whichi am responsible. say ten-thirty tomorrow, at my office. i should, by that time, knowwhat sort of evidence is going to be used against you. i will be expecting you, dr.kellogg.” he must have said more than that, but thatwas all that registered. leonard wasn’t really conscious of going back to the otherroom, until he realized that he was sitting

in his relaxer chair, filling the glass withbrandy. there was only a little ice in it, but he didn’t care. they were going to try him for murder forkilling that little animal, and ham o’brien had said they wouldn’t, he’d promisedhe’d keep the case from trial and he hadn’t, they were going to try him anyhow and if theyconvicted him they would take him out and shoot him for just killing a silly littleanimal he had killed it he’d kicked it and jumped on it he could still hear it screamingand feel the horrible soft crunching under his feet…. he gulped what was left in the glass and pouredand gulped more. then he staggered to his

feet and stumbled over to the couch and threwhimself onto it, face down, among the cushions. leslie coombes found nick emmert with victorgrego in the latter’s office when he entered. they both rose to greet him, and grego said“you’ve heard?” “yes. o’brien called me immediately. icalled my client—my client of record, that is—and told him. i’m afraid it was rathera shock to him.” “it wasn’t any shock to me,” grego saidas they sat down. “when ham o’brien’s as positive about anything as he was aboutthat, i always expect the worst.” “pendarvis is going to try the case himself,”emmert said. “i always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying todo now? cut the company’s throat?”

“he isn’t anti-company. he isn’t pro-companyeither. he’s just pro-law. the law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitantsis a class-iv planet, and has to have a class-iv colonial government. if zarathustra is a class-ivplanet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. if it’s a class-iv planet,the zarathustra company is illegally chartered. it’s his job to put a stop to illegality.frederic pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. you never get anywhereby arguing religion with a priest.” they were both silent for a while after hehad finished. grego was looking at the globe, and he realized, now, that while he was proudof it, his pride was the pride in a paste jewel that stands for a real one in a bankvault. now he was afraid that the real jewel

was going to be stolen from him. nick emmertwas just afraid. “you were right yesterday, victor. i wishholloway’d killed that son of a khooghra. maybe it’s not too late—” “yes, it is, nick. it’s too late to doanything like that. it’s too late to do anything but win the case in court.” heturned to grego. “what are your people doing?” grego took his eyes from the globe. “ernestmallin’s studying all the filmed evidence we have and all the descriptions of fuzzybehavior, and trying to prove that none of it is the result of sapient mentation. ruthortheris is doing the same, only she’s working on the line of instinct and conditioned reflexesand nonsapient, single-stage reasoning. she

has a lot of rats, and some dogs and monkeys,and a lot of apparatus, and some technician from henry stenson’s instrument shop helpingher. juan jimenez is studying mentation of terran dogs, cats and primates, and freyankholphs and mimir black slinkers.” “he hasn’t turned up any simian or canineparallels to that funeral, has he?” grego said nothing, merely shook his head.emmert muttered something inaudible and probably indecent. “i didn’t think he had. i only hope thosefuzzies don’t get up in court, build a bonfire and start making speeches in lingua terra.” nick emmert cried out in panic. “you believethey’re sapient yourself!”

“of course. don’t you?” grego laughed sourly. “nick thinks you haveto believe a thing to prove it. it helps but it isn’t necessary. say we’re a debatingteam; we’ve been handed the negative of the question. resolved: that fuzzies are sapientbeings. personally, i think we have the short end of it, but that only means we’ll haveto work harder on it.” “you know, i was on a debating team at college,”emmert said brightly. when that was disregarded, he added: “if i remember, the first thingwas definition of terms.” grego looked up quickly. “leslie, i thinknick has something. what is the legal definition of a sapient being?”

“as far as i know, there isn’t any. sapienceis something that’s just taken for granted.” “how about talk-and-build-a-fire?” he shook his head. “people of the colonyof vishnu versus emily morrosh, 612 a.e.” he told them about the infanticide case. “iwas looking up rulings on sapience; i passed the word on to ham o’brien. you know, whatyour people will have to do will be to produce a definition of sapience, acceptable to thecourt, that will include all known sapient races and at the same time exclude the fuzzies.i don’t envy them.” “we need some fuzzies of our own to study,”grego said. “too bad we can’t get hold of holloway’s,”emmert said. “maybe we could, if he leaves

them alone at his camp.” “no. we can’t risk that.” he thoughtfor a moment. “wait a moment. i think we might be able to do it at that. legally.” chapter ix jack holloway saw little fuzzy eying the pipehe had laid in the ashtray, and picked it up, putting it in his mouth. little fuzzylooked reproachfully at him and started to get down onto the floor. pappy jack was mean;didn’t he think a fuzzy might want to smoke a pipe, too? well, maybe it wouldn’t hurthim. he picked little fuzzy up and set him back on his lap, offering the pipestem. littlefuzzy took a puff. he didn’t cough over

it; evidently he had learned how to avoidinhaling. “they scheduled the kellogg trial first,”gus brannhard was saying, “and there wasn’t any way i could stop that. you see what theidea is? they’ll try him first, with leslie coombes running both the prosecution and thedefense, and if they can get him acquitted, it’ll prejudice the sapience evidence weintroduce in your trial.” mamma fuzzy made another try at interceptingthe drink he was hoisting, but he frustrated that. baby had stopped trying to sit on hishead, and was playing peek-a-boo from behind his whiskers. “first,” he continued, “they’ll excludeevery bit of evidence about the fuzzies that

they can. that won’t be much, but there’llbe a fight to get any of it in. what they can’t exclude, they’ll attack. they’llattack credibility. of course, with veridication, they can’t claim anybody’s lying, butthey can claim self-deception. you make a statement you believe, true or false, andthe veridicator’ll back you up on it. they’ll attack qualifications on expert testimony.they’ll quibble about statements of fact and statements of opinion. and what they can’texclude or attack, they’ll accept, and then deny that it’s proof of sapience. “what the hell do they want for proof ofsapience?” gerd demanded. “nuclear energy and contragravity and hyperdrive?”

“they will have a nice, neat, pedantic definitionof sapience, tailored especially to exclude the fuzzies, and they will present it in courtand try to get it accepted, and it’s up to us to guess in advance what that will be,and have a refutation of it ready, and also a definition of our own.” “their definition will have to include khooghras.gerd, do the khooghras bury their dead?” “hell, no; they eat them. but you have togive them this, they cook them first.” “look, we won’t get anywhere arguing aboutwhat fuzzies do and khooghras don’t do,” rainsford said. “we’ll have to get a definitionof sapience. remember what ruth said saturday night?”

gerd van riebeek looked as though he didn’twant to remember what ruth had said, or even remember ruth herself. jack nodded, and repeatedit. “i got the impression of non-sapient intelligence shading up to a sharp line, andthen sapience shading up from there, maybe a different color, or wavy lines instead ofstraight ones.” “that’s a good graphic representation,”gerd said. “you know, that line’s so sharp i’d be tempted to think of sapience as aresult of mutation, except that i can’t quite buy the same mutation happening in thesame way on so many different planets.” ben rainsford started to say something, thenstopped short when a constabulary siren hooted over the camp. the fuzzies looked up interestedly.they knew what that was. pappy jack’s friends

in the blue clothes. jack went to the doorand opened it, putting the outside light on. the car was landing; george lunt, two of hismen and two men in civilian clothes were getting out. both the latter were armed, and one ofthem carried a bundle under his arm. “hello, george; come on in.” “we want to talk to you, jack.” lunt’svoice was strained, empty of warmth or friendliness. “at least, these men do.” “why, yes. sure.” he backed into the room to permit them toenter. something was wrong; something bad had come up. khadra came in first, placinghimself beside and a little behind him. lunt

followed, glancing quickly around and placinghimself between jack and the gunrack and also the holstered pistols on the table. the thirdtrooper let the two strangers in ahead of him, and then closed the door and put hisback against it. he wondered if the court might have cancelled his bond and orderedhim into custody. the two strangers—a beefy man with a scrubby black mustache, and a smallerone with a thin, saturnine face—were looking expectantly at lunt. rainsford and van riebeekwere on their feet. gus brannhard leaned over to refill his glass, but did not rise. “let me have the papers,” lunt said tothe beefy stranger. the other took a folded document and handedit over.

“jack, this isn’t my idea,” lunt said.“i don’t want to do it, but i have to. i wouldn’t want to shoot you, either, butyou make any resistance and i will. i’m no kurt borch; i know you, and i won’t takeany chances.” “if you’re going to serve that paper,serve it,” the bigger of the two strangers said. “don’t stand yakking all night.” “jack,” lunt said uncomfortably, “thisis a court order to impound your fuzzies as evidence in the kellogg case. these men aredeputy marshals from central courts; they’ve been ordered to bring the fuzzies into mallorysport.” “let me see the order, jack,” brannhardsaid, still remaining seated.

lunt handed it to jack, and he handed it acrossto brannhard. gus had been drinking steadily all evening; maybe he was afraid he’d showit if he stood up. he looked at it briefly and nodded. “court order, all right, signed by the chiefjustice.” he handed it back. “they have to take the fuzzies, and that’s all thereis to it. keep that order, though, and make them give you a signed and thumbprinted receipt.type it up for them now, jack.” gus wanted to busy him with something, sohe wouldn’t have to watch what was going on. the smaller of the two deputies had droppedthe bundle from under his arm. it was a number of canvas sacks. he sat down at the typewriter,closing his ears to the noises in the room,

and wrote the receipt, naming the fuzziesand describing them, and specifying that they were in good health and uninjured. one ofthem tried to climb to his lap, yeeking frantically; it clutched his shirt, but it was snatchedaway. he was finished with his work before the invaders were with theirs. they had threefuzzies already in sacks. khadra was catching cinderella. ko-ko and little fuzzy had runfor the little door in the outside wall, but lunt was standing with his heels against it,holding it shut; when they saw that, both of them began burrowing in the bedding. thethird trooper and the smaller of the two deputies dragged them out and stuffed them into sacks. he got to his feet, still stunned and onlyhalf comprehending, and took the receipt out

of the typewriter. there was an argument aboutit; lunt told the deputies to sign it or get the hell out without the fuzzies. they signed,inked their thumbs and printed after their signatures. jack gave the paper to gus, tryingnot to look at the six bulging, writhing sacks, or hear the frightened little sounds. “george, you’ll let them have some oftheir things, won’t you?” he asked. “sure. what kind of things?” “their bedding. some of their toys.” “you mean this junk?” the smaller of thetwo deputies kicked the ball-and-stick construction. “all we got orders to take is the fuzzies.”

“you heard the gentleman.” lunt made theword sound worse than son of a khooghra. he turned to the two deputies. “well, you havethem; what are you waiting for?” jack watched from the door as they put thesacks into the aircar, climbed in after them and lifted out. then he came back and satdown at the table. “they don’t know anything about courtorders,” he said. “they don’t know why i didn’t stop it. they think pappy jacklet them down.” “have they gone, jack?” brannhard asked.“sure?” then he rose, reaching behind him, and took up a little ball of white fur.baby fuzzy caught his beard with both tiny hands, yeeking happily.

“baby! they didn’t get him!” brannhard disengaged the little hands fromhis beard and handed him over. “no, and they signed for him, too.” brannharddowned what was left of his drink, got a cigar out of his pocket and lit it. “now, we’regoing to go to mallorysport and get the rest of them back.” “but…. but the chief justice signed thatorder. he won’t give them back just because we ask him to.” brannhard made an impolite noise. “i’llbet everything i own pendarvis never saw that order. they have stacks of those things, signedin blank, in the chief of the court’s office.

if they had to wait to get one of the judgesto sign an order every time they wanted to subpoena a witness or impound physical evidence,they’d never get anything done. if ham o’brien didn’t think this up for himself, lesliecoombes thought it up for him.” “we’ll use my airboat,” gerd said. “youcoming along, ben? let’s get started.” he couldn’t understand. the big ones inthe blue clothes had been friends; they had given the whistles, and shown sorrow whenthe killed one was put in the ground. and why had pappy jack not gotten the big gunand stopped them. it couldn’t be that he was afraid; pappy jack was afraid of nothing. the others were near, in bags like the onein which he had been put; he could hear them,

and called to them. then he felt the edgeof the little knife pappy jack had made. he could cut his way out of this bag now andfree the others, but that would be no use. they were in one of the things the big oneswent up into the sky in, and if he got out now, there would be nowhere to go and theywould be caught at once. better to wait. the one thing that really worried him wasthat he would not know where they were being taken. when they did get away, how would theyever find pappy jack again? gus brannhard was nervous, showing it by beingovertalkative, and that worried jack. he’d stopped twice at mirrors along the hallwayto make sure that his gold-threaded gray neckcloth was properly knotted and that his black jacketwas zipped up far enough and not too far.

now, in front of the door marked the chiefjustice, he paused before pushing the button to fluff his newly shampooed beard. there were two men in the chief justice’sprivate chambers. pendarvis he had seen once or twice, but their paths had never crossed.he had a good face, thin and ascetic, the face of a man at peace with himself. withhim was mohammed ali o’brien, who seemed surprised to see them enter, and then apprehensive.nobody shook hands; the chief justice bowed slightly and invited them to be seated. “now,” he continued, when they found chairs,“miss ugatori tells me that you are making complaint against an action by mr. o’brienhere.”

“we are indeed, your honor.” brannhardopened his briefcase and produced two papers—the writ, and the receipt for the fuzzies, handingthem across the desk. “my client and i wish to know upon what basis of legality your honorsanctioned this act, and by what right mr. o’brien sent his officers to mr. holloway’scamp to snatch these little people from their friend and protector, mr. holloway.” the judge looked at the two papers. “asyou know, miss ugatori took prints of them when you called to make this appointment.i’ve seen them. but believe me, mr. brannhard, this is the first time i have seen the originalof this writ. you know how these things are signed in blank. it’s a practice that hassaved considerable time and effort, and until

now they have only been used when there wasno question that i or any other judge would approve. such a question should certainlyhave existed in this case, because had i seen this writ i would never have signed it.”he turned to the now fidgeting chief prosecutor. “mr. o’brien,” he said, “one simplydoes not impound sapient beings as evidence, as, say, one impounds a veldbeest calf ina brand-alteration case. the fact that the sapience of these fuzzies is still sub judiceincludes the presumption of its possibility. now you know perfectly well that the courtsmay take no action in the face of the possibility that some innocent person may suffer wrong.” “and, your honor,” brannhard leaped intothe breach, “it cannot be denied that these

fuzzies have suffered a most outrageous wrong!picture them—no, picture innocent and artless children, for that is what these fuzzies are,happy trusting little children, who, until then, had known only kindness and affection—rudelykidnapped, stuffed into sacks by brutal and callous men—” “your honor!” o’brien’s face turnedeven blacker than the hot sun of agni had made it. “i cannot hear officers of thecourt so characterized without raising my voice in protest!” “mr. o’brien seems to forget that he isspeaking in the presence of two eye witnesses to this brutal abduction.”

“if the officers of the court need defense,mr. o’brien, the court will defend them. i believe that you should presently considera defense of your own actions.” “your honor, i insist that i only actedas i felt to be my duty,” o’brien said. “these fuzzies are a key exhibit in thecase of people versus kellogg, since only by demonstration of their sapience can anyprosecution against the defendant be maintained.” “then why,” brannhard demanded, “didyou endanger them in this criminally reckless manner?” “endanger them?” o’brien was horrified.“your honor, i acted only to insure their safety and appearance in court.”

“so you took them away from the only manon this planet who knows anything about their proper care, a man who loves them as he wouldhis own human children, and you subjected them to abuse, which, for all you knew, mighthave been fatal to them.” judge pendarvis nodded. “i don’t believe,mr. brannhard, that you have overstated the case. mr. o’brien, i take a very unfavorableview of your action in this matter. you had no right to have what are at least putativelysapient beings treated in this way, and even viewing them as mere physical evidence i mustagree with mr. brannhard’s characterization of your conduct as criminally reckless. now,speaking judicially, i order you to produce those fuzzies immediately and return themto the custody of mr. holloway.”

“well, of course, your honor.” o’brienhad been growing progressively distraught, and his face now had the gray-over-brown hueof a walnut gunstock that has been out in the rain all day. “it’ll take an houror so to send for them and have them brought here.” “you mean they’re not in this building?”pendarvis asked. “oh, no, your honor, there are no facilitieshere. i had them taken to science center—” “what?” jack had determined to keep his mouth shutand let gus do the talking. the exclamation was literally forced out of him. nobody noticed;it had also been forced out of both gus brannhard

and judge pendarvis. pendarvis leaned forwardand spoke with dangerous mildness: “do you refer, mr. o’brien, to the establishmentof the division of scientific study and research of the chartered zarathustra company?” “why, yes; they have facilities for keepingall kinds of live animals, and they do all the scientific work for—” pendarvis cursed blasphemously. brannhardlooked as startled as though his own briefcase had jumped at his throat and tried to bitehim. he didn’t look half as startled as ham o’brien did. “so you think,” pendarvis said, recoveringhis composure with visible effort, “that

the logical custodian of prosecution evidencein a murder trial is the defendant? mr. o’brien, you simply enlarge my view of the possible!” “the zarathustra company isn’t the defendant,”o’brien argued sullenly. “not of record, no,” brannhard agreed.“but isn’t the zarathustra company’s scientific division headed by one leonardkellogg?” “dr. kellogg’s been relieved of his duties,pending the outcome of the trial. the division is now headed by dr. ernst mallin.” “chief scientific witness for the defense;i fail to see any practical difference.” “well, mr. emmert said it would be all right,”o’brien mumbled.

“jack, did you hear that?” brannhard asked.“treasure it in your memory. you may have to testify to it in court sometime.” heturned to the chief justice. “your honor, may i suggest the recovery of these fuzziesbe entrusted to colonial marshal fane, and may i further suggest that mr. o’brien bekept away from any communication equipment until they are recovered.” “that sounds like a prudent suggestion,mr. brannhard. now, i’ll give you an order for the surrender of the fuzzies, and a searchwarrant, just to be on the safe side. and, i think, an orphans’ court form naming mr.holloway as guardian of these putatively sapient beings. what are their names? oh, i have themhere on this receipt.” he smiled pleasantly.

“see, mr. o’brien, we’re saving youa lot of trouble.” o’brien had little enough wit to protest.“but these are the defendant and his attorney in another murder case i’m prosecuting,”he began. pendarvis stopped smiling. “mr. o’brien,i doubt if you’ll be allowed to prosecute anything or anybody around here any more,and i am specifically relieving you of any connection with either the kellogg or theholloway trial, and if i hear any argument out of you about it, i will issue a benchwarrant for your arrest on charges of malfeasance in office.” chapter x

colonial marshal max fane was as heavy asgus brannhard and considerably shorter. wedged between them on the back seat of the marshal’scar, jack holloway contemplated the backs of the two uniformed deputies on the frontseat and felt a happy smile spread through him. going to get his fuzzies back. littlefuzzy, and ko-ko, and mike, and mamma fuzzy, and mitzi, and cinderella; he named them overand imagined them crowding around him, happy to be back with pappy jack. the car settled onto the top landing stageof the company’s science center, and immediately a company cop came running up. gus openedthe door, and jack climbed out after him. “hey, you can’t land here!” the copwas shouting. “this is for company executives

only!” max fane emerged behind them and stepped forward;the two deputies piled out from in front. “the hell you say, now,” fane said. “acourt order lands anywhere. bring him along, boys; we wouldn’t want him to go and bumphimself on a communication screen anywhere.” the company cop started to protest, then subsidedand fell in between the deputies. maybe it was beginning to dawn on him that the federationcourts were bigger than the chartered zarathustra company after all. or maybe he just thoughtthere’d been a revolution. leonard kellogg’s—temporarily ernst mallin’s—officewas on the first floor of the penthouse, counting down from the top landing stage. when theystepped from the escalator, the hall was crowded

with office people, gabbling excitedly ingroups; they all stopped talking as soon as they saw what was coming. in the divisionchief’s outer office three or four girls jumped to their feet; one of them jumped intothe bulk of marshal fane, which had interposed itself between her and the communication screen.they were all shooed out into the hall, and one of the deputies was dropped there withthe prisoner. the middle office was empty. fane took his badgeholder in his left handas he pushed through the door to the inner office. kellogg’s—temporarily mallin’s—secretaryseemed to have preceded them by a few seconds; she was standing in front of the desk sputteringincoherently. mallin, starting to rise from

his chair, froze, hunched forward over thedesk. juan jimenez, standing in the middle of the room, seemed to have seen them first;he was looking about wildly as though for some way of escape. fane pushed past the secretary and went upto the desk, showing mallin his badge and then serving the papers. mallin looked athim in bewilderment. “but we’re keeping those fuzzies for mr.o’brien, the chief prosecutor,” he said. “we can’t turn them over without his authorization.” “this,” max fane said gently, “is anorder of the court, issued by chief justice pendarvis. as for mr. o’brien, i doubt ifhe’s chief prosecutor any more. in fact,

i suspect that he’s in jail. and that,”he shouted, leaning forward as far as his waistline would permit and banging on thedesk with his fist, “is where i’m going to stuff you, if you don’t get those fuzziesin here and turn them over immediately!” if fane had suddenly metamorphosed himselfinto a damnthing, it couldn’t have shaken mallin more. involuntarily he cringed fromthe marshal, and that finished him. “but i can’t,” he protested. “we don’tknow exactly where they are at the moment.” “you don’t know.” fane’s voice sankalmost to a whisper. “you admit you’re holding them here, but you … don’t … know… where. now start over again; tell the truth this time!”

at that moment, the communication screen beganmaking a fuss. ruth ortheris, in a light blue tailored costume, appeared in it. “dr. mallin, what is going on here?” shewanted to know. “i just came in from lunch, and a gang of men are tearing my office up.haven’t you found the fuzzies yet?” “what’s that?” jack yelled. at the sametime, mallin was almost screaming: “ruth! shut up! blank out and get out of the building!” with surprising speed for a man of his girth,fane whirled and was in front of the screen, holding his badge out. “i’m colonel marshal fane. now, youngwoman; i want you up here right away. don’t

make me send anybody after you, because iwon’t like that and neither will you.” “right away, marshal.” she blanked thescreen. fane turned to mallin. “now.” he wasn’tbothering with vocal tricks any more. “are you going to tell me the truth, or am i goingto run you in and put a veridicator on you? where are those fuzzies?” “but i don’t know!” mallin wailed. “juan,you tell him; you took charge of them. i haven’t seen them since they were brought here.” jack managed to fight down the fright thatwas clutching at him and got control of his voice.

“if anything’s happened to those fuzzies,you two are going to envy kurt borch before i’m through with you,” he said. “all right, how about it?” fane askedjimenez. “start with when you and ham o’brien picked up the fuzzies at central courts buildinglast night. “well, we brought them here. i’d gottensome cages fixed up for them, and—” ruth ortheris came in. she didn’t try toavoid jack’s eyes, nor did she try to brazen it out with him. she merely nodded distantly,as though they’d met on a ship sometime, and sat down. “what happened, marshal?” she asked. “whyare you here with these gentlemen?”

“the court’s ordered the fuzzies returnedto mr. holloway.” mallin was in a dither. “he has some kind a writ or something, andwe don’t know where they are.” “oh, no!” ruth’s face, for an instant,was dismay itself. “not when—” then she froze shut. “i came in about o-seven-hundred,” jimenezwas saying, “to give them food and water, and they’d broken out of their cages. thenetting was broken loose on one cage and the fuzzy that had been in it had gotten out andlet the others out. they got into my office—they made a perfect shambles of it—and got outthe door into the hall, and now we don’t know where they are. and i don’t know howthey did any of it.”

cages built for something with no hands andalmost no brains. ever since kellogg and mallin had come to the camp, mallin had been hypnotizinghimself into the just-silly-little-animals doctrine. he must have succeeded; last nighthe’d acted accordingly. “we want to see the cages,” jack said. “yeah.” fane went to the outer door. “miguel.” the deputy came in, herding the company copahead of him. “you heard what happened?” fane asked. “yeah. big fuzzy jailbreak. what did theydo, make little wooden pistols and bluff their way out?”

“by god, i wouldn’t put it past them.come along. bring chummy along with you; he knows the inside of this place better thanwe do. piet, call in. we want six more men. tell chang to borrow from the constabularyif he has to.” “wait a minute,” jack said. he turnedto ruth. “what do you know about this?” “well, not much. i was with dr. mallin herewhen mr. grego—i mean, mr. o’brien—called to tell us that the fuzzies were going tobe kept here till the trial. we were going to fix up a room for them, but till that couldbe done, juan got some cages to put them in. that was all i knew about it till o-nine-thirty,when i came in and found everything in an uproar and was told that the fuzzies had gottenloose during the night. i knew they couldn’t

get out of the building, so i went to my officeand lab to start overhauling some equipment we were going to need with the fuzzies. aboutten-hundred, i found i couldn’t do anything with it, and my assistant and i loaded iton a pickup truck and took it to henry stenson’s instrument shop. by the time i was throughthere, i had lunch and then came back here.” he wondered briefly how a polyencephalographicveridicator would react to some of those statements; might be a good idea if max fane found out. “i’ll stay here,” gus brannhard wassaying, “and see if i can get some more truth out of these people.” “why don’t you screen the hotel and tellgerd and ben what’s happened?” he asked.

“gerd used to work here; maybe he couldhelp us hunt.” “good idea. piet, tell our re-enforcementsto stop at the mallory on the way and pick him up.” fane turned to jimenez. “comealong; show us where you had these fuzzies and how they got away.” “you say one of them broke out of his cageand then released the others,” jack said to jimenez as they were going down on theescalator. “do you know which one it was?” jimenez shook his head. “we just took themout of the bags and put them into the cages.” that would be little fuzzy; he’d alwaysbeen the brains of the family. with his leadership, they might have a chance. the trouble wasthat this place was full of dangers fuzzies

knew nothing about—radiation and poisonsand electric wiring and things like that. if they really had escaped. that was a possibilitythat began worrying jack. on each floor they passed going down, he couldglimpse parties of company employees in the halls, armed with nets and blankets and othercatching equipment. when they got off jimenez led them through a big room of glass cases—mountedspecimens and articulated skeletons of zarathustran mammals. more people were there, looking aroundand behind and even into the cases. he began to think that the escape was genuine, andnot just a cover-up for the murder of the fuzzies. jimenez took them down a narrow hall beyondto an open door at the end. inside, the permanent

night light made a blue-white glow; a swivelchair stood just inside the door. jimenez pointed to it. “they must have gotten up on that to workthe latch and open the door,” he said. it was like the doors at the camp, springlatch, with a handle instead of a knob. they’d have learned how to work it from watchinghim. fane was trying the latch. “not too stiff,” he said. “your littlefellows strong enough to work it?” he tried it and agreed. “sure. and they’dbe smart enough to do it, too. even baby fuzzy, the one your men didn’t get, would be ableto figure that out.” “and look what they did to my office,”jimenez said, putting on the lights.

they’d made quite a mess of it. they hadn’tdelayed long to do it, just thrown things around. everything was thrown off the topof the desk. they had dumped the wastebasket, and left it dumped. he saw that and chuckled.the escape had been genuine all right. “probably hunting for things they coulduse as weapons, and doing as much damage as they could in the process.” there was evidentlya pretty wide streak of vindictiveness in fuzzy character. “i don’t think they likeyou, juan.” “wouldn’t blame them,” fane said. “let’ssee what kind of a houdini they did on these cages now.” the cages were in a room—file room, storeroom,junk room—behind jimenez’s office. it

had a spring lock, too, and the fuzzies haddragged one of the cages over and stood on it to open the door. the cages themselveswere about three feet wide and five feet long, with plywood bottoms, wooden frames and quarter-inchnetting on the sides and tops. the tops were hinged, and fastened with hasps, and boltsslipped through the staples with nuts screwed on them. the nuts had been unscrewed fromfive and the bolts slipped out; the sixth cage had been broken open from the inside,the netting cut away from the frame at one corner and bent back in a triangle big enoughfor a fuzzy to crawl through. “i can’t understand that,” jimenez wassaying. “why that wire looks as though it had been cut.”

“it was cut. marshal, i’d pull somebody’sbelt about this, if i were you. your men aren’t very careful about searching prisoners. oneof the fuzzies hid a knife out on them.” he remembered how little fuzzy and ko-ko hadburrowed into the bedding in apparently unreasoning panic, and explained about the little spring-steelknives he had made. “i suppose he palmed it and hugged himself into a ball, as thoughhe was scared witless, when they put him in the bag.” “waited till he was sure he wouldn’t getcaught before he used it, too,” the marshal said. “that wire’s soft enough to cuteasily.” he turned to jimenez. “you people ought to be glad i’m ineligible for juryduty. why don’t you just throw it in and

let kellogg cop a plea?” gerd van riebeek stopped for a moment in thedoorway and looked into what had been leonard kellogg’s office. the last time he’d beenhere, kellogg had had him on the carpet about that land-prawn business. now ernst mallinwas sitting in kellogg’s chair, trying to look unconcerned and not making a very goodjob of it. gus brannhard sprawled in an armchair, smoking a cigar and looking at mallin as hewould look at a river pig when he doubted whether it was worth shooting it or not. auniformed deputy turned quickly, then went back to studying an elaborate wall chart showingthe interrelation of zarathustran mammals—he’d made the original of that chart himself. andruth ortheris sat apart from the desk and

the three men, smoking. she looked up andthen, when she saw that he was looking past and away from her, she lowered her eyes. “you haven’t found them?” he asked brannhard. the fluffy-bearded lawyer shook his head.“jack has a gang down in the cellar, working up. max is in the psychology lab, puttingthe company cops who were on duty last night under veridication. they all claim, and theveridicator backs them up, that it was impossible for the fuzzies to get out of the building.” “they don’t know what’s impossible,for a fuzzy.” “that’s what i told him. he didn’t giveme any argument, either. he’s pretty impressed

with how they got out of those cages.” ruth spoke. “gerd, we didn’t hurt them.we weren’t going to hurt them at all. juan put them in cages because we didn’t haveany other place for them, but we were going to fix up a nice room, where they could playtogether….” then she must have seen that he wasn’t listening, and stopped, crushingout her cigarette and rising. “dr. mallin, if these people haven’t any more questionsto ask me, i have a lot of work to do.” “you want to ask her anything, gerd?”brannhard inquired. once he had had something very important hehad wanted to ask her. he was glad, now, that he hadn’t gotten around to it. hell, shewas so married to the company it’d be bigamy

if she married him too. “no, i don’t want to talk to her at all.” she started for the door, then hesitated.“gerd, i….” she began. then she went out. gus brannhard looked after her, and droppedthe ash of his cigar on leonard kellogg’s—now ernst mallin’s—floor. gerd detested her, and she wouldn’t havehad any respect for him if he didn’t. she ought to have known that something like thiswould happen. it always did, in the business. a smart girl, in the business, never got involvedwith any one man; she always got herself four or five boyfriends, on all possible sides,and played them off one against another.

she’d have to get out of the science centerright away. marshal fane was questioning people under veridication; she didn’t dare lethim get around to her. she didn’t dare go to her office; the veridicator was in thelab across the hall, and that’s where he was working. and she didn’t dare— yes, she could do that, by screen. she wentinto an office down the hall; a dozen people recognized her at once and began bombardingher with questions about the fuzzies. she brushed them off and went to a screen, punchinga combination. after a slight delay, an elderly man with a thin-lipped, bloodless face appeared.when he recognized her, there was a brief look of annoyance on the thin face.

“mr. stenson,” she began, before he couldsay anything: “that apparatus i brought to your shop this morning—the sensory-responsedetector—we’ve made a simply frightful mistake. there’s nothing wrong with it whatever,and if anything’s done with it, it may cause serious damage.” “i don’t think i understand, dr. ortheris.” “well, it was a perfectly natural mistake.you see, we’re all at our wits’ end here. mr. holloway and his lawyer and the colonialmarshal are here with an order from judge pendarvis for the return of those fuzzies.none of us know what we’re doing at all. why the whole trouble with the apparatus wasthe fault of the operator. we’ll have to

have it back immediately, all of it.” “i see, dr. ortheris.” the old instrumentmaker looked worried. “but i’m afraid the apparatus has already gone to the workroom.mr. stephenson has it now, and i can’t get in touch with him at present. if the mistakecan be corrected, what do you want done?” “just hold it; i’ll call or send for it.” she blanked the screen. old johnson, the chiefdata synthesist, tried to detain her with some question. “i’m sorry, mr. johnson. i can’t stopnow. i have to go over to company house right away.”

the suite at the hotel mallory was crowdedwhen jack holloway returned with gerd van riebeek; it was noisy with voices, and theventilators were laboring to get rid of the tobacco smoke. gus brannhard, ben rainsfordand baby fuzzy were meeting the press. “oh, mr. holloway!” somebody shouted ashe entered. “have you found them yet?” “no; we’ve been all over science centerfrom top to bottom. we know they went down a few floors from where they’d been caged,but that’s all. i don’t think they could have gotten outside; the only exit on theground level’s through a vestibule where a company policeman was on duty, and there’sno way for them to have climbed down from any of the terraces or landing stages.”

“well, mr. holloway, i hate to suggest this,”somebody else said, “but have you eliminated the possibility that they may have hiddenin a trash bin and been dumped into the mass-energy converter?” “we thought of that. the converter’s underground,in a vault that can be entered only by one door, and that was locked. no trash was disposedof between the time they were brought there and the time the search started, and everythingthat’s been sent to the converter since has been checked piece by piece.” “well, i’m glad to hear that, mr. holloway,and i know that everybody hearing this will be glad, too. i take it you’ve not givenup looking for them?”

“are we on the air now? no, i have not;i’m staying here in mallorysport until i either find them or am convinced that theyaren’t in the city. and i am offering a reward of two thousand sols apiece for theirreturn to me. if you’ll wait a moment, i’ll have descriptions ready for you….” victor grego unstoppered the refrigeratedcocktail jug. “more?” he asked leslie coombes. “yes, thank you.” coombes held his glassuntil it was filled. “as you say, victor, you made the decision, but you made it onmy advice, and the advice was bad.” he couldn’t disagree, even politely, withthat. he hoped it hadn’t been ruinously

bad. one thing, leslie wasn’t trying topass the buck, and considering how ham o’brien had mishandled his end of it, he could havedone so quite plausibly. “i used bad judgment,” coombes said dispassionately,as though discussing some mistake hitler had made, or napoleon. “i thought o’brienwouldn’t try to use one of those presigned writs, and i didn’t think pendarvis wouldadmit, publicly, that he signed court orders in blank. he’s been severely criticizedby the press about that.” he hadn’t thought brannhard and hollowaywould try to fight a court order either. that was one of the consequences of being too longin a seemingly irresistible position; you didn’t expect resistance. kellogg hadn’texpected jack holloway to order him off his

land grant. kurt borch had thought all heneeded to do with a gun was pull it and wave it around. and jimenez had expected the fuzziesto just sit in their cages. “i wonder where they got to,” coombeswas saying. “i understand they couldn’t be found at all in the building.” “ruth ortheris has an idea. she got awayfrom science center before fane could get hold of her and veridicate her. it seems sheand an assistant took some apparatus out, about ten o’clock, in a truck. she thinksthe fuzzies hitched a ride with her. i know that sounds rather improbable, but hell, everythingelse sounds impossible. i’ll have it followed up. maybe we can find them before hollowaydoes. they’re not inside science center,

that’s sure.” his own glass was empty;he debated a refill and voted against it. “o’brien’s definitely out, i take it?” “completely. pendarvis gave him his choiceof resigning or facing malfeasance charges.” “they couldn’t really convict him of malfeasancefor that, could they? misfeasance, maybe, but—” “they could charge him. and then they couldinterrogate him under veridication about his whole conduct in office, and you know whatthey would bring out,” coombes said. “he almost broke an arm signing his resignation.he’s still attorney general of the colony, of course; nick issued a statement supportinghim. that hasn’t done nick as much harm

as o’brien could do spilling what he knowsabout residency affairs. “now brannhard is talking about bringingsuit against the company, and he’s furnishing copies of all the fuzzy films holloway hasto the news services. interworld news is going hog-wild with it, and even the services wecontrol can’t play it down too much. i don’t know who’s going to be prosecuting thesecases; but whoever it is, he won’t dare pull any punches. and the whole thing’smade pendarvis hostile to us. i know, the law and the evidence and nothing but the lawand the evidence, but the evidence is going to filter into his conscious mind throughthis hostility. he’s called a conference with brannhard and myself for tomorrow afternoon;i don’t know what that’s going to be like.”

chapter xi the two lawyers had risen hastily when chiefjustice pendarvis entered; he responded to their greetings and seated himself at hisdesk, reaching for the silver cigar box and taking out a panatela. gustavus adolphus brannhardpicked up the cigar he had laid aside and began puffing on it; leslie coombes took acigarette from his case. they both looked at him, waiting like two drawn weapons—abattle ax and a rapier. “well, gentlemen, as you know, we have acouple of homicide cases and nobody to prosecute them,” he began. “why bother, your honor?” coombes asked.“both charges are completely frivolous.

one man killed a wild animal, and the otherkilled a man who was trying to kill him.” “well, your honor, i don’t believe myclient is guilty of anything, legally or morally,” brannhard said. “i want that establishedby an acquittal.” he looked at coombes. “i should think mr. coombes would be justas anxious to have his client cleared of any stigma of murder, too.” “i am quite agreed. people who have beencharged with crimes ought to have public vindication if they are innocent. now, in the first place,i planned to hold the kellogg trial first, and then the holloway trial. are you bothsatisfied with that arrangement?” “absolutely not, your honor,” brannhardsaid promptly. “the whole basis of the holloway

defense is that this man borch was killedin commission of a felony. we’re prepared to prove that, but we don’t want our caseprejudiced by an earlier trial.” coombes laughed. “mr. brannhard wants toclear his client by preconvicting mine. we can’t agree to anything like that.” “yes, and he is making the same objectionto trying your client first. well, i’m going to remove both objections. i’m going toorder the two cases combined, and both defendants tried together.” a momentary glow of unholy glee on gus brannhard’sface; coombes didn’t like the idea at all. “your honor, i trust that that suggestionwas only made facetiously,” he said.

“it wasn’t, mr. coombes.” “then if your honor will not hold me incontempt for saying so, it is the most shockingly irregular—i won’t go so far as to sayimproper—trial procedure i’ve ever heard of. this is not a case of accomplices chargedwith the same crime; this is a case of two men charged with different criminal acts,and the conviction of either would mean the almost automatic acquittal of the other. idon’t know who’s going to be named to take mohammed o’brien’s place, but i pityhim from the bottom of my heart. why, mr. brannhard and i could go off somewhere andplay poker while the prosecutor would smash the case to pieces.”

“well, we won’t have just one prosecutor,mr. coombes, we will have two. i’ll swear you and mr. brannhard in as special prosecutors,and you can prosecute mr. brannhard’s client, and he yours. i think that would remove anyfurther objections.” it was all he could do to keep his face judiciallygrave and unmirthful. brannhard was almost purring, like a big tiger that had just gottenthe better of a young goat; leslie coombes’s suavity was beginning to crumble slightlyat the edges. “your honor, that is a most excellent suggestion,”brannhard declared. “i will prosecute mr. coombes’s client with the greatest pleasurein the universe.” “well, all i can say, your honor, is thatif the first proposal was the most irregular

i had ever heard, the record didn’t lastlong!” “why, mr. coombes, i went over the law andthe rules of jurisprudence very carefully, and i couldn’t find a word that could beconstrued as disallowing such a procedure.” “i’ll bet you didn’t find any precedentfor it either!” leslie coombes should have known better thanthat; in colonial law, you can find a precedent for almost anything. “how much do you bet, leslie?” brannhardasked, a larcenous gleam in his eye. “don’t let him take your money away fromyou. i found, inside an hour, sixteen precedents, from twelve different planetary jurisdictions.”

“all right, your honor,” coombes capitulated.“but i hope you know what you’re doing. you’re turning a couple of cases of thepeople of the colony into a common civil lawsuit.” gus brannhard laughed. “what else is it?”he demanded. “friends of little fuzzy versus the chartered zarathustra company; i’m bringingaction as friend of incompetent aborigines for recognition of sapience, and mr. coombes,on behalf of the zarathustra company, is contesting to preserve the company’s charter, and that’sall there is or ever was to this case.” that was impolite of gus. leslie coombes hadwanted to go on to the end pretending that the company charter had absolutely nothingto do with it. there was an unending stream of reports offuzzies seen here and there, often simultaneously

in impossibly distant parts of the city. somewere from publicity seekers and pathological liars and crackpots; some were the resultof honest mistakes or overimaginativeness. there was some reason to suspect that nota few had originated with the company, to confuse the search. one thing did come tolight which heartened jack holloway. an intensive if concealed search was being made by thecompany police, and by the mallorysport police department, which the company controlled. max fane was giving every available momentto the hunt. this wasn’t because of ill will for the company, though that was present,nor because the chief justice was riding him. the colonial marshal was pro-fuzzy. so werethe colonial constabulary, over whom nick

emmert’s administration seemed to have littleif any authority. colonel ian ferguson, the commandant, had his appointment direct fromthe colonial office on terra. he had called by screen to offer his help, and george lunt,over on beta, screened daily to learn what progress was being made. living at the hotel mallory was expensive,and jack had to sell some sunstones. the company gem buyers were barely civil to him; he didn’ttry to be civil at all. there was also a noticeable coolness toward him at the bank. on the otherhand, on several occasions, space navy officers and ratings down from xerxes base went outof their way to accost him, introduce themselves, shake hands with him and give him their bestwishes.

once, in one of the weather-domed businesscenters, an elderly man with white hair showing under his black beret greeted him. “mr. holloway i want to tell you how grievedi am to learn about the disappearance of those little people of yours,” he said. “i’mafraid there’s nothing i can do to help you, but i hope they turn up safely.” “why, thank you, mr. stenson.” he shookhands with the old master instrument maker. “if you could make me a pocket veridicator,to use on some of these people who claim they saw them, it would be a big help.” “well, i do make rather small portable veridicatorsfor the constabulary, but i think what you

need is an instrument for detection of psychopaths,and that’s slightly beyond science at present. but if you’re still prospecting for sunstones,i have an improved micro-ray scanner i just developed, and….” he walked with stenson to his shop, had acup of tea and looked at the scanner. from stenson’s screen, he called max fane. sixmore people had claimed to have seen the fuzzies. within a week, the films taken at the camphad been shown so frequently on telecast as to wear out their interest value. baby, however,was still available for new pictures, and in a few days a girl had to be hired to takecare of his fan mail. once, entering a bar, jack thought he saw baby sitting on a woman’shead. a second look showed that it was only

a life-sized doll, held on with an elasticband. within a week, he was seeing baby fuzzy hats all over town, and shop windows werefull of life-sized fuzzy dolls. in the late afternoon, two weeks after thefuzzies had vanished, marshal fane dropped him at the hotel. they sat in the car fora moment, and fane said: “i think this is the end of it. we’reall out of cranks and exhibitionists now.” he nodded. “that woman we were talking to.she’s crazy as a bedbug.” “yeah. in the past ten years she’s confessedto every unsolved crime on the planet. it shows you how hard up we are that i wasteyour time and mine listening to her.” “max, nobody’s seen them. you think theyjust aren’t, any more, don’t you?”

the fat man looked troubled. “well, jack,it isn’t so much that nobody’s seen them. nobody’s seen any trace of them. there areland-prawns all around, but nobody’s found a cracked shell. and six active, playful,inquisitive fuzzies ought to be getting into things. they ought to be raiding food markets,and fruit stands, getting into places and ransacking. but there hasn’t been a thing.the company police have stopped looking for them now.” “well, i won’t. they must be around somewhere.”he shook fane’s hand, and got out of the car. “you’ve been awfully helpful, max.i want you to know how much i thank you.” he watched the car lift away, and then lookedout over the city—a vista of treetop green,

with roofs and the domes of shopping centersand business centers and amusement centers showing through, and the angular buttes oftall buildings rising above. the streetless contragravity city of a new planet that hadnever known ground traffic. the fuzzies could be hiding anywhere among those trees—orthey could all be dead in some man-made trap. he thought of all the deadly places into whichthey 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 therewas nothing worse than harpies and damnthings. gus brannhard was out when he went down tothe suite; ben rainsford was at a reading

screen, studying a psychology text, and gerdwas working at a desk that had been brought in. baby was playing on the floor with thebright new toys they had gotten for him. when pappy jack came in, he dropped them and ranto be picked up and held. “george called,” gerd said. “they havea family of fuzzies at the post now.” “well, that’s great.” he tried to makeit sound enthusiastic. “how many?” “five, three males and two females. theycall them dr. crippen, dillinger, ned kelly, lizzie borden and calamity jane.” wouldn’t it be just like a bunch of copsto hang names like that on innocent fuzzies? “why don’t you call the post and say helloto them?” ben asked.

“baby likes them; he’d think it was funto talk to them again.” he let himself be urged into it, and punchedout the combination. they were nice fuzzies; almost, but of course not quite, as nice ashis own. “if your family doesn’t turn up in timefor the trial, have gus subpoena ours,” lunt told him. “you ought to have some toproduce 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 wasdelighted with the offer from lunt. another one who didn’t expect to see pappy jack’sfuzzies alive again. “i’m not doing a damn thing here,” rainsfordsaid. “i’m going back to beta till the trial. maybe i can pick up some ideas fromgeorge lunt’s fuzzies. i’m damned if i’m getting away from this crap!” he gesturedat the reading screen. “all i have is a vocabulary, and i don’t know what half thewords mean.” he snapped it off. “i’m beginning to wonder if maybe jimenez mightn’thave been right and ruth ortheris is wrong. maybe you can be just a little bit sapient.” “maybe it’s possible to be sapient andnot know it,” gus said. “like the character

in the old french play who didn’t know hewas talking prose.” “what do you mean, gus?” gerd asked. “i’m not sure i know. it’s just an ideathat occurred to me today. kick it around and see if you can get anything out of it.” “i believe the difference lies in the areaof consciousness,” ernst mallin was saying. “you all know, of course, the axiom thatonly one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the levelof consciousness. now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire mentation is conscious.” “i hope they stay hypothetical,” victorgrego, in his office across the city, said

out of the screen. “they wouldn’t recognizeus as sapient at all.” “we wouldn’t be sapient, as they’d definethe term,” leslie coombes, in the same screen with grego, said. “they’d have some equivalentof the talk-and-build-a-fire rule, based on abilities of which we can’t even conceive.” maybe, ruth thought, they might recognizeus as one-tenth to as much as one-eighth sapient. no, then we’d have to recognize, say, achimpanzee as being one-one-hundredth sapient, and a flatworm as being sapient to the orderof one-billionth. “wait a minute,” she said. “if i understand,you mean that nonsapient beings think, but only subconsciously?”

“that’s correct, ruth. when confrontedby some entirely novel situation, a nonsapient animal will think, but never consciously.of course, familiar situations are dealt with by pure habit and memory-response.” “you know, i’ve just thought of something,”grego said. “i think we can explain that funeral that’s been bothering all of usin nonsapient terms.” he lit a cigarette, while they all looked at him expectantly.“fuzzies,” he continued, “bury their ordure: they do this to avoid an unpleasantsense-stimulus, a bad smell. dead bodies quickly putrefy and smell badly; they are thus equated,subconsciously, with ordure and must be buried. all fuzzies carry weapons. a fuzzy’s weaponis—still subconsciously—regarded as a

part of the fuzzy, hence it must also be buried.” mallin frowned portentously. the idea seemedto appeal to him, but of course he simply couldn’t agree too promptly with a merelayman, even the boss. “well, so far you’re on fairly safe ground,mr. grego,” he admitted. “association of otherwise dissimilar things because ofsome apparent similarity is a recognized element of nonsapient animal behavior.” he frownedagain. “that could be an explanation. i’ll have to think of it.” about this time tomorrow, it would be hisown idea, with grudging recognition of a suggestion by victor grego. in time, that would be forgotten;it would be the mallin theory. grego was apparently

agreeable, as long as the job got done. “well, if you can make anything out of it,pass it on to mr. coombes as soon as possible, to be worked up for use in court,” he said. chapter xii ben rainsford went back to beta continent,and gerd van riebeek remained in mallorysport. the constabulary at post fifteen had madesteel chopper-diggers for their fuzzies, and reported a gratifying abatement of the land-prawnnuisance. they also made a set of scaled-down carpenter tools, and their fuzzies were buildingthemselves a house out of scrap crates and boxes. a pair of fuzzies showed up at benrainsford’s camp, and he adopted them, naming

them flora and fauna. everybody had fuzzies now, and pappy jackonly had baby. he was lying on the floor of the parlor, teaching baby to tie knots ina piece of string. gus brannhard, who spent most of the day in the office in the centralcourts building which had been furnished to him as special prosecutor, was lolling inan armchair in red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee—his whisky consumptionwas down to a couple of drinks a day—and studying texts on two reading screens at once,making an occasional remark into a stenomemophone. gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper inan effort to work something out by symbolic logic. suddenly he crumpled a sheet and threwit across the room, cursing. brannhard looked

away from his screens. “trouble, gerd?” gerd cursed again. “how the devil can itell whether fuzzies generalize?” he demanded. “how can i tell whether they form abstractideas? how can i prove, even, that they have ideas at all? hell’s blazes, how can i evenprove, to your satisfaction, that i think consciously?” “working on that idea i mentioned?” brannhardasked. “i was. it seemed like a good idea but….” “suppose we go back to specific instancesof fuzzy behavior, and present them as evidence

of sapience?” brannhard asked. “that funeral,for instance.” “they’ll still insist that we define sapience.” the communication screen began buzzing. babyfuzzy looked up disinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a figure-eightknot he had tied. jack shoved himself to his feet and put the screen on. it was max fane,and for the first time that he could remember, the colonial marshal was excited. “jack, have you had any news on the screenlately?” “no. something turn up?” “god, yes! the cops are all over the cityhunting the fuzzies; they have orders to shoot

on sight. nick emmert was just on the airwith a reward offer—five hundred sols apiece, dead or alive.” it took a few seconds for that to register.then he became frightened. gus and gerd were both on their feet and crowding to the screenbehind him. “they have some bum from that squatters’camp over on the east side who claims the fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old daughter,”fane was saying. “they have both of them at police headquarters, and they’ve handedthe story out to zarathustra news, and planetwide coverage. of course, they’re company-controlled;they’re playing it for all it’s worth.” “have they been veridicated?” brannharddemanded.

“no, and the city cops are keeping themunder cover. the girl says she was playing outdoors and these fuzzies jumped her andbegan beating her with sticks. her injuries are listed as multiple bruises, fracturedwrist and general shock.” “i don’t believe it! they wouldn’t attacka child.” “i want to talk to that girl and her father,”brannhard was saying. “and i’m going to demand that they make their statements underveridication. this thing’s a frameup, max; i’d bet my ears on it. timing’s just right;only a week till the trial.” maybe the fuzzies had wanted the child toplay with them, and she’d gotten frightened and hurt one of them. a ten-year-old humanchild would look dangerously large to a fuzzy,

and if they thought they were menaced theywould fight back savagely. they were still alive and in the city. thatwas one thing. but they were in worse danger than they had ever been; that was another.fane was asking brannhard how soon he could be dressed. “five minutes? good, i’ll be along topick you up,” he said. “be seeing you.” jack hurried into the bedroom he and brannhardshared; he kicked off his moccasins and began pulling on his boots. brannhard, pulling histrousers up over his pajama pants, wanted to know where he thought he was going. “with you. i’ve got to find them beforesome dumb son of a khooghra shoots them.”

“you stay here,” gus ordered. “stayby the communication screen, and keep the viewscreen on for news. but don’t stop puttingyour boots on; you may have to get out of here fast if i call you and tell you they’vebeen located. i’ll call you as soon as i get anything definite.” gerd had the screen on for news, and was gettingplanetwide, openly owned and operated by the company. the newscaster was wrought up aboutthe brutal attack on the innocent child, but he was having trouble focusing the blame.after all, who’d let the fuzzies escape in the first place? and even a skilled semanticisthad trouble in making anything called a fuzzy sound menacing. at least he gave particulars,true or not.

the child, lolita lurkin, had been playingoutside her home at about twenty-one hundred when she had suddenly been set upon by sixfuzzies, armed with clubs. without provocation, they had dragged her down and beaten her severely.her screams had brought her father, and he had driven the fuzzies away. police had broughtboth the girl and her father, oscar lurkin, to headquarters, where they had told theirstory. city police, company police and constabulary troopers and parties of armed citizens werecombing the eastern side of the city; resident general emmert had acted at once to offera reward of five thousand sols apiece…. “the kid’s lying, and if they ever geta veridicator on her, they’ll prove it”, he said. “emmert, or grego, or the two ofthem together, bribed those people to tell

that story.” “oh, i take that for granted,” gerd said.“i know that place. junktown. ruth does a lot of work there for juvenile court.”he stopped briefly, pain in his eyes, and then continued: “you can hire anybody todo anything over there for a hundred sols, especially if the cops are fixed in advance.” he shifted to the interworld news frequency;they were covering the fuzzy hunt from an aircar. the shanties and parked airjalopiesof junktown were floodlighted from above; lines of men were beating the brush and pokingamong them. once a car passed directly below the pickup, a man staring at the ground fromit over a machine gun.

“wooo! am i glad i’m not in that mess!”gerd exclaimed. “anybody sees something he thinks is a fuzzy and half that gang’llmassacre each other in ten seconds.” “i hope they do!” interworld news was pro-fuzzy; the commentatorin the car was being extremely sarcastic about the whole thing. into the middle of one viewof a rifle-bristling line of beaters somebody in the studio cut a view of the fuzzies, takenat the camp, looking up appealingly while waiting for breakfast. “these,” a voicesaid, “are the terrible monsters against whom all these brave men are protecting us.” a few moments later, a rifle flash and a bang,and then a fusillade brought jack’s heart

into his throat. the pickup car jetted towardit; by the time it reached the spot, the shooting had stopped, and a crowd was gathering aroundsomething white on the ground. he had to force himself to look, then gave a shuddering breathof relief. it was a zaragoat, a three-horned domesticated ungulate. “oh-oh! some squatter’s milk supply finished.”the commentator laughed. “not the first one tonight either. attorney general—formerchief prosecutor—o’brien’s going to have quite a few suits against the administrationto defend as a result of this business.” “he’s going to have a goddamn thunderingbig one from jack holloway!” the communication screen buzzed; gerd snappedit on.

“i just talked to judge pendarvis,” gusbrannhard reported out of it. “he’s issuing an order restraining emmert from paying anyreward except for fuzzies turned over alive and uninjured to marshal fane. and he’sissuing a warning that until the status of the fuzzies is determined, anybody killingone will face charges of murder.” “that’s fine, gus! have you seen the girlor her father yet?” brannhard snarled angrily. “the girl’sin the company hospital, in a private room. the doctors won’t let anybody see her. ithink emmert’s hiding the father in the residency. and i haven’t seen the two copswho brought them in, or the desk sergeant who booked the complaint, or the detectivelieutenant who was on duty here. they’ve

all lammed out. max has a couple of men overin junktown, trying to find out who called the cops in the first place. we may get somethingout of that.” the chief justice’s action was announceda few minutes later; it got to the hunters a few minutes after that and the fuzzy huntbegan falling apart. the city and company police dropped out immediately. most of thecivilians, hoping to grab five thousand sols’ worth of live fuzzy, stayed on for twentyminutes, and so, apparently to control them, did the constabulary. then the reward wascancelled, the airborne floodlights went off and the whole thing broke up. gus brannhard came in shortly afterward, startingto undress as soon as he heeled the door shut

after him. when he had his jacket and neckclothoff, he dropped into a chair, filled a water tumbler with whisky, gulped half of it andthen began pulling off his boots. “if that drink has a kid sister, i’lltake it,” gerd muttered. “what happened, gus?” brannhard began to curse. “the whole thing’sa fake; it stinks from here to nifflheim. it would stink on nifflheim.” he pickedup a cigar butt he had laid aside when fane’s call had come in and relighted it. “we foundthe woman who called the police. neighbor; she says she saw lurkin come home drunk, anda little later she heard the girl screaming. she says he beats her up every time he getsdrunk, which is about five times a week, and

she’d made up her mind to stop it the nextchance she got. she denied having seen anything that even looked like a fuzzy anywhere around.” the excitement of the night before had incubateda new brood of fuzzy reports; jack went to the marshal’s office to interview the peoplemaking them. the first dozen were of a piece with the ones that had come in originally.then he talked to a young man who had something of different quality. “i saw them as plain as i’m seeing you,not more than fifty feet away,” he said. “i had an autocarbine, and i pulled up onthem, but gosh, i couldn’t shoot them. they were just like little people, mr. holloway,and they looked so scared and helpless. so

i held over their heads and let off a two-secondburst to scare them away before anybody else saw them and shot them.” “well, son, i’d like to shake your handfor that. you know, you thought you were throwing away a lot of money there. how many did yousee?” “well, only four. i’d heard that therewere six, but the other two could have been back in the brush where i didn’t see them.” he pointed out on the map where it had happened.there were three other people who had actually seen fuzzies; none were sure how many, butthey were all positive about locations and times. plotting the reports on the map, itwas apparent that the fuzzies were moving

north and west across the outskirts of thecity. brannhard showed up for lunch at the hotel,still swearing, but half amusedly. “they’ve exhumed ham o’brien, and they’veput him to work harassing us,” he said. “whole flock of civil suits and dangerous-nuisancecomplaints and that sort of thing; idea’s to keep me amused with them while leslie coombesis working up his case for the trial. even tried to get the manager here to evict baby;i threatened him with a racial-discrimination suit, and that stopped that. and i just filedsuit against the company for seven million sols on behalf of the fuzzies—million apiecefor them and a million for their lawyer.” “this evening,” jack said, “i’m goingout in a car with a couple of max’s deputies.

we’re going to take baby, and we’ll havea loud-speaker on the car.” he unfolded the city map. “they seem to be travelingthis way; they ought to be about here, and with baby at the speaker, we ought to attracttheir attention.” they didn’t see anything, though they keptat it till dusk. baby had a wonderful time with the loud-speaker; when he yeeked intoit, he produced an ear-splitting noise, until the three humans in the car flinched everytime he opened his mouth. it affected dogs too; as the car moved back and forth, it wasfollowed by a chorus of howling and baying on the ground. the next day, there were some scattered reports,mostly of small thefts. a blanket spread on

the grass behind a house had vanished. a coupleof cushions had been taken from a porch couch. a frenzied mother reported having found hersix-year-old son playing with some fuzzies; when she had rushed to rescue him, the fuzzieshad scampered away and the child had begun weeping. jack and gerd rushed to the scene.the child’s story, jumbled and imagination-colored, was definite on one point—the fuzzies hadbeen nice to him and hadn’t hurt him. they got a recording of that on the air at once. when they got back to the hotel, gus brannhardwas there, bubbling with glee. “the chief justice gave me another job ofspecial prosecuting,” he said. “i’m to conduct an investigation into the possibilitythat this thing, the other night, was a frame-up,

and i’m to prepare complaints against anybodywho’s done anything prosecutable. i have authority to hold hearings, and subpoena witnesses,and interrogate them under veridication. max fane has specific orders to cooperate. we’regoing to start, tomorrow, with chief of police dumont and work down. and maybe we can workup, too, as far as nick emmert and victor grego.” he gave a rumbling laugh. “maybethat’ll give leslie coombes something to worry about.” gerd brought the car down beside the rectangularexcavation. it was fifty feet square and twenty feet deep, and still going deeper, with apower shovel in it and a couple of dump scows beside. five or six men in coveralls and ankleboots advanced to meet them as they got out.

“good morning, mr. holloway,” one of themsaid. “it’s right down over the edge of the hill. we haven’t disturbed anything.” “mind running over what you saw again? mypartner here wasn’t in when you called.” the foreman turned to gerd. “we put offa couple of shots about an hour ago. some of the men, who’d gone down over the edgeof the hill, saw these fuzzies run out from under that rock ledge down there, and up thehollow, that way.” he pointed. “they called me, and i went down for a look, and saw wherethey’d been camping. the rock’s pretty hard here, and we used pretty heavy charges.shock waves in the ground was what scared them.”

they started down a path through the flower-dappledtall grass toward the edge of the hill, and down past the gray outcropping of limestonethat formed a miniature bluff twenty feet high and a hundred in length. under an overhangingledge, they found two cushions, a red-and-gray blanket, and some odds and ends of old garmentsthat looked as though they had once been used for polishing rags. there was a broken kitchenspoon, and a cold chisel, and some other metal articles. “that’s it, all right. i talked to thepeople who lost the blanket and the cushions. they must have made camp last night, afteryour gang stopped work; the blasting chased them out. you say you saw them go up thatway?” he asked, pointing up the little stream

that came down from the mountains to the north. the stream was deep and rapid, too much sofor easy fording by fuzzies; they’d follow it back into the foothills. he took everybody’snames and thanked them. if he found the fuzzies himself and had to pay off on an information-receivedbasis, it would take a mathematical genius to decide how much reward to pay whom. “gerd, if you were a fuzzy, where wouldyou go up there?” he asked. gerd looked up the stream that came rushingdown from among the wooded foothills. “there are a couple more houses fartherup,” he said. “i’d get above them. then i’d go up one of those side ravines, andget up among the rocks, where the damnthings

couldn’t get me. of course, there are nodamnthings this close to town, but they wouldn’t know that.” “we’ll need a few more cars. i’ll callcolonel ferguson and see what he can do for me. max is going to have his hands full withthis investigation gus started.” piet dumont, the mallorysport chief of police,might have been a good cop once, but for as long as gus brannhard had known him, he hadbeen what he was now—an empty shell of unsupported arrogance, with a sagging waistline and apuffy face that tried to look tough and only succeeded in looking unpleasant. he was sittingin a seat that looked like an old fashioned electric chair, or like one of those instrumentsof torture to which beauty-shop customers

submit themselves. there was a bright conicalhelmet on his head, and electrodes had been clamped to various portions of his anatomy.on the wall behind him was a circular screen which ought to have been a calm turquoiseblue, but which was flickering from dark blue through violet to mauve. that was simple nervoustension and guilt and anger at the humiliation of being subjected to veridicated interrogation.now and then there would be a stabbing flicker of bright red as he toyed mentally with somedeliberate misstatement of fact. “you know, yourself, that the fuzzies didn’thurt that girl,” brannhard told him. “i don’t know anything of the kind,”the police chief retorted. “all i know’s what was reported to me.”

that had started out a bright red; graduallyit faded into purple. evidently piet dumont was adopting a rules-of-evidence definitionof truth. “who told you about it?” “luther woller. detective lieutenant onduty at the time.” the veridicator agreed that that was the truthand not much of anything but the truth. “but you know that what really happenedwas that lurkin beat the girl himself, and woller persuaded them both to say the fuzziesdid it,” max fane said. “i don’t know anything of the kind!”dumont almost yelled. the screen blazed red. “all i know’s what they told me; nobodysaid anything else.” red and blue, juggling

in a typical quibbling pattern. “as faras i know, it was the fuzzies done it.” “now, piet,” fane told him patiently.“you’ve used this same veridicator here often enough to know you can’t get awaywith lying on it. woller’s making you the patsy for this, and you know that, too. isn’tit true, now, that to the best of your knowledge and belief those fuzzies never touched thatgirl, and it wasn’t till woller talked to lurkin and his daughter at headquarters thatanybody even mentioned fuzzies?” the screen darkened to midnight blue, andthen, slowly, it lightened. “yeah, that’s true,” dumont admitted.he avoided their eyes, and his voice was surly. “i thought that was how it was, and i askedwoller. he just laughed at me and told me

to forget it.” the screen seethed momentarilywith anger. “that son of a khooghra thinks he’s chief, not me. one word from me andhe does just what he damn pleases!” “now you’re being smart, piet,” fanesaid. “let’s start all over….” a constabulary corporal was at the controlsof the car jack had rented from the hotel: gerd had taken his place in one of the twoconstabulary cars. the third car shuttled between them, and all three talked back andforth by radio. “mr. holloway.” it was the trooper inthe car gerd had been piloting. “your partner’s down on the ground; he just called me withhis portable. he’s found a cracked prawn-shell.” “keep talking; give me direction,” thecorporal at the controls said, lifting up.

in a moment, they sighted the other car, hoveringover a narrow ravine on the left bank of the stream. the third car was coming in from thenorth. gerd was still squatting on the ground when they let down beside him. he looked upas they jumped out. “this is it, jack” he said. “regularfuzzy job.” so it was. whatever they had used, it hadn’tbeen anything sharp; the head was smashed instead of being cleanly severed. the shell,however, had been broken from underneath in the standard manner, and all four mandibleshad been broken off for picks. they must have all eaten at the prawn, share alike. it hadbeen done quite recently. they sent the car up, and while all threeof them circled about, they went up the ravine

on foot, calling: “little fuzzy! littlefuzzy!” they found a footprint, and then another, where seepage water had moistenedthe ground. gerd was talking excitedly into the portable radio he carried slung on hischest. “one of you, go ahead a quarter of a mile,and then circle back. they’re in here somewhere.” “i see them! i see them!” a voice whoopedout of the radio. “they’re going up the slope on your right, among the rocks!” “keep them in sight; somebody come and pickus up, and we’ll get above them and head them off.” the rental car dropped quickly, the corporalgetting the door open. he didn’t bother

going off contragravity; as soon as they werein and had pulled the door shut behind them, he was lifting again. for a moment, the hillswung giddily as the car turned, and then jack saw them, climbing the steep slope amongthe rocks. only four of them, and one was helping another. he wondered which ones theywere, what had happened to the other two and if the one that needed help had been badlyhurt. the car landed on the top, among the rocks,settling at an awkward angle. he, gerd and the pilot piled out and started climbing andsliding down the declivity. then he found himself within reach of a fuzzy and grabbed.two more dashed past him, up the steep hill. the one he snatched at had something in hishand, and aimed a vicious blow at his face

with it; he had barely time to block it withhis forearm. then he was clutching the fuzzy and disarming him; the weapon was a quarter-poundballpeen hammer. he put it in his hip pocket and then picked up the struggling fuzzy withboth hands. “you hit pappy jack!” he said reproachfully.“don’t you know pappy any more? poor scared little thing!” the fuzzy in his arms yeeked angrily. thenhe looked, and it was no fuzzy he had ever seen before—not little fuzzy, nor funny,pompous ko-ko, nor mischievous mike. it was a stranger fuzzy. “well, no wonder; of course you didn’tknow pappy jack. you aren’t one of pappy

jack’s fuzzies at all!” at the top, the constabulary corporal wassitting on a rock, clutching two fuzzies, one under each arm. they stopped strugglingand yeeked piteously when they saw their companion also a captive. “your partner’s down below, chasing theother one,” the corporal said. “you better take these too; you know them and i don’t.” “hang onto them; they don’t know me anybetter than they do you.” with one hand, he got a bit of extee threeout of his coat and offered it; the fuzzy gave a cry of surprised pleasure, snatchedit and gobbled it. he must have eaten it before.

when he gave some to the corporal, the othertwo, a male and a female, also seemed familiar with it. from below, gerd was calling: “i got one, it’s a girl fuzzy; i don’tknow if it’s mitzi or cinderella. and, my god, wait till you see what she was carrying.” gerd came into sight, the fourth fuzzy strugglingunder one arm and a little kitten, black with a white face, peeping over the crook of hisother elbow. he was too stunned with disappointment to look at it with more than vague curiosity. “they aren’t our fuzzies, gerd. i neversaw any of them before.” “jack, are you sure?”

“of course i’m sure!” he was indignant.“don’t you think i know my own fuzzies? don’t you think they’d know me?” “where’d the pussy come from?” the corporalwanted to know. “god knows. they must have picked it upsomewhere. she was carrying it in her arms, like a baby.” “they’re somebody’s fuzzies. they’vebeen fed extee three. we’ll take them to the hotel. whoever it is, i’ll bet he missesthem as much as i do mine.” his own fuzzies, whom he would never see again.the full realization didn’t hit him until he and gerd were in the car again. there hadbeen no trace of his fuzzies from the time

they had broken out of their cages at sciencecenter. this quartet had appeared the night the city police had manufactured the storyof the attack on the lurkin girl, and from the moment they had been seen by the youthwho couldn’t bring himself to fire on them, they had left a trail that he had been ableto pick up at once and follow. why hadn’t his own fuzzies attracted as much notice inthe three weeks since they had vanished? because his own fuzzies didn’t exist anymore. they had never gotten out of science center alive. somebody max fane hadn’t beenable to question under veridication had murdered them. there was no use, any more, trying toconvince himself differently. “we’ll stop at their camp and pick upthe blanket and the cushions and the rest

of the things. i’ll send the people wholost them checks,” he said. “the fuzzies ought to have those things.” chapter xiii the management of the hotel mallory appearedto have undergone a change of heart, or of policy, toward fuzzies. it might have beengus brannhard’s threats of action for racial discrimination and the possibility that thefuzzies might turn out to be a race instead of an animal species after all. the managermight have been shamed by the way the lurkin story had crumbled into discredit, and influencedby the revived public sympathy for the fuzzies. or maybe he just decided that the charteredzarathustra company wasn’t as omnipotent

as he’d believed. at any rate, a large room,usually used for banquets, was made available for the fuzzies george lunt and ben rainsfordwere bringing in for the trial, and the four strangers and their black-and-white kittenwere installed there. there were a lot of toys of different sorts, courtesy of the management,and a big view screen. the four strange fuzzies dashed for this immediately and turned iton, yeeking in delight as they watched landing craft coming down and lifting out at the municipalspaceport. they found it very interesting. it only bored the kitten. with some misgivings, jack brought baby downand introduced him. they were delighted with baby, and baby thought the kitten was themost wonderful thing he had ever seen. when

it was time to feed them, jack had his owndinner brought in, and ate with them. gus and gerd came down and joined him later. “we got the lurkin kid and her father,”gus said, and then falsettoed: “‘naw, pop gimme a beatin’, and the cops told meto say it was the fuzzies.’” “she say that?” “under veridication, with the screen blueas a sapphire, in front of half a dozen witnesses and with audiovisuals on. interworld’s puttingit on the air this evening. her father admitted it, too; named woller and the desk sergeant.we’re still looking for them; till we get them, we aren’t any closer to emmert orgrego. we did pick up the two car cops, but

they don’t know anything on anybody butwoller.” that was good enough, as far as it went, brannhardthought, but it didn’t go far enough. there were those four strange fuzzies showing upout of nowhere, right in the middle of nick emmert’s drive-hunt. they’d been keptsomewhere by somebody—that was how they’d learned to eat extee three and found out aboutviewscreens. their appearance was too well synchronized to be accidental. the whole thingsmelled to him of a booby trap. one good thing had happened. judge pendarvishad decided that it would be next to impossible, in view of the widespread public interestin the case and the influence of the zarathustra company, to get an impartial jury, and hadproposed a judicial trial by a panel of three

judges, himself one of them. even leslie coombeshad felt forced to agree to that. he told jack about the decision. jack listenedwith apparent attentiveness, and then said: “you know, gus, i’ll always be glad ilet little fuzzy smoke my pipe when he wanted to, that night out at camp.” the way he was feeling, he wouldn’t havecared less if the case was going to be tried by a panel of three zaragoats. ben rainsford, his two fuzzies, and georgelunt, ahmed khadra and the other constabulary witnesses and their family, arrived shortlybefore noon on saturday. the fuzzies were quartered in the stripped-out banquet room,and quickly made friends with the four already

there, and with baby. each family bedded downapart, but they ate together and played with each others’ toys and sat in a clump towatch the viewscreen. at first, the ferny creek family showed jealousy when too muchattention was paid to their kitten, until they decided that nobody was trying to stealit. it would have been a lot of fun, eleven fuzziesand a baby fuzzy and a black-and-white kitten, if jack hadn’t kept seeing his own family,six quiet little ghosts watching but unable to join the frolicking. max fane brightened when he saw who was onhis screen. “well, colonel ferguson, glad to see you.”

“marshal,” ferguson was smiling broadly.“you’ll be even gladder in a minute. a couple of my men, from post eight, pickedup woller and that desk sergeant, fuentes.” “ha!” he started feeling warm inside,as though he had just downed a slug of baldur honey-rum. “how?” “well, you know nick emmert has a huntinglodge down there. post eight keeps an eye on it for him. this afternoon, one of lieutenantobefemi’s cars was passing over it, and they picked up some radiation and infraredon their detectors, as though the power was on inside. when they went down to investigate,they found woller and fuentes making themselves at home. they brought them in, and both ofthem admitted under veridication that emmert

had given them the keys and sent them downthere to hide out till after the trial. “they denied that emmert had originatedthe frameup. that had been one of woller’s own flashes of genius, but emmert knew whatthe score was and went right along with it. they’re being brought up here the firstthing tomorrow morning.” “well, that’s swell, colonel! has it gottenout to the news services yet?” “no. we would like to have them both questionedhere in mallorysport, and their confessions recorded, before we let the story out. otherwise,somebody might try to take steps to shut them up for good.” that had been what he had been thinking of.he said so, and ferguson nodded. then he hesitated

for a moment, and said: “max, do you like the situation here inmallorysport? be damned if i do.” “what do you mean?” “there are too many strangers in town,”ian ferguson said. “all the same kind of strangers—husky-looking young men, twentyto thirty, going around in pairs and small groups. i’ve been noticing it since daybefore last, and there seem to be more of them every time i look around.” “well, ian, it’s a young man’s planet,and we can expect a big crowd in town for the trial….”

he didn’t really believe that. he just wantedian ferguson to put a name on it first. ferguson shook his head. “no, max. this isn’t a trial-day crowd.we both know what they’re like; remember when they tried the gawn brothers? no whoopingit up in bars, no excitement, no big crap games; this crowd’s just walking around,keeping quiet, as though they expected a word from somebody.” “infiltration.” goddamit, he’d saidit first, himself after all! “victor grego’s worried about this.” “i know it, max. and victor grego’s likea veldbeest bull; he isn’t dangerous till

he’s scared, and then watch out. and againstthe gang that’s moving in here, the men you and i have together would last about aslong as a pint of trade-gin at a sheshan funeral.” “you thinking of pushing the panic-button?” the constabulary commander frowned. “i don’twant to. a dim view would be taken back on terra if i did it without needing to. dimmerview would be taken of needing to without doing it, though. i’ll make another check,first.” gerd van riebeek sorted the papers on thedesk into piles, lit a cigarette and then started to mix himself a highball. “fuzzies are members of a sapient race,”he declared. “they reason logically, both

deductively and inductively. they learn byexperiment, analysis and association. they formulate general principles, and apply themto specific instances. they plan their activities in advance. they make designed artifacts,and artifacts to make artifacts. they are able to symbolize, and convey ideas in symbolicform, and form symbols by abstracting from objects. “they have aesthetic sense and creativity,”he continued. “they become bored in idleness, and they enjoy solving problems for the pleasureof solving them. they bury their dead ceremoniously, and bury artifacts with them.” he blew a smoke ring, and then tasted hisdrink. “they do all these things, and they

also do carpenter work, blow police whistles,make eating tools to eat land-prawns with and put molecule-model balls together. obviouslythey are sapient beings. but don’t please don’t ask me to define sapience, becausegod damn it to nifflheim, i still can’t!” “i think you just did,” jack said. “no, that won’t do. i need a definition.” “don’t worry, gerd,” gus brannhard toldhim. “leslie coombes will bring a nice shiny new definition into court. we’ll just usethat.” chapter xiv they walked together, frederic and claudettependarvis, down through the roof garden toward

the landing stage, and, as she always did,claudette stopped and cut a flower and fastened it in his lapel. “will the fuzzies be in court?” she asked. “oh, they’ll have to be. i don’t knowabout this morning; it’ll be mostly formalities.” he made a grimace that was half a frown andhalf a smile. “i really don’t know whether to consider them as witnesses or as exhibits,and i hope i’m not called on to rule on that, at least at the start. either way, coombesor brannhard would accuse me of showing prejudice.” “i want to see them. i’ve seen them onscreen, but i want to see them for real.” “you haven’t been in one of my courtsfor a long time, claudette. if i find that

they’ll be brought in today, i’ll callyou. i’ll even abuse my position to the extent of arranging for you to see them outsidethe courtroom. would you like that?” she’d love it. claudette had a limitlesscapacity for delight in things like that. they kissed good-bye, and he went to wherehis driver was holding open the door of the aircar and got in. at a thousand feet he lookedback; she was still standing at the edge of the roof garden, looking up. he’d have to find out whether it would besafe for her to come in. max fane was worried about the possibility of trouble, and so wasian ferguson, and neither was given to timorous imaginings. as the car began to descend towardthe central courts buildings, he saw that

there were guards on the roof, and they weren’tjust carrying pistols—he caught the glint of rifle barrels, and the twinkle of steelhelmets. then, as he came in, he saw that their uniforms were a lighter shade of bluethan the constabulary wore. ankle boots and red-striped trousers; space marines in dressblues. so ian ferguson had pushed the button. it occurred to him that claudette might besafer here than at home. a sergeant and a couple of men came up ashe got out; the sergeant touched the beak of his helmet in the nearest thing to a salutea marine ever gave anybody in civilian clothes. “judge pendarvis? good morning, sir.” “good morning, sergeant. just why are federationmarines guarding the court building?”

“standing by, sir. orders of commodore napier.you’ll find that marshal fane’s people are in charge below-decks, but marine captaincasagra and navy captain greibenfeld are waiting to see you in your office.” as he started toward the elevators, a bigzarathustra company car was coming in. the sergeant turned quickly, beckoned a coupleof his men and went toward it on the double. he wondered what leslie coombes would thinkabout those marines. the two officers in his private chambers wereboth wearing sidearms. so, also, was marshal fane, who was with them. they all rose togreet him, sitting down when he was at his desk. he asked the same question he had ofthe sergeant above.

“well, constabulary colonel ferguson calledcommodore napier last evening and requested armed assistance, your honor,” the officerin space navy black said. “he suspected, he said, that the city had been infiltrated.in that, your honor, he was perfectly correct; beginning wednesday afternoon, marine captaincasagra, here, on commodore napier’s orders, began landing a marine infiltration force,preparatory to taking over the residency. that’s been accomplished now; commodorenapier is there, and both resident general emmert and attorney general o’brien areunder arrest, on a variety of malfeasance and corrupt-practice charges, but that won’tcome into your honor’s court. they’ll be sent back to terra for trial.”

“then commodore napier’s taken over thecivil government?” “well, say he’s assumed control of it,pending the outcome of this trial. we want to know whether the present administration’slegal or not.” “then you won’t interfere with the trialitself?” “that depends, your honor. we are certainlygoing to participate.” he looked at his watch. “you won’t convene court for anotherhour? then perhaps i’ll have time to explain.” max fane met them at the courtroom door witha pleasant greeting. then he saw baby fuzzy on jack’s shoulder and looked dubious. “i don’t know about him, jack. i don’tthink he’ll be allowed in the courtroom.”

“nonsense!” gus brannhard told him. “iadmit, he is both a minor child and an incompetent aborigine, but he is the only surviving memberof the family of the decedent jane doe alias goldilocks, and as such has an indisputableright to be present.” “well, just as long as you keep him fromsitting on people’s heads. gus, you and jack sit over there; ben, you and gerd findseats in the witness section.” it would be half an hour till court wouldconvene, but already the spectators’ seats were full, and so was the balcony. the jurybox, on the left of the bench, was occupied by a number of officers in navy black andmarine blue. since there would be no jury, they had apparently appropriated it for themselves.the press box was jammed and bristling with

equipment. baby was looking up interestedly at the bigscreen behind the judges’ seats; while transmitting the court scene to the public, it also showed,like a nonreversing mirror, the same view to the spectators. baby wasn’t long in identifyinghimself in it, and waved his arms excitedly. at that moment, there was a bustle at thedoor by which they had entered, and leslie coombes came in, followed by ernst mallinand a couple of his assistants, ruth ortheris, juan jimenez—and leonard kellogg. the lasttime he had seen kellogg had been at george lunt’s complaint court, his face bandagedand his feet in a pair of borrowed moccasins because his shoes, stained with the bloodof goldilocks, had been impounded as evidence.

coombes glanced toward the table where heand brannhard were sitting, caught sight of baby waving to himself in the big screen andturned to fane with an indignant protest. fane shook his head. coombes protested again,and drew another headshake. finally he shrugged and led kellogg to the table reserved forthem, where they sat down. once pendarvis and his two associates—ashort, roundfaced man on his right, a tall, slender man with white hair and a black mustacheon his left—were seated, the trial got underway briskly. the charges were read, and then brannhard,as the kellogg prosecutor, addressed the court—“being known as goldilocks … sapient member ofa sapient race … willful and deliberate act of the said leonard kellogg … brutaland unprovoked murder.” he backed away,

sat on the edge of the table and picked upbaby fuzzy, fondling him while leslie coombes accused jack holloway of brutally assaultingthe said leonard kellogg and ruthlessly shooting down kurt borch. “well, gentlemen, i believe we can now beginhearing the witnesses,” the chief justice said. “who will start prosecuting whom?” gus handed baby to jack and went forward:coombes stepped up beside him. “your honor, this entire trial hinges uponthe question of whether a member of the species fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra is or isnot a sapient being,” gus said. “however, before any attempt is made to determine thisquestion, we should first establish, by testimony,

just what happened at holloway’s camp, incold creek valley, on the afternoon of june 19, atomic era six fifty-four, and once thisis established, we can then proceed to the question of whether or not the said goldilockswas truly a sapient being.” “i agree,” coombes said equably. “mostof these witnesses will have to be recalled to the stand later, but in general i thinkmr. brannhard’s suggestion will be economical of the court’s time.” “will mr. coombes agree to stipulate thatany evidence tending to prove or disprove the sapience of fuzzies in general be acceptedas proving or disproving the sapience of the being referred to as goldilocks?”

coombes looked that over carefully, decidedthat it wasn’t booby-trapped and agreed. a deputy marshal went over to the witnessstand, made some adjustments and snapped on a switch at the back of the chair. immediatelythe two-foot globe in a standard behind it lit, a clear blue. george lunt’s name wascalled; the lieutenant took his seat and the bright helmet was let down over his head andthe electrodes attached. the globe stayed a calm, untroubled blue whilehe stated his name and rank. then he waited while coombes and brannhard conferred. finallybrannhard took a silver half-sol piece from his pocket, shook it between cupped palmsand slapped it onto his wrist. coombes said, “heads,” and brannhard uncovered it, bowedslightly and stepped back.

“now, lieutenant lunt,” coombes began,“when you arrived at the temporary camp across the run from holloway’s camp, whatdid you find there?” “two dead people,” lunt said. “a terranhuman, who had been shot three times through the chest, and a fuzzy, who had been kickedor trampled to death.” “your honors!” coombes expostulated, “imust ask that the witness be requested to rephrase his answer, and that the answer hehas just made be stricken from the record. the witness, under the circumstances, hasno right to refer to the fuzzies as ‘people.’” “your honors,” brannhard caught it up,“mr. coombes’s objection is no less prejudicial. he has no right, under the circumstances,to deny that the fuzzies be referred to as

‘people.’ this is tantamount to insistingthat the witness speak of them as nonsapient animals.” it went on like that for five minutes. jackbegan doodling on a notepad. baby picked up a pencil with both hands and began makingdoodles too. they looked rather like the knots he had been learning to tie. finally, thecourt intervened and told lunt to tell, in his own words, why he went to holloway’scamp, what he found there, what he was told and what he did. there was some argument betweencoombes and brannhard, at one point, about the difference between hearsay and res gestae.when he was through, coombes said, “no questions.” “lieutenant, you placed leonard kelloggunder arrest on a complaint of homicide by

jack holloway. i take it that you consideredthis complaint a valid one?” “yes, sir. i believed that leonard kellogghad killed a sapient being. only sapient beings bury their dead.” ahmed khadra testified. the two troopers whohad come in the other car, and the men who had brought the investigative equipment anddone the photographing at the scene testified. brannhard called ruth ortheris to the stand,and, after some futile objections by coombes, she was allowed to tell her own story of thekilling of goldilocks, the beating of kellogg and the shooting of borch. when she had finished,the chief justice rapped with his gavel. “i believe that this testimony is sufficientto establish the fact that the being referred

to as jane doe alias goldilocks was in factkicked and trampled to death by the defendant leonard kellogg, and that the terran humanknown as kurt borch was in fact shot to death by jack holloway. this being the case, wemay now consider whether or not either or both of these killings constitute murder withinthe meaning of the law. it is now eleven forty. we will adjourn for lunch, and court willreconvene at fourteen hundred. there are a number of things, including some alterationsto the courtroom, which must be done before the afternoon session…. yes, mr. brannhard?” “your honors, there is only one member ofthe species fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra at present in court, an immature and hencenonrepresentative individual.” he picked

up baby and exhibited him. “if we are totake up the question of the sapience of this species, or race, would it not be well tosend for the fuzzies now staying at the hotel mallory and have them on hand?” “well, mr. brannhard,” pendarvis said,“we will certainly want fuzzies in court, but let me suggest that we wait until aftercourt reconvenes before sending for them. it may be that they will not be needed thisafternoon. anything else?” he tapped with his gavel. “then court is adjourned untilfourteen hundred.” some alterations in the courtroom had beena conservative way of putting it. four rows of spectators’ seats had been abolished,and the dividing rail moved back. the witness

chair, originally at the side of the bench,had been moved to the dividing rail and now faced the bench, and a large number of tableshad been brought in and ranged in an arc with the witness chair in the middle of it. everybodyat the tables could face the judges, and also see everybody else by looking into the bigscreen. a witness on the chair could also see the veridicator in the same way. gus brannhard looked around, when he enteredwith jack, and swore softly. “no wonder they gave us two hours for lunch.i wonder what the idea is.” then he gave a short laugh. “look at coombes; he doesn’tlike it a bit.” a deputy with a seating diagram came up tothem.

“mr. brannhard, you and mr. holloway overhere, at this table.” he pointed to one a little apart from the others, at the extremeright facing the bench. “and dr. van riebeek, and dr. rainsford over here, please.” the court crier’s loud-speaker, overhead,gave two sharp whistles and began: “now hear this! now hear this! court willconvene in five minutes—” brannhard’s head jerked around instantly,and jack’s eyes followed his. the court crier was a space navy petty officer. “what the devil is this?” brannhard demanded.“a navy court-martial?” “that’s what i’ve been wondering, mr.brannhard,” the deputy said. “they’ve

taken over the whole planet, you know.” “maybe we’re in luck, gus. i’ve alwaysheard that if you’re innocent you’re better off before a court-martial and if you’reguilty you’re better off in a civil court.” he saw leslie coombes and leonard kelloggbeing seated at a similar table at the opposite side of the bench. apparently coombes hadalso heard that. the seating arrangements at the other tables seemed a little odd too.gerd van riebeek was next to ruth ortheris, and ernst mallin was next to ben rainsford,with juan jimenez on his other side. gus was looking up at the balcony. “i’ll bet every lawyer on the planet’staking this in,” he said. “oh-oh! see

the white-haired lady in the blue dress, jack?that’s the chief justice’s wife. this is the first time she’s been in court foryears.” “hear ye! hear ye! hear ye! rise for thehonorable court!” somebody must have given the petty officera quick briefing on courtroom phraseology. he stood up, holding baby fuzzy, while thethree judges filed in and took their seats. as soon as they sat down, the chief justicerapped briskly with his gavel. “in order to forestall a spate of objections,i want to say that these present arrangements are temporary, and so will be the procedureswhich will be followed. we are not, at the moment, trying jack holloway or leonard kellogg.for the rest of this day, and, i fear, for

a good many days to come, we will be concernedexclusively with determining the level of mentation of fuzzy fuzzy holloway zarathustra. “for this purpose, we are temporarily abandoningsome of the traditional trial procedures. we will call witnesses; statements of purportedfact will be made under veridication as usual. we will also have a general discussion, inwhich all of you at these tables will be free to participate. i and my associates will preside;as we can’t have everybody shouting disputations at once, anyone wishing to speak will haveto be recognized. at least, i hope we will be able to conduct the discussion in thismanner. “you will all have noticed the presenceof a number of officers from xerxes naval

base, and i suppose you have all heard thatcommodore napier has assumed control of the civil government. captain greibenfeld, willyou please rise and be seen? he is here participating as amicus curiae, and i have given him theright to question witnesses and to delegate that right to any of his officers he may deemproper. mr. coombes and mr. brannhard may also delegate that right as they see fit.” coombes was on his feet at once. “your honors,if we are now to discuss the sapience question, i would suggest that the first item on ourorder of business be the presentation of some acceptable definition of sapience. i should,for my part, very much like to know what it is that the kellogg prosecution and the hollowaydefense mean when they use that term.”

that’s it. they want us to define it. gerdvan riebeek was looking chagrined; ernst mallin was smirking. gus brannhard, however, waspleased. “jack, they haven’t any more damn definitionthan we do,” he whispered. captain greibenfeld, who had seated himselfafter rising at the request of the court, was on his feet again. “your honors, during the past month we atxerxes naval base have been working on exactly that problem. we have a very considerableinterest in having the classification of this planet established, and we also feel thatthis may not be the last time a question of disputable sapience may arise. i believe,your honors, that we have approached such

a definition. however, before we begin discussingit, i would like the court’s permission to present a demonstration which may be ofhelp in understanding the problems involved.” “captain greibenfeld has already discussedthis demonstration with me, and it has my approval. will you please proceed, captain,”the chief justice said. greibenfeld nodded, and a deputy marshal openedthe door on the right of the bench. two spacemen came in, carrying cartons. one went up tothe bench; the other started around in front of the tables, distributing small battery-poweredhearing aids. “please put them in your ears and turn themon,” he said. “thank you.” baby fuzzy tried to get jack’s. he put theplug in his ear and switched on the power.

instantly he began hearing a number of smallsounds he had never heard before, and baby was saying to him: “he-inta sa-wa’aka;igga sa geeda?” “muhgawd, gus, he’s talking!” “yes, i hear him; what do you suppose—?” “ultrasonic; god, why didn’t we thinkof that long ago?” he snapped off the hearing aid. baby fuzzywas saying, “yeeek.” when he turned it on again, baby was saying, “kukk-ina zazeeva.” “no, baby, pappy jack doesn’t understand.we’ll have to be awfully patient, and learn each other’s language.”

“pa-pee jaaak!” baby cried. “ba-beeza-hinga; pa-pee jaak za zag ga he-izza!” “that yeeking is just the audible edge oftheir speech; bet we have a lot of transsonic tones in our voices, too.” “well, he can hear what we say; he’s pickedup his name and yours.” “mr. brannhard, mr. holloway,” judge pendarviswas saying, “may we please have your attention? now, have you all your earplugs in and turnedon? very well; carry on, captain.” this time, an ensign went out and came backwith a crowd of enlisted men, who had six fuzzies with them. they set them down in theopen space between the bench and the arc of tables and backed away. the fuzzies drew togetherinto a clump and stared around them, and he

stared, unbelievingly, at them. they couldn’tbe; they didn’t exist any more. but they were—little fuzzy and mamma fuzzy and mikeand mitzi and ko-ko and cinderella. baby whooped something and leaped from the table, and mammacame stumbling to meet him, clasping him in her arms. then they all saw him and beganclamoring: “pa-pee jaaak! pa-pee jaaak!” he wasn’t aware of rising and leaving thetable; the next thing he realized, he was sitting on the floor, his family mobbing himand hugging him, gabbling with joy. dimly he heard the gavel hammering, and the voiceof chief justice pendarvis: “court is recessed for ten minutes!” by that time, gus waswith him; gathering the family up, they carried them over to their table.

they stumbled and staggered when they moved,and that frightened him for a moment. then he realized that they weren’t sick or drugged.they’d just been in low-g for a while and hadn’t become reaccustomed to normal weight.now he knew why he hadn’t been able to find any trace of them. he noticed that each ofthem was wearing a little shoulder bag—a marine corps first-aid pouch—slung froma webbing strap. why the devil hadn’t he thought of making them something like that?he touched one and commented, trying to pitch his voice as nearly like theirs as he could.they all babbled in reply and began opening the little bags and showing him what theyhad in them—little knives and miniature tools and bits of bright or colored junk theyhad picked up. little fuzzy produced a tiny

pipe with a hardwood bowl, and a little pouchof tobacco from which he filled it. finally, he got out a small lighter. “your honors!” gus shouted, “i knowcourt is recessed, but please observe what little fuzzy is doing.” while they watched, little fuzzy snapped thelighter and held the flame to the pipe bowl, puffing. across on the other side, leslie coombes swallowedonce or twice and closed his eyes. when pendarvis rapped for attention and declaredcourt reconvened, he said: “ladies and gentlemen, you have all seenand heard this demonstration of captain greibenfeld’s.

you have heard these fuzzies uttering whatcertainly sounds like meaningful speech, and you have seen one of them light a pipe andsmoke. incidentally, while smoking in court is discountenanced, we are going to make anexception, during this trial, in favor of fuzzies. other people will please not feelthemselves discriminated against.” that brought coombes to his feet with a rush.he started around the table and then remembered that under the new rules he didn’t haveto. “your honors, i objected strongly to theuse of that term by a witness this morning; i must object even more emphatically to itsemployment from the bench. i have indeed heard these fuzzies make sounds which might be mistakenfor words, but i must deny that this is true

speech. as to this trick of using a lighter,i will undertake, in not more than thirty days, to teach it to any terran primate orfreyan kholph.” greibenfeld rose immediately. “your honors,in the past thirty days, while these fuzzies were at xerxes naval base, we have compileda vocabulary of a hundred-odd fuzzy words, for all of which definite meanings have beenestablished, and a great many more for which we have not as yet learned the meanings. weeven have the beginning of a fuzzy grammar. as for this so-called trick of using a lighter,little fuzzy—we didn’t know his name then and referred to him as m2—learned that forhimself, by observation. we didn’t teach him to smoke a pipe either; he knew that beforewe had anything to do with him.”

jack rose while greibenfeld was still speaking.as soon as the space navy captain had finished, he said: “captain greibenfeld, i want to thank youand your people for taking care of the fuzzies, and i’m very glad you learned how to hearwhat they’re saying, and thank you for all the nice things you gave them, but why couldn’tyou have let me know they were safe? i haven’t been very happy the last month, you know.” “i know that, mr. holloway, and if it’sany comfort to you, we were all very sorry for you, but we could not take the risk ofcompromising our secret intelligence agent in the company’s science center, the onewho smuggled the fuzzies out the morning after

their escape.” he looked quickly acrossin front of the bench to the table at the other end of the arc. kellogg was sittingwith his face in his hands, oblivious to everything that was going on, but leslie coombes’swell-disciplined face had broken, briefly, into a look of consternation. “by the timeyou and mr. brannhard and marshal fane arrived with an order of the court for the fuzzies’recovery, they had already been taken from science center and were on a navy landingcraft for xerxes. we couldn’t do anything without exposing our agent. that, i am gladto say, is no longer a consideration.” “well, captain greibenfeld,” the chiefjustice said, “i assume you mean to introduce further testimony about the observations andstudies made by your people on xerxes. for

the record, we’d like to have it establishedthat they were actually taken there, and when, and how.” “yes, your honor. if you will call the fourthname on the list i gave you, and allow me to do the questioning, we can establish that.” the chief justice picked up a paper. “lieutenantj.g. ruth ortheris, tfn reserve,” he called out. this time, jack holloway looked up into thebig screen, in which he could see everybody. gerd van riebeek, who had been trying to ignorethe existence of the woman beside him, had turned to stare at her in amazement. coombes’sface was ghastly for an instant, then froze

into corpselike immobility: ernst mallin wasdithering in incredulous anger; beside him ben rainsford was grinning in just as incredulousdelight. as ruth came around in front of the bench, the fuzzies gave her an ovation; theyremembered and liked her. gus brannhard was gripping his arm and saying: “oh, brother!this is it, jack; it’s all over but shooting the cripples!” lieutenant j.g. ortheris, under a calmly blueglobe, testified to coming to zarathustra as a federation naval reserve officer recalledto duty with intelligence, and taking a position with the company. “as a regularly qualified doctor of psychology,i worked under dr. mallin in the scientific

division, and also with the school departmentand the juvenile court. at the same time i was regularly transmitting reports to commanderaelborg, the chief of intelligence on xerxes. the object of this surveillance was to makesure that the zarathustra company was not violating the provisions of their charteror federation law. until the middle of last month, i had nothing to report beyond somerather irregular financial transactions involving resident general emmert. then, on the eveningof june fifteen—” that was when ben had transmitted the tapeto juan jimenez; she described how it had come to her attention. “as soon as possible, i transmitted a copyof this tape to commander aelborg. the next

night, i called xerxes from the screen ondr. van riebeek’s boat and reported what i’d learned about the fuzzies. i was theninformed that leonard kellogg had gotten hold of a copy of the holloway-rainsford tape andhad alerted victor grego; that kellogg and ernst mallin were being sent to beta continentwith instructions to prevent publication of any report claiming sapience for the fuzziesand to fabricate evidence to support an accusation that dr. rainsford and mr. holloway were perpetratinga deliberate scientific hoax.” “here, i’ll have to object to this, yourhonor,” coombes said, rising. “this is nothing but hearsay.” “this is part of a navy intelligence situationestimate given to lieutenant ortheris, based

on reports we had received from other agents,”captain greibenfeld said. “she isn’t the only one we have on zarathustra, you know.mr. coombes, if i hear another word of objection to this officer’s testimony from you, iam going to ask mr. brannhard to subpoena victor grego and question him under veridicationabout it.” “mr. brannhard will be more than happy tooblige, commander,” gus said loudly and distinctly. coombes sat down hastily. “well, lieutenant ortheris, this is mostinteresting, but at the moment, what we’re trying to establish is how these fuzzies gotto xerxes naval base,” the chubby associate

justice, ruiz, put in. “i’ll try to get them there as quicklyas possible, your honor,” she said. “on the night of friday the twenty-second, thefuzzies were taken from mr. holloway and brought into mallorysport; they were turned over bymohammed o’brien to juan jimenez, who took them to science center and put them in cagesin a room back of his office. they immediately escaped. i found them, the next morning, andwas able to get them out of the building, and to turn them over to commander aelborg,who had come down from xerxes to take personal charge of the fuzzy operation. i will nottestify as to how i was able to do this. i am at present and was then an officer of theterran federation armed forces; the courts

have no power to compel a federation officerto give testimony involving breach of military security. i was informed, through my contactin mallorysport, from time to time, of the progress of the work of measuring the fuzzies’mental level there; i was able to pass on suggestions occasionally. any time any ofthese suggestions was based on ideas originating with dr. mallin, i was careful to give himfull credit.” mallin looked singularly unappreciative. brannhard got up. “before this witness isexcused, i’d like to ask if she knows anything about four other fuzzies, the ones found byjack holloway up ferny creek on friday.” “why, yes; they’re my fuzzies, and i wasworried about them. their names are complex,

syndrome, id and superego.” “your fuzzies, lieutenant?” “well, i took care of them and worked withthem; juan jimenez and some company hunters caught them over on beta continent. they werekept at a farm center about five hundred miles north of here, which had been vacated forthe purpose. i spent all my time with them, and dr. mallin was with them most of the time.then, on monday night, mr. coombes came and got them.” “mr. coombes, did you say?” gus brannhardasked. “mr. leslie coombes, the company attorney.he said they were needed in mallorysport.

it wasn’t till the next day that i foundout what they were needed for. they’d been turned loose in front of that fuzzy hunt,in the hope that they would be killed.” she looked across at coombes; if looks werebullets, he’d have been deader than kurt borch. “why would they sacrifice four fuzzies merelyto support a story that was bound to come apart anyhow?” brannhard asked. “that was no sacrifice. they had to getrid of those fuzzies, and they were afraid to kill them themselves for fear they’dbe charged with murder along with leonard kellogg. everybody, from ernst mallin down,who had anything to do with them was convinced

of their sapience. for one thing, we’d beenusing those hearing aids ourselves; i suggested it, after getting the idea from xerxes. askdr. mallin about it, under veridication. ask him about the multiordinal polyencephalographexperiments, too.” “well, we have the holloway fuzzies placedon xerxes,” the chief justice said. “we can hear the testimony of the people who workedwith them there at any time. now, i want to hear from dr. ernst mallin.” coombes was on his feet again. “your honors,before any further testimony is heard, i would like to confer with my client privately.” “i fail to see any reason why we shouldinterrupt proceedings for that purpose, mr.

coombes. you can confer as much as you wishwith your client after this session, and i can assure you that you will be called uponto do nothing on his behalf until then.” he gave a light tap with his gavel and thensaid: “dr. ernst mallin will please take the stand.” chapter xv ernst mallin shrank, as though trying to pullhimself into himself, when he heard his name. he didn’t want to testify. he had been dreadingthis moment for days. now he would have to sit in that chair, and they would ask himquestions, and he couldn’t answer them truthfully and the globe over his head—

when the deputy marshal touched his shoulderand spoke to him, he didn’t think, at first, that his legs would support him. it seemedmiles, with all the staring faces on either side of him. somehow, he reached the chairand sat down, and they fitted the helmet over his head and attached the electrodes. theyused to make a witness take some kind of an oath to tell the truth. they didn’t anymore. they didn’t need to. as soon as the veridicator was on, he lookedup at the big screen behind the three judges; the globe above his head was a glaring red.there was a titter of laughter. nobody in the courtroom knew better than he what washappening. he had screens in his laboratory that broke it all down into individual patterns—thesteady pulsing waves from the cortex, the

alpha and beta waves; beta-aleph and beta-bethand beta-gimel and beta-daleth. the thalamic waves. he thought of all of them, and of theelectromagnetic events which accompanied brain activity. as he did, the red faded and theglobe became blue. he was no longer suppressing statements and substituting other statementshe knew to be false. if he could keep it that way. but, sooner or later, he knew, he wouldn’tbe able to. the globe stayed blue while he named himselfand stated his professional background. there was a brief flicker of red while he was listinghis publication—that paper, entirely the work of one of his students, which he hadpublished under his own name. he had forgotten about that, but his conscience hadn’t.

“dr. mallin,” the oldest of the threejudges, who sat in the middle, began, “what, in your professional opinion, is the differencebetween sapient and nonsapient mentation?” “the ability to think consciously,” hestated. the globe stayed blue. “do you mean that nonsapient animals aren’tconscious, or do you mean they don’t think?” “well, neither. any life form with a centralnervous system has some consciousness—awareness of existence and of its surroundings. andanything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest. what i meant was thatonly the sapient mind thinks and knows that it is thinking.” he was perfectly safe so far. he talked aboutsensory stimuli and responses, and about conditioned

reflexes. he went back to the first centurypre-atomic, and pavlov and korzybski and freud. the globe never flickered. “the nonsapient animal is conscious onlyof what is immediately present to the senses and responds automatically. it will perceivesomething and make a single statement about it—this is good to eat, this sensation isunpleasant, this is a sex-gratification object, this is dangerous. the sapient mind, on theother hand, is conscious of thinking about these sense stimuli, and makes descriptivestatements about them, and then makes statements about those statements, in a connected chain.i have a structural differential at my seat; if somebody will bring it to me—”

“well, never mind now, dr. mallin. whenyou’re off the stand and the discussion begins you can show what you mean. we justwant your opinion in general terms, now.” “well, the sapient mind can generalize.to the nonsapient animal, every experience is either totally novel or identical withsome remembered experience. a rabbit will flee from one dog because to the rabbit mindit is identical with another dog that has chased it. a bird will be attracted to anapple, and each apple will be a unique red thing to peck at. the sapient being will say,‘these red objects are apples; as a class, they are edible and flavorsome.’ he setsup a class under the general label of apples. this, in turn, leads to the formation of abstractideas—redness, flavor, et cetera—conceived

of apart from any specific physical object,and to the ordering of abstractions—‘fruit’ as distinguished from apples, ‘food’ asdistinguished from fruit.” the globe was still placidly blue. the threejudges waited, and he continued: “having formed these abstract ideas, itbecomes necessary to symbolize them, in order to deal with them apart from the actual object.the sapient being is a symbolizer, and a symbol communicator; he is able to convey to othersapient beings his ideas in symbolic form.” “like ‘pa-pee jaak’?” the judge onhis right, with the black mustache, asked. the globe flashed red at once. “your honors, i cannot consider words pickedup at random and learned by rote speech. the

fuzzies have merely learned to associate thatsound with a specific human, and use it as a signal, not as a symbol.” the globe was still red. the chief justice,in the middle, rapped with his gavel. “dr. mallin! of all the people on this planet,you at least should know the impossibility of lying under veridication. other peoplejust know it can’t be done; you know why. now i’m going to rephrase judge janiver’squestion, and i’ll expect you to answer truthfully. if you don’t i’m going tohold you in contempt. when those fuzzies cried out, ‘pappy jack!’ do you or do you notbelieve that they were using a verbal expression which stood, in their minds, for mr. holloway?”

he couldn’t say it. this sapience was alla big fake; he had to believe that. the fuzzies were only little mindless animals. but he didn’t believe it. he knew better.he gulped for a moment. “yes, your honor. the term ‘pappy jack’is, in their minds, a symbol standing for mr. jack holloway.” he looked at the globe. the red had turnedto mauve, the mauve was becoming violet, and then clear blue. he felt better than he hadfelt since the afternoon leonard kellogg had told him about the fuzzies. “then fuzzies do think consciously, dr.mallin?” that was pendarvis.

“oh, yes. the fact that they use verbalsymbols indicates that, even without other evidence. and the instrumental evidence wasmost impressive. the mentation pictures we got by encephalography compare very favorablywith those of any human child of ten or twelve years old, and so does their learning andpuzzle-solving ability. on puzzles, they always think the problem out first, and then do themechanical work with about the same mental effort, say, as a man washing his hands ortying his neckcloth.” the globe was perfectly blue. mallin had givenup trying to lie; he was simply gushing out everything he thought. leonard kellogg slumped forward, his headburied in his elbows on the table, and misery

washed over him in tides. i am a murderer; i killed a person. only afunny little person with fur, but she was a person, and i knew it when i killed her,i knew it when i saw that little grave out in the woods, and they’ll put me in thatchair and make me admit it to everybody, and then they’ll take me out in the jail yardand somebody will shoot me through the head with a pistol, and— and all the poor little thing wanted was toshow me her new jingle! “does anybody want to ask the witness anyquestions?” the chief justice was asking. “i don’t,” captain greibenfeld said.“do you, lieutenant?”

“no, i don’t think so,” lieutenant ybarrasaid. “dr. mallin’s given us a very lucid statement of his opinions.” he had, at that, after he’d decided he couldn’tbeat the veridicator. jack found himself sympathizing with mallin. he’d disliked the man fromthe first, but he looked different now—sort of cleaned and washed out inside. maybe everybodyought to be veridicated, now and then, to teach them that honesty begins with honestyto self. “mr. coombes?” mr. coombes looked as thoughhe never wanted to ask another witness another question as long as he lived. “mr. brannhard?” gus got up, holding a sapient member of asapient race who was hanging onto his beard,

and thanked ernst mallin fulsomely. “in that case, we’ll adjourn until o-nine-hundredtomorrow. mr. coombes, i have here a check on the chartered zarathustra company for twenty-fivethousand sols. i am returning it to you and i am canceling dr. kellogg’s bail,” judgependarvis said, as a couple of attendants began getting mallin loose from the veridicator. “are you also canceling jack holloway’s?” “no, and i would advise you not to makean issue of it, mr. coombes. the only reason i haven’t dismissed the charge against mr.holloway is that i don’t want to handicap you by cutting off your foothold in the prosecution.i do not consider mr. holloway a bail risk.

i do so consider your client, dr. kellogg.” “frankly, your honor, so do i,” coombesadmitted. “my protest was merely an example of what dr. mallin would call conditionedreflex.” then a crowd began pushing up around the table;ben rainsford, george lunt and his troopers, gerd and ruth, shoving in among them, theirarms around each other. “we’ll be at the hotel after a while,jack,” gerd was saying. “ruth and i are going out for a drink and something to eat;we’ll be around later to pick up her fuzzies.” now his partner had his girl back, and hispartner’s girl had a fuzzy family of her own. this was going to be real fun. what weretheir names now? syndrome, complex, id and

superego. the things some people named fuzzies! chapter xvi they stopped whispering at the door, turnedright, and ascended to the bench, bearing themselves like images in a procession, ruizfirst, then himself and then janiver. they turned to the screen so that the public whomthey served might see the faces of the judges, and then sat down. the court crier began hischant. they could almost feel the tension in the courtroom. yves janiver whispered tothem: “they all know about it.” as soon as the crier had stopped, max faneapproached the bench, his face blankly expressionless.

“your honors, i am ashamed to have to reportthat the defendant, leonard kellogg, cannot be produced in court. he is dead; he committedsuicide in his cell last night. while in my custody,” he added bitterly. the stir that went through the courtroom wasnot shocked surprise, it was a sigh of fulfilled expectation. they all knew about it. “how did this happen, marshal?” he asked,almost conversationally. “the prisoner was put in a cell by himself;there was a pickup eye, and one of my deputies was keeping him under observation by screen.”fane spoke in a toneless, almost robotlike voice. “at twenty-two thirty, the prisonerwent to bed, still wearing his shirt. he pulled

the blankets up over his head. the deputyobserving him thought nothing of that; many prisoners do that, on account of the light.he tossed about for a while, and then appeared to fall asleep. “when a guard went in to rouse him thismorning, the cot, under the blanket, was found saturated with blood. kellogg had cut histhroat, by sawing the zipper track of his shirt back and forth till he severed his jugularvein. he was dead.” “good heavens, marshal!” he was shocked.the way he’d heard it, kellogg had hidden a penknife, and he was prepared to be severewith fane about it. but a thing like this! he found himself fingering the toothed trackof his own jacket zipper. “i don’t believe

you can be at all censured for not anticipatinga thing like that. it isn’t a thing anybody would expect.” janiver and ruiz spoke briefly in agreement.marshal fane bowed slightly and went off to one side. leslie coombes, who seemed to be making avery considerable effort to look grieved and shocked, rose. “your honors, i find myself here withouta client,” he said. “in fact, i find myself here without any business at all; the caseagainst mr. holloway is absolutely insupportable. he shot a man who was trying to kill him,and that’s all there is to it. i therefore

pray your honors to dismiss the case againsthim and discharge him from custody.” captain greibenfeld bounded to his feet. “your honors, i fully realize that the defendantis now beyond the jurisdiction of this court, but let me point out that i and my associatesare here participating in this case in the hope that the classification of this planetmay be determined, and some adequate definition of sapience established. these are most seriousquestions, your honors.” “but, your honors,” coombes protested,“we can’t go through the farce of trying a dead man.” “people of the colony of baphomet versusjamshar singh, deceased, charge of arson and

sabotage, a.e. 604,” the honorable gustavusadolphus brannhard interrupted. yes, you could find a precedent in coloniallaw for almost anything. jack holloway was on his feet, a fuzzy cradledin the crook of his left arm, his white mustache bristling truculently. “i am not a dead man, your honors, and iam on trial here. the reason i’m not dead is why i am on trial. my defense is that ishot kurt borch while he was aiding and abetting in the killing of a fuzzy. i want it establishedin this court that it is murder to kill a fuzzy.” the judge nodded slowly. “i will not dismissthe charges against mr. holloway,” he said.

“mr. holloway had been arraigned on a chargeof murder; if he is not guilty, he is entitled to the vindication of an acquittal. i am afraid,mr. coombes, that you will have to go on prosecuting another brief stir, like a breath of windover a grain field, ran through the courtroom. the show was going on after all. all the fuzzies were in court this morning;jack’s six, and the five from the constabulary post, and ben’s flora and fauna, and thefour ruth ortheris claimed. there was too much discussion going on for anybody to keepan eye on them. finally one of the constabulary fuzzies, either dillinger or dr. crippen,and ben rainsford’s flora and fauna, came sauntering out into the open space betweenthe tables and the bench dragging the hose

of a vacuum-duster. ahmed khadra ducked undera table and tried to get it away from them. this was wonderful; screaming in delight,they all laid hold of the other end, and mike and mitzi and superego and complex ran tohelp them. the seven of them dragged khadra about ten feet before he gave up and let go.at the same time, an incipient fight broke out on the other side of the arc of tablesbetween the head of the language department at mallorysport academy and a spinsterishamateur phoneticist. at this point, judge pendarvis, deciding that if you can’t preventit, relax and enjoy it, rapped a few times with his gavel, and announced that court wasrecessed. “you will all please remain here; this isnot an adjournment, and if any of the various

groups who seem to be discussing differentaspects of the problem reach any conclusion they feel should be presented in evidence,will they please notify the bench so that court can be reconvened. in any case, we willreconvene at eleven thirty.” somebody wanted to know if smoking would bepermitted during the recess. the chief justice said that it would. he got out a cigar andlit it. mamma fuzzy wanted a puff: she didn’t like it. out of the corner of his eye, hesaw mike and mitzi, flora and fauna scampering around and up the steps behind the bench.when he looked again, they were all up on it, and mitzi was showing the court what shehad in her shoulder bag. he got up, with mamma and baby, and crossedto where leslie coombes was sitting. by this

time, somebody was bringing in a coffee urnfrom the cafeteria. fuzzies ought to happen oftener in court. the gavel tapped slowly. little fuzzy scrambledup onto jack holloway’s lap. after five days in court, they had all learned that thegavel meant for fuzzies and other people to be quiet. it might be a good idea, jack thought,to make a little gavel, when he got home, and keep it on the table in the living roomfor when the family got too boisterous. baby, who wasn’t gavel-trained yet, started outonto the floor; mamma dashed after him and brought him back under the table. the place looked like a courtroom again. thetables were ranged in a neat row facing the

bench, and the witness chair and the jurybox were back where they belonged. the ashtrays and the coffee urn and the ice tubs for beerand soft drinks had vanished. it looked like the party was over. he was almost regretful;it had been fun. especially for seventeen fuzzies and a baby fuzzy and a little black-and-whitekitten. there was one unusual feature; there was nowa fourth man on the bench, in gold-braided navy black; sitting a little apart from thejudges, trying to look as though he weren’t there at all—space commodore alex napier. judge pendarvis laid down his gavel. “ladiesand gentlemen, are you ready to present the opinions you have reached?” he asked.

lieutenant ybarra, the navy psychologist,rose. there was a reading screen in front of him; he snapped it on. “your honors,” he began, “there stillexists considerable difference of opinion on matters of detail but we are in agreementon all major points. this is quite a lengthy report, and it has already been incorporatedinto the permanent record. have i the court’s permission to summarize it?” the court told him he had. ybarra glanceddown at the screen in front of him and continued: “it is our opinion,” he said, “thatsapience may be defined as differing from nonsapience in that it is characterized byconscious thought, by ability to think in

logical sequence and by ability to think interms other than mere sense data. we—meaning every member of every sapient race—thinkconsciously, and we know what we are thinking. this is not to say that all our mental activityis conscious. the science of psychology is based, to a large extent, upon our realizationthat only a small portion of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness, andfor centuries we have been diagraming the mind as an iceberg, one-tenth exposed andnine-tenths submerged. the art of psychiatry consists largely in bringing into consciousnesssome of the content of this submerged nine-tenths, and as a practitioner i can testify to itsdifficulty and uncertainty. “we are so habituated to conscious thoughtthat when we reach some conclusion by any

nonconscious process, we speak of it as a‘hunch,’ or an ‘intuition,’ and question its validity. we are so habituated to actingupon consciously formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by systematic drill,those automatic responses upon which we depend for survival in combat or other emergencies.and we are by nature so unaware of this vast submerged mental area that it was not untilthe first century pre-atomic that its existence was more than vaguely suspected, and its natureis still the subject of acrimonious professional disputes.” there had been a few of those, off and on,during the past four days, too. “if we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg,we might depict nonsapient mentation as the

sunlight reflected from its surface. thisis a considerably less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals, consciously, withnothing but present sense data, there is a considerable absorption and re-emission ofsubconscious memories. also, there are occasional flashes of what must be conscious mental activity,in dealing with some novel situation. dr. van riebeek, who is especially interestedin the evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction of noveltybecause of drastic environmental changes may have forced nonsapient beings into more orless sustained conscious thinking and so initiated mental habits which, in time, gave rise totrue sapience. “the sapient mind not only thinks consciouslyby habit, but it thinks in connected sequence.

it associates one thing with another. it reasonslogically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises from which toarrive at further conclusions. it groups associations together, and generalizes. here we pass completelybeyond any comparison with nonsapience. this is not merely more consciousness, or morethinking; it is thinking of a radically different kind. the nonsapient mind deals exclusivelywith crude sensory material. the sapient mind translates sense impressions into ideas, andthen forms ideas of ideas, in ascending orders of abstraction, almost without limit. “this, finally, brings us to one of therecognized overt manifestations of sapience. the sapient being is a symbol user. the nonsapientbeing cannot symbolize, because the nonsapient

mind is incapable of concepts beyond meresense images.” ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dialof his reading screen with the other hand. “the sapient being,” he continued, “cando one other thing. it is a combination of the three abilities already enumerated, butcombining them creates something much greater than the mere sum of the parts. the sapientbeing can imagine. he can conceive of something which has no existence whatever in the sense-availableworld of reality, and then he can work and plan toward making it a part of reality. hecan not only imagine, but he can also create.” he paused for a moment. “this is our definitionof sapience. when we encounter any being whose mentation includes these characteristics,we may know him for a sapient brother. it

is the considered opinion of all of us thatthe beings called fuzzies are such beings.” jack hugged the small sapient one on his lap,and little fuzzy looked up and murmured, “he-inta?” “you’re in, kid,” he whispered. “youjust joined the people.” ybarra was saying, “they think consciouslyand continuously. we know that by instrumental analysis of their electroencephalographicpatterns, which compare closely to those of an intelligent human child of ten. they thinkin connected sequence; i invite consideration of all the different logical steps involvedin the invention, designing and making of their prawn-killing weapons, and in the developmentof tools with which to make them. we have abundant evidence of their ability to thinkbeyond present sense data, to associate, to

generalize, to abstract and to symbolize. “and above all, they can imagine, not onlya new implement, but a new way of life. we see this in the first human contact with therace which, i submit, should be designated as fuzzy sapiens. little fuzzy found a strangeand wonderful place in the forest, a place unlike anything he had ever seen, in whichlived a powerful being. he imagined himself living in this place, enjoying the friendshipand protection of this mysterious being. so he slipped inside, made friends with jackholloway and lived with him. and then he imagined his family sharing this precious comfort andcompanionship with him, and he went and found them and brought them back with him. likeso many other sapient beings, little fuzzy

had a beautiful dream; like a fortunate few,he made it real.” the chief justice allowed the applause torun on for a few minutes before using his gavel to silence it. there was a brief colloquyamong the three judges, and then the chief justice rapped again. little fuzzy lookedperplexed. everybody had been quiet after he did it the first time, hadn’t they? “it is the unanimous decision of the courtto accept the report already entered into the record and just summarized by lieutenantybarra, tfn, and to thank him and all who have been associated with him. “it is now the ruling of this court thatthe species known as fuzzy fuzzy holloway

zarathustra is in fact a race of sapient beings,entitled to the respect of all other sapient beings and to the full protection of the lawof the terran federation.” he rapped again, slowly, pounding the decision into the legalframework. space commodore napier leaned over and whispered;all three of the judges nodded emphatically. the naval officer rose. “lieutenant ybarra, on behalf of the serviceand of the federation, i thank you and those associated with you for a lucid and excellentreport, the culmination of work which reflects credit upon all who participated in it. ialso wish to state that a suggestion made to me by lieutenant ybarra regarding possibleinstrumental detection of sapient mentation

is being credited to him in my own report,with the recommendation that it be given important priority by the bureau of research and development.perhaps the next time we find people who speak beyond the range of human audition, who havefur and live in a mild climate, and who like their food raw, we’ll know what they arefrom the beginning.” bet ybarra gets another stripe, and a goodjob out of this. jack hoped so. then pendarvis was pounding again. “i had almost forgotten; this is a criminaltrial,” he confessed. “it is the verdict of this court that the defendant, jack holloway,is not guilty as here charged. he is herewith discharged from custody. if he or his attorneywill step up here, the bail bond will be refunded.”

he puzzled little fuzzy by hammering againwith his gavel to adjourn court. this time, instead of keeping quiet, everybodymade all the noise they could, and uncle gus was holding him high over his head and shouting: “the winnah! by unanimous decision!” chapter xvii ruth ortheris sipped at the tart, cold cocktail.it was good; oh, it was good, all good! the music was soft, the lights were dim, the tableswere far apart; just she and gerd, and nobody was paying any attention to them. and shewas clear out of the business, too. an agent who testified in court always was expendedin service like a fired round. they’d want

her back, a year from now, to testify whenthe board of inquiry came out from terra, but she wouldn’t be lieutenant j.g. ortheristhen, she’d be mrs. gerd van riebeek. she set down the glass and rubbed the sunstoneon her finger. it was a lovely sunstone, and it meant such a lovely thing. and we’re getting married with a ready-madefamily, too. four fuzzies and a black-and-white kitten. “you’re sure you really want to go tobeta?” gerd asked. “when napier gets this new government organized, it’ll be takingover science center. we could both get our old jobs back. maybe something better.”

“you don’t want to go back?” he shookhis head. “neither do i. i want to go to beta and be a sunstone digger’s wife.” “and a fuzzyologist.” “and a fuzzyologist. i couldn’t drop thatnow. gerd, we’re only beginning with them. we know next to nothing about their psychology.” he nodded seriously. “you know, they mayturn out to be even wiser than we are.” she laughed. “oh, gerd! let’s don’tget too excited about them. why, they’re like little children. all they think aboutis having fun.” “that’s right. i said they were wiserthan we are. they stick to important things.”

he smoked silently for a moment. “it’snot just their psychology; we don’t know anything much about their physiology, or biologyeither.” he picked up his glass and drank. “here; we had eighteen of them in all. seventeenadults and one little one. now what kind of ratio is that? and the ones we saw in thewoods ran about the same. in all, we sighted about a hundred and fifty adults and onlyten children.” “maybe last year’s crop have grown up,”she began. “you know any other sapient races with aone-year maturation period?” he asked. “i’ll bet they take ten or fifteen years to mature.jack’s baby fuzzy hasn’t gained a pound in the last month. and another puzzle; thiscraving for extee three. that’s not a natural

food; except for the cereal bulk matter, it’spurely synthetic. i was talking to ybarra; he was wondering if there mightn’t be somethingin it that caused an addiction.” “maybe it satisfies some kind of dietarydeficiency.” “well, we’ll find out.” he invertedthe jug over his glass. “think we could stand another cocktail before dinner?” space commodore napier sat at the desk thathad been nick emmert’s and looked at the little man with the red whiskers and the rumpledsuit, who was looking back at him in consternation. “good lord, commodore; you can’t be serious?” “but i am. quite serious, dr. rainsford.”

“then you’re nuts!” rainsford exploded.“i’m no more qualified to be governor general than i’d be to command xerxes base.why, i never held an administrative position in my life.” “that might be a recommendation. you’rereplacing a veteran administrator.” “and i have a job. the institute of zeno-sciences—” “i think they’ll be glad to give you leave,under the circumstances. doctor, you’re the logical man for this job. you’re anecologist; you know how disastrous the effects of upsetting the balance of nature can be.the zarathustra company took care of this planet, when it was their property, but nownine-tenths of it is public domain, and people

will be coming in from all over the federation,scrambling to get rich overnight. you’ll know how to control things.” “yes, as commissioner of conservation, orsomething i’m qualified for.” “as governor general. your job will be tomake policy. you can appoint the administrators.” “well, who, for instance?” “well, you’re going to need an attorneygeneral right away. who will you appoint for that position?” “gus brannhard,” rainsford said instantly. “good. and who—this question is purelyrhetorical—will you appoint as commissioner

of native affairs?” jack holloway was going back to beta continenton the constabulary airboat. official passenger: mr. commissioner jack holloway. and his staff:little fuzzy, mamma fuzzy, baby fuzzy, mike, mitzi, ko-ko and cinderella. bet they didn’tknow they had official positions! somehow he wished he didn’t have one himself. “want a good job, george?” he asked lunt. “i have a good job.” “this’ll be a better one. rank of major,eighteen thousand a year. commandant, native protection force. and you won’t lose seniorityin the constabulary; colonel ferguson’ll

give you indefinite leave.” “well, cripes, jack, i’d like to, buti don’t want to leave the kids. and i can’t take them away from the rest of the gang.” “bring the rest of the gang along. i’mauthorized to borrow twenty men from the constabulary as a training cadre, and you only have sixteen.your sergeants’ll get commissions, and all your men will be sergeants. i’m going tohave a force of a hundred and fifty for a start.” “you must think the fuzzies are going toneed a lot of protection.” “they will. the whole country between thecordilleras and the west coast range will

be fuzzy reservation and that’ll have tobe policed. then the fuzzies outside that will have to be protected. you know what’sgoing to happen. everybody wants fuzzies; why, even judge pendarvis approached me aboutgetting a pair for his wife. there’ll be gangs hunting them to sell, using stun-bombsand sleepgas and everything. i’m going to have to set up an adoption bureau; ruth willbe in charge of that. and that’ll mean a lot of investigators—” oh, it was going to be one hell of a job!fifty thousand a year would be chicken feed to what he’d lose by not working his diggings.but somebody would have to do it, and the fuzzies were his responsibility.

hadn’t he gone to law to prove their sapience? they were going home, home to the wonderfulplace. they had seen many wonderful places, since the night they had been put in the bags:the place where everything had been light and they had been able to jump so high andland so gently, and the place where they had met all the others of their people and hadso much fun. but now they were going back to the old wonderful place in the woods, whereit had all started. and they had met so many big ones, too. somebig ones were bad, but only a few; most big ones were good. even the one who had donethe killing had felt sorry for what he had done; they were all sure of that. and theother big ones had taken him away, and they

had never seen him again. he had talked about that with the others—withflora and fauna, and dr. crippen, and complex, and superego, and dillinger and lizzie borden.now that they were all going to live with the big ones, they would have to use thosefunny names. someday they would find out what they meant, and that would be fun, too. andthey could; now the big ones could put things in their ears and hear what they were saying,and pappy jack was learning some of their words, and teaching them some of his. and soon all the people would find big onesto live with, who would take care of them and have fun with them and love them, andgive them the wonderful food. and with the

big ones taking care of them, maybe more oftheir babies would live and not die so soon. and they would pay the big ones back. firstthey would give their love and make them happy. later, when they learned how, they would givetheir help, too.