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