THE TWO LAWYERS had risen hastily when Chief Justice Pendarvis
entered; he responded to their greetings and seated himself at his
desk, reaching for the silver cigar box and taking out a panatella.
Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard picked up the cigar he had laid aside
and began puffing on it; Leslie Coombes took a cigarette from his
case. They both looked at him, waiting like two drawn weapons—a
battle axe and a rapier.
“Well, gentlemen, as you know, we have a couple 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 other killed a man who was trying to kill him.”
“Well, your Honor, I don’t believe my client is
guilty of anything, legally or morally,” Brannhard said.
“I want that established by an acquittal.” He looked at
Coombes. “I should think Mr. Coombes would be just as anxious
to have his client cleared of any stigma of murder, too.”
“I am quite agreed. People who have been charged 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 both satisfied with that
arrangement?”
“Absolutely not, your Honor,” Brannhard said
promptly. “The whole basis of the Holloway defense is that
this man Borch was killed in commission of a felony. We’re
prepared to prove that, but we don’t want our case prejudiced
by an earlier trial.”
Coombes laughed. “Mr. Brannhard wants to clear his client
by preconvicting mine. We can’t agree to anything like
that.”
“Yes, and he is making the same objection to trying your
client first. Well, I’m going to remove both objections.
I’m going to order the two cases combined, and both
defendants tried together.”
A momentary glow of unholy glee on Gus Brannhard’s face;
Coombes didn’t like the idea at all.
“Your Honor, I trust that that suggestion was only made
facetiously,” he said.
“It wasn’t, Mr. Coombes.”
“Then if your Honor will not hold me in contempt for
saying so, it is the most shockingly irregular—I won’t go so
far as to say improper—trial procedure I’ve ever heard of.
This is not a case of accomplices charged with 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. I don’t know who’s going to be named to take
Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s place, but I pity him from the
bottom of my heart. Why, Mr. Brannhard and I could go off somewhere
and play 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
any further objections.”
It was all he could do to keep his face judicially grave and
unmirthful. Brannhard was almost purring, like a big tiger that had
just gotten the better of a young goat; Leslie Coombes’s
suavity was beginning to crumble slightly at the edges.
“Your Honor, that is a most excellent suggestion,”
Brannhard declared. “I will prosecute Mr. Coombes’s
client with the greatest pleasure in the universe.”
“Well, all I can say, your Honor, is that if the first
proposal was the most irregular I had ever heard, the record
didn’t last long!”
“Why, Mr. Coombes, I went over the law and the rules of
jurisprudence very carefully, and I couldn’t find a word that
could be construed as disallowing such a procedure.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t find any precedent for it
either!”
Leslie Coombes should have known better than that; in colonial
law, you can find a precedent for almost anything.
“How much do you bet, Leslie?” Brannhard asked, a
larcenous gleam in his eye.
“Don’t let him take your money away from you. 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 the People 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 bringing action 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’s all there is
or ever was to this case.”
That was impolite of Gus. Leslie Coombes had wanted to go on to
the end pretending that the Company charter had absolutely nothing
to do with it.
THERE WAS AN unending stream of reports of Fuzzies seen here and
there, often simultaneously in impossibly distant parts of the
city. Some were from publicity seekers and pathological liars and
crackpots; some were the result of honest mistakes or over
imaginativeness. There was some reason to suspect that not a few
had originated with the Company, to confuse the search. One thing
did come to light which heartened Jack Holloway. An intensive if
concealed search was being made by the Company police, and by the
Mallorysport police department, which the company controlled.
Max Fane was giving every available moment to 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 were the Colonial Constabulary, over whom
Nick Emmert’s administration seemed to have little if any
authority. Colonel Ian Ferguson, the commandant, had his
appointment direct from the 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’t try to be civil at all. There was also a noticeable
coolness toward him at the bank. On the other hand, on several
occasions, Space Navy officers and ratings down from Xerxes Base
went out of their way to accost him, introduce themselves, shake
hands with him and give him their best wishes.
Once, in one of the weather-domed business centers, an elderly
man with white hair showing under his black beret greeted him.
“Mr. Holloway, I want to tell you how grieved I am to
learn about the disappearance of those little people of
yours,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s
nothing I can do to help you, but I hope they turn up
safely.”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Stenson.” He shook hands 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 veridicators for
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 microray scanner I just developed, and . . . ”
He walked with Stenson to his shop, had a cup of tea and looked
at the scanner. From Stenson’s screen, he called Max Fane.
Six more people had claimed to have seen the Fuzzies.
Within a week, the films taken at the camp had 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 take care of his fan mail. Once, entering a
bar, Jack thought he saw Baby sitting on a woman’s head. A
second look showed that it was only a life-sized doll, held on with
an elastic band. Within a week, he was seeing Baby Fuzzy hats all
over town, and shop windows were full of life-sized Fuzzy
dolls.
In the late afternoon, two weeks after the Fuzzies had vanished,
Marshal Fane dropped him at the hotel. They sat in the car for a
moment, and Fane said:
“I think this is the end of it. We’re all 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 confessed to
every unsolved crime on the planet. It shows you how hard up we are
that I waste your time and mine listening to her.”
“Max, nobody’s seen them. You think they just
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 are land-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 looked out over the
city—a vista of treetop green, with roofs and the domes of shopping
centers and business centers and amusement centers showing through,
and the angular buttes of tall buildings rising above. The
streetless contragravity city of a new planet that had never known
ground traffic. The Fuzzies could be hiding anywhere among those
trees—or they could all be dead in some man-made trap. He thought
of all the deadly places into which they could have wandered.
Machinery, dormant and quiet, until somebody threw a switch.
Conduits, which could be flooded without warning, or filled with
scalding steam or choking gas. Poor little Fuzzies, they’d
think a city was as safe as the woods of home, where there was
nothing worse than harpies and damnthings.
Gus Brannhard was out when he went down to the suite; Ben
Rainsford was at a reading screen, studying a psychology text, and
Gerd was working at a desk that had been brought in. Baby was
playing on the floor with the bright new toys they had gotten for
him. When Pappy Jack came in, he dropped them and ran to be picked
up and held.
“George called,” Gerd said. “They have a
family of Fuzzies at the post now.”
“Well, that’s great.” He tried to make it
sound enthusiastic. “How many?”
“Five, three males and two females. They call them Dr.
Crippen, Dillinger, Ned Kelly, Lizzie Borden, and Calamity
Jane.”
Wouldn’t it be just like a bunch of cops to hang names
like that on innocent Fuzzies?
“Why don’t you call the post and say hello to
them?” Ben asked. “Baby likes them; he’d think it was fun to talk to
them again.”
He let himself be urged into it, and punched out the
combination. They were nice Fuzzies; almost, but of course not
quite, as nice as his own.
“If your family doesn’t turn up in time for the
trial, have Gus subpoena ours,” Lunt told him. “You
ought to have some to produce in court. Two weeks from now, this
mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things. You ought to see
them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon.”
He said he hoped he’d have his own by then; he realized
that he was saying it without much conviction.
They had a drink when Gus came in. He was delighted with the
offer from Lunt. Another one who didn’t expect to see Pappy
Jack’s Fuzzies alive again.
“I’m not doing a damn thing here,” Rainsford
said. “I’m going back to Beta till the trial. Maybe I
can pick up some ideas from George Lunt’s Fuzzies. I’m
damned if I’m getting any from this crap!” He gestured
at the reading screen. “All I have is a vocabulary, and I
don’t know what half the words mean.” He snapped it
off. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Jimenez
mightn’t have been right and Ruth Ortheris is wrong. Maybe
you can be just a little bit sapient.”
“Maybe it’s possible to be sapient and not know
it,” Gus said. “Like the character in the old French
play who didn’t know he was talking prose.”
“What do you mean, Gus?” Gerd asked.
“I’m not sure I know. It’s just an idea that
occurred to me today. Kick it around and see if you can get
anything out of it.”
“I BELIEVE THE difference lies in the area of
consciousness,” Ernst Mallin was saying. “You all know,
of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than
one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of
consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire
mentation is conscious.”
“I hope they stay hypothetical,” Victor Grego, in
his office across the city, said out of the screen. “They
wouldn’t recognize us as sapient at all.”
“We wouldn’t be sapient, as they’d define the
term,” Leslie Coombes, in the same screen with Grego, said.
“They’d have some equivalent of the
talk-and-build-a-fire rule, based on abilities of which we
can’t even conceive.”
Maybe, Ruth thought, they might recognize us as one-tenth to as
much as one-eighth sapient. No, then we’d have to recognize,
say, a chimpanzee as being one-one-hundredth sapient, and a
flatworm as being sapient to the order of one-billionth.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “If I understand,
you mean that nonsapient beings think, but only
subconsciously?”
“That’s correct, Ruth. When confronted by 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 us in 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 unpleasant sense-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 weapon is—still subconsciously—regarded as
a part of the Fuzzy, hence it must also be buried.”
Mallin frowned portentiously. The idea seemed to appeal to him,
but of course he simply couldn’t agree too promptly with a
mere layman, even the boss.
“Well, so far you’re on fairly safe ground, Mr.
Grego,” he admitted. “Association of otherwise
dissimilar things because of some apparent similarity is a
recognized element of nonsapient animal behavior.” He frowned
again. “That could be an explanation. I’ll have to
think of it.”
About this time tomorrow, it would be his own 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.
THE TWO LAWYERS had risen hastily when Chief Justice Pendarvis
entered; he responded to their greetings and seated himself at his
desk, reaching for the silver cigar box and taking out a panatella.
Gustavus Adolphus Brannhard picked up the cigar he had laid aside
and began puffing on it; Leslie Coombes took a cigarette from his
case. They both looked at him, waiting like two drawn weapons—a
battle axe and a rapier.
“Well, gentlemen, as you know, we have a couple 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 other killed a man who was trying to kill him.”
“Well, your Honor, I don’t believe my client is
guilty of anything, legally or morally,” Brannhard said.
“I want that established by an acquittal.” He looked at
Coombes. “I should think Mr. Coombes would be just as anxious
to have his client cleared of any stigma of murder, too.”
“I am quite agreed. People who have been charged 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 both satisfied with that
arrangement?”
“Absolutely not, your Honor,” Brannhard said
promptly. “The whole basis of the Holloway defense is that
this man Borch was killed in commission of a felony. We’re
prepared to prove that, but we don’t want our case prejudiced
by an earlier trial.”
Coombes laughed. “Mr. Brannhard wants to clear his client
by preconvicting mine. We can’t agree to anything like
that.”
“Yes, and he is making the same objection to trying your
client first. Well, I’m going to remove both objections.
I’m going to order the two cases combined, and both
defendants tried together.”
A momentary glow of unholy glee on Gus Brannhard’s face;
Coombes didn’t like the idea at all.
“Your Honor, I trust that that suggestion was only made
facetiously,” he said.
“It wasn’t, Mr. Coombes.”
“Then if your Honor will not hold me in contempt for
saying so, it is the most shockingly irregular—I won’t go so
far as to say improper—trial procedure I’ve ever heard of.
This is not a case of accomplices charged with 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. I don’t know who’s going to be named to take
Mohammed Ali O’Brien’s place, but I pity him from the
bottom of my heart. Why, Mr. Brannhard and I could go off somewhere
and play 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
any further objections.”
It was all he could do to keep his face judicially grave and
unmirthful. Brannhard was almost purring, like a big tiger that had
just gotten the better of a young goat; Leslie Coombes’s
suavity was beginning to crumble slightly at the edges.
“Your Honor, that is a most excellent suggestion,”
Brannhard declared. “I will prosecute Mr. Coombes’s
client with the greatest pleasure in the universe.”
“Well, all I can say, your Honor, is that if the first
proposal was the most irregular I had ever heard, the record
didn’t last long!”
“Why, Mr. Coombes, I went over the law and the rules of
jurisprudence very carefully, and I couldn’t find a word that
could be construed as disallowing such a procedure.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t find any precedent for it
either!”
Leslie Coombes should have known better than that; in colonial
law, you can find a precedent for almost anything.
“How much do you bet, Leslie?” Brannhard asked, a
larcenous gleam in his eye.
“Don’t let him take your money away from you. 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 the People 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 bringing action 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’s all there is
or ever was to this case.”
That was impolite of Gus. Leslie Coombes had wanted to go on to
the end pretending that the Company charter had absolutely nothing
to do with it.
THERE WAS AN unending stream of reports of Fuzzies seen here and
there, often simultaneously in impossibly distant parts of the
city. Some were from publicity seekers and pathological liars and
crackpots; some were the result of honest mistakes or over
imaginativeness. There was some reason to suspect that not a few
had originated with the Company, to confuse the search. One thing
did come to light which heartened Jack Holloway. An intensive if
concealed search was being made by the Company police, and by the
Mallorysport police department, which the company controlled.
Max Fane was giving every available moment to 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 were the Colonial Constabulary, over whom
Nick Emmert’s administration seemed to have little if any
authority. Colonel Ian Ferguson, the commandant, had his
appointment direct from the 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’t try to be civil at all. There was also a noticeable
coolness toward him at the bank. On the other hand, on several
occasions, Space Navy officers and ratings down from Xerxes Base
went out of their way to accost him, introduce themselves, shake
hands with him and give him their best wishes.
Once, in one of the weather-domed business centers, an elderly
man with white hair showing under his black beret greeted him.
“Mr. Holloway, I want to tell you how grieved I am to
learn about the disappearance of those little people of
yours,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s
nothing I can do to help you, but I hope they turn up
safely.”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Stenson.” He shook hands 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 veridicators for
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 microray scanner I just developed, and . . . ”
He walked with Stenson to his shop, had a cup of tea and looked
at the scanner. From Stenson’s screen, he called Max Fane.
Six more people had claimed to have seen the Fuzzies.
Within a week, the films taken at the camp had 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 take care of his fan mail. Once, entering a
bar, Jack thought he saw Baby sitting on a woman’s head. A
second look showed that it was only a life-sized doll, held on with
an elastic band. Within a week, he was seeing Baby Fuzzy hats all
over town, and shop windows were full of life-sized Fuzzy
dolls.
In the late afternoon, two weeks after the Fuzzies had vanished,
Marshal Fane dropped him at the hotel. They sat in the car for a
moment, and Fane said:
“I think this is the end of it. We’re all 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 confessed to
every unsolved crime on the planet. It shows you how hard up we are
that I waste your time and mine listening to her.”
“Max, nobody’s seen them. You think they just
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 are land-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 looked out over the
city—a vista of treetop green, with roofs and the domes of shopping
centers and business centers and amusement centers showing through,
and the angular buttes of tall buildings rising above. The
streetless contragravity city of a new planet that had never known
ground traffic. The Fuzzies could be hiding anywhere among those
trees—or they could all be dead in some man-made trap. He thought
of all the deadly places into which they could have wandered.
Machinery, dormant and quiet, until somebody threw a switch.
Conduits, which could be flooded without warning, or filled with
scalding steam or choking gas. Poor little Fuzzies, they’d
think a city was as safe as the woods of home, where there was
nothing worse than harpies and damnthings.
Gus Brannhard was out when he went down to the suite; Ben
Rainsford was at a reading screen, studying a psychology text, and
Gerd was working at a desk that had been brought in. Baby was
playing on the floor with the bright new toys they had gotten for
him. When Pappy Jack came in, he dropped them and ran to be picked
up and held.
“George called,” Gerd said. “They have a
family of Fuzzies at the post now.”
“Well, that’s great.” He tried to make it
sound enthusiastic. “How many?”
“Five, three males and two females. They call them Dr.
Crippen, Dillinger, Ned Kelly, Lizzie Borden, and Calamity
Jane.”
Wouldn’t it be just like a bunch of cops to hang names
like that on innocent Fuzzies?
“Why don’t you call the post and say hello to
them?” Ben asked. “Baby likes them; he’d think it was fun to talk to
them again.”
He let himself be urged into it, and punched out the
combination. They were nice Fuzzies; almost, but of course not
quite, as nice as his own.
“If your family doesn’t turn up in time for the
trial, have Gus subpoena ours,” Lunt told him. “You
ought to have some to produce in court. Two weeks from now, this
mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things. You ought to see
them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon.”
He said he hoped he’d have his own by then; he realized
that he was saying it without much conviction.
They had a drink when Gus came in. He was delighted with the
offer from Lunt. Another one who didn’t expect to see Pappy
Jack’s Fuzzies alive again.
“I’m not doing a damn thing here,” Rainsford
said. “I’m going back to Beta till the trial. Maybe I
can pick up some ideas from George Lunt’s Fuzzies. I’m
damned if I’m getting any from this crap!” He gestured
at the reading screen. “All I have is a vocabulary, and I
don’t know what half the words mean.” He snapped it
off. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Jimenez
mightn’t have been right and Ruth Ortheris is wrong. Maybe
you can be just a little bit sapient.”
“Maybe it’s possible to be sapient and not know
it,” Gus said. “Like the character in the old French
play who didn’t know he was talking prose.”
“What do you mean, Gus?” Gerd asked.
“I’m not sure I know. It’s just an idea that
occurred to me today. Kick it around and see if you can get
anything out of it.”
“I BELIEVE THE difference lies in the area of
consciousness,” Ernst Mallin was saying. “You all know,
of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than
one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of
consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire
mentation is conscious.”
“I hope they stay hypothetical,” Victor Grego, in
his office across the city, said out of the screen. “They
wouldn’t recognize us as sapient at all.”
“We wouldn’t be sapient, as they’d define the
term,” Leslie Coombes, in the same screen with Grego, said.
“They’d have some equivalent of the
talk-and-build-a-fire rule, based on abilities of which we
can’t even conceive.”
Maybe, Ruth thought, they might recognize us as one-tenth to as
much as one-eighth sapient. No, then we’d have to recognize,
say, a chimpanzee as being one-one-hundredth sapient, and a
flatworm as being sapient to the order of one-billionth.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “If I understand,
you mean that nonsapient beings think, but only
subconsciously?”
“That’s correct, Ruth. When confronted by 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 us in 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 unpleasant sense-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 weapon is—still subconsciously—regarded as
a part of the Fuzzy, hence it must also be buried.”
Mallin frowned portentiously. The idea seemed to appeal to him,
but of course he simply couldn’t agree too promptly with a
mere layman, even the boss.
“Well, so far you’re on fairly safe ground, Mr.
Grego,” he admitted. “Association of otherwise
dissimilar things because of some apparent similarity is a
recognized element of nonsapient animal behavior.” He frowned
again. “That could be an explanation. I’ll have to
think of it.”
About this time tomorrow, it would be his own 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.