ERNST MALLIN SHRANK, as though trying to pull himself into
himself, when he heard his name. He didn’t want to testify.
He had been dreading this moment for days. Now he would have to sit
in that chair, and they would ask him questions, and he
couldn’t answer them truthfully and the globe over his head
would turn red when he lied.
When the deputy marshal touched his shoulder and spoke to him,
he didn’t think, at first, that his legs would support him.
It seemed miles, with all the staring faces on either side of him.
Somehow, he reached the chair and sat down, and they fitted the
helmet over his head and attached the electrodes. They used to make
a witness take some kind of oath to tell the truth. They
didn’t any more. They didn’t need to.
As soon as the veridicator was on, he looked up at the big
screen behind the four judges; the globe above his head was a
glaring red. There was a titter of laughter. Nobody in the
courtroom knew better than he what was happening. He had screens in
his laboratory that broke it all down into individual patterns—the
steady pulsing waves from the cortex, the alpha and beta waves;
beta-aleph and beta-beth and beta-gimel and beta-daleth. The
thalamic waves. He thought of all of them, and of the
electromagnetic events which accompanied brain activity. As he did,
the red faded and the globe became blue. He was no longer
suppressing statements and substituting other statements he knew to
be false. If he could keep it that way. But, sooner or later, he
knew, he wouldn’t be able to.
The globe stayed blue while he named himself and stated his
professional background. There was a brief flicker of red while he
was listing his publications—that paper, entirely the work of one of
his students, which he had published under his own name. He had
forgotten about that, but his conscience hadn’t.
“Dr. Mallin,” the oldest of the three judges, who
sat in the middle, began, “what, in your professional
opinion, is the difference between sapient and nonsapient
mentation?”
“The ability to think consciously,” he stated. The
globe stayed blue.
“Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren’t
conscious, or do you mean they don’t think?”
“Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous
system has some consciousness awareness of existence and of its
surroundings. And anything having a brain thinks, to use the term
at its loosest. What I meant was that only the sapient mind thinks
and knows that it is thinking.”
He was perfectly safe so far. He talked about sensory stimuli
and responses, and about conditioned reflexes. He went back to the
first century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud. The
globe never flickered.
“The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is
immediately present to the senses and responds automatically. It
will perceive something and make a single statement about it—this
is good to eat, this sensation is unpleasant, this is a
sex-gratification object, this is dangerous. The sapient mind, on
the other hand, is conscious of thinking about these sense stimuli,
and makes descriptive statements about them, and then makes
statements about those statements, in a connected chain. I have a
structural differential at my seat; if somebody will bring it to
me.”
“Well, never mind now, Dr. Mallin. When you’re off
the stand and the discussion begins you can show what you mean. We
just want your opinion in general terms, now.”
“Well, the sapient mind can generalize. To the nonsapient
animal, every experience is either totally novel or identical with
some remembered experience. A rabbit will flee from one dog because
to the rabbit mind it is identical with another dog that has chased
it. A bird will be attracted to an apple, and each apple will be a
unique red thing to peck at. The sapient being will say,
‘These red objects are apples; as a class, they are edible
and flavorsome.’ He sets up a class under the general label
of apples. This, in turn, leads to the formation of abstract ideas,
redness, flavor, et cetera—conceived of apart from any specific
physical object, and to the ordering of
abstractions—‘fruit’ as distinguished from apples,
‘food’ as distinguished from fruit.”
The globe was still placidly blue. The three judges waited, and
he continued:
“Having formed these abstract ideas, it becomes necessary
to symbolize them, in order to deal with them apart from the actual
object. The sapient being is a symbolizer, and a symbol
communicator; he is able to convey to other sapient beings his
ideas in symbolic form.”
“Like ‘Pa-pee Jaak’?” the judge on his
right, with the black mustache, asked.
The globe flashed red at once.
“Your Honors, I cannot consider words picked up at random
and learned by rote speech. The Fuzzies have merely learned to
associate that sound with a specific human, and use it as a signal,
not as a symbol.”
The globe was still red. The Chief Justice, in the middle,
rapped with his gavel.
“Dr. Mallin! Of all the people on this planet, you at
least should know the impossibility of lying under veridication.
Other people just know it can’t be done; you know why. Now
I’m going to rephrase Judge Janiver’s question, and
I’ll expect you to answer truthfully. If you don’t
I’m going to hold you in contempt. When those Fuzzies cried
out, ‘Pappy Jack!’ do you or do you not believe that
they were using a verbal expression which stood, in their minds,
for Mr. Holloway?”
He couldn’t say it. This sapience was all a big fake; he
had to believe that. The Fuzzies were only little mindless
animals.
But he didn’t believe it. He knew better. He gulped for a
moment.
“Yes, your Honor. The term ‘Pappy Jack’ is, in
their minds, a symbol standing for Mr. Jack Holloway.”
He looked at the globe. The red had turned to mauve, the mauve
was becoming violet, and then clear blue. He felt better than he
had felt since the afternoon Leonard Kellogg had told him about the
Fuzzies.
“Then Fuzzies do think consciously, Dr. Mallin?”
That was Pendarvis.
“Oh, yes. The fact that they use verbal symbols indicates
that, even without other evidence. And the instrumental evidence
was most impressive. The mentation pictures we got by
encephalography compare very favorably with those of any human
child of ten or twelve years old, and so does their learning and
puzzle-solving ability. On puzzles, they always think the problem
out first, and, then do the mechanical work with about the same
mental effort, say, as a man washing his hands or tying his
neckcloth.”
The globe was perfectly blue. Mallin had given up trying to lie;
he was simply gushing out everything he thought.
LEONARD KELLOGG SLUMPED forward, his head buried in his elbows
on the table, and misery washed over him in tides.
I am a murderer; I killed a person. Only a funny little person
with fur, but she was a person, and I knew it when I killed her, I
knew it when I saw that little grave out in the woods, and
they’ll put me in the chair and make me admit it to
everybody, and then they’ll take me out in the jail yard and
somebody will shoot me through the head with a pistol, and—
And all the poor little thing wanted was to show me her new
jingle!
“DOES ANYBODY WANT to ask the witness any
questions?” the Chief Justice was asking.
“I don’t,” Captain Greibenfeld said. “Do
you, Lieutenant?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Lieutenant Ybarra
said. “Dr. Mallin’s given us a very lucid statement of
his opinions.”
He had, at that, after he’d decided he couldn’t beat
the veridicator. Jack found himself sympathizing with Mallin.
He’d disliked the man from the first, but he looked different
now, sort of cleaned and washed out inside. Maybe everybody ought
to be veridicated, now and then, to teach them that honesty begins
with honesty to self.
“Mr. Coombes?” Mr. Coombes looked as though he never
wanted to ask another witness another question as long as he lived.
“Mr. Brannhard?”
Gus, got up, holding a sapient member of a sapient race who was
hanging onto his beard, and thanked Ernst Mallin fulsomely.
“In that case we’ll adjourn until o-nine-hundred
tomorrow. Mr. Coombes, I have here a check on the chartered
Zarathustra Company for twenty-five thousand sols. I am returning
it to you and I am canceling Dr. Kellogg’s bail,” Judge
Pendarvis said, as a couple of attendants began getting Mallin
loose from the veridicator.
“Are you also canceling Jack Holloway’s?”
“No, and I would advise you not to make an issue of it,
Mr. Coombes. The only reason I haven’t dismissed the charge
against Mr. Holloway is that I don’t want to handicap you by
cutting off your foothold in the prosecution. I do not consider Mr.
Holloway a bail risk. I do so consider your client, Dr.
Kellogg.”
“Frankly, your Honor, so do I,” Coombes admitted.
“My protest was merely an example of what Dr. Mallin would
call conditioned reflex.”
Then a crowd began pushing up around the table; Ben Rainsford,
George Lunt and his troopers, Gerd and Ruth, shoving in among them,
their arms around each other.
“We’ll be at the hotel after a while, Jack,”
Gerd was saying. “Ruth and I are going out for a drink and
something to eat; we’ll be around later to pick up her
Fuzzies.”
Now his partner had his girl back, and his partner’s girl
had a Fuzzy family of her own. This was going to be real fun. What
were their names now? Syndrome, Complex, Id and Superego. The
things some people named Fuzzies!
ERNST MALLIN SHRANK, as though trying to pull himself into
himself, when he heard his name. He didn’t want to testify.
He had been dreading this moment for days. Now he would have to sit
in that chair, and they would ask him questions, and he
couldn’t answer them truthfully and the globe over his head
would turn red when he lied.
When the deputy marshal touched his shoulder and spoke to him,
he didn’t think, at first, that his legs would support him.
It seemed miles, with all the staring faces on either side of him.
Somehow, he reached the chair and sat down, and they fitted the
helmet over his head and attached the electrodes. They used to make
a witness take some kind of oath to tell the truth. They
didn’t any more. They didn’t need to.
As soon as the veridicator was on, he looked up at the big
screen behind the four judges; the globe above his head was a
glaring red. There was a titter of laughter. Nobody in the
courtroom knew better than he what was happening. He had screens in
his laboratory that broke it all down into individual patterns—the
steady pulsing waves from the cortex, the alpha and beta waves;
beta-aleph and beta-beth and beta-gimel and beta-daleth. The
thalamic waves. He thought of all of them, and of the
electromagnetic events which accompanied brain activity. As he did,
the red faded and the globe became blue. He was no longer
suppressing statements and substituting other statements he knew to
be false. If he could keep it that way. But, sooner or later, he
knew, he wouldn’t be able to.
The globe stayed blue while he named himself and stated his
professional background. There was a brief flicker of red while he
was listing his publications—that paper, entirely the work of one of
his students, which he had published under his own name. He had
forgotten about that, but his conscience hadn’t.
“Dr. Mallin,” the oldest of the three judges, who
sat in the middle, began, “what, in your professional
opinion, is the difference between sapient and nonsapient
mentation?”
“The ability to think consciously,” he stated. The
globe stayed blue.
“Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren’t
conscious, or do you mean they don’t think?”
“Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous
system has some consciousness awareness of existence and of its
surroundings. And anything having a brain thinks, to use the term
at its loosest. What I meant was that only the sapient mind thinks
and knows that it is thinking.”
He was perfectly safe so far. He talked about sensory stimuli
and responses, and about conditioned reflexes. He went back to the
first century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud. The
globe never flickered.
“The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is
immediately present to the senses and responds automatically. It
will perceive something and make a single statement about it—this
is good to eat, this sensation is unpleasant, this is a
sex-gratification object, this is dangerous. The sapient mind, on
the other hand, is conscious of thinking about these sense stimuli,
and makes descriptive statements about them, and then makes
statements about those statements, in a connected chain. I have a
structural differential at my seat; if somebody will bring it to
me.”
“Well, never mind now, Dr. Mallin. When you’re off
the stand and the discussion begins you can show what you mean. We
just want your opinion in general terms, now.”
“Well, the sapient mind can generalize. To the nonsapient
animal, every experience is either totally novel or identical with
some remembered experience. A rabbit will flee from one dog because
to the rabbit mind it is identical with another dog that has chased
it. A bird will be attracted to an apple, and each apple will be a
unique red thing to peck at. The sapient being will say,
‘These red objects are apples; as a class, they are edible
and flavorsome.’ He sets up a class under the general label
of apples. This, in turn, leads to the formation of abstract ideas,
redness, flavor, et cetera—conceived of apart from any specific
physical object, and to the ordering of
abstractions—‘fruit’ as distinguished from apples,
‘food’ as distinguished from fruit.”
The globe was still placidly blue. The three judges waited, and
he continued:
“Having formed these abstract ideas, it becomes necessary
to symbolize them, in order to deal with them apart from the actual
object. The sapient being is a symbolizer, and a symbol
communicator; he is able to convey to other sapient beings his
ideas in symbolic form.”
“Like ‘Pa-pee Jaak’?” the judge on his
right, with the black mustache, asked.
The globe flashed red at once.
“Your Honors, I cannot consider words picked up at random
and learned by rote speech. The Fuzzies have merely learned to
associate that sound with a specific human, and use it as a signal,
not as a symbol.”
The globe was still red. The Chief Justice, in the middle,
rapped with his gavel.
“Dr. Mallin! Of all the people on this planet, you at
least should know the impossibility of lying under veridication.
Other people just know it can’t be done; you know why. Now
I’m going to rephrase Judge Janiver’s question, and
I’ll expect you to answer truthfully. If you don’t
I’m going to hold you in contempt. When those Fuzzies cried
out, ‘Pappy Jack!’ do you or do you not believe that
they were using a verbal expression which stood, in their minds,
for Mr. Holloway?”
He couldn’t say it. This sapience was all a big fake; he
had to believe that. The Fuzzies were only little mindless
animals.
But he didn’t believe it. He knew better. He gulped for a
moment.
“Yes, your Honor. The term ‘Pappy Jack’ is, in
their minds, a symbol standing for Mr. Jack Holloway.”
He looked at the globe. The red had turned to mauve, the mauve
was becoming violet, and then clear blue. He felt better than he
had felt since the afternoon Leonard Kellogg had told him about the
Fuzzies.
“Then Fuzzies do think consciously, Dr. Mallin?”
That was Pendarvis.
“Oh, yes. The fact that they use verbal symbols indicates
that, even without other evidence. And the instrumental evidence
was most impressive. The mentation pictures we got by
encephalography compare very favorably with those of any human
child of ten or twelve years old, and so does their learning and
puzzle-solving ability. On puzzles, they always think the problem
out first, and, then do the mechanical work with about the same
mental effort, say, as a man washing his hands or tying his
neckcloth.”
The globe was perfectly blue. Mallin had given up trying to lie;
he was simply gushing out everything he thought.
LEONARD KELLOGG SLUMPED forward, his head buried in his elbows
on the table, and misery washed over him in tides.
I am a murderer; I killed a person. Only a funny little person
with fur, but she was a person, and I knew it when I killed her, I
knew it when I saw that little grave out in the woods, and
they’ll put me in the chair and make me admit it to
everybody, and then they’ll take me out in the jail yard and
somebody will shoot me through the head with a pistol, and—
And all the poor little thing wanted was to show me her new
jingle!
“DOES ANYBODY WANT to ask the witness any
questions?” the Chief Justice was asking.
“I don’t,” Captain Greibenfeld said. “Do
you, Lieutenant?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Lieutenant Ybarra
said. “Dr. Mallin’s given us a very lucid statement of
his opinions.”
He had, at that, after he’d decided he couldn’t beat
the veridicator. Jack found himself sympathizing with Mallin.
He’d disliked the man from the first, but he looked different
now, sort of cleaned and washed out inside. Maybe everybody ought
to be veridicated, now and then, to teach them that honesty begins
with honesty to self.
“Mr. Coombes?” Mr. Coombes looked as though he never
wanted to ask another witness another question as long as he lived.
“Mr. Brannhard?”
Gus, got up, holding a sapient member of a sapient race who was
hanging onto his beard, and thanked Ernst Mallin fulsomely.
“In that case we’ll adjourn until o-nine-hundred
tomorrow. Mr. Coombes, I have here a check on the chartered
Zarathustra Company for twenty-five thousand sols. I am returning
it to you and I am canceling Dr. Kellogg’s bail,” Judge
Pendarvis said, as a couple of attendants began getting Mallin
loose from the veridicator.
“Are you also canceling Jack Holloway’s?”
“No, and I would advise you not to make an issue of it,
Mr. Coombes. The only reason I haven’t dismissed the charge
against Mr. Holloway is that I don’t want to handicap you by
cutting off your foothold in the prosecution. I do not consider Mr.
Holloway a bail risk. I do so consider your client, Dr.
Kellogg.”
“Frankly, your Honor, so do I,” Coombes admitted.
“My protest was merely an example of what Dr. Mallin would
call conditioned reflex.”
Then a crowd began pushing up around the table; Ben Rainsford,
George Lunt and his troopers, Gerd and Ruth, shoving in among them,
their arms around each other.
“We’ll be at the hotel after a while, Jack,”
Gerd was saying. “Ruth and I are going out for a drink and
something to eat; we’ll be around later to pick up her
Fuzzies.”
Now his partner had his girl back, and his partner’s girl
had a Fuzzy family of her own. This was going to be real fun. What
were their names now? Syndrome, Complex, Id and Superego. The
things some people named Fuzzies!