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 seemed
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 embossed on, and
that’s the 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 over-anthropomorphizing? 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 likes 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
it 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 romp time 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 preexisting
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 sapience! 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 recognizably
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, erect posture, 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.”
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 seemed
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 embossed on, and
that’s the 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 over-anthropomorphizing? 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 likes 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
it 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 romp time 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 preexisting
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 sapience! 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 recognizably
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, erect posture, 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.”