He wondered what to give the professor, if that was what he was, to work on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him too much about taking things apart, just at present.  Sometime he might come home and find something important taken apart, or, worse, taken apart and put together incorrectly.  Finally, he went to a closet, rummaging in it until he found a tin canister.  By the time he returned, Little Fuzzy had gotten up on the chair, found his pipe in the ashtray and was puffing on it and coughing.

“Hey, I don’t think that’s good for you!”

He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirt-sleeve and put it in his mouth, then placed the canister on the floor, and put Little Fuzzy on the floor beside it.  There were about ten pounds of stones in it.  When he had first settled here, he had made a collection of the local minerals, and, after learning what he’d wanted to, he had thrown them out, all but twenty or thirty of the prettiest specimens.  He was glad, now, that he had kept these.

Little Fuzzy looked the can over, decided that the lid was a member of the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got it off.  The inside of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a little thought to discover that what he saw in it was only himself.  He yeeked about that, and looked into the can.  This, he decided, belonged to the class of things-that-can-be-dumped, like wastebaskets, so he dumped it on the floor.  Then he began examining the stones and sorting them by color.

Except for an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was the first real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception.  He proceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red stone.  Well, maybe he’d seen rainbows.  Maybe he’d lived near a big misty waterfall, where there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining.  Or maybe that was just his natural way of seeing colors.

Then, when he saw what he had to work with, he began making arrangements with them, laying them out in odd circular and spiral patterns.  Each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to call attention to it, sit and look at it for a while, and then take it apart and start a new one.  Little Fuzzy was capable of artistic gratification too.  He made useless things, just for the pleasure of making and looking at them.

Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside his bed along with his other treasures.  The new weapon he laid on the blanket beside him when he went to bed.

* * * * *

The next morning, Jack broke up a whole cake of Extee Three and put it down, filled the bowl with water, and, after making sure he had left nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on which he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the diggings.  He worked all morning, cracking nearly a ton and a half of flint, and found nothing.  Then he set off a string of shots, brought down an avalanche of sandstone and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball tree to eat his lunch.