“Hey, look!” Jimenez cried.  “He’s making a lobster pick for himself!”

Through lunch, they talked exclusively about Fuzzies.  The subjects of the discussion nibbled things that were given to them, and yeeked among themselves.  Gerd van Riebeek suggested that they were discussing the odd habits of human-type people.  Juan Jimenez looked at him, slightly disturbed, as though wondering just how seriously he meant it.

“You know, what impressed me most in the taped account was the incident of the damnthing,” said Ruth Ortheris.  “Any animal associating with man will try to attract attention if something’s wrong, but I never heard of one, not even a Freyan kholph or a Terran chimpanzee, that would use descriptive pantomime.  Little Fuzzy was actually making a symbolic representation, by abstracting the distinguishing characteristic of the damnthing.”

“Think that stiff-arm gesture and bark might have been intended to represent a rifle?” Gerd van Riebeek asked.  “He’d seen you shooting before, hadn’t he?”

“I don’t think it was anything else.  He was telling me, ’Big nasty damnthing outside; shoot it like you did the harpy.’  And if he hadn’t run past me and pointed back, that damnthing would have killed me.”

Jimenez, hesitantly, said, “I know I’m speaking from ignorance.  You’re the Fuzzy expert.  But isn’t it possible that you’re overanthropomorphizing?  Endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?”

“Juan, I’m not going to answer that right now.  I don’t think I’ll answer at all.  You wait till you’ve been around these Fuzzies a little longer, and then ask it again, only ask yourself.”

* * * * *

“So you see, Ernst, that’s the problem.”

Leonard Kellogg laid the words like a paperweight on the other words he had been saying, and waited.  Ernst Mallin sat motionless, his elbows on the desk and his chin in his hands.  A little pair of wrinkles, like parentheses, appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes.  I’m not a lawyer, of course, but....”

“It’s not a legal question.  It’s a question for a psychologist.”

That left it back with Ernst Mallin, and he knew it.

“I’d have to see them myself before I could express an opinion.  You have that tape of Holloway’s with you?” When Kellogg nodded, Mallin continued:  “Did either of them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?”

He answered it as he had when Victor Grego had asked the same question, adding: 

“The account consists almost entirely of Holloway’s uncorroborated statements concerning things to which he claims to have been the sole witness.”

“Ah.”  Mallin permitted himself a tight little smile.  “And he’s not a qualified observer.  Neither, for that matter, is Rainsford.  Regardless of his position as a xeno-naturalist, he is 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?”