“One of the best.  One of our own, lieutenant j.g., Naval Reserve.  You don’t need to worry about credibility, Pancho.”

“They sound sapient to me,” Ybarra said.  “You know, this is something I’ve always been half hoping and half afraid would happen.”

“You mean an excuse to intervene in that mess down there?” Greibenfeld asked.

Ybarra looked blankly at him for a moment.  “No.  No, I meant a case of borderline sapience; something our sacred talk-and-build-a-fire rule won’t cover.  Just how did this come to our attention, Stephen?”

“Well, it was transmitted to us from Contact Center in Mallorysport late Friday night.  There seem to be a number of copies of this tape around; our agent got hold of one of them and transmitted it to Contact Center, and it was relayed on to us, with the agent’s comments,” Aelborg said.  “Contact Center ordered a routine surveillance inside Company House and, to play safe, at the Residency.  At the time, there seemed no reason to give the thing any beat-to-quarters-and-man-guns treatment, but we got a report on Saturday afternoon—­Mallorysport time, that is—­that Leonard Kellogg had played off the copy of the tape that Juan Jimenez had made for file, and had alerted Victor Grego immediately.

“Of course, Grego saw the implications at once.  He sent Kellogg and the chief Company psychologist, Ernst Mallin, out to Beta Continent with orders to brand Rainsford’s and Holloway’s claims as a deliberate hoax.  Then the Company intends to encourage the trapping of Fuzzies for their fur, in hopes that the whole species will be exterminated before anybody can get out from Terra to check on Rainsford’s story.”

“I hadn’t heard that last detail before.”

“Well, we can prove it,” Aelborg assured him.

It sounded like a Victor Grego idea.  He lit his pipe slowly.  Damnit, he didn’t want to have to intervene.  No Space Navy C.O. did.  Justifying intervention on a Colonial planet was too much bother—­always a board of inquiry, often a courtmartial.  And supersession of civil authority was completely against Service Doctrine.  Of course, there were other and more important tenets of Service Doctrine.  The sovereignty of the Terran Federation for one, and the inviolability of the Federation Constitution.  And the rights of extraterrestrials, too.  Conrad Greibenfeld, too, seemed to have been thinking about that.

“If those Fuzzies are sapient beings, that whole setup down there is illegal.  Company, Colonial administration and all,” he said.  “Zarathustra’s a Class-IV planet, and that’s all you can make out of it.”

“We won’t intervene unless we’re forced to.  Pancho, I think the decision will be largely up to you.”

Pancho Ybarra was horrified.

“Good God, Alex!  You can’t mean that.  Who am I?  A nobody.  All I have is an ordinary M.D., and a Psych.D.  Why, the best psychological brains in the Federation—­”