“Aren’t on Zarathustra, Pancho.  They’re on Terra, five hundred light-years, six months’ ship voyage each way.  Intervention, of course, is my responsibility, but the sapience question is yours.  I don’t envy you, but I can’t relieve you of it.”

* * * * *

Gerd van Riebeek’s suggestion that all three of the visitors sleep aboard the airboat hadn’t been treated seriously at all.  Gerd himself was accommodated in the spare room of the living hut.  Juan Jimenez went with Ben Rainsford to his camp for the night.  Ruth Ortheris had the cabin of the boat to herself.  Rainsford was on the screen the next morning, while Jack and Gerd and Ruth and the Fuzzies were having breakfast; he and Jimenez had decided to take his airjeep and work down from the head of Cold Creek in the belief that there must be more Fuzzies around in the woods.

Both Gerd and Ruth decided to spend the morning at the camp and get acquainted with the Fuzzies on hand.  The family had had enough breakfast to leave them neutral on the subject of land-prawns, and they were given another of the new toys, a big colored ball.  They rolled it around in the grass for a while, decided to save it for their evening romp and took it into the house.  Then they began playing aimlessly among some junk in the shed outside the workshop.  Once in a while one of them would drift away to look for a prawn, more for sport than food.

Ruth and Gerd and Jack were sitting at the breakfast table on the grass, talking idly and trying to think of excuses for not washing the dishes.  Mamma Fuzzy and Baby were poking about in the tall grass.  Suddenly Mamma gave a shrill cry and started back for the shed, chasing Baby ahead of her and slapping him on the bottom with the flat of her chopper-digger to hurry him along.

Jack started for the house at a run.  Gerd grabbed his camera and jumped up on the table.  It was Ruth who saw the cause of the disturbance.

“Jack!  Look, over there!” She pointed to the edge of the clearing.  “Two strange Fuzzies!”

He kept on running, but instead of the rifle he had been going for, he collected his movie camera, two of the spare chopper-diggers and some Extee Three.  When he emerged again, the two Fuzzies had come into the clearing and stood side by side, looking around.  Both were females, and they both carried wooden prawn-killers.

“You have plenty of film?” he asked Gerd.  “Here, Ruth; take this.”  He handed her his own camera.  “Keep far enough away from me to get what I’m doing and what they’re doing.  I’m going to try to trade with them.”

He went forward, the steel weapons in his hip pocket and the Extee Three in his hand, talking softly and soothingly to the newcomers.  When he was as close to them as he could get without stampeding them, he stopped.

“Our gang’s coming up behind you,” Gerd told him.  “Regular skirmish line; choppers at high port.  Now they’ve stopped, about thirty feet behind you.”