They were both silent for a while after he had finished.  Grego was looking at the globe, and he realized, now, that while he was proud of it, his pride was the pride in a paste jewel that stands for a real one in a bank vault.  Now he was afraid that the real jewel was going to be stolen from him.  Nick Emmert was just afraid.

“You were right yesterday, Victor.  I wish Holloway’d killed that son of a Khooghra.  Maybe it’s not too late—­”

“Yes, it is, Nick.  It’s too late to do anything like that.  It’s too late to do anything but win the case in court.”  He turned to Grego.  “What are your people doing?”

Grego took his eyes from the globe.  “Ernest Mallin’s studying all the filmed evidence we have and all the descriptions of Fuzzy behavior, and trying to prove that none of it is the result of sapient mentation.  Ruth Ortheris is doing the same, only she’s working on the line of instinct and conditioned reflexes and nonsapient, single-stage reasoning.  She has a lot of rats, and some dogs and monkeys, and a lot of apparatus, and some technician from Henry Stenson’s instrument shop helping her.  Juan Jimenez is studying mentation of Terran dogs, cats and primates, and Freyan kholphs and Mimir black slinkers.”

“He hasn’t turned up any simian or canine parallels to that funeral, has he?”

Grego said nothing, merely shook his head.  Emmert muttered something inaudible and probably indecent.

“I didn’t think he had.  I only hope those Fuzzies don’t get up in court, build a bonfire and start making speeches in Lingua Terra.”

Nick Emmert cried out in panic.  “You believe they’re sapient yourself!”

“Of course.  Don’t you?”

Grego laughed sourly.  “Nick thinks you have to believe a thing to prove it.  It helps but it isn’t necessary.  Say we’re a debating team; we’ve been handed the negative of the question. Resolved:  that Fuzzies are Sapient Beings. Personally, I think we have the short end of it, but that only means we’ll have to work harder on it.”

“You know, I was on a debating team at college,” Emmert said brightly.  When that was disregarded, he added:  “If I remember, the first thing was definition of terms.”

Grego looked up quickly.  “Leslie, I think Nick has something.  What is the legal definition of a sapient being?”

“As far as I know, there isn’t any.  Sapience is something that’s just taken for granted.”

“How about talk-and-build-a-fire?”

He shook his head. “People of the Colony of Vishnu versus Emily Morrosh, 612 A.E.”  He told them about the infanticide case.  “I was looking up rulings on sapience; I passed the word on to Ham O’Brien.  You know, what your people will have to do will be to produce a definition of sapience, acceptable to the court, that will include all known sapient races and at the same time exclude the Fuzzies.  I don’t envy them.”