Wouldn’t it be just like a bunch of cops to hang names like that on innocent Fuzzies?
“Why don’t you call the post and say hello to them?” Ben asked. “Baby likes them; he’d think it was fun to talk to them again.”
He let himself be urged into it, and punched out the combination. They were nice Fuzzies; almost, but of course not quite, as nice as his own.
“If your family doesn’t turn up in time for the trial, have Gus subpoena ours,” Lunt told him. “You ought to have some to produce in court. Two weeks from now, this mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things. You ought to see them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon.”
He said he hoped he’d have his own by then; he realized that he was saying it without much conviction.
They had a drink when Gus came in. He was delighted with the offer from Lunt. Another one who didn’t expect to see Pappy Jack’s Fuzzies alive again.
“I’m not doing a damn thing here,” Rainsford said. “I’m going back to Beta till the trial. Maybe I can pick up some ideas from George Lunt’s Fuzzies. I’m damned if I’m getting any from this crap!” He gestured at the reading screen. “All I have is a vocabulary, and I don’t know what half the words mean.” He snapped it off. “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Jimenez mightn’t have been right and Ruth Ortheris is wrong. Maybe you can be just a little bit sapient.”
“Maybe it’s possible to be sapient and not know it,” Gus said. “Like the character in the old French play who didn’t know he was talking prose.”
“What do you mean, Gus?” Gerd asked.
“I’m not sure I know. It’s just an idea that occurred to me today. Kick it around and see if you can get anything out of it.”
“I BELIEVE THE difference lies in the area of consciousness,” Ernst Mallin was saying. “You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness. Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire mentation is conscious.”
“I hope they stay hypothetical,” Victor Grego, in his office across the city, said out of the screen. “They wouldn’t recognize us as sapient at all.”
“We wouldn’t be sapient, as they’d define the term,” Leslie Coombes, in the same screen with Grego, said. “They’d have some equivalent of the talk-and-build-a-fire rule, based on abilities of which we can’t even conceive.”
Maybe, Ruth thought, they might recognize us as one-tenth to as much as one-eighth sapient. No, then we’d have to recognize, say, a chimpanzee as being one-one-hundredth sapient, and a flatworm as being sapient to the order of one-billionth.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “If I understand, you mean that nonsapient beings think, but only subconsciously?”
“That’s correct, Ruth. When confronted by some entirely novel situation, a nonsapient animal will think, but never consciously. Of course, familiar situations are dealt with by pure habit and memory-response.”
“You know, I’ve just thought of something,” Grego said. “I think we can explain that funeral that’s been bothering all of us in nonsapient terms.” He lit a cigarette, while they all looked at him expectantly. “Fuzzies,” he continued, “bury their ordure: they do this to avoid an unpleasant sense-stimulus, a bad smell. Dead bodies quickly putrefy and smell badly; they are thus equated, subconsciously, with ordure and must be buried. All Fuzzies carry weapons. A Fuzzy’s weapon is — still subconsciously — regarded as a part of the Fuzzy, hence it must also be buried.”
Mallin frowned portentiously. The idea seemed to appeal to him, but of course he simply couldn’t agree too promptly with a mere layman, even the boss.
“Well, so far you’re on fairly safe ground, Mr. Grego,” he admitted. “Association of otherwise dissimilar things because of some apparent similarity is a recognized element of nonsapient animal behavior.” He frowned again. “That could be an explanation. I’ll have to think of it.”
About this time tomorrow, it would be his own idea, with grudging recognition of a suggestion by Victor Grego. In time, that would be forgotten; it would be the Mallin Theory. Grego was apparently agreeable, as long as the job got done.
“Well, if you can make anything out of it, pass it on to Mr. Coombes as soon as possible, to be worked up for use in court,” he said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BEN RAINSFORD WENT back to Beta Continent, and Gerd van Riebeek remained in Mallorysport. The constabulary at Post Fifteen had made steel chopper-diggers for their Fuzzies, and reported a gratifying abatement of the land-prawn nuisance. They also made a set of scaled-down carpenter tools, and their Fuzzies were building themselves a house out of scrap crates and boxes. A pair of Fuzzies showed up at Ben Rainsford’s camp, and he adopted them, naming them Flora and Fauna.
Everybody had Fuzzies now, and Pappy Jack only had Baby. He was lying on the floor of the parlor, teaching Baby to tie knots in a piece of string. Gus Brannhard, who spent most of the day in the office in the Central Courts building which had been furnished to him as special prosecutor, was lolling in an armchair in red-and-blue pajamas, smoking a cigar, drinking coffee — his whisky consumption was down to a couple of drinks a day — and studying texts on two reading screens at once, making an occasional remark into a stenomemophone. Gerd was at the desk, spoiling notepaper in an effort to work something out by symbolic logic. Suddenly he crumpled a sheet and threw it across the room, cursing. Brannhard looked away from his screens.
“Trouble, Gerd?”
Gerd cursed again. “How the devil can I tell whether Fuzzies generalize?” he demanded. “How can I tell whether they form abstract ideas? How can I prove, even, that they have ideas at all? Hell’s blazes, how can I even prove, to your satisfaction, that I think consciously?”
“Working on that idea I mentioned?” Brannhard asked.
“I was. It seemed like a good idea but…”
“Suppose we go back to specific instances of Fuzzy behavior, and present them as evidence of sapience?” Brannhard asked. “That funeral, for instance.”
“They’ll still insist that we define sapience.”
The communication screen began buzzing. Baby Fuzzy looked up disinterestedly, and then went back to trying to untie a figure-eight knot he had tied. Jack shoved himself to his feet and put the screen on. It was Max Fane, and for the first time that he could remember, the Colonial Marshal was excited.
“Jack, have you had any news on the screen lately?”
“No. Something turn up?”
“God, yes! The cops are all over the city hunting the Fuzzies; they have orders to shoot on sight. Nick Emmert was just on the air with a reward offer — five hundred sols apiece, dead or alive.”
It took a few seconds for that to register. Then he became frightened. Gus and Gerd were both on their feet and crowding to the screen behind him.
“They have some bum from that squatters’ camp over on the East Side who claims the Fuzzies beat up his ten-year-old daughter,” Fane was saying. “They have both of them at police headquarters, and they’ve handed the story out to Zarathustra News, and Planetwide Coverage. Of course, they’re Company controlled; they’re playing it for all it’s worth.”
“Have they been veridicated?” Brannhard demanded.
“No, and the city cops are keeping them under cover. The girl says she was playing outdoors and these Fuzzies jumped her and began beating her with sticks. Her injuries are listed as multiple bruises, fractured wrist and general shock.”
“I don’t believe it! They wouldn’t attack a child.”
“I want to talk to that girl and her father,” Brannhard was saying. “And I’m going to demand that they make their statements under veridication. This thing’s a frame-up, Max; I’d bet my ears on it. Timing’s just right; only a week till the trial.”