Hitchcock used his camera to record the ones that stopped him. If the floppers were considered stupid on the basis of tests like these, it was good proof that they were intelligent.
Then they came to the maze problems. Hitchcock blundered through the first few simple ones and came out pleased with his own accomplishment, but annoyed because he couldn’t use them for evidence.
“Well, at least these are simple enough,” he snapped.
“We just use those to give ‘em an idea what a maze is,” Muller told him. He conducted Hitchcock into another room, where a gigantic panel of signal lights covered a whole wall. He opened a door and motioned Hitchcock inside. Confidently, Hitchcock walked in.
The door clicked behind him. When he turned, there wasn’t a sign of where the door had been.
An awful, trapped feeling seized him. He pounded on the wall and shouted. No one answered. The tunnels around him swallowed the sounds without an echo.
He started to run.
Half a minute later, out of breath, he stopped.
This wasn’t like the other ones. This one was hard.
He looked around. Nothing looked familiar. He couldn’t even be sure which way he’d come. He was lost.
Appalled and fearful, he started to search. It was useless. The passageways branched and intersected endlessly. They curved and zigzagged and circled back on themselves. He lost all sense of direction—all sense of distance and time. Trying to trace back his steps, he took a wrong turn. Blank walls stopped him. A down-spiraling tunnel descended to a pool of black, utterly motionless water. Wearily, he turned around and climbed up again.
Then he stopped, breathing hard from the climb. The tunnel forked and other tunnels led off from it. Any one of them could be the right one. Or none of them. Blank-minded, frustrated, Hitchcock lifted his camera and slowly swung it in a full circle.
Let the people back home see this, he thought.. Let them see the endless convolutions—the total formlessness of this maze. Let them judge for themselves how well it measured a person’s intelligence.
And it was because of things like this they said the floppers were animal stupid! It was ridiculous. Why, even a man as intelligent as himself couldn’t find his way through. The most brilliant man alive couldn’t do it.
“Had enough, Hitchcock?” Muller’s voice asked.
Startled, Hitchcock whirled. He was completely alone. “Where are you?” he demanded. “Show yourself.”
“Had enough?” Muller asked again tauntingly.
The tunnels twisted around him crazily, shapelessly. A man was a fool to keep trying. He might spend days in this place. Why, he could starve! “Yes! YES!” Hitchcock cried. “Where are you?”
“Wait there,” Muller told him. “I’ll come get you.”
Legs aching with fatigue, Hitchcock slouched against the smooth wall. Why, it was outrageous! The silly rabbit warren didn’t even have a place to sit down!
Sigurd Muller came strolling along the passageway less than two minutes later. “How was it?” he asked, smiling raffishly.
Hitchcock straightened up. “How can you believe that this... this silly game gives the slightest indication of a person’s intelligence? It’s absolutely foolish.”
Muller chuckled. “I don’t know,” he said easily. “It gave me a good look at yours.”
Hitchcock sputtered. “Young man, no person could possibly find his way out.”
“Yeah?” Muller wondered. “Follow me.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, turned, and walked off.
“But you know the way out,” Hitchcock protested. He had to scurry to catch up with Muller.
Muller didn’t look back. “It isn’t easy,” he admitted, walking along almost jauntily. “But some people do it the first time through. We’ve even had some Floppers do it.”
“Chance,” Hitchcock declared, breathing hard to match Muller’s pace. “Pure chance.”
Muller shook his head. “It wasn’t chance,” he said. He was very sure. “You don’t get through a thing this tricky just with luck. Not fast, you don’t. You either just hunt till you hit it, or you think up a method. If you hunt, you’re a good long time getting out. But if you’re real smart, you think up a method. Those floppers were smart.”
“I was told,” Hitchcock said pointedly, “that these natives are not intelligent.”
“You were, huh?” Muller growled. He shrugged. “They must’ve been talking about the tame ones that do our muscle work for us. They are dumb. So are a lot of the wild ones, but there’s been some smart ones, too. There’s even been a few so smart none of these tests showed their limits. And that is smart. I get scared when I think about ‘em.”
Then suddenly, they emerged from the maze. Hitchcock stopped and looked around. They were in the same room he had entered the maze from. The door he had gone through was there in the opposite wall.
“Want to try it again?” Muller asked.
“No thank you,” Hitchcock snapped. “I’ve had quite enough of these childish games.”
Wryly, carelessly, Muller smiled. “Anything else you want to see?”
“Yes,” Hitchcock said firmly. “I want you to show me proof of these intelligent floppers.”
Muller nodded cockily. “I figured you would,” he said. “I got it all ready for you.”
He led Hitchcock from the testing rooms to a small, file-jammed office. The files were a primitive type, as if the scientists here had never heard of memory crystals. Muller bent over the librarian’s console and punched out a combination. A folder dropped into the delivery slot.
Muller passed it to Hitchcock, and motioned him to the desk. Hitchcock sat down and spread out the folder’s contents. It wasn’t an impressive display. The data-tables were meaningless. The multi-colored photo plates were nothing but abstract designs. Nevertheless, Hitchcock held his camera over them and recorded them slowly, page by page.
Then Muller’s shadow fell across the desk. His finger prodded the stacked data pages. “This is how they went through the tests,” he said. With a twist of the hand he fanned the sheets out and pulled free a set of seven pages. He laid them on top of the others. “These are how a scientist-candidate scored—I put ‘em in to compare with.”
Hitchcock separated the four sets of papers and laid them on the desk—the one of the scientist-candidate and three containing the scores Floppers had made. He tried to compare the records, glancing randomly from one set to another. But all four were confusingly similar, and the complex mass of numbers, plus and minus signs, and symbols meant nothing to him.
Muller brushed Hitchcock’s hands out of the way. He traced a fingertip across the laid-out sequence of the scientist-candidate’s scores. Three-quarters of the way through the record, he paused.
“Up to here,” he said, “he was even with ‘em. They missed a few and he missed a few—they came out even. But from here on—”
His finger traced to the end of the record, then transferred to the corresponding section of the record of one of the floppers. Instantly, Hitchcock saw that the two were radically different.
“From here on,” Muller continued, “they were way ahead of him—faster and slicker. They didn’t miss hardly one. And those jobs were tough. Just to give you an idea—” He pointed to a spot not quite halfway through the test sequence. “Here’s where you pegged out.”
Astonished, Hitchcock looked down at the expanse of records. The scientist-candidate must have been a genius to score so far above him. And those floppers—he could not comprehend such intelligence. It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand the notations or the things they made reference to. Now that it had been pointed out to him, the meaning of those tabulations was plain. He held his camera up and recorded them again.