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Just what part your Fuzzies play in this ability of your people I am not sure, but I'm quite certain that without them you would not have it." He smiled at Dal's stricken face. "A forbidden topic, eh? And yet perfectly true. You know right now that if you wanted to you could virtually paralyze me with fright, render me helpless to do anything but stand here and shiver, couldn't you?
Every one of the thousand three hundred and sixty-five inhabited worlds, a trillion and a half intelligent beings, fourteen races fifteen if you counted the Zarathustran Fuzzies, who were almost able to qualify under the talk-and-build-a-fire rule.
"He's going to have a goddamn thundering big one from Jack Holloway!" The communication screen buzzed; Gerd snapped it on. "I just talked to Judge Pendarvis," Gus Brannhard reported out of it. "He's issuing an order restraining Emmert from paying any reward except for Fuzzies turned over alive and uninjured to Marshal Fane.
He got to his feet, still stunned and only half comprehending, and took the receipt out of the typewriter. There was an argument about it; Lunt told the deputies to sign it or get the hell out without the Fuzzies. They signed, inked their thumbs and printed after their signatures.
They had both tried to get the whole thing dismissed self-defense for Holloway, and killing an unprotected wild animal for Kellogg. When that had failed, they had teamed in flagrant collusion to fight the inclusion of any evidence about the Fuzzies. After all it was only a complaint court; Lieutenant Lunt, as a police magistrate, had only the most limited powers.
"I stopped at the constabulary post on the way home. I thought George Lunt had turned into the biggest liar in the known galaxy. Then I went home, and found your call on the recorder, so I came over here." "Been waiting long?" The Fuzzies had all abandoned Rainsford and come trooping over as soon as the manipulator was off contragravity.
She thought sapiently And she only thought in sense-imagery limited to feeling." She looked at Rainsford reproachfully; he'd knocked a breach in one of her fundamental postulates. "Of course, she had inherited the cerebroneural equipment for sapient thinking." She let that trail off, before somebody asked her how she knew that the Fuzzies hadn't.
It made him feel sick. Tuesday dawned hot and windless, a scarlet sun coming up in a hard, brassy sky. The Fuzzies, who were in to wake Pappy Jack with their whistles, didn't like it; they were edgy and restless. Maybe it would rain today after all.
Little Fuzzy had come out and was pulling at his trouser leg; he stooped and picked him up, setting him on his shoulder. The rest of the family, deciding that it must be safe, had come to the door and were looking out. "Hey! What the devil are those things?" Lunt asked, stopping short halfway from the car. "Fuzzies. Mean to tell me you've never seen Fuzzies before?" "No, I haven't. What are they?"
Lunt looked at the small battered body and the six mourners around it. "But, Jack, they aren't legally sapient beings." "There is no such thing. A sapient being is a being on the mental level of sapience, not a being that has been declared sapient." "Fuzzies are sapient beings," Rainsford said. "That's the opinion of a qualified xeno-naturalist." "Two of them," Gerd van Riebeek said.
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