e last,
and there seem to be more of them every time I look around."

"Well, Ian, it's a young man's planet, and we can expect a big crowd in
town for the trial...."

He didn't really believe that. He just wanted Ian Ferguson to put a name
on it first. Ferguson shook his head.

"No, Max. This isn't a trial-day crowd. We both know what they're like;
remember when they tried the Gawn brothers? No whooping it up in bars, no
excitement, no big crap games; this crowd's just walking around, keeping
quiet, as though they expected a word from somebody."

"Infiltration." Goddamit, he'd said it first, himself after all! "Victor
Grego's worried about this."

"I know it, Max. And Victor Grego's like a veldbeest bull; he isn't
dangerous till he's scared, and then watch out. And against the gang
that's moving in here, the men you and I have together would last about as
long as a pint of trade-gin at a Sheshan funeral."

"You thinking of pushing the panic-button?"

The constabulary commander frowned. "I don't want to. A dim view would be
taken back on Terra if I did it without needing to. Dimmer view would be
taken of needing to without doing it, though. I'll make another check,
first."

* * * * *

Gerd van Riebeek sorted the papers on the desk into piles, lit a cigarette
and then started to mix himself a highball.

"Fuzzies are members of a sapient race," he declared. "They reason
logically, both deductively and inductively. They learn by experiment,
analysis and association. They formulate general principles, and apply
them to specific instances. They plan their activities in advance. They
make designed artifacts, and artifacts to make artifacts. They are able to
symbolize, and convey ideas in symbolic form, and form symbols by
abstracting from objects.

"They have aesthetic sense and creativity," he continued. "They become
bored in idleness, and they enjoy solving problems for the pleasure of
solving them. They bury their dead ceremoniously, and bury artifacts with
them."

He blew a smoke ring, and then tasted his drink. "They do all these
things, and they also do carpenter work, blow police whistles, make eating
tools to eat land-prawns with and put molecule-model balls together.
Obviously they are sapient beings. But don't please don't ask me to define
sapience, because God damn it to Nifflheim, I still can't!"

"I think you just did," Jack said.

"No, that won't do. I need a defin