isn't it possible that you're overanthropomorphizing?
Endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?"

"Juan, I'm not going to answer that right now. I don't think I'll answer
at all. You wait till you've been around these Fuzzies a little longer,
and then ask it again, only ask yourself."

* * * * *

"So you see, Ernst, that's the problem."

Leonard Kellogg laid the words like a paperweight on the other words he
had been saying, and waited. Ernst Mallin sat motionless, his elbows on
the desk and his chin in his hands. A little pair of wrinkles, like
parentheses, appeared at the corners of his mouth.

"Yes. I'm not a lawyer, of course, but...."

"It's not a legal question. It's a question for a psychologist."

That left it back with Ernst Mallin, and he knew it.

"I'd have to see them myself before I could express an opinion. You have
that tape of Holloway's with you?" When Kellogg nodded, Mallin continued:
"Did either of them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?"

He answered it as he had when Victor Grego had asked the same question,
adding:

"The account consists almost entirely of Holloway's uncorroborated
statements concerning things to which he claims to have been the sole
witness."

"Ah." Mallin permitted himself a tight little smile. "And he's not a
qualified observer. Neither, for that matter, is Rainsford. Regardless of
his position as a xeno-naturalist, he is complete layman in the
psychosciences. He's just taken this other man's statements uncritically.
As for what he claims to have observed for himself, how do we know he
isn't including a lot of erroneous inferences with his descriptive
statements?"

"How do we know he's not perpetrating a deliberate hoax?"

"But, Leonard, that's a pretty serious accusation."

"It's happened before. That fellow who carved a Late Upland Martian
inscription in that cave in Kenya, for instance. Or Hellermann's claim to
have cross-bred Terran mice with Thoran tilbras. Or the Piltdown Man, back
in the first century Pre-Atomic?"

Mallin nodded. "None of us like to think of a thing like that, but, as you
say, it's happened. You know, this man Rainsford is just the type to do
something like that, too. Fundamentally an individualistic egoist; badly
adjusted personality type. Say he wants to make some sensational discovery
which will assure him the position in the scientific world to which he
believes himself enti