ow, I came out here loaded with suspicion.
Not that I doubted your honesty; I just thought you'd let your obvious
affection for the Fuzzies lead you into giving them credit for more
intelligence than they possess. Now I think you've consistently
understated it. Short of actual sapience, I've never seen anything like
them."

"Why short of it?" van Riebeek asked. "Ruth, you've been pretty quiet this
evening. What do you think?"

Ruth Ortheris looked uncomfortable. "Gerd, it's too early to form opinions
like that. I know the way they're working together looks like cooperation
on an agreed-upon purpose, but I simply can't make speech out of that
yeek-yeek-yeek."

"Let's keep the talk-and-build-a-fire rule out of it," van Riebeek said.
"If they're working together on a common project, they must be
communicating somehow."

"It isn't communication, it's symbolization. You simply can't think
sapiently except in verbal symbols. Try it. Not something like changing
the spools on a recorder or field-stripping a pistol; they're just learned
tricks. I mean ideas."

"How about Helen Keller?" Rainsford asked. "Mean to say she only started
thinking sapiently after Anna Sullivan taught her what words were?"

"No, of course not. 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.

"I'll suggest, just to keep the argument going, that speech couldn't have
been invented without pre-existing sapience," Jack said.

Ruth laughed. "Now you're taking me back to college. That used to be one
of the burning questions in first-year psych students' bull sessions. By
the time we got to be sophomores, we'd realized that it was only an
egg-and-chicken argument and dropped it."

"That's a pity," Ben Rainsford said. "It's a good question."

"It would be if it could be answered."

"Maybe it can be," Gerd said. "There's a clue to it, right there. I'll say
that those fellows are on the edge of sapience, and it's an even-money bet
which side."

"I'll bet every sunstone in my bag they're over."

"Well, maybe they're just slightly sapient," Jimenez suggested.

Ruth Ortheris hooted at that. "That's like talking about being just
slightly dead or just sli