“If your family doesn’t turn up in time for the trial, have Gus subpoena ours,” Lunt told him.  “You ought to have some to produce in court.  Two weeks from now, this mob of ours will be doing all kinds of things.  You ought to see them now, and we only got them yesterday afternoon.”

He said he hoped he’d have his own by then; he realized that he was saying it without much conviction.

They had a drink when Gus came in.  He was delighted with the offer from Lunt.  Another one who didn’t expect to see Pappy Jack’s Fuzzies alive again.

“I’m not doing a damn thing here,” Rainsford said.  “I’m going back to Beta till the trial.  Maybe I can pick up some ideas from George Lunt’s Fuzzies.  I’m damned if I’m getting away from this crap!” He gestured at the reading screen.  “All I have is a vocabulary, and I don’t know what half the words mean.”  He snapped it off.  “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Jimenez mightn’t have been right and Ruth Ortheris is wrong.  Maybe you can be just a little bit sapient.”

“Maybe it’s possible to be sapient and not know it,” Gus said.  “Like the character in the old French play who didn’t know he was talking prose.”

“What do you mean, Gus?” Gerd asked.

“I’m not sure I know.  It’s just an idea that occurred to me today.  Kick it around and see if you can get anything out of it.”

* * * * *

“I believe the difference lies in the area of consciousness,” Ernst Mallin was saying.  “You all know, of course, the axiom that only one-tenth, never more than one-eighth, of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness.  Now let us imagine a hypothetical race whose entire mentation is conscious.”

“I hope they stay hypothetical,” Victor Grego, in his office across the city, said out of the screen.  “They wouldn’t recognize us as sapient at all.”

“We wouldn’t be sapient, as they’d define the term,” Leslie Coombes, in the same screen with Grego, said.  “They’d have some equivalent of the talk-and-build-a-fire rule, based on abilities of which we can’t even conceive.”

Maybe, Ruth thought, they might recognize us as one-tenth to as much as one-eighth sapient.  No, then we’d have to recognize, say, a chimpanzee as being one-one-hundredth sapient, and a flatworm as being sapient to the order of one-billionth.

“Wait a minute,” she said.  “If I understand, you mean that nonsapient beings think, but only subconsciously?”

“That’s correct, Ruth.  When confronted by some entirely novel situation, a nonsapient animal will think, but never consciously.  Of course, familiar situations are dealt with by pure habit and memory-response.”

“You know, I’ve just thought of something,” Grego said.  “I think we can explain that funeral that’s been bothering all of us in nonsapient terms.”  He lit a cigarette, while they all looked at him expectantly.  “Fuzzies,” he continued, “bury their ordure:  they do this to avoid an unpleasant sense-stimulus, a bad smell.  Dead bodies quickly putrefy and smell badly; they are thus equated, subconsciously, with ordure and must be buried.  All Fuzzies carry weapons.  A Fuzzy’s weapon is—­still subconsciously—­regarded as a part of the Fuzzy, hence it must also be buried.”