much trapping," Tom said. "But in zoos I've watched
animals in cages. The thought always came to me that if they could think
the way we do, they could just open their cages and walk away."

"Now you take turkeys," Jed answered. "Pin 'em up with a high fence,
they'll back up, take off and fly over it. But pin 'em with a low fence,
and they won't. Seems like they know they have to fly over a high
obstruction, but don't figger on it for a low one. Sometimes they
flutter up against it, or try to push it over, but most of the time they
just walk around and around in the yard lookin' for an opening."

"Natural survival pattern," Cal commented. "In the woods, in their
natural state, when they came up against a fallen log, it took more
effort to lift their heavy bodies in flight over it than it took to walk
around the log. It became a fixed pattern of behavior to walk around
it."

"That's what they do with a low fence then," Jed said. "They just keep
tryin' to walk around the obstruction. Not enough sense to treat it like
a high fence, because it ain't high, see? No use tryin' to tell 'em it's
high, because they know it ain't. So they can't solve it. Seems awful
stupid, somehow, a little low fence, all that blue sky above 'em, and
they can't figger it out."

"I suspect that's what's happening to us," Cal said. "We've always
argued that wherever there is matter and energy in the universe, certain
natural laws will prevail. We've learned ways to take advantage of those
natural laws, to do certain things that will make them work for us
instead of against us.

"We've always argued that for any kind of intelligence to arise in the
universe it, too, would have to become aware of these natural laws; that
it, too, would have to do these same certain things to take advantage of
those laws; that because the laws and what to do about them would always
be similar man would have a lot in common with that other intelligence,
and a means of communicating because of that similarity.

"We'd argue that whatever its evolutionary physical shape, this wasn't
so important as its mental evolution--because that mental evolution
would follow the same course as ours. They wouldn't be truly alien,
because science would be a common denominator.

"Now it appears we could be wrong. Maybe our concept of science is too
narrow. Maybe we're like the turkey. We've become so fixed in our
pattern of solving a problem we can't change, can't back off and tak