r man a son of a
Khooghra," Jack said. "The man who shot him had been on Yggdrasil and knew
what he was being called."

"I spent a couple of years among them," Gerd said. "They do build fires;
I'll give them that. They char points on sticks to make spears. And they
talk. I learned their language, all eighty-two words of it. I taught a few
of the intelligentsia how to use machetes without maiming themselves, and
there was one mental giant I could trust to carry some of my equipment, if
I kept an eye on him, but I never let him touch my rifle or my camera."

"Can they generalize?" Ruth asked.

"Honey, they can't do nothin' else but! Every word in their language is a
high-order generalization. _Hroosha_, live-thing. _Noosha_, bad-thing.
_Dhishta_, thing-to-eat. Want me to go on? There are only seventy-nine
more of them."

Before anybody could stop him, the communication screen got itself into an
uproar. The Fuzzies all ran over in front of it, and Jack switched it on.
The caller was a man in gray semiformals; he had wavy gray hair and a face
that looked like Juan Jimenez's twenty years from now.

"Good evening; Holloway here."

"Oh, Mr. Holloway, good evening." The caller shook hands with himself,
turning on a dazzling smile. "I'm Leonard Kellogg, chief of the Company's
science division. I just heard the tape you made about the--the Fuzzies?"
He looked down at the floor. "Are these some of the animals?"

"These are the Fuzzies." He hoped it sounded like the correction it was
intended to be. "Dr. Bennett Rainsford's here with me now, and so are Dr.
Jimenez, Dr. van Riebeek and Dr. Ortheris." Out of the corner of his eye
he could see Jimenez squirming as though afflicted with ants, van Riebeek
getting his poker face battened down and Ben Rainsford suppressing a grin.
"Some of us are out of screen range, and I'm sure you'll want to ask a lot
of questions. Pardon us a moment, while we close in."

He ignored Kellogg's genial protest that that wouldn't be necessary until
the chairs were placed facing the screen. As an afterthought, he handed
Fuzzies around, giving Little Fuzzy to Ben, Ko-Ko to Gerd, Mitzi to Ruth,
Mike to Jimenez and taking Mamma and Baby on his own lap.

Baby immediately started to climb up onto his head, as expected. It seemed
to disconcert Kellogg, also as expected. He decided to teach Baby to thumb
his nose when given some unobtrusive signal.

"Now, about that tape I recorded last evening," he bega