hose artifacts yourselves and the two of you are conspiring to foist
the Fuzzies off as sapient beings. Jack, if it weren't so goddamn stinking
contemptible, it would be the biggest joke of the century!"

"I take it they wanted you to sign this report, too?"

"Yes, and I told Kellogg he could--" What Kellogg could do, it seemed, was
both appalling and physiologically impossible. He cursed again, and then
lit a cigarette and got hold of himself. "Here's what happened. Kellogg
and I went up that stream, about twenty miles down Cold Creek, the one
you've been working on, and up onto the high flat to a spring and a stream
that flows down in the opposite direction. Know where I mean? Well, we
found where some Fuzzies had been camping, among a lot of fallen timber.
And we found a little grave, where the Fuzzies had buried one of their
people."

He should have expected something like that, and yet it startled him. "You
mean, they bury their dead? What was the grave like?"

"A little stone cairn, about a foot and a half by three, a foot high.
Kellogg said it was just a big toilet pit, but I was sure of what it was.
I opened it. Stones under the cairn, and then filled-in earth, and then a
dead Fuzzy wrapped in grass. A female; she'd been mangled by something,
maybe a bush-goblin. And get this Jack; they'd buried her prawn-stick with
her."

"They bury their dead! What was Kellogg doing, while you were opening the
grave?"

"Dithering around having ants. I'd been taking snaps of the grave, and I
was burbling away like an ass about how important this was and how it was
positive proof of sapience, and he was insisting that we get back to camp
at once. He called the other jeep and told Mallin to get to camp
immediately, and Mallin and Ruth and Juan were there when we got in. As
soon as Kellogg told them what we'd found, Mallin turned fish-belly white
and wanted to know how we were going to suppress it. I asked him if he was
nuts, and then Kellogg came out with it. They don't dare let the Fuzzies
be proven sapient."

"Because the Company wants to sell Fuzzy furs?"

Van Riebeek looked at him in surprise. "I never thought of that. I doubt
if they did, either. No. Because if the Fuzzies are sapient beings, the
Company's charter is automatically void."

This time Jack cursed, not Kellogg but himself.

"I am a senile old dotard! Good Lord, I know colonial law; I've been
skating on the edge of it on more planets than you're years