ped 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."

Mallin frowned portentously. The idea seemed to appeal to him, but of
course he simply couldn't agree too promptly with