zing. Bottle tops and nuts belonged to the general class of
things-that-screwed-onto-things. To take them off, you turned left; to put
them on again, you turned right, after making sure that the threads
engaged. And since he could conceive of right- and left-handedness, that
might mean that he could think of properties apart from objects, and that
was forming abstract ideas. Maybe that was going a little far, but....

"You know, Pappy Jack's got himself a mighty smart Little Fuzzy. Are you a
grown-up Little Fuzzy, or are you just a baby Little Fuzzy? Shucks, I'll
bet you're Professor Doctor Fuzzy."

He wondered what to give the professor, if that was what he was, to work
on next, and he doubted the wisdom of teaching him too much about taking
things apart, just at present. Sometime he might come home and find
something important taken apart, or, worse, taken apart and put together
incorrectly. Finally, he went to a closet, rummaging in it until he found
a tin canister. By the time he returned, Little Fuzzy had gotten up on the
chair, found his pipe in the ashtray and was puffing on it and coughing.

"Hey, I don't think that's good for you!"

He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirt-sleeve and put it in
his mouth, then placed the canister on the floor, and put Little Fuzzy on
the floor beside it. There were about ten pounds of stones in it. When he
had first settled here, he had made a collection of the local minerals,
and, after learning what he'd wanted to, he had thrown them out, all but
twenty or thirty of the prettiest specimens. He was glad, now, that he had
kept these.

Little Fuzzy looked the can over, decided that the lid was a member of
the class of things-that-screwed-onto-things and got it off. The inside
of the lid was mirror-shiny, and it took him a little thought to discover
that what he saw in it was only himself. He yeeked about that, and looked
into the can. This, he decided, belonged to the class of
things-that-can-be-dumped, like wastebaskets, so he dumped it on the
floor. Then he began examining the stones and sorting them by color.

Except for an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was the first
real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He proceeded to
give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, in
correct spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red
stone. Well, maybe he'd seen rainbows. Maybe he'd lived near a bi