Jimenez, hesitantly, said, “I know I’m speaking from ignorance. You’re the Fuzzy expert. But isn’t it possible that you’re overanthropomorphizing? Endowing them with your own characteristics and mental traits?”
“Juan, I’m not going to answer that right now. I don’t think I’ll answer at all. You wait till you’ve been around these Fuzzies a little longer, and then ask it again, only ask yourself.”
“So you see, Ernst, that’s the problem.”
Leonard Kellogg laid the words like a paperweight on the other words he had been saying, and waited. Ernst Mallin sat motionless, his elbows on the desk and his chin in his hands. A little pair of wrinkles, like parentheses, appeared at the corners of his mouth.
“Yes. I’m not a lawyer, of course, but….”
“It’s not a legal question. It’s a question for a psychologist.”
That left it back with Ernst Mallin, and he knew it.
“I’d have to see them myself before I could express an opinion. You have that tape of Holloway’s with you?” When Kellogg nodded, Mallin continued: “Did either of them make any actual, overt claim of sapience?”
He answered it as he had when Victor Grego had asked the same question, adding:
“The account consists almost entirely of Holloway’s uncorroborated statements concerning things to which he claims to have been the sole witness.”