They ate outside on the picnic table, with the Fuzzies watching them interestedly. Kellogg and Mallin carefully avoided discussing them. It wasn’t until after dusk, when the Fuzzies brought their ball inside and everybody was in the living room, that Kellogg, adopting a presiding-officer manner, got the conversation onto the subject. For some time, without giving anyone else an opportunity to say anything, he gushed about what an important discovery the Fuzzies were. The Fuzzies themselves ignored him and began dismantling the stick-and-ball construction. For a while Goldilocks and Cinderella watched interestedly, and then they began assisting.
“Unfortunately,” Kellogg continued, “so much of our data is in the form of uncorroborated statements by Mr. Holloway. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t, myself, doubt for a moment anything Mr. Holloway said on that tape, but you must realize that professional scientists are most reluctant to accept the unsubstantiated reports of what, if you’ll pardon me, they think of as nonqualified observers.”
“Oh, rubbish, Leonard!” Rainsford broke in impatiently. “I’m a professional scientist, of a good many more years’ standing than you, and I accept Jack Holloway’s statements. A frontiersman like Jack is a very careful and exact observer. People who aren’t don’t live long on frontier planets.”
“Now, please don’t misunderstand me,” Kellogg reiterated. “I don’t doubt Mr. Holloway’s statements. I was just thinking of how they would be received on Terra.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that, Leonard. The Institute accepts my reports, and I’m vouching for Jack’s reliability. I can substantiate most of what he told me from personal observation.”
“Yes, and there’s more than just verbal statements,” Gerd van Riebeek chimed in. “A camera is not a nonqualified observer. We have quite a bit of film of the Fuzzies.”
“Oh, yes; there was some mention of movies,” Mallin said. “You don’t have any of them developed yet, do you?”
“Quite a lot. Everything except what was taken out in the woods this afternoon. We can run them off right now.”
He pulled down the screen in front of the gunrack, got the film and loaded his projector. The Fuzzies, who had begun on a new stick-and-ball construction, were irritated when the lights went out, then wildly excited when Little Fuzzy, digging a toilet pit with the wood chisel, appeared. Little Fuzzy in particular was excited about that; if he didn’t recognize himself, he recognized the chisel. Then there were pictures of Little Fuzzy killing and eating land-prawns, Little Fuzzy taking the nut off the bolt and putting it on again, and pictures of the others, after they had come in, hunting and at play. Finally, there was the film of the adoption of Goldilocks and Cinderella.
“What Juan and I got this afternoon, up in the woods, isn’t so good, I’m afraid,” Rainsford said when the show was over and the lights were on again. “Mostly it’s rear views disappearing into the brush. It was very hard to get close to them in the jeep. Their hearing is remarkably acute. But I’m sure the pictures we took this afternoon will show the things they were carrying—wooden prawn-killers like the two that were traded from the new ones in that last film.”