"H. Beam Piper - Fuzzy Papers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

put off a couple more shots, uncovered more flint and found another sunstone. It wasn't often that he
found stones on two successive days. When he returned to the camp, Little Fuzzy was picking another
land-prawn apart in front of the living hut.

After dinner-Little Fuzzy liked cooked food, too, if it wasn't too hot-they went into the living room. He
remembered having seen a bolt and nut in the desk drawer when he had been putting the wooden
prawn-killer away, and he got it out, showing it to Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy studied it for a moment, then
ran into the bed-room and came back with his screw-top bottle. He took the top off, put it on again and
then screwed the nut off the bolt, holding it up.

"See, Pappy?' Or yeeks to that effect. "Nothing to it."

Then he unscrewed the bottle top, dropped the bolt inside after replacing the nut and screwed the cap on
again.

"Yeek," he said, with considerable self-satisfaction.

He had a right to be satisfied with himself. What he'd been doing had been generalizing. 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 cannister. By the time he re-turned, 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 youl"

He recovered the pipe, wiped the stem on his shirtsleeve and put it in his mouth, then placed the cannister
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 pro-ceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the
stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethyst-like quartz to a dark red stone. Well,
maybe he'd seen rainbows. Maybe he'd lived near a big misty waterfall, where there was always a