The trouble was a harpy--a thing about the size and general design of a
Terran Jurassic pterodactyl, big enough to take a Little Fuzzy at one
mouthful. It must have made one swoop at him already, and was circling
back for another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward
loop and dropped like a stone.
Little Fuzzy made a very surprised remark, looked at the dead harpy for a
moment and then spotted the ejected empty cartridge. He grabbed it and
held it up, asking if he could have it. When told that he could, he ran
back to the bedroom with it. When he returned, Pappy Jack picked him up
and carried him to the hangar and up into the control cabin of the
manipulator.
The throbbing of the contragravity-field generator and the sense of rising
worried him at first, but after they had picked up the harpy with the
grapples and risen to five hundred feet he began to enjoy the ride. They
dropped the harpy a couple of miles up what the latest maps were
designating as Holloway's Run, and then made a wide circle back over the
mountains. Little Fuzzy thought it was fun.
After lunch, Little Fuzzy had a nap on Pappy Jack's bed. Jack took the
manipulator up to the diggings, 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 bedroom 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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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