"The first one out of the building on his feet . . ."
If it were possible for Bill to dodge the first assault of Bone Breaker, trip the big Dilbian up somehow, and get past him; a quick rush could carry Bill to the door at the end of the building and out—
Less than fifteen feet in front of Bill, there was a sudden rattle of something set rolling by the movement of an incautious foot.
Bill checked, suddenly taut in nerves and muscles. Directly in front of him, the corridor was narrow, but a little beyond—Bill screened his eyes against the dimness—it seemed as if the corridor might open up again into one of its wide spaces. If that were true, it was from that wide space that the sound Bill had heard had just now come. It was there that Bone Breaker was waiting for him.
Bill reached out with the back of his sword hand to explore by touch both sides of the aisle, without letting go of his weapon. To his left were sacks full of some hard, lumpy objects, too heavy to lift, and stacked clear to the ceiling—he had had some thought of climbing up on them and approaching the open space across their top. To his right, was a stack of logs, their farther ends reaching off ahead of him into darkness. These were not stacked more than halfway to the ceiling, barely above Bill's head—their top would be shoulder-high on Bone Breaker. Bill took hold of one of them, testing it by putting his weight on it—and it shifted slightly.
Hastily, he let go. A log rolling from under him, as he attempted to creep along it, would not only destroy the surprise approach he planned, but possibly leave him helpless at Bone Breaker's feet. There was nothing forward but to continue creeping along the aisle as quietly as possible and hope to steal upon the waiting Dilbian, before Bone Breaker knew he was close.
Accordingly, Bill inched forward, setting his feet down lightly and only gradually shifting his weight upon them. He was lucky—no boards creaked as that weight came on them. Slowly, in this manner, he stole forward until he reached the point where the aisle widened.
Unexpectedly, the foot he reached forward stubbed its toe against something hard above floor level. Bill stopped, trying to hover in mid-air and bent forward to inspect by touch what he had encountered. It was the end of a log, evidently fallen off the pile and angling up ahead into the darkness. Cautiously, Bill began to circle around it, holding his breath.
Where was Bone Breaker? The wide space in which Bill stood now, was more open than any he had encountered so far. To his left the sacks of hard lumpy objects had completely disappeared. It was evidently clear to the far wall of the narrow building. To his right the logs appeared to have changed their orderly piling for a dim tangle, from which several of them had rolled out onto the floor. Bill began carefully to pick his way among them.
Suddenly, he stopped. His foot had come down on something yielding. He snatched it up again and stood on one leg, like a crane.
But nothing happened. After a moment he reached down with the back of his sword hand toward the object on which he had stepped.
For a moment he felt nothing, then the skin on the back of his hand came in contact with the coarse curly fur of a Dilbian. It was motionless to his touch. Shock raced through him. Hastily he shifted his sword to his shield hand, and reached down to feel what he had touched.
It was a large, motionless, Dilbian foot pointing up at the ceiling and attached to a leg stretched out upon the floor.
"What—" began Bill, incautiously speaking out loud. Then, abruptly, everything happened at once.
With an ear-splitting roar and a rumble, the murky tangle of logs at his right suddenly seemed to disintegrate, falling and rolling about with great noise. Bill leaped away from the pile, but, curiously, none of the logs rolled in his direction. After what seemed like several minutes, but was only probably a second or two, the sound and motion ceased. But now the darkness was reinforced by a thick cloud of dust raised by the falling logs. Bill sneezed loudly.
It was a moment before he got his wits back. When he did, he stepped back and searched about for the Dilbian foot and leg with which he had been in contact just before the logs fell. After some groping he found it, lying just as motionless as before. He groped his way up along it, and eventually made out that what he was touching was Bone Breaker, lying silent and apparently unconscious underneath a log.
Bill stood up quickly. He had no intention of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Taking his sword in his right hand, he turned and raced toward the farther entrance of the building, that one through which the outlaw chief had entered. That door, with the line of light around it, dimly illuminating that end of the building to Bill's now darkness-adjusted eyes, loomed in a little open space of its own, not more than twenty feet away. Bill made that opening in three running strides—and burst out from the mouth of the narrow aisle just in time to catch sight, out of the corner of his right eye, of the glint of whirling steel descending upon him.
He jumped away, throwing up his own sword instinctively. In the same instant it was hammered from his grasp, as if that grasp had been the grip of a child, and sent flying against the wall behind him. Something terrifically hard crashed against the side of his head, and he staggered back until the wall itself stopped him from falling.
Blood was streaming down onto his face, half blinding him.
He grabbed his sword from the floor instinctively, and raised his head to face his attacker. The end of the building was swimming around him, but the sight that greeted his eyes from the leakage of daylight around the door, brought him to a halt.
Facing him, half-held in mid-air and with Bone Breaker's great sword just now dropping from his paralyzed grasp, was the yellow robed figure of Mula-ay. But he was neither attacking nor making a sound—and for very good reason.
Around his waist, pinning one arm to his side and enclosing the wrist of the other, sword-carrying arm in a crushing grip, was a black-furred forearm the size of a young watermain. Another black-furred arm encircled the Hemnoid's thick throat in a choke hold, and above that choke hold Mula-ay's eyes were popping and his mouth was gasping for breath. Over the Hemnoid's shoulder grinned the ferociously cheerful, round features of More Jam.
For just a moment, Bill goggled at the sight. He would not have believed that any Dilbian on the planet could not only have overpowered Mula-ay, but lifted him right off his feet in the process. If More Jam was capable of something like this now, what indeed had he been like as a wrestler in the days of his youth?
But it was not a sight that Bill could stay to enjoy. The building was swaying around him now like a ship upon heavy seas, and his strength was beginning to desert him. At all costs he must make it out of the door of the building.
He turned and staggered toward the door. He had to drop his shield to get it open, but he hung onto his grip on his sword as he staggered down the steps, into the blinding, sudden sunlight. Into the center of a circle of black, furry faces that danced and wavered around him.
Barely, he heard the mounting cheer that went up from those faces. Suddenly, the whole earth and crowd and sunlit sky whirled about him; and he tumbled, sprawling forward into darkness.
At some indefinable time later, he swam up briefly from the darkness to find himself lying on a human-style bed, within the white walls of a room. The walls shimmered, advancing and retreating to his unsteady eyes. A face moved into his field of vision. It was the face of Anita and it seemed to Bill to be the most beautiful face he had ever seen. It too wavered in unreliable fashion.
There was a touch of something cold and wet against his forehead and the side of his head. Anita seemed to be sponging him off with something.
"Is this a hospital ship?" he croaked.
"Certainly not!" replied Anita, and her voice was strangely choked. "You're back at the Residency. You don't need a hospital ship. There's nothing wrong with you I can't fix. I've got a medical assistance certificate."
He looked at her wonderingly.
"Is there anything you haven't got?" he asked her.
To his surprise,
she burst into tears.
"Oh shut up!" she said, threw the cloth, or whatever it was she had in her hand, into the basin where she had been dampening it, and ran out of the room.
Startled, baffled, dismayed, Bill tried to push himself up on his elbows to call after her. But as he lifted his head, a heavy weight seemed to swing from the inside front of his skull and smashed dizzyingly against the inside of the same skull at its back. Unconsciousness rose and sucked him down into it once more.
Chapter 25
"—Then you'll be going back to Earth with me for debriefing?" asked Bill, delighted.
"I will be traveling on the same ship, if that is what you mean," replied Anita, very coldly and distinctly.
She turned and marched off toward the courier ship lying lengthwise on the grass in the center of the meadow. It was a sleek, heavily built ninety-footer, capable of interstellar travel on its own; and its size, which was several times that of the usual shuttle boat, had attracted the attention of several Dilbians, who were now examining it curiously.
Bill gazed after the retreating shape of Anita wistfully. How could he talk to her if she would not talk to him? Recovering from the blow on the head he had gotten from Mula-ay, he had admitted to himself that he liked her. Liked her a good deal in fact. In short, the idea of parting company with her was suddenly very painful.
But even as he had come to realize this, his relationship with her had seemed to be getting worse and worse. It had started with that unfortunate question of his, about there being anything she didn't have, when he had just come to and she was sponging his head. He had tried to explain later that he had actually meant it as a compliment. He realized that she was a hothouse type and he was a pretty ordinary sort of individual. In fact, he had just sort of muddled through to a fortunate conclusion of the situation, while she was attacking it properly with all the unusual resources of her unusual mind and training. He wasn't trying to pretend he was anything like her equal, or anything like that.
But the more he had tried to explain, the more displeased Anita had become. It was as if every time he opened his mouth, he dug himself in that much deeper.
"Well, Pick-and-Shovel—" the voice of the Hill Bluffer interrupted his thoughts and Bill started guiltily. He had completely forgotten he had been talking to the postman when Anita had passed by, just now on her way to the ship. She was, he saw, being met in a very familiar way by a tall man who had just stepped out of the hatchway. The tall man was himself vaguely familiar. Bill peered at him somewhat grimly.
"—So I guess I'll be off, back to the mountains," the Bluffer's voice boomed on Bill's ear. "They'll all be wanting to hear up there if you turned out the way I said you would."
"They will?" Bill was startled. Then he remembered how he had speculated on the Hill Bluffer's having some stake of his own in the outcome of the situation in which Bill had been trapped. Bill looked sharply up at the lanky Dilbian.
"Why, sure," said the Hill Bluffer comfortably. "They all remember the Half-Pint-Posted, but there was considerable discussion about whether you Shorties could do it twice in a row."
"Twice in a row?" echoed Bill. "Do what?"
"Come out one up on a Fatty, of course," replied the Bluffer. "You know, like him!"
He nodded over at the far side of the meadow, behind Bill. Bill turned and saw the yellow-robed figure of Mula-ay standing solitary in the shadow of the trees in his yellow robes. The heavy-gravity figure was not likely to slump in this Dilbian gravity, but there was something defeated about its isolation.
"Word is, a flying box like yours is coming in anytime now," said the Bluffer, "—only one run by Fatties—to take him out. That's probably the last we'll see of old Wasn't Drunk around these parts."
"Who?" Bill blinked at the distant figure. He had been sure that it was Mula-ay. In fact, he still was. "But that's Barrel Belly over there, isn't it?"
The Bluffer snorted with contemptuous good humor.
"Not any more. Got his name changed," he said. "You didn't hear—?"
"No," said Bill.
"Why, after your hassle with Bone Breaker was over, it turned out that More Jam had found old Wasn't Drunk passed out cold behind the eating hall, with half a barrel of beer spilled down his front. It was pretty plain for everyone to see that he'd figured the villagers swarming down on the valley would keep the outlaws so busy he could sneak a bellyful. So he'd poured most of a barrel of beer down himself on the sly and passed out." The Bluffer stopped to laugh uproariously. "Result was, he missed all the fun, just by getting drunk at the wrong time!"
"Fun?"
"Why, your duel with Bone Breaker. He missed all that!" said the Hill Bluffer. "So, after More Jam found him and brought everybody to see, they poured some water over him to bring him to, and he sat up to find everyone laughing at him. After all his talk about how tough the Fatties were! Turned out he'd rather drink than fight!"
The Bluffer chortled again, at the memory.
"But," said Bill, "how did his name—"
"Oh, that!" interrupted the Bluffer. "That's the funniest part of all. When he sat up with all that water streaming off him and everybody started kidding him about getting drunk and missing the duel, he lost his head and tried to say it wasn't so. Why, if he'd only kept his mouth shut, or admitted it and laughed at himself—but he had to go and claim he wasn't drunk. `But I'm not drunk!' That's the very first words he used. Only when they asked him how come he was out cold, he didn't have any good answer. Tried to come up with some weak story about maybe tripping and hitting his head on the side of the building. Well, you know that's a lie, Pick-and-Shovel. No one's going to trip and hit his head on a log wall hard enough to knock himself out. So, naturally, he got his name changed."
"Naturally," echoed Bill automatically. He was aware enough of Dilbian attitudes now to realize that Wasn't Drunk was as much a liability of a name as Barrel Belly had been an advantage to Mula-ay. What it boiled down to was that the Hemnoid had become a figure of fun to the Dilbians and his usefulness to the Hemnoid purpose on Dilbia was at an end. No wonder he was being withdrawn. Bill could even find it in himself to feel a little sorry for Mula-ay, now that he had come to understand how the Dilbian mind worked.
Remembering the vagaries of Dilbian thought, he woke abruptly now to the fact that the Hill Bluffer, in the oblique Dilbian way, was trying to tell him something.
"But you were saying," said Bill hastily, "that the people up in the mountains were interested in how I worked things out down here? Why would they be interested?"
"Oh, lots of reasons, Pick-and-Shovel," said the Bluffer carelessly. "Some of them might've been wondering, of course, just how things might work out, with you helping these Muddy Nosers to grow all kinds of stuff. Of course, Lowland folk like this don't count for much in the minds of mountain people, but they're still real people down here, just the same, and a lot of Upland folk were kind of interested to see who the Muddy Nosers'd end up going along with—you or the Fatty. Just in case they ran into the same sort of situation themselves, some day."
"I see," said Bill. It was pretty much as he expected, he thought, interpreting what the postman was saying in the light of his newfound Dilbian knowledge. The Hill Bluffer had been more than a hired companion for Bill. He had been an unofficial—almost everything practical was unofficial among the Dilbians—observer for the Uplanders, with the duty of reporting back on the feasibility of accepting Shorty, rather than Hemnoid, help in agricultural and other matters. And the Bluffer was now delicately informing Bill of that fact.
"How do you suppose they'll feel at the way things turned out?" Bill asked the postman.
"Well," said the Bluffer judiciously, "I think there might be some people, maybe quite some people, who'll be kind of pleased things worked out the way they did. Guess I'm one of them myself." Abruptly, the tall Dilbian changed the subject. "By the way, I passed the word to Bone Breaker the way you told me. I said to him you'd like to see him before you leave."
"You did?" Bill looked hastily off in the direction of the village. He had seen no sign of the former outlaw chief, and had assumed that Bone Breaker had not got the message, or had refused to come—though that was unlikely. "He said he wouldn't come?"
"Oh no. He's coming," said the Bluffer. "He started out with me when I left Muddy Nose."
"Started out?" Bill, staring about, could still not see any sign of Bone Breaker. "What happened—"
"Oh, well, I sort of outwalked him, you know," said the Hill Bluffer comfortably. "He's slowed down a mite. Not that he ever could have kept up with me before either, if I'd been minded to leave him behind. There's no man living who could do that."
"I believe you," said Bill honestly. And he did.
"There he is now," said the Bluffer, nodding over Bill's head at the courier ship. "Must have circled around to look at that flying box of yours."
Bill turned. Sure enough, there was Bone Breaker, towering amidst the other Dilbians examining the ship. As Bill watched, the former outlaw chief turned and ambled in Bill's direction.
"Well," said the Bluffer's voice, "guess I'll be throwing my feet. See you again, maybe, sometime, Pick-and-Shovel."
Bill turned back to the postman.
"I hope so," said Bill.
"Right. So long," replied the Hill Bluffer. He turned and went—his abrupt farewell being quite in accordance with Dilbian lack of ceremony over both meetings and partings. Bill stared after the tall, striding figure for a moment. Being human, himself, he would have liked to have made a little more out of the process of saying good-bye, particularly since he had come to have a strong feeling of friendship for the Bluffer. But the other was already dwindling in the distance and a moment later he disappeared among the trees not far from where the solitary figure of Mula-ay was standing.
"Well, Pick-and-Shovel!" said a different, deep, bass voice, and looking around, Bill saw that Bone Breaker was indeed upon him. "I heard you were asking around about me since you got back on your feet. So I told the wife I'd step over and see what you had on your mind before you took off."
The Right to Arm Bears Page 32