The Right to Arm Bears (dilbia)

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Guts-and-muscle department…” muttered Bill thoughtfully, echoing the Bluffer’s words. That was certainly the department in which everyone seemed to be eager to have him operate—including whoever or whatever was responsible for his being in this place and situation in the first place.

  It was hardly to be considered that Mula-ay had been telling the truth, this morning in the woods, when he had claimed Bill had been deliberately put on the spot by human authorities simply to save face in the case of the Muddy Nose Project. On the other hand, some of the things the Hemnoid had said had chimed uncomfortably well with some of the things Anita had said when he spoke to her in Outlaw Valley.

  Either Anita had been as badly misled about the true situation here as Bill had, or… It occurred to Bill that the cards might be stacked more heavily against him than he had thought, even when he had sat thinking in front of the communications console after his unsuccessful attempt to contact Greentree or anyone else off-planet. There seemed to be no way out of his duel with Bone Breaker unless he could figure out who or what had put him in this situation, and what the true aims and motives of everyone concerned were.

  In any case, Anita was going to have to provide him with some answers. That meant he must talk to her again, which meant another penetration of Outlaw Valley, which could hardly be done in the broad light of day…

  “Muscle-and-guts department?” he repeated again, looking up at the Bluffer. “I suppose it would take a little muscle—and guts too—to get in and out of that Outlaw Valley after it’s been shut up for the night?”

  The Bluffer stared back at him in astonishment. Sweet Thing and More Jam also stared. Some little distance away the blacksmith raised his head in astonishment.

  “Are you crazy, Pick-and-Shovel?” demanded Flat Fingers. “The gate to that valley is locked and barred the minute the sun goes down and there are two armed men on guard until it’s opened up at dawn. Nobody goes in and out of that valley after the sun’s gone down!”

  “I do,” said Bill grimly. “I think I’ll just drop in there tonight; and I’ll bring back that piece of metal outside the outlaw’s dining hall they use as a gong, to prove I’ve been there!”

  Chapter 15

  “Will we get there before dark?” Bill asked.

  “Before dark?” The Bluffer, striding beneath Bill, squinted through the trees at the descending sun now, gleaming redly through black-looking trunks and branches, close to setting. “Well, it’ll be dark down in the valley. But up on top of the cliffs there’ll be some daylight, still. And it’s the north clifftop you want, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Bill. “If it’s still light there, that’s all I’ll need.”

  “All you need, is it?” muttered the Bluffer. “Mind telling a man how you’re going to get into that valley, anyway?”

  “I’ll show you when we get there,” said Bill.

  In fact, while he was fairly confident that he would make it, one way or another, Bill himself would not know for sure until he actually got to the top of the cliff and made some measurements. There was a hundred feet of soft, quarter-inch climbing rope wound around his waist under his shirt, and with the help of the programmed lathe he had produced some homemade pitons, snap rings, and a light metal hammer with an opposed pick end. These latter items were in a knapsack on his back.

  As the postman had predicted, when they reached the north wall overlooking Outlaw Valley, the sunset was only falling on the buildings of the valley floor below them. The Bluffer stopped and let Bill down, but with a strong air of skepticism.

  “What’re you going to do, Pick-and-Shovel,” the Postman asked. “Fly down into that valley?”

  “Not exactly,” said Bill. He had produced a jackknife from his pocket and opened it. Now, while the Bluffer watched with unconcealed curiosity, Bill found and cut off a couple of small tree branches with y-shaped ends. The branching ends he trimmed down to vee’s; and stuck the long end of the branches in the ground, one in front of the other, with the vee’s in line, pointing out across the valley.

  Bill then found and cut another straight stick, long enough to lie in the two vee’s, so that it lay like an arrow pointing across at the top of the opposite valley wall. Digging into his knapsack, he came up with one of his homemade pitons, looking like a heavy nail with one end sharpened and the opposite end bent into a loop. He tied one end of a length of string to the loop and the other end to the center of the stick resting in the forks of the two stakes he had driven into the earth. Then he adjusted the stakes until the piton hung straight up and down and in line with the two stakes, over a point midway between them.

  “What is it?” demanded the Bluffer, unable to conceal his interest.

  “Another of our Shorty gadgets,” said Bill. There was, in fact, no Dilbian word for what he had just built—which was a sort of crude surveyor’s transit. The dangling piton acted like a plumb bob which allowed him to check whether his line of sight—which was along the straight stick in the two forks of the stakes—was level. Now assured that it was, Bill knelt at the back end of the stake, so that he could sight along its length at the top of the valley wall opposite. It seemed to be almost directly in line. That should mean that the two valley walls were roughly of the same height.

  From his pocket he took out a protractor he had located back at the Residency, and with this held against the end of the straight stick in the stake forks he rotated it through its angles of declination, making an attempt to get a rough approximation of the angle subtended by the height of the opposite cliff from its valley bottom to its tree-clad top.

  He got the angle, and abandoned the transit for a pencil and a notebook. In the notebook, he jotted down the angle he had just observed. Then, using his eye, he made an attempt to judge the distance of the opposite cliff from where he stood.

  Since both cliffs were more or less vertical, the gap between the point where he stood and the top of the cliff directly opposite should be roughly the same as the width of the valley floor at that point. His memory of the outlaws’ eating hall down below enabled him to estimate its overall length to be about eighty feet. Just about twelve such eating halls placed end-to-end would be required to stretch from this cliff to the other one. Twelve times eighty was nine hundred and sixty—call it a thousand feet roughly between the cliffs.

  He sat back, with his notebook and his pencil, and—closely observed by the Hill Bluffer who had hunkered down nearby—performed the simple geometric calculation that gave him an approximate measurement of the opposite cliff as being some sixty feet in vertical height. If the other cliff was sixty feet high, it could hardly be much more than that from where he sat right now to the valley below. He had brought with him a hundred feet of rope, so he had more than enough to let himself down into the valley once darkness fell.

  “Well, I suppose I might as well tell you,” Bill said. “What I plan to do is climb down this cliff here into the valley, and climb back up after I’ve gotten hold of the gong I said I’d bring back.”

  The Bluffer stared at him. For a moment, it seemed that even the Dilbian postman was finally at a loss for words. Then he found his voice.

  “Down the cliff!” he echoed.

  He got to his feet; and, screened by the bushes that grew thickly along the lip of the cliff, and by the trees surrounding, he moved to where he could peer over the edge of the cliff as Bill had earlier done. He peered for a long moment and then came back shaking his head sadly.

  “Pick-and-Shovel,” he said, “you’re either plumb crazy, or better than any man or Shorty I’ve ever seen.”

  Bill had expected just this reaction. The cliff was a vertical face but not a smooth one. The dark granitic rock of which it was composed was roughened and broken by outcroppings and fissures large enough to supply adequate hand-holds for someone like Bill who had had rock-climbing experience. With a couple of other experienced climbers to help him and proper equipment, Bill would have felt quite confident about tackl
ing it without any further aid. However, what were adequate hand- and foot-holds for someone with mountaineering experience were not necessarily sufficient to make climbable such a route for another human, without mountaineering experience—let alone a Dilbian, with his much greater weight and clumsiness. Consequently, it was not surprising that the Bluffer found the notion ridiculous—as undoubtedly would the outlaws themselves, or any of the other Dilbians resident in the neighborhood.

  To tell the truth, Bill found it a little ridiculous himself. Not the idea of scaling it in full daylight with a team and proper equipment—but the idea of doing it by himself, with his few homemade devices, alone and in the dark. However, he had the rope up his sleeve—or rather, around his waist—which he now decided to keep secret even from the Bluffer.

  “It’s dark down in the valley now,” he said as casually as possible. “Let’s walk along the cliff until we find a good place for me to start down.”

  They started out together, the Dilbian postman shaking his head, with a renewed air of skepticism. A little further along the edge of the cliff, in the rapidly gathering gloom, they came to a place where part of the rock had fallen away, leaving a notch about eight feet wide going down, narrowing as it went into the dimness below.

  “Here’s a good spot,” said Bill with a cheerfulness that he did not completely feel. “Suppose you come back for me here about sunrise. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “It’s your neck,” said the Bluffer, with philosophy. “I’ll be here. I hope you are.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Bill. As the Bluffer watched curiously, he began to climb cautiously backward down into the cleft—the notch in the edge of the cliff.

  Setting himself securely, with his feet braced and his left hand firmly locked around a projection of the rock, with his right hand he unbuttoned his shirt and began to unwrap the rope from around his waist. It took a matter of some few minutes for him to get it all unwound. He was left at last with the rope lying in coils upon and between his feet and with one end in his grasp. He searched around him for some strong point of anchor.

  He found it in a projecting, somewhat upward-thrusting boss of rock about half a foot to his right, just outside the cleft itself. He wrapped his end of rope several times securely around the boss and tied it there. Then, cautiously, bit by bit, he put his weight on the anchored rope until all of his weight was upon it.

  The rope held firm around the boss. Gingerly, with his breath quickening in spite of all of his determination and experience, Bill abandoned the security of the cliff for the open rock-face with the rope as his only support.

  For a moment, he swung pendulumlike, giddily upon the rope. Then his feet, catching the cliff face, stopped his movement. Slowly, carefully, he began to let himself down the vertical wall of rock, his hands holding firmly to the rope, and his feet walking backward down the vertical surface.

  Both the valley floor and all its walls were in deep darkness now. The sun had been set for some minutes, and, so far, no moon had risen. In the obscurity, Bill lowered himself cautiously down the rope, stopping only now and then, when he encountered secure footholds, to rest his arms—which alone took the weight of his body upon the rope. By this procedure, slowly and with a number of pauses, Bill went down into darkness.

  He had made knots in the rope at ten-foot intervals. He had counted off more than seven of these—which would make the distance from himself to the bottom of the cliff alone higher than he had figured the cliff face to be. He was wondering with the first, fine, small teeth of panic nibbling at his nerves whether his calculations might not have been badly in error and there was more cliff than he had rope, when, stepping down, his foot jarred suddenly upon a flat and solid surface.

  Peering about, he saw that he had reached the valley floor.

  Bill stepped down with his other foot and let go of the rope. With a sigh of relief, he turned about and stood supported by his own two legs alone. Now that he was on level ground, he could barely make out the black-against-black of bushes and trees nearby. Cautiously, he began to feel his way among them—not without a scratched face and scratched hands from the spidery limbs and branches he encountered.

  Pausing, he turned and looked back up the cliff down which he had come. By the moonlight, he was able to make out the notch at the top of the cliff where he had started his climb down into the valley. It stood out clearly, now that the moon was risen, and he marked it in his mind—for he would have to find his rope again in order to get back out of the valley.

  Having located himself, Bill turned about and peered through the open dimness of the valley floor, still in shadow from the rising moon. Some five hundred yards away, and barely discernible, chunks of heavier darkness, with here and there a little crack of yellow light showing about their walls where light from within escaped through the gaps of a high curtain, he made out the buildings of the outlaw settlement.

  He went toward them.

  As he got closer, it was easy for him to distinguish the large eating hall from the others. It was still occupied, for not only was light showing here and there through its curtains, but the sounds of cheerful, if argumentative, Dilbian male voices came clearly to his ear. Giving the building a wide berth, Bill circled to his left and began, one by one, to examine the smaller buildings as he encountered them.

  Peering through a crack in one set of curtains where yellow light showed, Bill discovered what appeared to be nothing less than a regiment of young Dilbians evidently engaged in something between a pillow fight and a general game of Red Rover, for which purpose they had divided into two teams, one at each end of the building—from which they raced at intervals to the other end, roaring at the top of their lungs and batting out furiously at any other runner who came within reach.

  Fascinated—for Bill had not seen any of the younger generation of Dilbia’s natives until this moment—he stood staring through a gap in the curtain until the sound of a door opening at the far end of the room and the appearance of an adult Dilbian not only brought the game to a close but reminded him that he was an intruder here. He turned back to his searching.

  He had investigated all of the buildings but two, when distantly—but unmistakably—the sounds of a human voice fell on his ear. Turning about, he followed it to one of the buildings not yet investigated, found a window, and peered in through an opening—actually a tear—in the hide curtain.

  He had found Anita. But, unfortunately, she was not alone. She was seated in a circle with at least a dozen powerful and competent-looking Dilbian females, working on what looked like a large net.

  Dominating the group was a heavy-bodied, older female who looked like a small, distaff edition of More Jam. The group had all the cozy appearance of a ladies’ sewing circle back on Earth. Bill could hardly stick his head in the door and ask Anita to step outside and talk to him. On the other hand, every minute he stood about out in the open in Outlaw Valley increased the chance of some local inhabitant stumbling over him.

  And the rapidly rising moon would be shining full on the valley floor very shortly.

  Chapter 16

  As he continued to watch through the tear in the curtain, undecided as to what he should do, Bill’s hypnoed information came to mind with the advice that this was a net of the sort used by Dilbians to capture the wild, musk-oxlike herbivores that roamed the Dilbian forest. Anita apparently had been entertaining the others with some kind of a story. For, as Bill put his eye to the rent in the curtain, all the rest burst into laughter hardly less rough and boisterous than Bill had heard from their male counterparts at the eating hall.

  “—Of course,” said Anita when the laughter died down, apparently referring back to the story she had just been telling, “I wouldn’t want Bone Breaker to lose his temper, and string me up by the heels.”

  “He’d better not try,” said the fat matriarch meaningfully, looking around the circle. “Not while we’re around. Eh, girls?”

  There was a chorus of
assent, grim-voiced enough to send a shiver down the back of Bill, watching at the window.

  “My father—Bone Breaker’s great-grandfather—” went on the speaker, looking triumphantly around the circle, “was a Grandfather of the Hunters Clan near Wildwood Peak,” went on Bone Breaker’s great-aunt. “And his father, before him was a Grandfather.”

  “What about Bone Breaker’s own grandfather?” queried the smallest of the female Dilbians, sitting almost directly opposite Anita, who was at the left of Bone Breaker’s great-aunt in the circle. “Was he a Grandfather too?”

  “He was not, Noggle Head,” replied Bone Breaker’s great-aunt majestically. “He was a tanner. But a very excellent tanner, one of the toughest men who ever walked on two legs and a good deal sneakier than most, if I say so myself who was his blood sister.”

  “Indeed, No Rest,” spoke up another comfortably upholstered female a quarter of the way around the circle from Anita, “we all know how you lean over backward, if anything, where your relatives are concerned.”

  Mutters of agreement, which Bill could not be sure were either real or feigned, arose from the rest of the group.

  “But to get back to little Dirty Teeth here,” said No Rest, turning to Anita. “The last thing we’d want to do is be without you and these interesting little tales you tell us about you Shorty females.” The circle muttered agreement. “Some of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, and so—educational.”

  The last word was uttered with a particular emphasis that brought a hum of approval from the other females.

  “Oh, well,” said Anita modestly, her hands, like the hands of the females about her, busy at tying knots in the net as she spoke, “of course, as you know, under our Shorty agreement with the Fatties, I’m not supposed to mention anything that they wouldn’t mention. But I don’t see any harm in telling you these little stories—which, for all you know, I’m just making up out of thin air as I go.”