Spacepaw Read online

  Bill gulped.

  “Very good. Very good,” gurgled Mula-ay, tossing off at a gulp his own refilled flagon, which if anything was a little bit bigger than Bill’s. “Our Shorty is quite an eater and drinker”— he added in a deprecating tone—“for a Shorty.”

  “Man don’t lick the world by filling his belly,” growled the Hill Bluffer.

  An instinct warned Bill against glancing appreciatively in the Bluffer’s direction. Nonetheless, he warmed inside, at this evidence of support by the lanky Dilbian.

  “But a man’s got to lick the world sometime,” said the Hemnoid, chuckling richly as if this was some rare kind of joke. “Isn’t that so, Pick-and-Shovel?”

  Bill checked himself on the verge of answering, and picked up his heavy drinking utensil in order to gain time.

  “Well …” he said, and put the vessel to his lips.

  As he pretended to swallow, over the circular wooden rim of the container, he unexpectedly caught sight of a small slim, non-Dilbian figure moving along next to a far wall, until it reached the big double doors which still stood open to the twilight without. It passed through those doors and was gone. But not before Bill, staring after it over the rim of his drinking vessel, had identified the figure as human—and female, at that.

  Hastily, he replaced the drinking container on the table, turning to Bone Breaker.

  “Wasn’t that—” he had to think a moment to remember the Dilbian name for her, “Dirty Teeth, I just saw going out the door?”

  The huge Dilbian outlaw chief stared back down at Bill with dark, unreadable eyes.

  “Why, I don’t know, Pick-and-Shovel,” answered Bone Breaker. “Did you say you saw her?”

  “That’s right,” replied Bill, a little grimly, “she just went out the doors there. You didn’t see her? You’re facing that way.”

  “Why,” said Bone Breaker mildly, “I don’t remember seeing her. But as I said, she’s around here some place. It could have been her. Why don’t you take a look for yourself, if you want?”

  “I think I’ll do just that,” replied Bill. He swung around on the stool and dropped to the floor. To his discomfort and dismay, he discovered that the dangling of his legs in midair over the sharp edge of the stool had put the right leg to sleep. A sensation of pins and needles was shooting through it now, and it felt numb and unreliable. Trying not to hobble, he turned and headed toward the big, open, double door.

  Finally he reached the wide-open doors and stepped thankfully into the twilight outside. Looking first right and then left he saw that even the guards who had been lounging there were gone now. For a moment, as his gaze swept the gloaming that was settling down over the barricaded valley, a feeling of annoyance began to kindle in him. He could not discover anywhere that slim, girlish figure he had seen passing within the hall. Then abruptly his eyes located her— hardly more than a dark shadow against the darkening loom of the wall of an outbuilding some fifty feet away.

  He went down the steps at a bound and headed toward her at a run, just as she turned the corner of the outbuilding and disappeared.

  The soft turf all but absorbed the sound of his thudding boots as he ran. He reached the corner of the building and came swiftly around it. Suddenly, he was almost on top of her, for she had been merely idling on her way, it appeared, her head down as if she was deep in thought.

  What do you say in a situation like this, wondered Bill, ashe hastily put on the brakes; and she, still deep in thought, continued to wander on, evidently without having heard him. He searched his mind for her real name, but all that would come up from his memory in this winded moment was the nickname of Dirty Teeth that the Dilbians had given her. Finally, in desperation, he compromised.

  “Hey!” he said, moving up behind her.

  She jumped, and turned. From a distance of only a few feet away, in the growing dimness of the twilight, he was able to make out that her face was oval and fine-boned, her hair was brown and smooth, fitting her head almost like a helmet, and her eyes were startling green and wide. They widened still further at the sight of him.

  “Oh, here you are!” she cried in English. “For heaven’s sake, what do you mean by coming here, of all places? Didn’t you know any better’than to charge into a delicate situation like this, the moment you landed, like a bull into a china shop?”

  Chapter 6

  Bill stared at Anita Lyme, wordlessly.

  He was not wordless because she had left him with nothing to say. He was wordless because he had too many things to say at once, and they were all fighting each other in his mind for first use of his tongue. If he had been the stuttering kind, he would have stuttered—with incredulity and plain, downright fury.

  “Now, wait!” he managed to say at last, “you got yourself into this place, here—”

  “—And I knew what I was doing! You don’t!” she snapped back, neatly stealing the conversational ball from his grip. “You’re just lucky I was here to get you out of it. If I hadn’t heard from the outlaw females about Sweet Thing’s message to Bone Breaker that you were coming, you’d have been committed to a duel with Bone Breaker right now! Do you know why you aren’t? Because the moment I heard, I went to Bone Breaker and told him that I was enjoying my visit here with the females and I wasn’t going to leave for anybody! You couldn’t very well fight over my being here after that!”

  “No,” said Bill grimly. “But as it happens, I wasn’t planning to. Meanwhile, you’re still stuck here, Greenleaf is off-planet, and I’m left with a Residency and a project I’ve been drafted to and don’t know anything about. I’m not one of your agricultural or sociological trainee-assistants. My field’s mechanical engineering. What do I do—”

  “Well, you find that out for yourself,” she said. “Just call Lafe and ask him—”

  “The communications equipment’s dead. It won’t work.”

  She stared at him.

  “It can’t be,” she said at last. “You just didn’t get it turned on right.”

  “Of course I got it turned on right!” said Bill stiffly. “It’s not working, I tell you!”

  “Of course it’s working. It has to work! Go back and try it again. And that’s the point—” she said, checking herself suddenly. “The point is, you shouldn’t ever have come here in the first place. Common sense should have told you—”

  “Sweet Thing said you needed rescuing from Bone Breaker.”

  “Did you have to believe her, just like that? Honestly!” said Anita, on an exasperated note. “You should have immediately called Lafe—”

  “I tried to. I tell you—” said Bill, almost between his teeth, “the communications equipment doesn’t work!”

  “I tell you it does! It worked when I left for the valley here, two days ago—and what could have happened to it since? Wait—” Anita held out a hand in the gathering dusk to stop him as he was about to explode into speech. She lowered her own voice to a more reasonable tone. “Look, let’s not fight about it. The situation here is too important. The point is, I’ve saved you from fighting Bone Breaker. Now, the thing for you to do is get back to the village as fast as you can, and stay there. Get busy at your real job.”

  “What real job?” ejaculated Bill, staring at her.

  “Organizing the villagers to stand up all together to the outlaws, of course!”

  “What!”

  “That’s right.” She lowered her voice still further, until it barely carried to his ears. “Listen to me—ah—Mr. Waltham—”

  “Call me Pick-and-Shov—I mean, Bill,” answered Bill, lowering his own voice in turn. “What are we whispering for?”

  She glanced around them at the gathering dusk.

  “That Hemnoid understands English as well as you or I understand Hemnoid,” she murmured. “Let me explain a few things to you about Project Spacepaw—Bill.”

  “I wish you would,” said Bill, with deep emotion.

  “Oh, stop it! There’s no need to keep getting a chip on
your shoulder!” said Anita. “Listen to me now. This started out here as a perfectly ordinary agricultural project, taking advantage of the fact that when the original Human-Hemnoid Non-Interference Treaty on Dilbia was signed, neither the Hemnoids nor we knew that there were any sizable Dilbian communities that weren’t organized and disciplined by the clan structure you find among the Dilbians in the mountains—where ninety percent of the native population lives.”

  “I know that,” interrupted Bill. “I spent five days on the way here wearing a hypno-helmet. I can even quote the part about the project aims. The project name ‘Spacepaw,’ refers to the hope of giving technology a foothold among the Dilbians—literally translated into Dilbian, it comes out meaning ‘helping hand from the stars’—except that since the Dilbians consider themselves to be the ones who have hands—Shorties and the Fatties are referred to as having ‘paws.’ I already know all about that. But I was sent here to teach the natives how to use farm tools, not to organize a—” he fumbled for a word.

  “Civil defense force!” supplied Anita.

  “Civil defense …” he goggled at her through the increasing darkness.

  “Why not? That’s as good a name for it as any!” she whispered, briskly. “Now, will you listen and learn a few things you don’t know? I said this started out like an ordinary project. The Lowland Dilbians here at Muddy Nose come from fifty or sixty different Upland clans. They don’t have the clan organization, therefore, and they don’t have any Grandfathers of the Clan, to exert a conservative control over the way they think and act. Also, they don’t have the Upland Dilbian’s idea that it’s sissy to use tools or weapons. So it looked like they were just the community to let us demonstrate to the mountain Dilbians that tools and technology in general could raise more crops, build better buildings, and everything else—start them on the road to modem civilization.”

  “And, incidentally, make them closer friends of ours than they are of the Hemnoids,” put in Bill skeptically.

  “That, too, of course,” said Anita. “At least, if the Dilbians have some knowledge of modem technology, they’ll be better able to understand the psychological difference between us and the Hemnoids. We’re betting that if we can raise their mean technological level, they’ll want to be partners with us. The Hemnoids don’t want them to become technologically sophisticated. They’d rather take the Dilbians into the Hemnoid sphere of influence, now while they’re still safely primitive and they’d have to be technologically dependent.”

  “You were going,” pointed out Bill, “to tell me something I didn’t know.”

  “I am, if you’ll listen!” whispered Anita fiercely. “When we started to make a success of this project, the Hemnoids moved to counter it. They sent in Mula-ay, one of their best agents—”

  “Agents?” echoed Bill. He had suspected it, of course, but finding himself undeniably up against a highly trained alien agent sent an abruptly cold shiver snaking its way between his shoulder blades.

  “That’s what I said. Agent. And Mula-ay didn’t lose any time in taking advantage of the one local condition which could frustrate the project. He moved in with the outlaws, here, and pointed out to them that the more the villagers could produce from their farms, the more surplus the outlaws would be able to take from them. The outlaws only take what the farmers can spare, you know. Dilbian custom is very strict on that, even without Grandfathers—”

  “I know,” muttered Bill impatiently. “Why wasn’t I told about the Hemnoid being here and being an agent, though? None of the hypnoed information mentioned it.”

  “Lafe was supposed to brief you after you got here—that’s what he told me, anyway,” she said, in so low a voice that he could hardly hear her. “The Hemnoids are too good at intercepting and decoding interstellar transmissions for the information I’m giving you now to be sent out for inclusion in ordinary hypno tapes. The point is that word of what Mula-ay told the outlaws got back from the outlaws to the villagers, and the villagers began to ask themselves what was the point of using tools, if making a better living simply meant making a better living for the outlaws. You see, the outlaws go around collecting their so-called tax and the Muddy Nosers can’t stop them.”

  “Why not?” asked Bill. “There must be more of them than there are of outlaws—”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” whispered Anita. “There are more of them than there are of outlaws. But without a clan structure they won’t combine, and the outlaws raid one farm at a time and take whatever the farmer has to spare. The farmer doesn’t even fight for his property—for one thing he’s always outnumbered. For another, most of them rather admire the outlaws.”

  “Admire them!”

  “That’s right,” said Anita. “They complain about how the outlaws take things from them, but when they’re telling you about it, you can see they’re halfway proud of having been robbed. It’s been a sort of romantic interlude, a holiday in their lives—”

  “Yes,” said Bill, suddenly thoughtful. He remembered Tin Ear’s drunken but happy grin as he had sat at the table, being forced to swallow his own beer.

  “The point is,” wound up Anita, “agriculture isn’t going to be improved around Muddy Nose as long as this nest of outlaws continues to exist. We’ve got a stalemate here— outlaws balanced off against villagers, the Hemnoid influence balanced off against ours. Well, I’ve had some success with bringing the local females around to a human point of view. Lafe told me our superiors think maybe someone—er, mechanically oriented—like you, could have some success with the village males. So—as I say, you go back and try to organize them into a civil defense force—”

  “I see,” said Bill. “Just like that, I suppose?”

  “You don’t have to sneer at the very notion,” she retorted. In fact, a note of enthusiasm was beginning to kindle in her own voice as she talked—almost as if, Bill thought, she was falling in love with her own idea. “All the village males really need is a leader. You can be that—only, of course, you’ll need to operate from behind the scenes. But why don’t you talk to the village blacksmith to begin with? His name’s Flat Fingers. He’s big enough and strong enough to be a match for Bone Breaker himself, if they went at it without weapons. You get him on your side—”

  “All right. Hold on a minute!” interrupted Bill. “I don’t know what this business of raising a civil defense force has to do with the situation, but it’s not the reason I came here. For your information, I was drafted while I was en route to a terraforming project on Deneb Seventeen, and what I was drafted for was to instruct the Muddy Nose villagers in the use of farming tools. In short, those were my orders and no one in authority has changed them. Until someone does—”

  “So!”

  It was the first time Bill had ever actually heard the word hissed. He stopped his own flow of words out of sheer surprise.

  “So—you’re one of those, are you!” Anita’s voice was bitterly accusing. “You don’t really care a thing about your work out between the stars! All you want to do is put in your two years and get your credit so that you can enter a university back home and get a general instead of a restricted professional license when you graduate! You don’t care what happens to the project you work on, or the job it’s trying to do—”

  “Now hold on—” began Bill.

  “—You don’t care about anything but putting in your time the easiest way possible—”

  “If you want to know,” began Bill, “the way I feel about the terraforming of a whole world, with—”

  “—and to blazes with anyone else concerned, human or native! Well, it happens I do care about the Dilbians—I care too much to let the Hemnoids stand in the way of their developing into an expanding, technological society and joining us and the Hemnoids not just as poor country cousins, but as an independent, self-sufficient, space-going race—”

  “If you’ll listen a minute, I didn’t mean to say:—”

  “So nobody’s given you a
ny orders, have they?” furiously whispered a spot in the by-now pitch-darkness, twelve inches in front of and eight inches below Bill’s nose. “Well, we’ll just fix that! You’re a trainee-assistant, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” he said, when he was able to get the words out.

  “And I’m a trainee-assistant. Right? But which one of us was here first?”

  “You, of course,” said Bill. “But—”

  “Then who’s senior at this post? Me. You go back to the village tonight—”

  “You know I can’t get back tonight!” said Bill desperately. “The gates were closed at sundown!”

  “Well, they’ll be opened up again, if Bone Breaker says so—ask him!” snapped Anita. “Then go back to the village tonight and stay there and start organizing the villagers to defend themselves against the outlaws! That’s not a suggestion I’m giving you, it’s an order—from me as your superior! Now go do it, and good night, Mr. Pickham—I mean, Mr. Billham—I mean—oh, good night!”

  There was a feminine snort of rage almost Dilbian in its intensity, and Bill heard the sound of shod human feet stamping off across the turf away from him in the blackness.

  Bill stood where he was, stunned. It was part and parcel of the ridiculously unorthodox way in which things had been going ever since he had landed on Dilbia that he should find himself at the orders of a female trainee-assistant who apparently was stark, raving unreasonable on the subject of the local natives. Now what? Should he follow Anita’s orders, organize the Dilbians of Muddy Nose—even if he was able to accomplish that—into a fighting force, and end up being tried under out-space law for unwarranted interference with natives’ affairs on Dilbia? Or should he go back to the village, instruct the locals in the uses of picks and shovels, and end up being tried under out-space law for refusing to obey an order of his immediate superior?