The Right to Arm Bears (dilbia) Read online

  John was getting interested in spite of the ropes and the situation.

  “What did you say to that?” he asked.

  “I pointed out that this couldn’t be true, since there were no colleges upon her world where she could have learned it.”

  “That stopped her?”

  “No,” said Tark-ay sadly. “She said, there was, too. She had studied all about psychology at the college at Blunder Bush.”

  “Blunder Bush?”

  “There’s no such place,” said Tark-ay, “of course. I told her this, and she claimed that I just didn’t know about it. That it was highly secret. It must have been plain to her that I was seeing through all this, so she went on, piling her fictions higher. Her whole family were college graduates, she told me. She had been offered a teaching position herself. She wound up telling me that the Streamside Terror was actually an instructor at his college; and all his running around and fighting was just so people wouldn’t suspect his true abilities. Well, well—”

  Tark-ay sighed heavily, got up, and went back to the fire.

  John frowned. He had been expecting the Hemnoid to get even more confidential, and had even hoped he could find some lever in the conversation which he might turn to his own advantage in getting out of this fix. But Tark-ay had broken things off too abruptly.

  John could have sworn Tark-ay had settled down beside him with intentions for an extended conversation. What had made the short Hemnoid change his mind?

  Then John heard the distant crackling of footfalls among the dry leaves under the trees a little distance off. They were approaching behind John, and he found he was too tightly trussed to turn around. At the fire, Tark-ay busied himself breaking up small pieces of wood and adding them to the blaze. He did not look up.

  The footfalls approached. They came right up behind John and stopped. John heard the slow, even sound of deep breathing, above and behind his head.

  Then the feet moved whoever it was around in front of John and he saw a great yellow moon-face beaming down at him from eight feet above the ground.

  “Well, well,” said a heavy, liquid voice, “so, here’s our quarry, trussed and ready for roasting. How should we season him, Tark-ay?”

  It was the Hemnoid ambassador to Dilbia, Gulark-ay.

  CHAPTER 13

  “You’ll think of something, Mr. Ambassador, I’m sure,” replied Tark-ay and the two Hemnoids chuckled together like a couple of gallon jugs of machine oil poured out on the ground.

  The sound woke up Boy Is She Built. She sat up.

  “Here you are!” she said to Gulark-ay.

  “Absolutely right, Boy Is She Built,” replied the Hemnoid ambassador. “Here, indeed, I am. You don’t look pleased?”

  “I don’t know why we had to wait for you,” she said.

  “Because,” said Gulark-ay, “there’s more to this than simply throwing someone you don’t like over a cliff. Remember? You were only supposed to take his wrist radio there at Brittle Rock, not drop him into a five hundred foot canyon.”

  “It would have saved a lot of trouble,” said Boy Is She Built. She looked rebellious.

  “So you think. But, as you would have found out, if you’d been successful, what it actually would have done would have been to cause a lot of trouble. Do you think the Shorty authorities are going to let one of their people get killed here on your world and not want to know what happened?”

  “They wouldn’t dare make a fuss,” said Boy Is She Built. “They need to make friends with us real people. Just like you Fatties do. If they attacked us, you’d just like the excuse to back us up.” She snorted. A curiously feminine version of the Hill Bluffer’s favorite emotional outlet. “They wouldn’t dare make trouble over one little Shorty.”

  “Never mind,” said Gulark-ay. “Life’s a little more complicated than you think, Boy Is She Built. You don’t get things without paying for them. And, believe me, you can’t just kill a Shorty on a whim without paying for that, either.”

  “Oh, you sound just like my father!” said Boy Is She Built, furiously.

  “Thank you,” said Gulark-ay, dryly. He turned away from her and sat down by John on the ground, spreading his robes over his enormous knees.

  “And how is our cat’s-paw doing?” he asked.

  “You’re talking to me?” said John.

  “Of course,” said Gulark-ay. “Didn’t you realize that’s what you’ve been all along?”

  “To tell you the truth,” said John, “and now that you ask me, no, I didn’t.”

  “Such trust,” said Gulark-ay.

  “And faith,” said John. “To say nothing of experience.” He pointed out something. “I’m a little bit older and more widely traveled than Boy Is She Built, for example.”

  “What’s he saying about me?” said Boy Is She Built, lifting her head up. “What’s travel got to do with it?”

  “But I’m only telling you what’s true,” said Gulark-ay, bassly and liquidly. “How do you think Tark-ay here, and Boy Is She Built happened to be waiting for you on the trail your first day out? How do you think Boy Is She Built happened to know enough to deprive you of your wrist phone?”

  “Now, that’s an interesting point,” said John. “You say she took my wrist phone off. Why? When she was going to throw me over the cliff, anyway?”

  “She wasn’t supposed to do anything but get the wrist phone,” said Gulark-ay. “As to why she still bothered to do that after deciding to kill you, is something you’d have to ask her.”

  “They told me to,” said Boy Is She Built sulkily.

  “But you miss the point,” said Gulark-ay to John, “which is how we knew where you were going to be and when. Aren’t you going to ask me who tipped off Boy Is She Built?”

  “You did.”

  “Not at all. Your ambassador, Joshua.”

  John looked at him sourly.

  “You expect me to believe that, don’t you?”

  “Why not?” Gulark-ay spread his enormous hands.

  “For one reason, because you wouldn’t have any reason for telling it to me unless to convince me of something that wasn’t true.”

  “Not at all,” said Gulark-ay. “Don’t you know about us Hemnoids? We’re a cruel people. We enjoy seeing others suffer. I enjoy dashing your faith in Joshua Guy—particularly because I’ve no doubt in the back of your mind, you’ve been planning on using action by him, in the event of your death, as a threat to make me let you go.”

  John had. But he kept his face bland.

  “Seems to me,” he said, “you protest your cruelty too much.”

  Gulark-ay shook his head. He seemed to be quite earnest and enjoying the conversation.

  “That’s because,” he said, “according to your mores it is immoral to make someone else suffer. But according to my mores it is not only moral, but eminently respectable. It is a skill, a high art.”

  “Do you jump up in the air and click your heels before beginning?” asked John, sourly.

  For the first time, Gulark-ay looked slightly baffled. Tark-ay, busily poking the fire with his head down, did not offer to interpret the remark for his ambassador.

  “We seem to be drifting off the subject,” said Gulark-ay. “The point I am laboring to get across to you is that your Joshua Guy is to be no help to you. He had you written off from the beginning.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t judging according to Hemnoid mores?” said John. “Human ambassadors usually operate a little differently.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” said Gulark-ay chuckling richly. “But there are special reasons in the case of Mr. Guy. You’re a draftee, aren’t you, my friend?”

  “That’s right,” said John. “A willing draftee, I might point out.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” said Gulark-ay chuckling richly, and chuckled again. “Well, so is your ambassador to Dilbia.”

  “Guy? Drafted?”

  John blinked in spite of himself. There was, of course, no technical reason why y
ou couldn’t draft a man with the proper talents into a diplomatic post. It was just kind of farfetched, that was all.

  “Quite right,” said Gulark-ay. “Joshua Guy, three years ago, had retired after a full lifetime in the diplomatic service. He was planning to spend the rest of his life cultivating certain species of your native flora—I don’t remember just what. Roses, or some such name. However, his government thought they needed him on Dilbia, and so they sent him here.”

  John accepted this in silence, without arguing or accepting. But he was busy thinking.

  “Of course,” went on Gulark-ay,—and he did, indeed, seem to be enjoying himself—“Joshua has been very eager all this time to get relieved of his duties and be allowed to return to his roses, or his turnips, or whatever. And of course you realize, the only way for anyone like him to get relieved would be to—how do you put it?—goof up so badly that he would have to be replaced. He fomented this whole fuss with Boy Is She Built just to create the proper kind of trouble.”

  “In that case he didn’t need me,” said John. “Ty Lamorc being kidnapped by the Terror was trouble enough.”

  “Ah, yes, but you see, he found he had misplayed his hand in the case of Ty. That young female was sent out here by a different branch of your government. One which would be only too glad to pin something on the Diplomatic Service. If anything happened to Ty, it began to look as if Joshua might face not merely retirement, but trial for manslaughter, or worse. On the other, by throwing you to the Terror, he could more or less ransom Ty. And an obscure young biochemist with no connections could be spared with only the routine amount of reprimand and investigation.”

  “Very interesting,” said John. “And you undertook to mess up Guy’s plans just out of your natural, healthy instinct for cruelty? Tell me another fairy tale.”

  “You misjudge me!” said Gulark-ay sharply. “I have my personal pride and pleasures; but first and foremost, I am a servant and representative of my people. It’s as important to our plans as to the plans of you humans, to get the inside track on friendship with the Dilbians. A bad and an unwilling human ambassador such as Guy is just what we’re pleased to see on Dilbia. It was my duty to back up Guy’s superiors in this matter and see that he failed in trying to arrange for his own retirement.”

  “Well, then,” said John. “Since we’re all working together in this, why don’t you just cut these ropes off; and we can all go back to Sour Ford Inn for breakfast.”

  Gulark-ay quivered and shook with sudden laughter. His laughing was so infectious that shortly Tark-ay and Boy Is She Built had joined in the humor. And John, to his own surprise, had to fight back the beginnings of a smile.

  “Well, now!” chortled Gulark-ay, running down at last. “If that doesn’t—! Let you go! We couldn’t do that, Mr. Tardy. You see, you’re the price of Boy Is She Built’s assistance. She wants you out of the way, permanently. We promised this; and she promised to talk the Terror into giving Miss Lamorc up without argument, when his clan grandfathers order him to do so.” He looked at John. “Which,” he said, delicately, “they will undoubtedly do when you are found dead within their clan territory of the Hollows, just over the river.”

  John looked at Gulark-ay, gave a short incredulous laugh and looked away.

  “Good! Very good, Mr. Tardy!” cried Gulark-ay bursting into a fresh gallon-jug’s worth of laughter. “Oh, it’s going to be a pleasure to work on you, Mr. Tardy, when we get down to actual business. Well—” he heaved himself erect and went over to sit down by Tark-ay and Boy Is She Built at the fire.

  “Well!” he said again, clapping his big hands together, briskly. “I don’t believe in being a hog about these things. All good suggestions are welcome. How’ll we do it?”

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Ambassador,” said Tark-ay, with polite eagerness. “There’s a new technique my cousin was reading about recently. He wrote me about it in his last letter. A sort of peeling-back of the fingernails.”

  “Well now, that sounds interesting,” said Gulark-ay. “I’m no expert, more’s the pity on human nerve-endings, particularly in the fingertip areas; but we can assume a basic similarity. We’ll put that on the list. Now, I myself, have a small specialty involving the inside of the mouth, if no one objects?” He looked at the other two.

  “Why don’t we just hit him over the head?” said Boy Is She Built.

  Tark-ay gave her a look or scorn.

  “We aren’t barbarians!” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  The discussion went on in lively fashion for some time. And an amazing thing happened to John. He dozed off. The subject matter might have been enough to keep him awake; but the two Hemnoids had become unintelligibly technical; and the tone had become the tone of in-group discussions the universe over. Half the wrangling was over authorities and precedents, rather than about the actual performance contemplated. Moreover, John had had two rough nights and days in a row. His body made up his mind for him. It went to sleep.

  When he reawakened, the sun was well up over the trees, and he found that he was not the only one who had become tired of the discussion. Boy Is She Built was reading the two Hemnoids the riot act.

  “—and I think you’re disgusting, both of you!” she was informing them, in anything but well-modulated tones. “And crazy! And stupid! I keep telling you why don’t you just hit him over the head? But, oh no! Not you! It’s got to be first we’ll do this. And then we’ll do that. And then—oh, no, we can’t do that, because it’d finish him off too quick—or somebody else tried it and it didn’t work out too well.”

  “Little lady,” began Tark-ay.

  “You give me a pain!” cried Boy Is She Built. “And you aren’t even mad at him, that’s what gets me! If it wasn’t for Streamside, I don’t think I’d even let you have him! You’re just—just—you’re disgusting, both of you!”

  “You don’t understand,” said Gulark-ay. “The point is—”

  “Well, I’m glad I don’t. If this is the way you Hemnoids are, I’m not sure I don’t like Shorties better, after all. I’ll bet if it was him helping me and you two tied up over there, he’d tell me to go right ahead and hit you over the head. He wouldn’t go on arguing about doing this first, and doing that second.” Boy Is She Built made an unsuccessful effort to imitate the deep liquidity of the Hemnoid voices gloating over a particularly attractive idea. ” ‘and we moost try thees. Oh, wee surleee moost!’ You both give me a pain!”

  Tark-ay, glancing helplessly away from her, found his glance meeting that of John’s; and shrugged helplessly at the human.

  “Well,” said Gulark-ay, shaking his head and getting to his feet, “there’s no help for it. We’d just be wasting him to go to work now. I have to get on to see the grandfathers of the Hollows clan; and I can’t get back until late afternoon, now. Let’s put it all off until this evening. I’ll bring some supplies from my stuff, when I get back, something good in the way of food and drink, and we can make a bang-up night of it. How does that strike you, Tark-ay?”

  “Mr. Ambassador,” said Tark-ay, his voice full of deep emotion, “you are a gentleman!”

  “Thank you, thank you indeed,” said Gulark-ay. “Well, I’m on my way, then. Traveling in my direction, Boy Is She Built?”

  “I should think so!” Boy Is She Built jumped to her feet. “I was supposed to meet Streamside just two hours after the sun was up, and I forgot all about it. He gets awfully impatient. Maybe he went off and left that Shorty female alone.”

  And without even waiting for Gulark-ay, Boy Is She Built hurried off.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” said Tark-ay, looking after her. “You don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  “Cheer up,” said Gulark-ay. “It’ll be all remembered to your advantage in my reports.” He rearranged his robes. “I’ll be back this evening, then.”

  “May the hours fly until then, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Indeed,” said Gulark-ay; and departed in his turn.

  * *
*

  Tark-ay left alone with John, sighed heavily. He produced a curved knife from his robe, with which he proceeded to clean his fingernails, meanwhile heaving another occasional heavy sigh. Finished, he stuck the knife into a piece of firewood beside him and tapped its hilt with his finger to make it vibrate back and forth. After a while he gave even this up. His eyes closed. He dozed.

  John, lying still, watched the Hemnoid carefully from fifteen feet of distance. It had not occurred to John before, but Tark-ay had probably not had a good night’s sleep either for some time. He waited.

  Tark-ay slid down the tree against which he was leaning. He began to breathe heavily with a whistling overtone which John took to be the Hemnoid equivalent of a snore. He lay sprawled out. John’s eyes went to the knife, still stuck in the chunk of firewood.

  As quietly as he could, John slid down flat on the ground himself. Luckily, it was downhill. He rolled over once. Twigs crackled and pebbles rattled away from him. But Tark-ay did not wake up. John rolled over a second time.

  Three minutes later he was rubbing his bound wrists against the blade of the upright knife blade. It was not as easy as it looked in the pictures John had seen. He did a pretty good job of slicing up his wrists in the process, and the rope was thick. Also, he discovered, it is not easy to get pressure against the blade of a knife stuck upright in a piece of wood. The angle is all wrong.

  Nevertheless, some ten minutes after he had first started his roll downhill, he was cutting his feet loose from their bindings, knife in hand. He got the foot-tyings parted, stuck the knife in his belt and took off, as quietly as he could up the slope into the trees.

  Tark-ay had not stirred.

  John was just about to congratulate himself on having gained his freedom without mishap, when an infuriated roar behind him stopped him in his tracks. Instinctively, he dodged behind a nearby tree, turned and looked back.