Spacepaw (2 page)

Accordingly, he picked up his traveling case from where he had put it down, and tramped ahead in under the trees before him. The grove was not more than fifty to seventy-five feet thick, and he reached the other side shortly, stepping out into what appeared to be the front yard of a log farmhouse.

In the yard a plank table had been set up on trestles, and at that table were half a dozen towering, bearlike individuals, nearly nine feet tall, and covered with brown-black hair plus a few straps, from which each had hung a monstrous sword, as well as various pouches or satchels. The crowd at the table was eating and drinking out of large wooden mugs refilled constantly from a nearby barrel with its top broken in. A dozen feet or so from the table was a pile of what appeared to be sacks of root vegetables, half a carcass resembling a side of beef, and an unopened barrel like the one from which they were drinking—together with some odds and ends, including a three-legged wooden stool. A small piglike animal was tied by a cord to one of the heavy vegetable sacks, and it was granting and chewing on the cord. It was plain the creature would soon be loose.

But no one in the farmyard was paying any attention to the animal as Bill joined them. They had stopped singing and their attention was all directed to a smaller, more rounded— you might actually say fat—native, a good head shorter than the nine-footers at the table, and with a voice a good octave or two higher than the rest. From which, in addition to the fact that this one wore no sword, Bill concluded that she was a female. She was standing back a dozen feet from the table and shouting at the others—at one in particular who Bill now noticed was also not wearing a sword, but who sat rather more drunkenly than the others, at the head of the table facing down at her.

“… Look at him!” she was shouting, as Bill stepped into the yard and approached the table without any of them apparently noticing him. “He
likes
it! Isn’t it bad enough that we have to live here outside the village because he won’t _ speak up for our right to live at the Inn, when he knows I’m More Jam’s dead wife’s own blood cousin. No, he’s got to sit down and get drunk with rascals and no-goods like the rest of you. Why do you put up with it, Tin Ear? Well,
answer me!
”

 
“They’re making me,” muttered the individual at the top of the table who was evidently called Tin Ear. His tongue was a little thick, but his expression, as far as Bill could read it on his furry face, was far from unhappy.

“Well, why do you let them? Why don’t you fight them like a man? If I was a man—”

“Impolite not drink guests,” protested Tin Ear thickly.

“Impolite! Guests!” shouted the female. “Ex-Upland runagates, reivers, thieves …”

“Hold on, there, Thing-or-Two! No need to get nasty!” rumbled one of the sworded drinkers warningly. “Fair’s fair. If there’s something in that stack there”—he pointed to the pile to which the animal was tied—“you really can’t spare, you’re free to trot yourself over and talk to Bone Breaker—”

“Oh yes!” cried Thing-or-Two. “Talk to Bone Breaker, is it? He’s no better than the rest of you—letting Sweet Thing stick her nose in the air and treat him the way she does! If there were any real men around here, they’d have settled the hash of men like him and you, long ago! When I was a girl, if a girl didn’t want to leave home just yet, much she had to say about it. The man who wanted her just came in one day and swept her off her feet and carried her off—”

“Like Tin Ear, here, did to you? Is that it?” interrupted the male with the sword—and the whole table exploded into gargantuan laughter that made Bill’s ears ring. Even Tin Ear choked appreciatively on the contents of the wooden mug from which he was swallowing, in spite of being, as far as Bill could see, in some measure the butt of the joke.

Thing-or-Two shouted back at them, but her words were lost in the laughter, which took a few minutes to die down.

“Why, I heard it was
you,
Thing-or-Two, who broke into Tin Ear’s daddy’s house one dark night and carried
him
off!” bellowed the speaker at the table, as soon as he could be heard, and the laughter mounted skyward again.

This last sally apparently had the unusual effect of rendering Thing-or-Two momentarily speechless. Taking advantage of this, and the gradual diminishing of the laughter, Bill decided it was time to call the attention of the gathering to himself. He had been standing in plain daylight right beside the table all this time, but for some strange reason no one seemed to have noticed him. Now he stepped up to the side of the Dilbian who had been trading insults with Thing-or-Two and poked
him
in the ribs.

“Hey!” said Bill.

The head of the Dilbian jerked around. Seated, his hairy face was on a level with Bill’s and he stared at Bill now from a distance of less than three feet. His jaw dropped. Behind him, the laughter and other sounds died out, giving way to a stony silence as everyone at the table goggled incredulously at Bill.

“Sorry to bother you,” said Bill, stiffly, in his best Dilbian, “but I’ve just got here, and I’m on my way to the Shorty Residency building, in Muddy Nose Village. Maybe one of you would be kind enough to point me in the right direction for the village, and maybe even one of you wouldn’t mind coming along and giving me a hand with my luggage case?”

He waited, but they only continued to stare at him in fascinated silence. So he added, cautiously, knowing that bargaining was as much a part of Dilbian culture as breathing:

“I could probably scrape up a half-pint of nails for anyone who’d like to help me.”

Again he waited. But there was no answer. Amazingly, the silence of the Dilbians persisted. They were still staring at Bill as if he were some strange creature, materialized out of thin air. Bill felt a slight uneasiness stir inside him. It seemed to him they were gaping at him as if they had never seen a human before, which was strange. His hypnoed information plainly informed him that Shorties—as humans were called by the Dilbians—were well known to the Muddy Nosers. Perhaps he had made a mistake in stopping here, after all.

“A Shorty!” gasped the Dilbian he had spoken to, finally breaking the silence. “As I live and breathe! A real, walking, talking, little Shorty! Out here, all by himself!”

He turned about in his seat and slowly reached out a long arm, which Bill avoided by backing away out of reach.

“Come here, Shorty!” said the Dilbian.

“No thanks,” said Bill, now fully alerted to the fact that there was something very wrong in the situation. He kept backing away. “Forget I asked.” It was high time to remind them of his protected status, he decided. The sworded individual he had been speaking to was already beginning to rise from the table with every obvious intention of laying hands upon him.

“It was just a thought—that I might get one of you to help me,” Bill said rapidly. “I’m a member of the Residency, myself, you know.”

The Dilbian was now on his feet and others were rising. Alarm rang as clearly in Bill as the clanging of a fire bell.

“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted at the oncoming Dilbian. “Don’t you know we Shorties have a treaty with the Muddy Nosers? According to that treaty, you all owe me protection and assistance!”

The male Dilbians, still rising from the table, froze and stared once again for a long second before suddenly bursting out into wild whoops of laughter, wilder and louder than Bill had yet heard from them.

Bill stared at them, amazed.

“Why, you crazy little Shorty!” cried the voice of Thing-or-Two furiously behind him. “Can’t you tell the differences between people, when you see them? These aren’t honest folk like us here around the village! They’re those thieves and plunderers and no-goods from the Outlaw Valley! They’re
outlaws
—and
they
never signed any kind of treaty with
anybody
!”

Chapter 2

Thing-or-Two’s shouted warning explained matters, but it came, if anything, a little late. By the time she had finished speaking, the leading outlaw was almost upon Bill, and Bill was already in motion.

He dropped his luggage case and ducked desperately as the big Dilbian hands made a grab for him. They missed, and he spun about only to find himself running in the wrong direction. With whoops and yells the whole crew of outlaws was after him. Every way he turned, he found a towering, nine-foot figure barring his escape.

Not that an immediate attempt to escape would do him any good at the moment, he realized almost at once. Bill’s first reaction had been that of any small animal being chased by larger ones—to duck and dodge and take advantage of his reflexes, which were faster simply because he was smaller. The Dilbian outlaws, being all nearly twice Bill’s size and several times his weight, were by that very fact slower and clumsier than he was. In fact, after the first leap to escape, he found himself evading their clutches with relative ease.

But even as he realized he could do this, he saw the spot he was in. At first he had been dodging about only in order to find a clear space in which he could make a run for the forest. Now he realized that simply running away was no solution. The reflexes of the Dilbians might be slower than his, but their huge strides could cover the same amount of ground at double his speed. They could catch him in no time if he simply tried to outrun them in a straight-away chase.

His only hope, he realized now, still dodging desperately about the farmyard, was to keep evading them in this small area until they began to grow winded, and then take his chances on outrunning them. If he could only keep this up, he thought—ducking under a flailing dark-furred arm as thick as a man’s thigh—for just a few minutes more …

“Hold it!” the outlaw leader was shouting. “Don’t let him run you ragged. Circle him! Circle him! Herd him into a corner!”

Bill’s hopes took a nose dive. He dodged and spun about, but without finding an opening. Already the outlaws were forming a semicircle, long arms extended sideways, that was herding him back against the front wall of the house. They were closing in, now …

Bill made a feint toward the right end of the semicircle, and then made a dash toward the left end, with the wild thought of diving between the legs of the outlaw leader, standing at the corner of the house. But at the last second the outlaw stepped forward and whooped in the powerful voice Bill had come to recognize.

“Got you, Shorty!”

Bill braked to a frantic halt. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the rest of the semicircle closing rapidly on him. He looked back at the outlaw leader, standing crouched now and ready by the interlaced butt ends of the logs at the corner of the house. The leader spread his arms and reached forward—

—And went suddenly flat on his face with a furry figure atop him, as a wild war cry split the air.

“I’m
a Muddy Noser and proud of it!” roared the still-drunken voice of Tin Ear, in triumph.
“Run,
Shorty!”

But there was no place to which Bill could run. Other outlaws had rushed over to bar the escape route opened up by the fallen leader. Glancing wildly about, Bill looked up and saw that where the roof of the house joined the wall there was an opening leading to some dark interior, probably a loft or attic. The alternating ends of the logs in the front and side walls of the house were notched and interlocked together so that they stuck out like the tips of the fingers of two hands, interlaced at right angles to each other. They were as good as a ladder to someone Bill’s size. He had not won a climbing medal in Survival School, back on Earth, for nothing. He went up the log ends like a squirrel.

A second later he had dived into the dark, loftlike area to which the opening he had seen gave entrance. For a moment he simply lay there, panting, on what seemed to be a rough bed of poles, which was probably a roof to the room or rooms below. Then, as he began to breathe easily once more, he squirmed about, crawled back to the entrance, and looked down and out.

Tin Ear was slumbering or unconscious on the ground at the spot where he had jumped the outlaw leader. The leader himself was on his feet with the other outlaws clustered around the corner of the house, and one of their number was trying to climb the sixteen or eighteen feet up the same ladder of log ends Bill had used.

However, the log ends were too small for the big feet and hands of the Dilbians. The climber was finding fairly good support for his toes, but he was able to hang on to the log ends higher up only by his fingertips. His attention was all on those fingertips, and Bill had a sudden inspiration. Leaning out and reaching down the short couple of feet that separated the climber’s head from the entrance, he put his hand on the top of the hard, furry skull and shoved outward with all his strength.

The head went back, and the climber’s fingertips lost their precarious grip. There was a yell and a thud, and the climber landed on his back in the farmyard dirt. Roaring with rage, he scrambled to his feet as if he would climb again, but checked himself at the foot of the log corner, and dropped his upreaching arms.

“It’s no use!” he growled, turning away toward the outlaw leader. “There’s nothing you can really get a grip on. You see what he did to me?”

“Go get some fire from the stove inside,” said the outlaw leader, struck by a happy thought. “We’ll burn him out of there!”

“No, you don’t!” trumpeted the voice of Thing-or-Two in the background. “Paying outlaw-tax is one thing, ‘but you’re not burning down our house! You try it and you’ll see how fast I get to Outlaw Valley and tell Bone Breaker on you! You just try!”

Her words stopped a concerted move toward the front door of the house. The outlaws muttered among themselves, occasionally glancing up to the opening from which Bill was looking down. Finally, the leader looked up at Bill’s observing face.

“All right, Shorty!” he said, sternly. “You come down out of there!”

Bill laughed grimly.

“What’s so funny?” glowered the outlaw leader.

Bill had a sudden, desperate inspiration. His hypnoed information had just reminded him of a double fact. One, that preserving face—in the human, Oriental sense—meant a great deal to the Dilbians, since an individual Dilbian had no more status in the community than his wit or his muscles could earn for him. Two, that in Dilbian conversation the more outrageous statement you could get away with, the more face-destroying points you were able to score on an opponent. Maybe he could bluff his way out of this situation by making it so humiliating for the outlaws that they would go off and leave him alone.