Spacepaw (29 page)

“Maybe you’ll tell me,” said Greentree in an odd voice, “just what it was—this understanding of the Dilbians you say I have?”

“You know!” snarled Bill.

“Tell me anyway,” urged Greentree.

“All right, if you want it spelled out, so you can be sure I’ve seen through the whole thing!” said Bill furiously. “What you found out was what I finally figured out—just in time to tip off Bone Breaker that I understood, by pushing the duel through after all. If he hadn’t understood that I understood, he might have had to make a real fight out of it. Just to make sure I didn’t tell the other Dilbians afterward that he’d deliberately lost to me. And that a real duel would have left me very dead indeed!”

“But,” said Greentree, “you still haven’t told me what this knowledge about the Dilbians was.”

“Why, it’s their different way of doing everything, of course!” burst out Bill, exasperated. “A Dilbian never lies, except in desperate circumstances—”

“We know that—” began Greentree. “It’s a capital offence under the tribal laws in the mountains—”

“—But he never tells the exact, whole truth, either, if he can possibly twist it or distort it to give a different impression!” said Bill. “He admits nothing, and acknowledges nothing. He exaggerates in order to minimize, and minimizes in order to exaggerate. He blusters and brags when he wants to be modest, and he practically quivers with modesty and meekness when he’s issuing his strongest warning to another Dilbian to back off or prepare for trouble. In short—the Dilbians do everything backward, inside out, and wrong-way-to, on principle!”

Greentree’s face lit up.

“So that’s how—” he broke off, sobering. “No, that can’t be the answer. We concluded a long time back that the Dilbians had some kind of overall political system, or understanding, that they wouldn’t admit to—they worked too well together as individuals and communities for them not to have something like that. But what you’re talking about can’t be the answer. No political system could exist—”

“What’re you talking about?” said Bill harshly. “They’ve got a perfect political system. What they’ve got here on Dilbia is a one hundred percent, simon-pure,
classic
democracy. Nobody tells anybody else what to do among the Dilbians. Under cover of a set of apparently iron-clad visible rules like that one about not lying, there’s a set of invisible, changeable rules that really govern their actions. Also, no matter what the circumstances, every Dilbian has an equal right to persuade any other Dilbian to agree with him. If he gets a majority to agree, the new invisible, unacknowledged rule that results is applied to all Dilbians. That’s what makes More Jam and Bone Breaker top dogs in their community— they’re champion persuaders—in short, makers of invisible laws.”

Greentree stared.

“That’s hard to believe,” he said, at last, slowly. “After all, as chief outlaw, Bone Breaker headed a strong-arm band—”

“Which only took from the villagers what the villagers could spare!” snapped Bill. “And if they took more, the villager complained to Bone Breaker, who made the outlaws who took it give it back.”

“But obviously—”

“Obviously!”
 Bill snorted. “The whole point of the way the Dilbians do things is that whatever is obvious is a smoke screen for the real thing—” he broke off suddenly. “What’re you doing here? Trying to make me sound as if I’m telling you all this? You know as well as I do the Dilbians were running a test case on you and Mula-
ay
, to see which of you would win out in the end—instead of you and he competing to sway the primitive natives to your side, as you thought at first—and that was the joke you wanted so badly to bury. Even if you had to get me killed to do it.”

“A test case?” Greentree had stared at Bill before during this conversation, but not the way he stared now. “A
test case?”

“You know that,” said Bill, but with suddenly lessening conviction. Either, he began to think, Greentree was telling the truth—or he was the best actor ever born.

“Tell me,” said Greentree in a hushed voice.

“Why … the whole idea of the agricultural project in updating Dilbian farming methods was a debatable question. The Dilbians wondered if the advantages you claimed for it were all true, or if there weren’t hidden disadvantages. So they took sides—the way they always do. The villagers took your side, and those who took the other joined the outlaws and cosied up to Mula-
ay
. Then they all sat back to see which one—human or Hemnoid—would break the stalemate wide open in his own favor. Look,” said Bill, almost pleading now. “You know this. You know all this!”

Greentree slowly shook his head.

“I swear to you,” he said, slowly, “I give you my word—I didn’t know it. No one in the Alien Cultures Service knew it!”

It was Bill’s turn to stare now.

“But—” he said after a long moment, “if you didn’t know, how could
I
find out—”

He checked, baffled. Looking again at Greentree, he saw the beginnings of a smile starting to dawn again beneath the long nose.

“I’ll tell you—if you’ll listen now,” said Greentree.

“Go ahead,” said Bill, cautiously.

“You found out—” began Greentree, and the smile was breaking out now like gleeful sunshine across the tall man’s face, “because you’re the most unique subject of the most important experiment in the duplication of alien psychologies that’s ever been tried!”

Bill scowled suspiciously.

“It’s the truth!” said Greentree energetically. “I was going to tell you all about it—but you started talking and now it turns out that you’re even more of a success than we dreamed you’d be. You see, you
were
sent here to Dilbia to break up a stalemate between the project and Hemnoid opposition. And you’ve done that—but you’ve also given us a whole new understanding of Dilbian nature, and proved that we’ve got a tool in dealing with other alien races that the Hemnoids can’t match!”

Bill scowled harder. It was all he could think of to do, in view of the tall man’s words.

“You
weren’t just pitched into the Dilbian situation without consideration,” Greentree said. “But somebody else once was. It was John Tardy, the one the Dilbians called the Half-Pint-Posted. It was sheer accident, and our lack of understanding of the Dilbians, that caused him to be caught in an impossible situation—faced with a fight against the Streamside Terror, and the Terror really wanted to win
his
fight.”

“I don’t get it, then,” said Bill feebly.

“Well you see,” said Greentree, “John Tardy managed— almost miraculously—to come out on top. He managed to win his battle with the Terror and solve the situation. It was something that by all the rules simply could not have happened. And figuring out how it could have happened became a Number One priority project that took several years. Finally, they came up with an answer—a sort of an answer.”

“What?”

“The one thing that came out of all the investigation,” said the tall man, with deep seriousness, “was the fact that John Tardy by accident happened to fit the Dilbian personality very closely with his own. The point was raised that he had perhaps been able to solve his situation on Dilbia because he was able to think more like Dilbians than the rest of us. In short, that perhaps he had been just exactly the right man in the right place at the right moment. And a new concept was born; a concept called the Unconscious Agent.”

“Unconscious—” even the words sounded silly in Bill’s mouth.

“That’s right,” said Greentree. “Unconscious Agent. A man who’s had absolutely no briefing—and therefore has no visible ties to his superiors, but who so exactly fits the situation he meets and the personalities in that situation, that he’s ideally fitted to improvise a solution to it. The difference between an Unconscious, and an ordinary, Agent is something like that between the old-fashioned sea-diver with his helmet and air hose tethering him to a pump on the surface, and a free-swimming scuba diver of the mid-twentieth century.”

Bill shook his head again.

“The Unconscious Agent isn’t only free to improvise,” went on Greentree. “He’s
forced
to improvise. And, being ideally suited to the situation and the characters in it, he can’t fail—we hope—to come up with the ideal solution.”

The last two words of this penetrated deeply into Bill.

“You hope—” he echoed bitterly. “So I was an Unconscious Agent, was I?”

“That’s right,” said Greentree. “The first one—of what will probably be many, now. Of course, we insured our bet on you by supplying you with a hypnoed storehouse of general Dilbian information and another complementary Dilbian-like human who was Anita. But the solution was all your own. And now I’m finding out you’ve also come up with an insight into the Dilbian character and culture we’ve never had before. But the best of it all is that you’ve proved the workability of something we have that the Hemnoid can’t match.”

Bill frowned.

“Why?” he asked. “You mean—they can’t find and send in personality-matched Unconscious Agents of their own? Why?”

“Because of a lack in their own emotional structure!” Greentree’s smile hardened a little. “Don’t you know? The Hemnoid character has a cruel streak (as we would call it) that prohibits their having anything but the most rudimentary capacity for empathy. Empathy—the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, emotionally. That’s what we humans have, that they haven’t. And that’s why your likeness to the Dilbians paid off the way it did. Your being like them wouldn’t have helped, if you hadn’t instinctively tried to think the way they did, in order to figure out what they were doing!”

Of course, thought Bill, suddenly. All at once he remembered his first clue to the fact that perhaps there was more to Dilbian nature than even a trained Hemnoid agent like Mula-
ay
seemed to know. He remembered how Mula-
ay
had taken it for granted that Bill did
not
empathize with someone like Bone Breaker, and had even used that as an example in explaining his own, Hemnoid nature. But Greentree was still talking.

“—if you only knew,” he was saying to Bill, “how many millions of individuals on Earth and even on the newly settled worlds were screened to find you, as the closest Dilbian-like human. And how much of our future dealings with alien races has been riding on your success or failure here. Did you know you can just about write your own ticket as far as future work or study goes, after this? Did you know at the moment you’re currently the most valuable man off-Earth in the whole Alien Cultures area ...”

He went on talking, and slowly Bill’s spirits began to rise, in spite of himself, like a cork released in deep water and headed for the surface. Within himself—though he was far from admitting it to Greentree, yet—he had to face the fact that he was not the revengeful type, and if there had been a shadow of an excuse for what he had believed Greentree had done, he would probably never have pushed matters to the point of filing charges against the tall man, anyway. Particularly since, after all, Bill had come out of the situation on Dilbia without harm, and even with some benefits in the way of new knowledge and experience.

Certainly, therefore, now that it was turning out that there were strong extenuating circumstances, there was no reason why he shouldn’t sit back and ride with the situation. Was that his Dilbian-like nature counseling him how to act? As he stopped to question himself, suddenly a new aspect of the situation burst upon him like sunlight through an unexpected break in a heavy cover of clouds.

If he was Dilbian-like and Anita was Dilbian female-like, he saw at once why she had been so intractable and upset these last few days. Of course! Here, when he was in charge of the situation, he had been going around pretending he had done nothing, and was nothing—at just the time when Anita had expected him to show his authority and strength.

Sweet Thing, now that he stopped to think of it, had provided him with considerable insight into the way Anita’s mind might be working. He woke from his thoughts to find that Greentree was shaking his hand and saying good-bye.

“… You’ll understand in the long run, Bill, I know,” the tall man was saying. “I’ve got to go now. Somebody’s got to hold down the situation at the project here, for the moment. But I’ll be following you and Anita to Earth shortly. We’ll talk some more then. So long …”

“Good-bye,” said Bill. He watched the tall man move off toward the woods where Barrel Belly—Wasn’t Drunk, that is, Bill corrected himself—was still standing disconsolately. Poor old Mula-
ay
, thought Bill; he was the real loser—and the only real villain there had been in the whole situation. But then Bill shivered, suddenly, remembering the episode with Grandpa Squeaky; and, later on, the cliff-edge above Outlaw Valley, where only a light shove from the Hemnoid had been needed to send Bill plunging to his death. Mula-
ay
had been a real enough villain and enemy, at that. Bill shifted his gaze to another part of the meadow. The sun was moving into later afternoon position between the trees, and Bone Breaker, having finished his talk with the smaller Dilbian male, was finally headed off toward Muddy Nose and his dinner table. Bill stared after the big Dilbian, his attention suddenly caught.

“Bill!” It was Anita’s voice calling exasperatedly from the open hatch of the courier ship behind
him
. “Come
on!
We’re ready to go!”

“Just a minute!” he shouted back.

He squinted impatiently against the sunlight, striving to catch the tall figure of Bone Breaker in silhouette again. Yes, there it was. There was no doubt about it.

Marriage was apparently being good to the Bone Breaker. It was visible only when you caught him blackly outlined against the sun this way, but it was undeniably a fact, all the same.

Bone Breaker had begun to put on weight.