"A whole houseful, Dirty Teeth?" said the outlaw matriarch. "Wasn't that maybe going a little bit too far?"
"My grandmother didn't think so," replied Anita seriously. "After all, a man gets anything he wants, doesn't he? All a woman has is her house and her children, isn't that right? And the children grow up and leave fast enough, don't they?"
"How true," said No Rest, shaking her head sadly. "Yes, every word of it's true. Go on, Dirty Teeth, how did your grandmother get her whole house full of furniture?"
"You'll never guess," said Anita.
"She hit him on the head—" Noggle Head was beginning hopefully, when she was sneered into silence almost automatically by the rest of the audience.
"No," said Anita. "What my grandmother did was to take off one day and go down and visit her neighbor—the same one whose husband she had asked about building the piece of furniture she wanted—because she
had
really asked him, you see."
"Ah," said No Rest meaningfully, nodding her head as if she had known it all the time.
"And," went on Anita, "she quite naturally invited her neighbor up to her house for a bite to eat and to look at her new chair that her husband had built. Well, the neighbor came up and admired the chair very much, and went home again. And what do you think happened before a week was out?"
"That neighbor had her husband make her a chair just like it!" said Word-and-a-Half emphatically. "She told him about the chair, and he went up and saw it and got all fired up, and he came back down and built one just like it!"
"That's exactly right," said Anita quietly but approvingly. "And of course the neighbor invited my grandmother down to see
her
chair. So my grandmother went down and admired it very much."
"So they both had chairs," said Noggle Head. "That was the end, then?"
"No," said Anita. "That was still just the beginning. Because the next day my grandfather came in and saw that the chair he'd built my grandmother wasn't out in the center of the room where it used to be; it was tucked back in a corner where it was dark and pretty well hidden. Well, of course he asked why it was put someplace else. And my grandmother told him about the neighbor's chair. Which made him furious!"
"Why?" asked Noggle Head, blundering in where her older and wiser sisters hesitated to play the role of interlocutor.
"Why," said Anita sweetly, "you see my grandmother was such a modest, kindly, unassuming sort of a Shorty female that she wouldn't for any reason try to hold her head higher than her neighbor. So that when she told my grandfather about the chair her neighbor's husband had built for her neighbor, somehow the way she told it made the chair the neighbor had built seem a lot bigger and grander and softer and higher polished than the one my grandfather had built for my grandmother—almost as if the neighbor's husband had built a better chair than my grandfather had, just to spite my grandfather. So, as I say, my grandfather became furious and what do you suppose he did then?"
"Hit her on the head?" queried Noggle Head, but faintly and with a note of hope that was almost dead, in her voice.
"You think too much of hitting on the head, my girl!" snapped No Rest, in a tone of stern authority. "Only the most helpless sort of a woman tries to handle a husband that way. Little good ever comes of it. Most women don't hit their husbands hard enough, anyway, and it doesn't do anything but make the husbands mad!"
Noggle Head shrank up over her work again, once more properly crushed. No Rest turned back to Anita.
"Well, Dirty Teeth," said Bone Breaker's great-aunt, "go on. Tell us what happened next!"
"Nothing much," said Anita mildly. "Although, by the time it was ended, my grandmother had the best houseful of furniture you have ever seen. But the point is—she continued to put her good sneaky talents to work the rest of her married life with my grandfather. And by the time of his death, he had become one of the richest and best known male Shorties around."
The group considered this conclusion for a long moment in satisfied silence. Then No Rest sighed and placed her seal of approval upon the anecdote.
"There's always a woman behind a man who amounts to anything," she observed sagely.
Outside the window at which he was listening, Bill suddenly jerked his attention away from the aperture in the hide curtains, and strove suddenly with his light-dazzled eyes to pierce the night darkness surrounding him. There was no more time to waste. He had to get Anita outside and away from her net-weaving social circle before the rising moon exposed him to capture. He turned and peered in at the window again. Dilbians, he remembered, because of a difference from humans in jaw structure and lip muscles, could not whistle. Bill took a breath and whistled the first two lines of "
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
."
The results were far greater than anything he had expected. Anita's hands froze suddenly in their movement of making a tie in the net, and her face suddenly went pale in the lamplight. But the effect upon Anita was nothing compared to the effect that the sound of Bill's whistle had on the rest of the Dilbian social circle.
All the Dilbian females in the room checked in mid-motion and apparently stopped breathing. They sat like a tableau, listening. For a long moment the silence seemed to ring in Bill's ears. Then Noggle Head began to shiver violently.
"W-what k-kind of a critter's that . . . ?" she whimpered.
"Hush!" ordered No Rest in a harsh whisper, but one so full of terror that Bill himself chilled at the sound of it. "No critter—no bird—no wind in the trees ever made
that
sound!"
Noggle Head's shivers grew until she trembled uncontrollably. Others of the Dilbian females were beginning to cower and shake.
"A Cobbly!" hissed No Rest—and outside the building, Bill stiffened. For a Cobbly was a supernatural creature out of Dilbian legend—a sort of malicious but very powerful elf. "A
Cobbly
," repeated No Rest now. "And it's come for one us women, here!"
The eyes of all the Dilbian females turned slowly and grimly upon Noggle Head.
"You—and your talk about hitting husbands over the head!" whispered No Rest savagely. "You know what Cobblies do to undutiful females! Now one of them's heard you!"
Noggle Head was shivering so hard she was making the floor creak beneath her.
"What'll we do?" whispered one of the other females.
"There's just one chance!" ordered No Rest, still in a whisper. "Maybe we can still frighten the Cobbly off. I'll give the word, girls, and we'll all scream for help. We'll have men with torches running out of all the buildings before you can wink. I'll count
one, two,
three—and then we'll all yell. All right? Ready now; and take a deep breath!"
"Wait!" interrupted Anita's voice.
Bill, who had just been about to take to his heels at the prospect of a chorus of powerful female Dilbian lungs shouting for help, checked himself just in time.
"Don't shout," Anita's voice went on, hastily. "You don't want to get the men all roused up and over here, and then find out that the Cobbly's gone before they get here, and there's no way of proving it was here at all. Cobblies don't bother us Shorties. Let me go outside and see if I can get a look at it."
There was no immediate response to Anita's suggestion. Bill turned back to glance in through the tear in the curtain. The assembled Dilbian females were sitting and staring at her. If she had proposed that she try to walk up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall of the room, or casually suggested flying to the top of the cliffs that surrounded the valley they could not have looked more upset. The thought of anyone—let alone a female, whether native or Shorty—facing a Cobbly was evidently so enormous that it had rendered even No Rest speechless. But then that matriarch found her voice.
"Don't bother you?" she echoed, forgetting in her astonishment, to whisper. "But whatever—whatever—" words failed her in an attempt to state the concept of any kind of female world undeviled by Cobblies.
"Oh, we used to have something like Cobblies on our Shorty world," Anita said into the silence. "We had a different name for them, of course. But Cobblies and things like them don't like places where there's been a lot of building and making of things—you know that. You know they like the woods better than the villages and places like here, particularly in the daytime."
There were a few scared, hesitant nods around the circle.
"So our Cobblies sort of faded away," said Anita. "Just the way maybe yours will someday. Anyway, why don't I go outside and look?"
There was another long pause. But then No Rest visibly took a firm hold on herself. She sat up straight and spoke in a decisive voice.
"Very well, Dirty Teeth," she said sternly. "If you're not afraid to go out and look for the Cobbly, we'd all appreciate it very much."
"I'll look all around," said Anita, hastily getting to her feet. "But if I'm not back at the end of fifteen or twenty minutes, then you can always go ahead and shout for the men and torches, the way you were planning to do."
She slipped quickly to the door, opened it, and went out. To Bill, transferring his gaze to the outside, she appeared like a black shadow, slipping through the suddenly lighted opening, which was immediately darkened behind her as the door quickly shut again. The sound of a bar being dropped across it from the inside followed closely upon its closing.
Bill went toward her dark silhouette. She had come down the three steps onto the grass and was standing still—probably trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness outside. Bill came noiselessly up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.
She gave a sudden gasp—like a choked-off scream—and spun about so abruptly and violently that he backed off a step.
"W-who's there?" she whispered, in English. "Is that you, Pick-and—I mean, Mr. Waltham?"
"
Bill
, blast it! Call me Bill!" whispered Bill fiercely in return. "Come on, let's get away from here to someplace where we can talk."
Without a further word, she turned and began to move off along the building and through several patches of shadow until they came up against the wall of a long, narrow, almost windowless building that was completely dark within.
"This is a storage place—sort of a warehouse," said Anita in a low voice and turning to face him as they stopped. "There won't be anyone around here to hear us. What on earth are you doing in the valley here? Didn't you know any better than to come back here—especially at night?"
"Never mind that!" snapped Bill. He was surprised to find a good deal of honest anger suddenly bubbling up inside him. Here he had risked his neck to find her, and she was adopting the same irritating, authoritative tone she had taken with him on his first visit to the valley. It was the final straw upon the heavy load of frustrations and harrowing experiences which had been loaded upon him ever since he had set foot on Dilbian soil. "I'm here to get some straight answers, and you're going to supply them!"
"Answers?" she replied, almost blankly.
"That's right!" Bill snapped. "Since I saw you last, I've spent an educational fifteen minutes with our Hemnoid friend—with me tied to a tree during the conversation . . ." and he told her about his kidnapping and rescue of the day before.
"But you don't believe him!" exclaimed Anita, when he was finished. "Mula-
ay
's a
Hemnoid
! The authorities wouldn't send you here to get killed, just to get themselves out of a tough spot! You
know
that!"
"Do I?" said Bill, between his teeth. "How about the fact that I've been sent here to a job I never trained for? How about the fact the communicator wasn't working when I got here—oh, I found out what was wrong and fixed it . . ." he told her about finding the power lead disconnected. "But who knows how to use a power wrench? No Dilbian, for sure. That leaves you or Lafe Greentree as the only ones who could have disconnected it!"
"How about Mula-
ay
?" she demanded.
"Mula-
ay
doesn't control our relay stations and hospital ship computers. When I got it connected, all I could get was the hospital ship Greentree's supposed to have gone to, and the computer there wouldn't connect me with any live person, or give me anything but a bulletin on his health." Bill told her about his conversation over the communications equipment.
"But—" Anita's voice was unhappy, almost a wail, "it still doesn't prove anything! And the authorities
don't
want to close this project down! Don't you know what the name of the project itself stands for—"
"I know all right!" broke in Bill. "They told me at the reassignment center. `Spacepaw—
Helping Paw from the Stars
,' in Dilbian translation, because according to the Dilbians they're the only ones who have hands, and we Shorties have `paws.' " Bill laughed shortly. "Let's try another interpretation, shall we? Project Catspaw—with me as the `catspaw' that bails our Alien Relations people out of a jam on this world!"
"Bill, you
know
better!" said Anita desperately. "Oh, if you only knew how hard Lafe's worked here, you'd know he'd never have agreed to anything to close this project, let alone helping in making you the catspaw, as you say. It's all coincidence, my being here, and his breaking his leg—"
"Were you there when he broke it?" interrupted Bill.
"Well, I . . . no," admitted Anita grudgingly. "I was away from the Residency. When I got back, he hadn't waited for me. He'd already got a cast on it and called in, asking for transportation to a hospital ship—"
"Then you don't know for sure if he ever did fall and break it," said Bill grimly. "All right, maybe you can tell me what kind of a trick was used when this Half-Pint-Posted I keep hearing about beat up that mountain Dilbian with his bare hands."
"But there wasn't any trick! Honestly—" said Anita fervently. "Or rather, the only trick was that he used his belt. The Half-Pint—I mean, John Tardy—was a former Olympic decathlon champion. He got the Dilbian in the water with him, managed to get behind him and put his belt around the Streamside Terror's neck, and choked him. Outside of using the belt and the fact that he was able to maneuver in the water better than the Streamside Terror, it was a fair fight."