"Good-bye," said Bill. He watched the tall man move off towards 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.
"He's a pretty tough character, that Iron Bender—" said the Hill Bluffer, conversationally. Malcolm O'Keefe clung to the straps of the saddle he rode on the Hill Bluffer's back, as the nearly ten-foot-tall Dilbian strode surefootedly along the narrow mountain trail, looking somewhat like a slim Kodiak bear on its hind legs. "But a Shorty like you, Law-Twister, ought to be able to handle him, all right."
"Law-Twister . . ." echoed Mal, dizzily. The Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, had said something about the Dilbians wasting no time in pinning a name of their own invention on every Shorty (as humans were called by them) they met. But Mal had not expected to be named so soon. And what was that other name the Dilbian postman carrying him had just mentioned?
"Who won't I have any trouble with, did you say?" Mal added.
"Iron Bender," said the Hill Bluffer, with a touch of impatience. "Clan Water Gap's harnessmaker. Didn't Little Bite back there at Humrog Town tell you anything about Iron Bender?"
"I . . . I think so," said Mal. Little Bite, as Ambassador Guy was known to the Dilbians, had in fact told Mal a great many things. But thinking back on their conversation now, it did not seem to Mal that the Ambassador had been very helpful in spite of all his words. "Iron Bender's the—er—protector of this Gentle . . . Gentle . . ."
"Gentle Maiden. Hor!" The Bluffer broke into an unexpected snort of laughter. "Well, anyway, that's who Iron Bender's protector of."
"And she's the one holding the three Shorties captive—"
"Captive? What're you talking about, Law-Twister?" demanded the Bluffer. "She's
adopted
them! Little Bite must have told you that."
"Well, he . . ." Mal let the words trail off. His head was still buzzing from the hypnotraining he had been given on his way to Dilbia, to teach him the language and the human-known facts about the outsize natives of this Earth-like world; and the briefing he had gotten from Ambassador Guy had only confused him further.
" . . . Three tourists, evidently," Guy had said, puffing on a heavy-bowled pipe. He was a brisk little man in his sixties, with sharp blue eyes. "Thought they could slip down from the cruise by spaceliner they were taking and duck into a Dilbian village for a firsthand look at the locals. Probably had no idea what they were getting into."
"What—uh," asked Mal, "were they getting into, if I can ask?"
"Restricted territory! Treaty territory!" snapped Guy, knocking the dottle out of his pipe and beginning to refill it. Mal coughed discreetly as the fumes reached his nose. "In this sector of space we're in open competition with a race of aliens called Hemnoids, for every available, habitable world. Dilbia's a plum. But it's got this intelligent—if primitive—native race on it. Result, we've got a treaty with the Hemnoids restricting all but emergency contact with the Dilbians—by them or us—until the Dilbians themselves become civilized enough to choose either us or the Hemnoids for interstellar partners. Highly illegal, those three tourists just dropping in like that."
"How about me?" asked Mal.
"You? You're being sent in under special emergency orders to get them out before the Hemnoids find out they've been there," said Guy. "As long as they're gone when the Hemnoids hear about this, we can duck any treaty violation charge. But you've got to get them into their shuttle boat and back into space by midnight tonight—"
The dapper little ambassador pointed outside the window of the log building that served as the human embassy on Dilbia at the dawn sunlight on the cobblestoned Humrog Street.
"Luckily, we've got the local postman in town at the moment," Guy went on. "We can mail you to Clan Water Gap with him—"
"But," Mal broke in on the flow of words, "you still haven't explained—why me? I'm just a high school senior on a work-study visit to the Pleiades. Or at least, that's where I was headed when they told me my travel orders had been picked up, and I was drafted to come here instead, on emergency duty. There must be lots of people older than I am, who're experienced—"
"Not the point in this situation," said Guy, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe toward the log rafters overhead. "Dilbia's a special case. Age and experience don't help here as much as a certain sort of—well—personality. The Dilbian psychological profile and culture is tricky. It needs to be matched by a human with just the proper profile and character, himself. Without those natural advantages the best of age, education, and experience doesn't help in dealing with the Dilbians."
"But," said Mal, desperately, "there must be some advice you can give me—some instructions. Tell me what I ought to do, for example—"
"No, no. Just the opposite," said Guy. "We want you to follow your instincts. Do what seems best as the situation arises. You'll make out all right. We've already had a couple of examples of people who did, when they had the same kind of personality pattern you have. The book anthropologists and psychologists are completely baffled by these Dilbians as I say, but you just keep your head and follow your instincts . . ."
He had continued to talk, to Mal's mind, making less and less sense as he went, until the arrival of the Hill Bluffer had cut the conversation short. Now, here Mal was—with no source of information left, but the Bluffer, himself.
"This, er, Iron Bender," he said to the Dilbian postman. "You were saying I ought to be able to handle him all right?"
"Well, if you're any kind of a Shorty at all," said the Bluffer, cheerfully. "There's still lots of people in these mountains, and even down in the lowlands, who don't figure a Shorty can take on a real man and win. But not me. After all, I've been tied up with you Shorties almost from the start. It was me delivered the Half-Pint Posted to the Streamside Terror. Hor! Everybody thought the Terror'd tear the Half-Pint apart. And you can guess who won, being a Shorty yourself."
"The Half-Pint Posted won?"
"Hardly worked up a sweat doing it, either," said the Hill Bluffer. "Just like the Pick-and-Shovel Shorty, a couple of years later. Pick-and-Shovel, he took on Bone Breaker, the lowland outlaw chief—of course, Bone Breaker being a lowlander, they two tangled with swords and shields and that sort of modern junk."
Mal clung to the straps supporting the saddle on which he rode below the Hill Bluffer's massive, swaying shoulders.
"Hey!" said the Hill Bluffer, after a long moment of silence. "You go to sleep up there, or something?"
"Asleep?" Mal laughed, a little hollowly. "No. Just thinking. Just wondering where a couple of fighters like this Half-Pint and Pick-and-Shovel could have come from back on our Shorty worlds."
"Never knew them, did you?" asked the Bluffer. "I've noticed that. Most of you Shorties don't seem to know much about each other."
"What did they look like?" Mal asked.
"Well . . . you know," said the Bluffer. "Like Shorties. All you Shorties look alike, anyway. Little squeaky-voiced characters. Like you—only, maybe not so skinny."
"Skinny?" Mal had spent the last year of high school valiantly lifting weights and had finally built up his five-foot-eleven frame from a hundred and forty-eight to a hundred and seventy pounds. Not that this made him any mass of muscle—particularly compared to nearly a half-ton of Dilbian. Only, he had been rather proud of the fact that he had left skinniness behind him. Now, what he was hearing was incredible! What kind of supermen had the computer found on these two previous occasions—humans who could outwrestle a Dilbian or best one of the huge native aliens with sword and shield?
On second thought, it just wasn't possible there could be two such men, even if they had been supermen, by human standards. There had to have been some kind of a gimmick in each case that had let the humans win. Maybe, a concealed weapon of some kind—a tiny tranquilizer gun, or some such . . .
But Ambassador Guy had been adamant about refusing to send Mal out with any such equipment.
"Absolutely against the Treaty. Absolutely!" the little ambassador had said.
Mal snorted to himself. If anyone, Dilbian or human, was under the impression that
he
was going to get into any kind of physical fight with any Dilbian—even the oldest, weakest, most midget Dilbian on the planet—they had better think again. How he had come to be selected for this job, anyway . . .
"Well, here we are—Clan Water Gap Territory!" announced the Hill Bluffer, cheerfully, slowing his pace.
Mal straightened up in the saddle and looked around him. They had finally left the narrow mountain trail that had kept his heart in his mouth most of the trip. Now they had emerged into a green, bowl-shaped valley, with a cluster of log huts at its lowest point and the silver thread of a narrow river spilling into it from the valley's far end, to wind down into a lake by the huts.
But he had little time to examine the further scene in detail. Just before them, and obviously waiting in a little grassy hollow by an egg-shaped granite boulder, were four large Dilbians and one small one.
Correction—Mal squinted against the afternoon sun. Waiting by the stone were two large and one small male Dilbians, all with the graying fur of age, and one unusually tall and black-furred Dilbian female. The Hill Bluffer snorted appreciatively at the female as he carried Mal up to confront the four.
"Grown even a bit more yet, since I last saw you, Gentle Maiden," said the native postman, agreeably. "Done a pretty good job of it, too. Here, meet the Law-Twister Shorty."
"I don't want to meet him!" snapped Gentle Maiden. "And you can turn around and take him right back where you got him. He's not welcome in Clan Water Gap Territory; and I've got the Clan Grandfather here to tell him so!"
Mal's hopes suddenly took an upturn.
"Oh?" he said. "Not welcome? That's too bad. I guess there's nothing left but to go back. Bluffer—"
"Hold on, Law-Twister," growled the Bluffer. "Don't let Gentle here fool you." He glared at the three male Dilbians. "What Grandfather? I see three grandpas—Grandpa Tricky, Grandpa Forty Winks and—" he fastened his gaze on the smallest of the elderly males, "old One Punch, here. But none of them are Grandfathers, last I heard."
"What of it?" demanded Gentle Maiden. "Next Clan meeting, the Clan's going to choose a Grandfather. One of these grandpas is going to be the one chosen. So with all three of them here, I've got the next official Grandfather of Clan Water Gap here, too—even if he doesn't know it himself, yet!"
"Hor!" The Bluffer exploded into snorts of laughter. "Pretty sneaky, Gentle, but it won't work! A Grandfather's no good until he's
named
a Grandfather. Why, if you could do things that way, we'd have little kids being put up to give Grandfather rulings. And if it came to that, where'd the point be in having a man live long enough to get wise and trusted enough to be named a Grandfather?"
He shook his head.
"No, no," he said. "You've got no real Grandfather here, and so there's nobody can tell an honest Shorty like the Law-Twister to turn about and light out from Clan Territory."
"Told y'so, Gentle," said the shortest grandpa in a rusty voice. "Said it wouldn't work."
"You!" cried Gentle Maiden, wheeling on him. "A fine grandpa you are, One Punch—let alone the fact you're my own real, personal grandpa! You don't have to be a Grandfather! You could just tell this Shorty and this long-legged postman on your own—tell them to get out while they were still in one piece! You would have, once!"
"Well, once, maybe," said the short Dilbian, rustily and sadly. Now that Mal had a closer look at him, he saw that this particular oldster—the one the Hill Bluffer had called One Punch—bore more than a few signs of having led an active life. A number of old scars seamed his fur; one ear was only half there and the other badly tattered. Also, his left leg was crooked as if it had been broken and badly set at one time.
"I don't see why you can't
still
do it—for your granddaughter's sake!" said Gentle Maiden sharply. Mal winced. Gentle Maiden might be good looking by Dilbian standards—the Hill Bluffer's comments a moment ago seemed to indicate that—but whatever else she was, she was plainly not very gentle, at least, in any ordinary sense of the word.
"Why, Granddaughter," creaked One Punch mildly, "like I've told you and everyone else, now that I'm older I've seen the foolishness of all those little touches of temper I used to have when I was young. They never really proved anything—except how much wiser those big men were who used to kind of avoid tangling with me. That's what comes with age, Granddaughter. Wisdom. You never hear nowdays of One Man getting into hassles, now that he's put a few years on him—or of More Jam, down there in the lowlands, talking about defending his wrestling championship anymore."