Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

For a long second, the outlaw merely looked at him.

“Why, yes,” answered Bone Breaker. Then, with strange mildness, “She did wander in here the other day and I believe she’s still around. Seems I remember she told me yesterday she didn’t plan to leave for a while—whether I liked it or not.”

He continued to gaze at Bill, as Bill sat, momentarily shaken both by his own lack of caution and by Bone Breaker’s astonishing answer. Now, while Bill was still trying to collect his scattered wits, Bone Breaker spoke again.

“But let’s not get into that now, Pick-and-Shovel,” said the outlaw chief, still in that tone of surprising mildness. “It’s just time for the food and drink. Sit back and make yourself comfortable. We’ll have dinner first. Then we can talk.”

Mula- ay , Bill saw, was still grinning at him, evidently hugely enjoying Bill’s confusion and discomfiture.

“Well… thanks,” said Bill to Bone Breaker.

A couple of Dilbian females were just at this moment coming to the table with huge platters of what appeared to be either boiled or roasted meat, enormous irregular chunks of brown material that seemed to be some kind of bread, and large wooden drinking containers.

“What’s the matter, Pick-and-Shovel?” Bone Breaker inquired mildly, as the wooden vessels were being poured full of a dark brown liquid, which Bill’s nose told him was probably some form of native beer. “Nothing wrong with the food and drink, is there? Dig in.”

“Quite right,” Mula- ay echoed the Dilbian with an oily chuckle, cramming his own large mouth full of bread and meat and lifting the wooden tankard to wash the mouthful down. “Best food for miles around.”

“Not quite, Barrel Belly,” replied Bone Breaker, turning his deceptive mildness this time upon the Hemnoid. “I thought I told you. Sweet Thing is the best cook in these parts.”

“Oh yes—yes,” agreed the Hemnoid hastily, swallowing with a gulp, and beaming hugely at the outlaw, “of course. How could it have slipped my mind? Good as this is, it isn’t a patch on what Sweet Thing could cook. Why, sure!”

Bone Breaker, Bill thought, must possess an iron fist within the velvet glove of this apparent mildness of his, judging by the reaction of the Hemnoid. Now the black-furred outlaw’s eyes were coming back to Bill. Bill hastily picked up a chunk of meat and began gnawing on it. Oh well, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Conversation in general had ceased, not merely at their own head table, but about the hall, as the Dilbians present settled down to the serious business of eating. Their industry in performing that task was awesome enough from a human’s point of view. Bill had never thought of himself as a particularly light eater—in fact, at Survival School, he had been accused of just the opposite. But compared to these Dilbians, and to the Hemnoid at his left elbow, his performance as a trencherman was so insignificant as to seem ridiculous.

To begin with, somewhere between six and eight pounds of boiled meat had been dumped upon his wooden plate, along with what looked like about the equivalent of two loaves of bread. The wooden flagon alongside his plate looked as if it could hold at least a quart or two of liquid, and it had been generously filled.

After a first attempt at trying to keep up with the oversized appetites and capacities of those around him, Bill gave up. He scattered the food around on his plate as much as possible to make it look as if he had eaten, and resigned himself to pretending to be busy with the drinking flagon, which, as it became more and more empty, got easier to handle.

He had just, somewhat to his own surprise, managed at last to drain the final mouthful of liquid from this oversized utensil and set it back down on the table, when to his dismay he saw Bone Breaker turn and lift a pawlike hand. One of the serving Dilbians came over and refilled the flagon.

Bill gulped.

“Very good. Very good,” gurgled Mula- ay , tossing off at a gulp his own refilled flagon, which if anything was a little bit bigger than Bill’s. “Our Shorty is quite an eater and drinker”—he added in a deprecating tone—“for a Shorty.”

“Man don’t lick the world by filling his belly,” growled the Hill Bluffer.

An instinct warned Bill against glancing appreciatively in the Bluffer’s direction. Nonetheless, he warmed inside, at this evidence of support by the lanky Dilbian.

“But a man’s got to lick the world sometime,” said the Hemnoid, chuckling richly as if this was some rare kind of joke. “Isn’t that so, Pick-and-Shovel?”

Bill checked himself on the verge of answering, and picked up his heavy drinking utensil in order to gain time.

“Well…” he said, and put the vessel to his lips.

As he pretended to swallow, over the circular wooden rim of the container, he unexpectedly caught sight of a small slim, non-Dilbian figure moving along next to a far wall, until it reached the big double doors which still stood open to the twilight without. It passed through those doors and was gone. But not before Bill, staring after it over the rim of his drinking vessel, had identified the figure as human—and female, at that.

Hastily, he replaced the drinking container on the table, turning to Bone Breaker.

“Wasn’t that—” he had to think a moment to remember the Dilbian name for her, “Dirty Teeth, I just saw going out the door?”

The huge Dilbian outlaw chief stared back down at Bill with dark, unreadable eyes.

“Why, I don’t know, Pick-and-Shovel,” answered Bone Breaker. “Did you say you saw her?”

“That’s right,” replied Bill, a little grimly, “she just went out the doors there. You didn’t see her? You’re facing that way.”

“Why,” said Bone Breaker mildly, “I don’t remember seeing her. But as I said, she’s around here some place. It could have been her. Why don’t you take a look for yourself, if you want?”

“I think I’ll do just that,” replied Bill. He swung around on the stool and dropped to the floor. To his discomfort and dismay, he discovered that the dangling of his legs in midair over the sharp edge of the stool had put the right leg to sleep. A sensation of pins and needles was shooting through it now, and it felt numb and unreliable. Trying not to hobble, he turned and headed toward the big, open, double door.

Finally he reached the wide-open doors and stepped thankfully into the twilight outside. Looking first right and then left he saw that even the guards who had been lounging there were gone now. For a moment, as his gaze swept the gloaming that was settling down over the barricaded valley, a feeling of annoyance began to kindle in him. He could not discover anywhere that slim, girlish figure he had seen passing within the hall. Then abruptly his eyes located her—hardly more than a dark shadow against the darkening loom of the wall of an outbuilding some fifty feet away.

He went down the steps at a bound and headed toward her at a run, just as she turned the corner of the outbuilding and disappeared.

The soft turf all but absorbed the sound of his thudding boots as he ran. He reached the corner of the building and came swiftly around it. Suddenly, he was almost on top of her, for she had been merely idling on her way, it appeared, her head down as if she was deep in thought.

What do you say in a situation like this, wondered Bill, as he hastily put on the brakes; and she, still deep in thought, continued to wander on, evidently without having heard him. He searched his mind for her real name, but all that would come up from his memory in this winded moment was the nickname of Dirty Teeth that the Dilbians had given her. Finally, in desperation, he compromised.