Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“Hey!” he said, moving up behind her.

She jumped, and turned. From a distance of only a few feet away, in the growing dimness of the twilight, he was able to make out that her face was oval and fine-boned, her hair was brown and smooth, fitting her head almost like a helmet, and her eyes were startling green and wide. They widened still further at the sight of him.

“Oh, here you are!” she cried in English. “For heaven’s sake, what do you mean by coming here, of all places? Didn’t you know any better than to charge into a delicate situation like this, the moment you landed, like a bull into a china shop?”

Bill stared at Anita Lyme, wordlessly.

He was not wordless because she had left him with nothing to say. He was wordless because he had too many things to say at once, and they were all fighting each other in his mind for first use of his tongue. If he had been the stuttering kind, he would have stuttered—with incredulity and plain, downright fury.

“Now, wait!” he managed to say at last, “you got yourself into this place, here—”

“—And I knew what I was doing! You don’t!” she snapped back, neatly stealing the conversational ball from his grip. “You’re just lucky I was here to get you out of it. If I hadn’t heard from the outlaw females about Sweet Thing’s message to Bone Breaker that you were coming, you’d have been committed to a duel with Bone Breaker right now! Do you know why you aren’t? Because the moment I heard, I went to Bone Breaker and told him that I was enjoying my visit here with the females and I wasn’t going to leave for anybody! You couldn’t very well fight over my being here after that!”

“No,” said Bill grimly. “But as it happens, I wasn’t planning to. Meanwhile, you’re still stuck here, Greenleaf is off-planet, and I’m left with a Residency and a project I’ve been drafted to and don’t know anything about. I’m not one of your agricultural or sociological trainee-assistants. My field’s mechanical engineering. What do I do—”

“Well, you find that out for yourself,” she said. “Just call Lafe and ask him—”

“The communications equipment’s dead. It won’t work.”

She stared at him.

“It can’t be,” she said at last. “You just didn’t get it turned on right.”

“Of course I got it turned on right!” said Bill stiffly. “It’s not working, I tell you!”

“Of course it’s working. It has to work! Go back and try it again. And that’s the point—” she said, checking herself suddenly. “The point is, you shouldn’t ever have come here in the first place. Common sense should have told you—”

“Sweet Thing said you needed rescuing from Bone Breaker.”

“Did you have to believe her, just like that? Honestly!” said Anita, on an exasperated note. “You should have immediately called Lafe—”

“I tried to. I tell you—” said Bill, almost between his teeth, “the communications equipment doesn’t work!”

“I tell you it does! It worked when I left the valley here, two days ago—and what could have happened to it since? Wait—” Anita held out her hand in the gathering dusk to stop him as he was about to explode into speech. She lowered her own voice to a more reasonable tone. “Look, let’s not fight about it. The situation here is too important. The point is, I’ve saved you from fighting Bone Breaker. Now, the thing for you to do is get back to the village as fast as you can, and stay there. Get busy at your real job.”

“What real job?” ejaculated Bill, staring at her.

“Organizing the villagers to stand up all together to the outlaws, of course!”

“What!”

“That’s right.” She lowered her voice still further, until it barely carried to his ear. “Listen to me—ah—Mr. Waltham—”

“Call me Pick-and-Shov—I mean, Bill,” answered Bill, lowering his own voice in turn. “What are we whispering for?”

She glanced around them at the gathering dusk.

“That Hemnoid understands English as well as you or I understand Hemnoid,” she murmured. “Let me explain a few thing to you about Project Spacepaw—Bill.”

“I wish you would,” said Bill, with deep emotion.

“Oh, stop it! There’s no need to keep getting a chip on your shoulder!” said Anita. “Listen to me now. This started out here as a perfectly ordinary agricultural project, taking advantage of the fact that when the original Human-Hemnoid Non-Interference Treaty on Dilbia was signed, neither the Hemnoids nor we knew that there were any sizable Dilbian communities that weren’t organized and disciplined by the clan structure you find among the Dilbians in the mountains—where ninety percent of the native population lives.”

“I know that,” interrupted Bill. “I spent five days on the way here wearing a hypno-helmet. I can even quote the part about the project aims. The project name ‘Spacepaw,’ refers to the hope of giving technology a foothold among the Dilbians—literally translated into Dilbian, it comes out meaning ‘helping hand from the stars’—except that since the Dilbians consider themselves to be the ones who have hands—Shorties and Fatties are referred to as having ‘paws.’ I already know all about that. But I was sent here to teach the natives how to use farm tools, not to organize a—” he fumbled for a word.

“Civil defense force!” supplied Anita.

“Civil defense…” he goggled at her through the increasing darkness.

“Why not? That’s as good a name for it as any!” she whispered, briskly. “Now, will you listen and learn a few things you don’t know? I said this started out like an ordinary project. The Lowland Dilbians here at Muddy Nose come from fifty or sixty different Upland clans. They don’t have the clan organization, therefore, and they don’t have any Grandfathers of the Clan, to exert a conservative control over the way they think and act. Also, they don’t have the Upland Dilbian’s idea that it’s sissy to use tools or weapons. So it looked like they were just the community to let us demonstrate to the mountain Dilbians that tools and technology in general could raise more crops, build better buildings, and everything else—start them on the road to modern civilization.”

“And, incidentally, make them closer friends of ours than they are of the Hemnoids,” put in Bill skeptically.

“That, too, of course,” said Anita. “At least, if the Dilbians have some knowledge of modern technology, they’ll be better able to understand the psychological difference between us and the Hemnoids. We’re betting that if we can raise their mean technological level, they’ll want to be partners with us. The Hemnoids don’t want them to become technologically sophisticated. They’d rather take the Dilbians into the Hemnoid sphere of influence, now while they’re still safely primitive and they’d have to be technologically dependent.”

“You were going,” pointed out Bill, “to tell me something I didn’t know.”

“I am, if you’ll listen!” whispered Anita fiercely. “When we started to make a success of this project, the Hemnoids moved to counter it. They sent in Mula- ay , one of their best agents—”

“Agents?” echoed Bill. He had suspected it, of course, but finding himself undeniably up against a highly trained alien agent sent an abruptly cold shiver snaking its way between his shoulder blades.

“That’s what I said. Agent. And Mula- ay didn’t lose any time in taking advantage of the one local condition which could frustrate the project. He moved in with the outlaws, here, and pointed out to them that the more the villagers could produce from their farms, the more surplus the outlaws would be able to take from them. The outlaws only take what the farmers can spare, you know. Dilbian custom is very strict on that, even without Grandfathers—”