Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“Swords…” said Bill dazedly.

“I know how you feel,” said the Bluffer with sudden sympathy. “Kind of sickening, isn’t it, when a man’s still got the teeth and nails he was born with? Anyway, we can get you one made, and the duel’s on. Everybody knows about it by now. That’s why Bone Breaker and I arranged for him to holler after you through the gate to come back in the daylight, and I nudged you to holler back you would, meaning you’d be around to tangle as soon as it was convenient, in daylight and in front of witnesses. But I agree with you about those swords. It’s sure a measly way to fight.”

The Hill Bluffer sighed heavily.

“Of course, maybe I shouldn’t worry about it,” he said brightening. “Maybe you Shorties like fighting with tools. You seem to use them for just about everything else. Well, grab yourself a good night’s sleep—and I’ll see you at dawn!”

Bill awoke from a confused dream of rolling thunder, as in a heavy thunderstorm, in which Kodiak bears had risen up on their hind legs, put on armor, and begun a sort of medieval tournament which he was being compelled to join. Then he became more fully awake and realized that the thunder was the roaring of a Dilbian voice, shouting Bill’s own Dilbian name of Pick-and-Shovel, and that the nightmare was no dream but merely the dream-twisted facts of his previous day on Dilbia.

He opened his eyes to the sight of one of the Residency’s spare bedrooms. Scrambling out of bed, he pulled on his pants and stumbled down the hall in his bare feet to open a door and step into the reception room at the front of the Residency. Standing in the middle of the room and still shouting for him was a Dilbian. But it was not the Hill Bluffer, as Bill had automatically assumed it would be. Instead, it was the strangest-looking member of Dilbia’s native race that Bill had so far encountered.

He was the widest being on two legs that Bill had ever seen, in the flesh or in any reproduction of any alien race humans had discovered. Bill had so far adjusted to the size of the Dilbians in his one day among them that he had felt prepared for anything the race might present him with. But the individual he looked at now was beyond belief.

He was a Dilbian who made Mula- ay look skinny. This, in spite of the fact that he must have been a good head taller than the Hemnoid. What he must weigh was beyond the power of Bill’s imagination to guess. Certainly, at least double the poundage of the ordinary Dilbian male. So furry and round was he, that he had a jovial, if monstrous teddy-bear look to him; but this impression was immediately diluted by the fact that, hearing Bill come through the door, the fat Dilbian whirled to face him, literally on tiptoe, like a ballet dancer, as if his enormous weight was nothing at all.

“Well, well, there you are, Pick-and-Shovel!” he beamed, chortling in a voice like the booming of some enormous kettledrum. “I had a hunch if I just stood still and yelled about for you, a bit, you’d come running sooner or later.”

“Grnpf!” growled Bill, deep in his throat. He was only half awake, and he had never been one to wake up in an immediate good humor. On top of this, having been summoned from sleep, and down the long cold floor of a hallway in his bare feet, by someone who seemed to be using the same technique a human might use to call a dog or cat to him, did not improve his morning temper. “I thought you were the Bluffer!”

“The postman?” the laughter of the roly-poly Dilbian shook the rafters. “Do I look like that skinny mountain cat? No, no—” His laughter subsided, his humor fled, and his voice took on a wistful note. “No bluffing of hills for me, Pick-and-Shovel. Not these many years. It’s all I can do to waddle from place to place, nowadays. You see why?”

He gazed down at his vast stomach and patted it tenderly, heaving a heavy sigh.

“I suppose you’d guess from the looks of me that I enjoyed my food, wouldn’t you, Pick-and-Shovel?” he said sadly.

Bill scowled at him. Then, remembering the duty he owed as a trainee-assistant assigned to this area, he managed to check the instinctive agreement that was about to burst from his lips.

“Well, I—ah—” he began uncomfortably.

“No, no,” sighed the Dilbian. “I know what you think. And I don’t blame you. People herebouts have probably told you about poor old More Jam.”

“More Jam?” echoed Bill frowning. He had heard that name somewhere before.

“That’s right. I’m the innkeeper here,” said More Jam. “You’ve already talked to my little girl. Yes, that’s exactly who I am, Sweet Thing’s poor old father; a widower these last ten years—would you believe it?”

“Sorry to hear it,” muttered Bill, caught between confusion and embarrassment.

“An old, worn-out widower,” mourned More Jam, sitting down disconsolately on one of the room’s benches that were designed for Dilbians—which, however, in spite of its design, creaked alarmingly underneath him as his weight settled upon it. He sighed heavily. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, would you, Pick-and-Shovel? But I wasn’t always the decrepit shell of a man you see before you. Once—years ago—I was the champion Lowland wrestler.”

“Long ago?” echoed Bill, somewhat suspiciously. He was waking up, automatically, remembering Dilbian verbal ploys. The unkind suspicion began to kindle in his mind that More Jam was protesting his weakness and age a bit too much to be truthful. He remembered the lightness and quickness with which the rotund Dilbian had spun about on his toes as Bill entered the room. If More Jam could still move that mass of flesh he called a body with that much speed and agility, he could hardly be quite as decrepit and ancient as he claimed.

Not only that, thought Bill, watching the native now through narrowed eyes, but Bill’s experience on Dilbia so far had begun to breed in him a healthy tendency to take a large grain of salt with anything one of them claimed about himself.

“Tell me,” Bill said now, becoming once more uncomfortably conscious of the iciness of the boards under his bare feet, “what did you want to see me about?”

More Jam sighed again—if possible, even more sadly than he had managed to sigh before.

“It’s about that daughter of mine, Sweet Thing,” he answered heavily. “The apple of my eye, and the burden of my declining years. But why don’t you pull up a bench, Pick-and-Shovel, and we can go into this matter in detail?”

“Well—all right,” said Bill. “But if you’ll wait a moment or two, I’d like to get some clothes on.”

“Clothes?” said More Jam, looking genuinely surprised. “Oh, those contraptions you Shorties cover yourselves up with. You and the Fatties. Never could understand that—but go ahead, don’t mind me. I’ll just wait here until you’re ready.”

“Thanks. Won’t be a minute,” said Bill gratefully.

He ducked back through the door and down the hall back into his bedroom, where he proceeded to get the rest of his clothing on. Now at least dressed and shod—he returned to the reception room where More Jam was waiting.

Before he had fully traversed the hall, and long before he had opened the door to the reception room, a booming of Dilbian voices informed him that More Jam was no longer alone. Even with this warning, however, he was not prepared for the sight that greeted his eyes as he stepped back into that room. Two more Dilbians had appeared. One of them was the Hill Bluffer. Another was a Dilbian with grayish-black, rather singed-looking hair on his forearms, who was fully as large as Bone Breaker. It was not, thought Bill as he stepped into the room without being noticed at all by the three natives, that any of them were larger than he might have expected. It was just that all three of them together seemed to fill the reception room well past the overcrowding point. Not only this, but the sound of their three voices, all talking at once, was deafening.