Gordon Dickson: The Right to Arm Bears

Realizing this did not make him happy. It is a sort of inverse but universal law of nature that makes poets want to be soldiers of fortune, and soldiers of fortune secretly yearn to write poetry. John, a naturally born physical success, had always dreamed of the day his life could be exclusively devoted to peering through microscopes and writing scholarly reports. Fate, he reflected not without bitterness, was operating against him as usual.

“What?” demanded the Hill Bluffer.

“Did I say something?” asked John, starting guiltily back to the realities of his situation.

“You said something ,” replied the Hill Bluffer darkly. “I don’t know what, exactly. Sounded like something in that Shorty talk of yours.”

“Oh,” said John.

“That’s what I figured it was,” said the Bluffer. “I mean, if it had been something in real words, I would have understood it. I figure any talking you’d be doing to me would be in regular speech. A man wouldn’t want anyone making cracks behind his back in some kind of talk he couldn’t understand.”

“Oh, no. No,” said John, hastily. “I was just sort of daydreaming—about things back on the Shorty world where I come from.”

The Hill Bluffer absorbed this information in silence for a moment or two, during which he reached the bottom of one small valley and started up its far side.

“You mean,” he said, after a moment, “you been asleep back there?”

“Uh—well—sort of dozing…”

The Bluffer snorted like a small laboratory explosion and put on speed. He did not utter a word for the next two hours. Not, in fact, until someone beside John appeared on the verbal horizon to offer an excuse for conversation.

This new individual turned out to be another Dilbian, very much on the shaggy side, who appeared suddenly out of the woods on to the path ahead of them as they were crossing the low-slung curve of one of the interminable valleys. The stranger was carrying over one shoulder one of the local wild herbivores, a type of musk ox, large by human rather than Dilbian standards. In his other hand swung an ax with a seven foot handle.

The head of the ax was a thick, grey triangle of native iron, one leading side forming the edge of the blade, and the point at the far end being drawn back into a hook. A wicked-looking tool and weapon which John’s hypno training now reminded him was carried and used on all occasions of civil and police matters.

But never used in brawls or combats. The Dilbians considered reliance on any weapon to be rather unmanly.

The Dilbian who had just appeared, waited agreeably in the path for them to catch up. John’s nose, which was getting rather used to the Hill Bluffer by this time, discovered the newcomer’s odor to be several notches more powerful than that of the Dilbians he had met so far. This Dilbian also had a couple of teeth missing and was plentifully matted about the shoulder and chest with blood from the dead animal he was carrying. He grinned in gap-toothed interest at John; but spoke to the Bluffer, as the Bluffer stopped before him.

“Bluffer,” he said.

“Hello, woodsman,” said the Bluffer.

“Hello, postman.” The tap-toothed grin widened. “Anything for me in the mail?”

“You!” The Bluffer’s snort rang through the woods.

“Not so funny!” growled the other. “My second cousin got a piece of mail, once. His clan was gathering at Two Falls; he was a Two Faller through his mother’s blood aunt…” the woodsman went on heatedly in an apparent attempt to prove his cousin’s genealogical claim to have received the piece of mail in question.

Meanwhile, John’s attention had been attracted by something else back in the trees from which the woodsman had just emerged. He was trying to get a clearer view of it without betraying himself by turning to look directly at it. It was hard to make out there in the deep shadow behind the branches of the trees, but there seemed to be two other individuals standing back out of sight and listening.

Neither one was a human being. One seemed to be a Dilbian, a small, rather fat-looking Dilbian. And the other, John was just about prepared to swear, was a Buddha-like Hemnoid. It was infuriating that just as he was about to get a clear glimpse of this second individual, a breeze or movement of the air would sway a branch in the way of his vision. If it were a Hemnoid…

John’s hypno training, possibly by reason of the general snafu that seemed to effect anything having to do with John and Dilbia in general, had omitted to inform him about the Hemnoids. Accordingly, all he knew about this race, which were neck-and-necking it with the humans in a general race to the stars, was what he had picked up in the ordinary way through newspapers and chance encounters.

The Hemnoids looked exactly like jolly fat men half again the size of a human. Only what looked like fat was mostly muscle resulting from a heavier-than-earth gravity on their home world. And they were not—repeat, not—jolly, in the human sense of the word. They had a sense of humor, all right; but it was of the variety that goes with pulling wings off flies. John’s only personal encounter with a Hemnoid before this had been at the Interplanetary Olympiad in Brisbane, Australia, the year John had won the decathlon competition.

The Hemnoid ambassador, who had been in the stands that day to witness the competition, came down afterwards to be introduced to some of the athletes; he amused himself by putting the shot two hundred and twenty feet, making a standing broad jump of twenty-eight feet, and otherwise showing up the winners of the recent events. He had then laughed uproariously and suggested a heavy-fat diet such as he followed himself, and also hard physical labor.

If he had time, he said, he would be glad to train a school of athletes who would undoubtedly sweep the next Olympics. Alas, he had to get back to his embassy in Geneva. But let them follow his advice, which would undoubtedly do wonders for them. He had then departed, still chuckling.

While over by the sawdust pit of the pole vault, half the Italian track team were engaged in restraining one of their number, the miler Rudi Maltetti, who had gotten his hands on a javelin and was threatening to cause an interstellar incident.

“So that’s the Half-Pint Posted.”

John came back to the present with a start, suddenly realizing that the words the woodsman had just spoken were in reference to himself. He turned and stared over the Bluffer’s shoulder at the other Dilbian, who was grinning at him in almost Hemnoid fashion. John had, it seemed, already been nicknamed as Joshua had predicted.

“What do you know about him?” the Bluffer was demanding.

“The Cobbly Queen told me,” said the other, curling up the right side of his upper lip in the native equivalent of a wink. John recalled that the Cobblies were the Dilbian equivalent of elves, brownies, or what-have-you. He wondered if the woodsman could be serious. John decided the Dilbian wasn’t, which still left the problem of how he had recognized John.

“Who’re you?” demanded John, taking advantage of the best Dilbian manners, which allowed anybody to horn in on any conversation.

“So it talks does it?” said the woodsman. The Hill Bluffer snorted and threw a displeased glance over his own shoulder. “They calls me Tree Weeper, Half-Pint. Because I chops them down, you see.”

“Who told you about me?”

“Ah, that’s telling too much,” grinned the Tree Weeper. “Call it the Cobbly Queen and you’ve half of it, anyway. You knows why they call him the Streamside Terror, don’t you, Half-Pint? It’s because he likes to do his fighting alongside a stream, and pull the other man in the water and get him drowned.”