Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

They came to a halt, their eyes roaming the little dell, and fastened all together on Bill.

“There he is!” said the old male with a (for a Dilbian) high-pitched cackle of satisfaction. “Right where we want him!” And he rubbed his hands with glee.

“I leave you in good hands, Pick-and-Shovel,” murmured Mula- ay . With a wink and a nod, but no words spoken, in the direction of the three Dilbians who had just arrived, he glided softly off into the surrounding brush and disappeared.

“All right, Pick-and-Shovel,” said the aged Dilbian male, as the three of them reached him and stopped, standing over him, “are you ready to stand trial, hey? Are you ready to submit yourself to the judgment of a Grandfather—”

A snort from the tall, young-looking female interrupted him. He turned angrily on her.

“Don’t you go getting smart with me, Perfectly Delightful!” he shouted. “Got grandchildren, haven’t I? I got just as good right to be a Grandfather as anyone!”

“Thank goodness,” replied Perfectly Delightful, with the Dilbian equivalent of a ladylike sniff, “at least I’m not one of them!”

“Perfectly Delightful,” said the older, plumper female sternly, in a voice which Bill suddenly recognized from the episode in Tin Ear’s farmyard, “you leave Grandpa Squeaky alone! He’s here to do a job, that’s all. If you keep bothering him, he’ll never be able to do it!”

Grandpa Squeaky burst into sneering laughter.

“That’s right, Thing-or-Two!” he cackled. “Tell the young biddy a thing or two! Go ahead! Thinks she’s so good-looking she can get away with murder! Well, it may work with the young squirts, but it doesn’t work with old Grandpa Squeaky. And judging by the way things have been going, it hasn’t worked too well with Bone Breaker either! The last I heard,” he added in a jeering tone, “he was still hankering after Sweet Thing!”

“Is that so!” cried Perfectly Delightful, on a rising note, furiously turning upon the aged male, who slipped behind the stout body of Thing-or-Two with prudent alacrity. “Some people,” spat out Perfectly Delightful, “will say anything! And some other people will repeat it! But that doesn’t change things. It’s me Bone Breaker’s always liked best.”

She lifted her head and craned her neck, looking down rather complacently at herself. “After all,” she went on in a calmer tone, “I am Perfectly Delightful. Everyone’s always said so. Is it sensible that a tall, powerful man like Bone Breaker would want some little chunky creature like Sweet Thing? Oh, she can cook all right. I don’t deny that. I believe in giving everyone their due. But there’s more to life than eating, you know.”

“Never mind that now, Perfectly Delightful!” snapped the older female. “We aren’t here to talk about Bone Breaker. We’re here to settle this Shorty’s hash. Bear in mind, both of you, if you please, that it’s the ancient and honorable customs of our village that’s at stake here. We’re not going to keep this Shorty from helping Sweet Thing get Bone Breaker, just to please you , Perfectly Delightful!”

“Hey, never mind that!” broke in Grandpa Squeaky, jittering with what appeared to be eagerness. “Let me at him, hey? I’ll judge him! I’ll rule on what’s to be done with him!”

Grandpa Squeaky approached Bill and bent down until his breath fanned the hair on Bill’s forehead. Bill held his breath—for Grandpa Squeaky, it seemed, had a rather bad case of halitosis.

“Hey, you Shorty! Pick-and-Shovel!” demanded Grandpa Squeaky.

“What is it?” demanded Bill, turning his face away. To his relief, the aged Dilbian stood upright, removing both his face and his breath to a bearable distance.

“Answers to his name, all right,” commented Grandpa Squeaky to the two females. “That takes care of the part about who he is.”

“Why don’t we find a rock and hit him on the head?” queried Perfectly Delightful, in a pleasant tone of voice.

“Go on, I say!” insisted Thing-or-Two to Grandpa Squeaky. Grandpa Squeaky swallowed, and obeyed.

“Here, you, Pick-and-Shovel,” he said, “you come in here, helping Dirty Teeth and the Tricky Teacher upset all our honorable old ways of living. We let you get away with that, and you think you can get away with even worse. Now, didn’t you take Sweet Thing’s side against a fine young buck like Bone Breaker, encouraging a young female to dispute where her husband-to-be wants her to live? Didn’t you interfere, hey, in something that wasn’t your concern? And besides, didn’t you go and challenge our village blacksmith to a weightlifting contest at noon today?”

“Certainly I did!” retorted Bill. “And I was just about to head for his forge—”

“Never mind about that!” interrupted Thing-or-Two. “Go on, Grandpa Squeaky.”

“I’ll find a rock in a minute, and then we can shut him up,” put in Perfectly Delightful brightly. She was searching around among the grassy open area of the dell.

“Sure you did!” said Grandpa Squeaky. “And then you sneaked off to the woods here and hid out, so you wouldn’t have to face him—I mean Flat Fingers—thereby injuring the honor of our village.”

“Hey!” shouted Bill. “What do you mean, sneaked off? Can’t you see my hands are tied behind me here?”

“Nonsense! Go on,” said Thing-or-Two. “You can’t see his hands from where you’re standing, can you? So you’ve only got his word for it, haven’t you? And you aren’t going to take the word of a moral wrecker, who thinks our young women can start telling their future husbands how to come and go and where they’re supposed to live after they’re married? Well, are you?”

“Of course not,” said Grandpa Squeaky. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, and addressed Bill once more in a rather more grand manner. “This acting Grandfather—me, that is—finds you guilty as all get out on all counts. Accordingly, he sentences you—this acting Grandfather, who’s me—to have your head chopped and your body left at that Residency building for the next Shorty that comes along to take care of.”

He dropped his grand manner for a more colloquial one.

“I left the axes back in the woods a-ways. I’ll go get them now.”

Grandpa Squeaky turned away toward the brush, just as Perfectly Delightful came up with a rock the size of a small cantaloupe.

“Knock him on the head with this,” she suggested helpfully, “that way he can’t dodge around—”

“No, we don’t!” snapped Thing-or-Two. “Grandpa Squeaky’s got to chop him, and nobody’ll believe it was a fair fight if we’ve got a dead Shorty with a large bump on his head—”

“Wait!” shouted Bill, desperation adding volume to his voice. “Are you crazy? You can’t go killing me, just like that—”

“Why, sure we can, Pick-and-Shovel,” interrupted Grandpa Squeaky, staggering back under the double load of a pair of heavy Dilbian axes, massive, with triangular heads made of gray, native iron. “It’s not as if you don’t have a chance. Seeing I’m just an acting Grandfather, I’m giving you a chance to fight for your life, instead of just chopping you like that. I’ll take one ax and you can have the other. Here!”

He dropped one ax in front of Bill, and its handle thudded to the earth six inches from Bill’s crossed legs.

“What do you mean?” cried Bill. “I told you, I’m tied up! Can’t you see my hands are tied—”

“What do you mean, tied?” demanded Thing-or-Two. Looking at the older Dilbian female, Bill discovered that she had her eyes tightly shut. “ I don’t see any ropes on his hands. Do you, Perfectly Delightful?”