Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“Neither do I!” exclaimed Perfectly Delightful, shutting her own eyes. “You know what I think? I think the Shorty’s scared. He’s just scared—that’s why he won’t pick up the ax.”

“All right, Pick-and-Shovel!” piped Grandpa Squeaky, doing a kind of feeble war dance, tottering around with his own ax. “What’s the matter, hey? Scared of me, hey? Come on and face up to me like a man! The witnesses don’t see any ropes on your hands—” Hastily, he shut his own eyes. “Neither do I! Grab your ax, if you’ve got the guts to face me, or I’ll start to chop you anyway. This is your last chance, Pick-and-Shovel—”

At that moment, however, he was interrupted by a voice. It burst upon them all like a shout of thunder.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH MY SHORTY?”

For a second the three Dilbians facing Bill stiffened in mid-movement. Then they spun about to face in the direction from which the voice had come, and, in turning, moved enough apart so that Bill could see between them.

Breaking into the clearing through the brush at its edge was another Dilbian, a female, shorter than either Perfectly Delightful or Thing-or-Two. For a moment, he had no idea who this was, though the voice that had just shouted at them rang on his ear with accents of familiarity. He was suddenly aware, however, that he seemed to have found a friend, if not a rescuer, and that was all that was important at the moment.

Then Thing-or-Two unconsciously, if conveniently, came to his aid.

“Sweet Thing!” the other Dilbian female exploded, on an indrawn, snarling note.

“You just bet it’s me!” snarled Sweet Thing in return, advancing into the clearing. She stopped some fifteen feet from the other three. She did not put her hands on her hips, but Bill got the strong impression that if this had been a Dilbian gesture, she certainly would have done so. “And here you are with my Shorty!” Her eyes scorched them all, but ended upon Grandpa Squeaky. “ You !”

“Hey, now,” protested Grandpa Squeaky, with a perceptible quaver in his voice. A quaver of tremulous old age which contrasted markedly with his energy of a moment before.

“What were you doing to Pick-and-Shovel?”

“None of your business!” snapped Thing-or-Two.

“Pick-and-Shovel!” called Sweet Thing. “What were they doing to you here?”

“They seemed to be putting me on trial—or something,” shouted Bill back. He found himself wondering how he could have originally have wondered, on first seeing Sweet Thing, what made her attractive to the outlaw. Right now she was looking decidedly beautiful to him. In fact, the only individual who could have looked much more beautiful would have been Lafe Greentree, himself, with a cast on his broken leg if necessary, but with a handgun in his fist. “This Grandfather here—”

He tried to point at Grandpa Squeaky with his head, but both the pointing and the finishing of the sentence were unnecessary.

“Grandfather!” cried Sweet Thing, scorching Grandpa Squeaky with her eyes again. “ You , a Grandfather!” She laughed scornfully. “A fine, squeaking Grandfather you’d make, with your nose in a beer cup all day long! You, a Grandfather! Wait’ll I tell my father! I’ll just tell More Jam that you’ve been pretending to be a Grandfather—”

“No!” cried Squeaky Grandpa, agonized. “Sweet Thing, you wouldn’t do that to an old man? You wouldn’t tell your father about a little harmless joke like this? You wouldn’t—”

“You better get out of here fast, then,” said Sweet Thing ominously.

“I’m going—I’m going—” Squeaky Grandpa lost no time in putting his words into action. He was across the clearing and into the brush, in a sort of tottering rush before he had finished repeating himself the second time. Sweet Thing’s eye swung to the other two females. These, however, did not show the satisfactory sort of response that Grandpa Squeaky had exhibited.

“For your information, Sweet Thing,” said Thing-or-Two grimly, “you can tell your father about this every day and twice on Sunday, and much it’ll mean to me!”

“How much will it mean to you, though,” said Sweet Thing, in a surprisingly gentle voice, “when my father tells the whole village how you’ve been making fun of them by putting up poor old Grandpa Squeaky to act like he’s the sort they might pick for a Grandfather? Don’t you think that might bother you just the least little bit?”

“Why—” Thing-or-Two broke off sharply. She hesitated. “Why, they’d never believe such a thing. Never in a lifetime!”

Nonetheless, Bill noted, a good deal of the fire had gone out of her tone of voice.

“They won’t believe it?” echoed Sweet Thing in a voice filled with innocent wonder. “Not even when More Jam tells them he saw it with his own two eyes?”

“Saw it?” Thing-or-Two darted a sudden, nervous glance around her at the silent brush enclosing the dell. Her voice stiffened. “More Jam wouldn’t lie to the whole village. He wouldn’t do such a thing!”

“Not if I just refused to cook for him until he did?” queried Sweet Thing, in the same innocent and wondering tone. “Of course, Thing-or-Two, you’re a lot older than I am and you know best. But I should think that if I really told my father I wouldn’t do any more cooking for him, that he wouldn’t hesitate about telling everybody what he really saw with his own two eyes here in this clearing.”

Thing-or-Two stared angrily back at the younger female. But after a second, the stiffness seemed to leak out of her. She snorted angrily—but also she began to move. With her head in the air, she marched across the clearing and into the brush, and Bill heard her moving away from them. He looked back at Sweet Thing, who was now facing Perfectly Delightful, the only one of the original three conspirators left in the dell.

“You can go, too,” said Sweet Thing, in a voice that suddenly had become very ugly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Perfectly Delightful lightly. “Everybody knows what an obedient young girl I am. Naturally I had to do what my elders said—like when Thing-or-Two and Grandpa Squeaky told me to come along here.”

“They aren’t telling you what to do now,” said Sweet Thing.

“Oh, I don’t know,” repeated Perfectly Delightful, gazing absently at the same white clouds drifting overhead that had earlier interested Mula- ay —but without failing to watch Sweet Thing at the same time out of the corners of her eyes. “They told me earlier to see that Pick-and-Shovel, here, didn’t get loose and run away. They haven’t told me anything to change that. They’ve just gone off. Maybe they’re going to be back a little later. Or maybe they figure I’d stay here and guard the Shorty for them. I really don’t know what else I can do,” said Perfectly Delightful, helplessly withdrawing her eyes from the clouds at last and fixing them firmly on Sweet Thing, “but stay right here and see that nobody tampers with this Shorty.”

As Perfectly Delightful had been talking, Sweet Thing had begun to move forward slowly. However, as she came to just beyond arm’s reach of the other young Dilbian female, she began to circle to her right. So it was that Perfectly Delightful, while still speaking, began to turn so as to face Sweet Thing. Gradually, they were beginning to circle each other like a couple of wrestlers, and after Perfectly Delightful had stopped talking, they continued to circle in silence for a number of seconds.

Bill, watching in fascination with his hands tied behind the tree trunk, was made suddenly aware of the fact that he was unable to get out of the way in case trouble should erupt. It was true that Perfectly Delightful, though tall for a female, would hardly have been able to raise the crown of her head above the point of the Hill Bluffer’s shoulder, and that Sweet Thing was a head and a half shorter than her opponent. Nonetheless, either one would have considerably outweighed and outmuscled any two good-sized professional human wrestlers, and they seemed to possess the same willingness as Dilbian males to get down to physical brass tacks when a question was in dispute. Added to this was the fact that the nails on their hands and feet were rather more like bear claws, and their teeth rather more like the teeth of grizzlies than those of humans. So that in sum, the situation was one that made Bill devoutly wish he was on the other side of the tree to which he was tied.