Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“I thought it likely you would want to visit your female confederate down there in the valley before long,” chuckled Mula- ay thickly. “And I was right.”

Bill looked into the round moon-face narrowly. What Mula- ay said made sense—but only up to a certain point. His galloping mind seized upon the hole in the Hemnoid’s statement.

“You might’ve been expecting me to try to get in to the valley and see Miss Lyme,” said Bill bluntly, “but how would you know that I would try to get in by climbing down the cliffs—and how would you know just where on the cliffs I’d choose to climb down?” His gaze narrowed further. “You’ve got a robot warning system set up around this valley, haven’t you? And that’s in violation of the Human-Hemnoid agreement.”

He pointed a finger at Mula- ay .

“The minute I report this,” he snapped, “your superiors will have to pull you from your post here on Dilbia!”

“ If you tell them, don’t you mean, my young friend?” murmured Mula- ay comfortably. “I seem to remember something about your not being able to reach your superiors off-planet. And if you did, it would simply be your word against mine.”

“I don’t think so,” retorted Bill grimly. “Any efficient warning system would require power expenditure, and good detection equipment would be able to find traces of power expenditure in this area, once they knew where to look—which they would, as soon as I told them how you had been warned by my entering the valley down the cliff. You must have a sensory ring set up all around the valley.”

“And if I have?” Mula- ay shrugged. “And if detection equipment actually could find traces? There’s still the question of your telling them about it.”

These last words were said in the same light and careless tone in which Mula- ay had been conversing from the beginning. But something about them sent a sudden chill through Bill. He was abruptly aware of the position in which he stood.

This isolated spot at the cliff’s edge, closely and thickly hemmed in by bushes, was now proving to work its former advantages to his present disadvantage. Directly before him, the gross and inconceivably powerful heavy-gravity form of the Hemnoid blocked Bill’s only direct route of escape into the nighttime woods. Behind him was the cliff, where one step backward would send him plunging down through emptiness. To right and left the thickly grown bushes formed flanking walls, through which a Dilbian or a Hemnoid might be able to push by brute force, but which would slow down a human like himself, so that he could easily be caught by someone like Mula- ay .

These bushes grew almost to the very lip of the cliff. Only perhaps half a foot of crumbling, overhanging turf separated the last of them from the vertical drop. Bill was as neatly enclosed as a steer in a slaughter pen at a meat-packing company. Only his reflexes, which would be faster than the heavy-gravity being facing him—just as they were faster than the Dilbians’—because of his smaller size, remained in his favor. And he did not at the moment see how faster reflexes could help him here.

“You aren’t—” he began and hesitated, “you aren’t such a fool as to think of actually doing something to me yourself? There’d be bound to be an investigation, and the investigation would be bound to turn up the fact that you were responsible.”

Mula- ay shook his head.

“I?” he said, and his smile broadened. “Who’d bother to push the investigation in my direction, when it will be plain that your Dilbian postman left you off here for the express purpose of climbing down the cliff? And when your body is found at the very foot of the rope down which you climbed, with every indication that your grip upon it failed so that you fell to your death?”

Mula- ay chuckled, and, withdrawing his hands for their sleeves, flexed their thick, wide fingers.

“Oh?” demanded Bill, on what he hoped was a convincing note of scorn, “if that’s really what you mean to do, why haven’t you just done it, instead of standing around talking to me about it?”

Mula- ay chuckled again, continuing to flex his fingers.

“Aren’t you forgetting,” he replied cheerfully, “that we Hemnoids enjoy the suffering of our victims?” He chuckled. “And mental suffering is so much more delicately satisfying than gross physical discomfort. I wanted to thank you—before pushing you over the cliff, for being so obliging as to put yourself in this exposed and compromising position after you were so lucky as to be rescued from the little execution I arranged for you at the hands of Grandpa Squeaky—”

“All right, Hill Bluffer,” interrupted Bill swiftly, looking over Mula- ay ’s right shoulder. “He’s admitted what I wanted him to say. You can grab him now.”

Mula- ay chuckled again.

“You didn’t think you could fool me by saying something like that—” he began. But as he did so, his eyes flickered for a second backward over his right shoulder. And in that second, Bill acted.

Spinning on his heel, he dashed off to his left along the narrow strip between the end of the bushes and the cliff edge. He felt the ground giving under his feet as his weight came upon it—but then he was past, veering into the darkness of the forest beyond and the solid footing farther back. Behind him, he heard Mula- ay ’s muffled shout, followed by the crashing of the bushes as the tremendously powerful, heavy-gravity body of the other bulldozed through them in pursuit. But without pausing, Bill ran on, taking advantage of every open spot and break in the undergrowth that he could find.

He covered perhaps seventy-five or a hundred yards this way. Then, winded, he stopped. Listening, he heard—quite some distance behind him now—the sound of the Hemnoid blundering and tearing his way through the undergrowth. Panting, and with sweat running off him in rivulets, Bill stood still and kept quiet.

After a few seconds, the sound of the Hemnoid’s pursuit also stopped abruptly. Bill could imagine Mula- ay standing, listening, waiting for some sound to tell him in which way Bill was trying to escape. But Bill knew better than to give him that clue. Bill continued to stand still, and for the long, drawn-out space of perhaps two and a half minutes nothing but night silence held the cliff-top forest.

At the end of that time, Mula- ay moved again. He was evidently trying to move quietly, but sound of his passage, of leaves rustling and branches being swept aside by his passage, came clearly and unmistakably to Bill’s ears. After perhaps half a minute of this, it must have become obvious to Mula- ay as well that he could not move anywhere near as quietly as Bill—nor could he find Bill in the darkened forest this way as long as Bill chose to hide. Amazingly and unexpectedly, the almost ghostly chuckle of the Hemnoid floated through the moonlit undergrowth and trees to Bill’s ear. And the voice of Mula- ay came quite distinctly, although muted by distance.

“Very good. Very good indeed, my young friend…” The ghostly chuckle came again. “But there will be other opportunities and other ways. Good-bye for now—and pleasant dreams.”

With the last word, there came the sound of the Hemnoid unmistakably moving off. The rustling and crashing sounds of his departure moved straight away from the edge of the cliff until they were lost in the distance. Bill sat down on a fallen log to catch his breath.

The fact that the Hemnoid had been willing to risk open violence against a representative of the human race here on this neutral world went far to confirm the sudden understanding that had burst upon Bill while he was talking to Anita Lyme in the valley below. There was no doubt now that there was a great deal more at stake between humans and Hemnoids, a great deal more wavering in the balance between them here on Dilbia in this situation than appeared on the surface. Why Bill himself had not been informed of this remained a puzzle.