Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

But even as he had come to realize this, his relationship with her had seemed to be getting worse and worse. It had started with that unfortunate question of his, about there being anything she didn’t have, when he had just come to and she was sponging his head. He had tried to explain later that he had actually meant it as a compliment. He realized that she was a hothouse type and he was a pretty ordinary sort of individual. In fact, he had just sort of muddled through to a fortunate conclusion of the situation, while she was attacking it properly with all the unusual resources of her unusual mind and training. He wasn’t trying to pretend he was anything like her equal, or anything like that.

But the more he had tried to explain, the more displeased Anita had become. It was as if every time he opened his mouth, he dug himself in that much deeper.

“Well, Pick-and-Shovel—” the voice of the Hill Bluffer interrupted his thoughts and Bill started guiltily. He had completely forgotten he had been talking to the postman when Anita had passed by, just now on her way to the ship. She was, he saw, being met in a very familiar way by a tall man who had just stepped out of the hatchway. The tall man was himself vaguely familiar. Bill peered at him somewhat grimly.

“—So I guess I’ll be off, back to the mountains,” the Bluffer’s voice boomed on Bill’s ear. “They’ll all be wanting to hear up there if you turned out the way I said you would.”

“They will?” Bill was startled. Then he remembered how he had speculated on the Hill Bluffer’s having some stake of his own in the outcome of the situation in which Bill had been trapped. Bill looked sharply up at the lanky Dilbian.

“Why, sure,” said the Hill Bluffer comfortably. “They all remember the Half-Pint-Posted, but there was considerable discussion about whether you Shorties could do it twice in a row.”

“Twice in a row?” echoed Bill. “Do what?”

“Come out one up on a Fatty, of course,” replied the Bluffer. “You know, like him!”

He nodded over at the far side of the meadow, behind Bill. Bill turned and saw the yellow-robed figure of Mula- ay standing solitary in the shadow of the trees in his yellow robes. The heavy-gravity figure was not likely to slump in this Dilbian gravity, but there was something defeated about its isolation.

“Word is, a flying box like yours is coming in anytime now,” said the Bluffer, “—only one run by Fatties—to take him out. That’s probably the last we’ll see of old Wasn’t Drunk around these parts.”

“Who?” Bill blinked at the distant figure. He had been sure that it was Mula- ay . In fact, he still was. “But that’s Barrel Belly over there, isn’t it?”

The Bluffer snorted with contemptuous good humor.

“Not any more. Got his name changed,” he said. “You didn’t hear—?”

“No,” said Bill.

“Why, after your hassle with Bone Breaker was over, it turned out that More Jam had found old Wasn’t Drunk passed out cold behind the eating hall, with half a barrel of beer spilled down his front. It was pretty plain for everyone to see that he’d figured the villagers swarming down on the valley would keep the outlaws so busy he could sneak a bellyful. So he’d poured most of a barrel of beer down himself on the sly and passed out.” The Bluffer stopped to laugh uproariously. “Result was, he missed all the fun, just by getting drunk at the wrong time!”

“Fun?”

“Why, your duel with Bone Breaker. He missed all that!” said the Hill Bluffer. “So, after More Jam found him and brought everybody to see, they poured some water over him to bring him to, and he sat up to find everyone laughing at him. After all his talk about how tough the Fatties were! Turned out he’d rather drink than fight!”

The Bluffer chortled again, at the memory.

“But,” said Bill, “how did his name—”

“Oh, that!” interrupted the Bluffer. “That’s the funniest part of all. When he sat up with all that water streaming off him and everybody started kidding him about getting drunk and missing the duel, he lost his head and tried to say it wasn’t so. Why, if he’d only kept his mouth shut, or admitted it and laughed at himself—but he had to go and claim he wasn’t drunk. ‘ But I’m not drunk !’ That’s the very first words he used. Only when they asked him how come he was out cold, he didn’t have any good answer. Tried to come up with some weak story about maybe tripping and hitting his head on the side of the building. Well, you know that’s a lie, Pick-and-Shovel. No one’s going to trip and hit his head on a log wall hard enough to knock himself out. So, naturally, he got his name changed.”

“Naturally,” echoed Bill automatically. He was aware enough of Dilbian attitudes now to realize that Wasn’t Drunk was as much a liability of a name as Barrel Belly had been an advantage to Mula- ay . What it boiled down to was that the Hemnoid had become a figure of fun to the Dilbians and his usefulness to the Hemnoid purpose on Dilbia was at an end. No wonder he was being withdrawn. Bill could even find it in himself to feel a little sorry for Mula- ay , now that he had come to understand how the Dilbian mind worked.

Remembering the vagaries of Dilbian thought, he woke abruptly now to the fact that the Hill Bluffer, in the oblique Dilbian way, was trying to tell him something.

“But you were saying,” said Bill hastily, “that the people up in the mountains were interested in how I worked things out down here? Why would they be interested?”

“Oh, lots of reasons, Pick-and-Shovel,” said the Bluffer carelessly. “Some of them might’ve been wondering, of course, just how things might work out, with you helping these Muddy Nosers to grow all kinds of stuff. Of course, Lowland folk like this don’t count for much in the minds of mountain people, but they’re still real people down here, just the same, and a lot of Upland folk were kind of interested to see who the Muddy Nosers’d end up going along with—you or the Fatty. Just in case they ran into the same sort of situation themselves, some day.”

“I see,” said Bill. It was pretty much as he expected, he thought, interpreting what the postman was saying in the light of his newfound Dilbian knowledge. The Hill Bluffer had been more than a hired companion for Bill. He had been an unofficial—almost everything practical was unofficial among the Dilbians—observer for the Uplanders, with the duty of reporting back on the feasibility of accepting Shorty, rather than Hemnoid, help in agricultural and other matters. And the Bluffer was now delicately informing Bill of that fact.

“How do you suppose they’ll feel at the way things turned out?” Bill asked the postman.

“Well,” said the Bluffer judiciously, “I think there might be some people, maybe quite some people, who’ll be kind of pleased things worked out the way they did. Guess I’m one of them myself.” Abruptly, the tall Dilbian changed the subject. “By the way, I passed the word to Bone Breaker the way you told me. I said to him you’d like to see him before you leave.”

“You did?” Bill looked hastily off in the direction of the village. He had seen no sign of the former outlaw chief, and had assumed that Bone Breaker had not got the message, or had refused to come—though that was unlikely. “He said he wouldn’t come?”

“Oh no. He’s coming,” said the Bluffer. “He started out with me when I left Muddy Nose.”

“Started out?” Bill, staring about, could still not see any sign of Bone Breaker. “What happened—”

“Oh, well, I sort of outwalked him, you know,” said the Hill Bluffer comfortably. “He’s slowed down a mite. Not that he ever could have kept up with me before either, if I’d been minded to leave him behind. There’s no man living who could do that.”