Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

“Well, he…” Mal let the words trail off. His head was still buzzing from the hypnotraining he had been given on his way to Dilbia, to teach him the language and the human-known facts about the outsize natives of this Earth-like world; and the briefing he had gotten from Ambassador Guy had only confused him further.

“…Three tourists, evidently,” Guy had said, puffing on a heavy-bowled pipe. He was a brisk little man in his sixties, with sharp blue eyes. “Thought they could slip down from the cruise by spaceliner they were taking and duck into a Dilbian village for a firsthand look at the locals. Probably had no idea what they were getting into.”

“What—uh,” asked Mal, “were they getting into, if I can ask?”

“Restricted territory! Treaty territory!” snapped Guy, knocking the dottle out of his pipe and beginning to refill it. Mal coughed discreetly as the fumes reached his nose. “In this sector of space we’re in open competition with a race of aliens called Hemnoids, for every available, habitable world. Dilbia’s a plum. But it’s got this intelligent—if primitive—native race on it. Result, we’ve got a treaty with the Hemnoids restricting all but emergency contact with the Dilbians—by them or us—until the Dilbians themselves become civilized enough to choose either us or the Hemnoids for interstellar partners. Highly illegal, those three tourists just dropping in like that.”

“How about me?” asked Mal.

“You? You’re being sent in under special emergency orders to get them out before the Hemnoids find out they’ve been there,” said Guy. “As long as they’re gone when the Hemnoids hear about this, we can duck any treaty violation charge. But you’ve got to get them into their shuttle boat and back into space by midnight tonight—”

The dapper little ambassador pointed outside the window of the log building that served as the human embassy on Dilbia at the dawn sunlight on the cobblestoned Humrog Street.

“Luckily, we’ve got the local postman in town at the moment,” Guy went on. “We can mail you to Clan Water Gap with him—”

“But,” Mal broke in on the flow of words, “you still haven’t explained—why me? I’m just a high school senior on a work-study visit to the Pleiades. Or at least, that’s where I was headed when they told me my travel orders had been picked up, and I was drafted to come here instead, on emergency duty. There must be lots of people older than I am, who’re experienced—”

“Not the point in this situation,” said Guy, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe toward the log rafters overhead. “Dilbia’s a special case. Age and experience don’t help here as much as a certain sort of—well—personality. The Dilbian psychological profile and culture is tricky. It needs to be matched by a human with just the proper profile and character, himself. Without those natural advantages the best of age, education, and experience doesn’t help in dealing with the Dilbians.”

“But,” said Mal, desperately, “there must be some advice you can give me—some instructions. Tell me what I ought to do, for example—”

“No, no. Just the opposite,” said Guy. “We want you to follow your instincts. Do what seems best as the situation arises. You’ll make out all right. We’ve already had a couple of examples of people who did, when they had the same kind of personality pattern you have. The book anthropologists and psychologists are completely baffled by these Dilbians as I say, but you just keep your head and follow your instincts…”

He had continued to talk, to Mal’s mind, making less and less sense as he went, until the arrival of the Hill Bluffer had cut the conversation short. Now, here Mal was—with no source of information left, but the Bluffer, himself.

“This, er, Iron Bender,” he said to the Dilbian postman. “You were saying I ought to be able to handle him all right?”

“Well, if you’re any kind of a Shorty at all,” said the Bluffer, cheerfully. “There’s still lots of people in these mountains, and even down in the lowlands, who don’t figure a Shorty can take on a real man and win. But not me. After all, I’ve been tied up with you Shorties almost from the start. It was me delivered the Half-Pint Posted to the Streamside Terror. Hor! Everybody thought the Terror’d tear the Half-Pint apart. And you can guess who won, being a Shorty yourself.”

“The Half-Pint Posted won?”

“Hardly worked up a sweat doing it, either,” said the Hill Bluffer. “Just like the Pick-and-Shovel Shorty, a couple of years later. Pick-and-Shovel, he took on Bone Breaker, the lowland outlaw chief—of course, Bone Breaker being a lowlander, they two tangled with swords and shields and that sort of modern junk.”

Mal clung to the straps supporting the saddle on which he rode below the Hill Bluffer’s massive, swaying shoulders.

“Hey!” said the Hill Bluffer, after a long moment of silence. “You go to sleep up there, or something?”

“Asleep?” Mal laughed, a little hollowly. “No. Just thinking. Just wondering where a couple of fighters like this Half-Pint and Pick-and-Shovel could have come from back on our Shorty worlds.”

“Never knew them, did you?” asked the Bluffer. “I’ve noticed that. Most of you Shorties don’t seem to know much about each other.”

“What did they look like?” Mal asked.

“Well… you know,” said the Bluffer. “Like Shorties. All you Shorties look alike, anyway. Little squeaky-voiced characters. Like you—only, maybe not so skinny.”

“Skinny?” Mal had spent the last year of high school valiantly lifting weights and had finally built up his five-foot-eleven frame from a hundred and forty-eight to a hundred and seventy pounds. Not that this made him any mass of muscle—particularly compared to nearly a half-ton of Dilbian. Only, he had been rather proud of the fact that he had left skinniness behind him. Now, what he was hearing was incredible! What kind of supermen had the computer found on these two previous occasions—humans who could outwrestle a Dilbian or best one of the huge native aliens with sword and shield?

On second thought, it just wasn’t possible there could be two such men, even if they had been supermen, by human standards. There had to have been some kind of a gimmick in each case that had let the humans win. Maybe, a concealed weapon of some kind—a tiny tranquilizer gun, or some such…

But Ambassador Guy had been adamant about refusing to send Mal out with any such equipment.

“Absolutely against the Treaty. Absolutely!” the little ambassador had said.

Mal snorted to himself. If anyone, Dilbian or human, was under the impression that he was going to get into any kind of physical fight with any Dilbian—even the oldest, weakest, most midget Dilbian on the planet—they had better think again. How he had come to be selected for this job, anyway…

“Well, here we are—Clan Water Gap Territory!” announced the Hill Bluffer, cheerfully, slowing his pace.

Mal straightened up in the saddle and looked around him. They had finally left the narrow mountain trail that had kept his heart in his mouth most of the trip. Now they had emerged into a green, bowl-shaped valley, with a cluster of log huts at its lowest point and the silver thread of a narrow river spilling into it from the valley’s far end, to wind down into a lake by the huts.

But he had little time to examine the further scene in detail. Just before them, and obviously waiting in a little grassy hollow by an egg-shaped granite boulder, were four large Dilbians and one small one.

Correction—Mal squinted against the afternoon sun. Waiting by the stone were two large and one small male Dilbians, all with the graying fur of age, and one unusually tall and black-furred Dilbian female. The Hill Bluffer snorted appreciatively at the female as he carried Mal up to confront the four.