Spacepaw (16 page)

“At any rate, I thought that maybe now we might get together and start to make some plans about cleaning out the outlaws …” For the first time, Bill began to be conscious of a good-natured, but rather obvious, lack of response from the crowd before him. In fact, from his elevated position on top of the logs, he now saw some of the outer members of his audience beginning to turn away and amble off.

“Believe me,” he said, raising his voice and speaking as earnestly and forcefully as he could, “Muddy Nose Village can’t get better and richer and stronger until those outlaws are settled. So what I thought was that we might get together a town meeting …”

The crowd, however, was visibly breaking up. Individually and in small groups they began to scatter, turning their backs on Bill and drifting off into the body of the village. Bill continued to talk on, almost desperately. But it was plainly a losing cause. Very shortly, his audience was down to its hard core. That is to say—Sweet Thing, More Jam, the Hill Bluffer, and Rat Fingers. Feeling foolish, Bill stopped talking and climbed down from the pile.

“I guess I don’t convince people very well,” he said in honest bewilderment to those who remained.

“Don’t say that!” said Flat Fingers strongly. “You convinced
me,
Pick-and-Shovel! And I’m as good as any three other men in the village, any day—” He checked himself, looking apologetically at Sweet Thing’s male parent. “—men my own age, that is.”

“Why thanks, Blacksmith,” said More Jam with’ a heavy sigh. “Nice of you not to include me—though of course I’m only ashadow of my former self.” He turned his head to Bill, however, and his voice became serious. “In fact, you’ve got a friend in me too, Pick-and-Shovel—just as I told you yesterday. But that doesn’t change things. If you figured this village to fall in line behind you in a feud with the outlaws, you should’ve known better.”

“You sure should have!” interrupted the Bluffer emphatically. “Why I could’ve told you, Pick-and-Shovel, you’d never get anywhere impressing these people by being tricky. They
know
Shorties can be sneaky as all get out. The Tricky Teacher proved that. What they want to see is what you can do in the muscle-and-guts department. What you’ve got to do is just what you’re set up to do—and that’s tangle with Bone Breaker. Lay him out!
Then
these people will back you against the outlaws.”

“I’ll get started right away on that blade and buckler, Pick-and-Shovel,” put in Flat Fingers. “Let’s see if I can find something around here that’s particularly good blade material.”

“Guts-and-muscles department …” muttered Bill thoughtfully, echoing the Bluffer’s words. That was certainly the department in which everyone seemed to be eager to have him operate—including whoever or whatever was responsible for his being in this place and situation in the first place.

It was hardly to be considered that Mula-
ay
had been telling the truth, this morning in the woods, when he had claimed Bill had been deliberately put on the spot by human authorities simply to save face in the case of the Muddy Nose Project. On the other hand, some of the things the Hemnoid had said had chimed uncomfortably well with some of the things Anita had said when he spoke to her in Outlaw Valley.

Either Anita had been as badly misled about the true situation here as Bill had, or …  It occurred to Bill that the cards might be stacked more heavily against him than he had thought, even when he had sat thinking in front of the communications console after his unsuccessful attempt to contact Greentree or anyone else off-planet. There seemed to be no way out of his duel with Bone Breaker unless he could figure out who or what had put him in this situation, and what the true aims and motives of everyone concerned were.

In any case, Anita was going to have to provide him with some answers. That meant he must talk to her again, which meant another penetration of Outlaw Valley, which could hardly be done in the broad light of day….

“Muscle-and-guts department?” he repeated again, looking up at the Bluffer. “I suppose it would take a little muscle— and guts too—to get in and out of that Outlaw Valley after it’s been shut up for the night?”

The Bluffer stared back at him in astonishment.- Sweet Thing and More Jam also stared. Some little distance away the blacksmith raised his head in astonishment.

“Are you crazy, Pick-and-Shovel?” demanded Flat Fingers. “The gate to that valley is locked and barred the minute the sun goes down and there are two armed men on guard until it’s opened up at dawn.
Nobody
goes in and out of that valley after the sun’s gone down!”

“I do,” said Bill grimly. “I think I’ll just drop in there tonight; and I’ll bring back that piece of metal outside the outlaw’s dining hall they use as a gong, to prove I’ve been there!”

Chapter 15

“Will we get there before dark?” Bill asked.

“Before dark?” The Bluffer, striding beneath Bill, squinted through the trees at the descending sun now, gleaming redly through black-looking trunks and branches, close to setting.

“Well, it’ll be dark down in the valley. But up on top of the cliffs there’ll be some daylight, still. And it’s the north cliff-top you want, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” said Bill. “If it’s still light there, that’s all I’ll need.”

“All you need, is it?” muttered the Bluffer. “Mind telling a man how you’re going to get into that valley, anyway?”

“I’ll show you when we get there,” said Bill.

In fact, while he was fairly confident that he would make it, one way or another, Bill himself would not know for sure until he actually got to the top of the cliff and made some measurements. There was a hundred feet of soft, quarter-inch climbing rope wound around his waist under his shirt, and with the help of the programed lathe he had produced some homemade pitons, snap rings, and a light metal hammer with an opposed pick end. These latter items were in a knapsack on his back.

As the postman had predicted, when they reached the north wall overlooking Outlaw Valley, the sunset was only falling on the buildings of the valley floor below, them. The Bluffer stopped and let Bill down, but with a strong air of skepticism.

“What’re you going to do, Pick-and-Shovel,” the Postman asked.
“Fly
down into that valley?”

“Not exactly,” said Bill. He had produced a jackknife from his pocket and opened it. Now, while the Bluffer watched with unconcealed curiosity, Bill found and cut off a couple of small tree branches with y-shaped ends. The branching ends he trimmed down to vee’s; and stuck the long end of the branches in the ground, one in front of the other, with the vee’s in line, pointing out across the valley.

Bill then found and cut another straight stick, long enough to be in the two vee’s, so that it lay like an arrow pointing across at the top of the opposite valley wall. Digging into his knapsack, he came up with one of his homemade pitons, looking like a heavy nail with one end sharpened and the opposite end bent into a loop. He tied one end of a length of string to the loop and the other end to the center of the stick resting in the forks of the two stakes he had driven into the earth. Then he adjusted the stakes until the piton hung straight up and down and in line with the two stakes, over a point midway between them.

“What is it?” demanded the Bluffer, unable to conceal his interest.

“Another of our Shorty gadgets,” said Bill. There was, in fact, no Dilbian word for what he had just built—which was a sort of crude surveyor’s transit. The dangling piton acted like a plumb bob which allowed him to check whether his line of sight—which was along the straight stick in the two forks of the stakes—was level. Now assured that it was, Bill knelt at the back end of the stake, so that he could sight along its length at the top of the valley wall opposite. It seemed to be almost directly in line. That should mean that the two valley walls were roughly of the same height.

From his pocket he took out a protractor he had located back at the Residency, and with this held against the end of the straight stick in the stake forks he rotated it through its angles of declination, making an attempt to get a rough approximation of the angle subtended by the height of the opposite cliff from its valley bottom to its tree-clad top.

He got the angle, and abandoned the transit for a pencil and a notebook. In the notebook, he jotted down the angle he had just observed. Then, using his eye, he made an attempt to judge the distance of the opposite cliff from where he stood.

Since both cliffs were more or less vertical, the gap between the point where he stood and the top of the cliff directly opposite should be roughly the same as the width of the valley floor at that point. His memory of the outlaws’ eating hall down below enabled him to estimate its overall length now about eighty feet. Just about twelve such eating halls placed end-to-end would be required to stretch from this cliff to the other one. Twelve times eighty was nine hundred and sixty—call it a thousand feet roughly between the cliffs.

He sat back, with his notebook and his pencil, and— closely observed by the Hill Bluffer who had hunkered down nearby—performed the simple geometric calculation that gave him an approximate measurement of the opposite cliff as being some sixty feet in vertical height. If the other cliff was sixty feet high, it could hardly be much more than that from where he sat right now to the valley below. He had brought with him a hundred feet of rope, so he had more than enough to let
hims
elf down into the valley once darkness fell.

“Well, I suppose I might as well tell you,” Bill said. “What I plan to do is climb down this cliff here into the valley, and climb back up after I’ve gotten hold of the gong I said I’d bring back.”

The Bluffer stared at him. For a moment, it seemed that even the Dilbian postman was finally at a loss for words. Then he found his voice.

“Down
the cliff!” he echoed.

He got to his feet; and, screened by the bushes that grew thickly along the lip of the cliff, and by the trees surrounding, he moved to where he could peer over the edge of the cliff as Bill had earlier done. He peered for a long moment and then came back shaking his head sadly.

“Pick-and-Shovel,” he said, “you’re either plumb crazy, or better than any man or Shorty I’ve ever seen.”

Bill had expected just this reaction. The cliff was a vertical face but not a smooth one. The dark granitic rock of which it was composed was roughened and broken by outcroppings and fissures large enough to supply adequate hand-holds for someone like Bill who had had rock-climbing experience. With a couple of other experienced climbers to help him and proper equipment, Bill would have felt quite confident about tackling it without any further aid. However, what were adequate hand- and foot-holds for someone with mountaineering experience were not necessarily sufficient to make climbable such a route for another human, without mountaineering experience—let alone a Dilbian, with his much greater weight and clumsiness. Consequently, it was not surprising that the Bluffer found the notion ridiculous—as undoubtedly would the outlaws themselves, or any of the other Dilbians resident in the neighborhood.

To tell the truth, Bill found it a little ridiculous himself. Not the idea of scaling it in full daylight with a team and proper equipment—but the idea of doing it by himself, with his few homemade devices, alone and in the dark. However, he had the rope up his sleeve—or rather, around his waist— which he now decided to keep secret even from the Bluffer.

“It’s dark down in the valley now,” he said as casually as possible. “Let’s walk along the cliff until we find a good place for me to start down.”

They started out together, the Dilbian postman shaking his head, with a renewed air of skepticism. A little farther along the edge of the cliff, in the rapidly gathering gloom, they came to a place where part of the rock had fallen away, leaving a notch about eight feet wide going down, narrowing as it went into the dimness below.

“Here’s a good spot,” said Bill with a cheerfulness that he did not completely feel. “Suppose you come back for me here about sunrise. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’s your neck,” said the Bluffer, with philosophy. “I’ll be here. I hope you are.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Bill. As the Bluffer watched curiously, he began to climb cautiously backward down into the cleft—the notch in the edge of the cliff.

Setting himself securely, with his feet braced and his left hand firmly locked around a projection of the rock, with his right hand he unbuttoned his shirt and began to unwrap the rope from around his waist. It took a matter of some few minutes for him to get it all unwound. He was left at last with the rope lying in coils upon and between his feet and with one end in his grasp. He searched around him for some strong point of anchor.

He found it in a projecting, somewhat upward-thrusting boss of rock about half a foot to his right, just outside the cleft itself. He wrapped his end of rope several times securely around the boss and tied it there. Then, cautiously, bit by bit, he put his weight on the anchored rope until all of his weight was upon it.

The rope held firm around the boss. Gingerly, with his breath quickening in spite of all of his determination and experience, Bill abandoned the security of the cliff for the open rock-face with the rope as his only support.

For a moment, he swung pendulumlike, giddily upon the rope. Then his feet, catching the cliff face, stopped his movement. Slowly, carefully, he began to let himself down the vertical wall of rock, his hands holding firmly to the rope, and his feet walking backward down the vertical surface.

Both the valley floor and all its walls were in deep darkness now. The sun had been set for some minutes, and, so far, no moon had risen. In the obscurity, Bill lowered himself cautiously down the rope, stopping only now and then, when he encountered secure footholds, to rest his arms— which alone took the weight of his body upon the rope. By this procedure, slowly and with a number of pauses, Bill went down into darkness.

He had made knots in the rope at ten-foot intervals. He had counted off more than seven of these—which would make the distance from himself to the bottom of the cliff alone higher than he had figured the cliff face to be. He was wondering with the first, fine, small teeth of panic nibbling at his nerves whether his calculations might not have been badly in error and there was more cliff than he had rope, when, stepping down, his foot jarred suddenly upon a flat and solid surface.