Spacepaw (28 page)

“But there wasn’t much they could do directly to help you,” said Bill. “So it was sort of handy—my coming along. You couldn’t very well quit outlawing without being licked in a fair fight. And you couldn’t very well let yourself get licked by any other real man, especially from around these parts, and still keep your reputation after you’d retired. But of course, if a Shorty like me won a fight with you, and I flew out of here a few days later, that’d still leave you top dog—locally, at least. Of course, you didn’t
have
to quit outlawing just because a Shorty beat you. It wasn’t as if I was a real man.”

“No, but it was a sign to me—you winning like that,” said Bone Breaker sadly. “I was getting slow and weak, Pick-and-Shovel, and it was only a matter of time until somebody else took me. I could tell that.”

“Oh, you don’t look all that old and weak yet,” said Bill. “Nice of you to say so, Pick-and-Shovel,” said the Bone Breaker. “Oh, I might stand up to any other real man around here for a few years yet. But I sure can’t stand up to a fire-eating Shorty like you.”

“Well, it’s particularly nice to hear you say that,” pounced Bill. Bone Breaker’s gaze centered on him remained calm and innocent. “Because this mixed-up memory of mine’s been giving me all sorts of trouble about that fight.”

“Memory?” queried Bone Breaker, with rumbling softness. “That’s right.” Bill shook his head. “You remember you must have hit me quite a clip in that storehouse, even if I did get out of it on my feet, first. I was laid up for a few days afterward. And that knock on the head seems to have got my memory all mixed up. Would you believe it, I find myself thinking that I touched your leg, lying on the floor,
before
all those logs came tumbling down, and covered you up.”

“My!” Bone Breaker shook his head slowly. “I really did clip you one, then, didn’t I, Pick-and-Shovel? Now, what would I be doing lying down on the floor, waiting for some logs to roll down on me?”

“Well, I guess you’ll laugh,” said Bill. “But it just seems to stick in my head that you were not only lying there, but that you pulled those logs down on yourself, and it was that that made folks think I’d won. But anyone knows you wouldn’t do that. After all, you were fighting for your old free way of life. The last thing you wanted was to get married and settle down to innkeeping. So I tell myself I shouldn’t think that way.
Should I?
”

Bill shot the last two words hard at the big Dilbian. Bone Breaker breathed quietly for a second, his eyes half-closed, his expression thoughtful.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Pick-and-Shovel,” he said at last. “As long as it’s just you, and you being a Shorty, I don’t guess I mind your thinking that, if you want to. After all, your thinking it happened like that doesn’t do
me
any harm as long as you’re getting in that flying box there and going away. So, you go ahead and think that, if you like and I won’t mind.”

Bill let out a deep breath in defeat. Bone Breaker had managed to weasel out of it.

“But I’ll tell you something,” went on Bone Breaker, unexpectedly. “I’ll tell you how I like to think of our fight.”

“How’s that?” asked Bill, suspiciously.

“Why, I like to think of how I was tiptoeing along in the darkness there—and suddenly you came at me like a wild tree-cat,” said Bone Breaker. “Before I was half-ready, you were on me. Next thing I knew you’d knocked my sword spinning out of my fist and split my shield. Then you picked up a log and hit me. And then you hit me with another log and the whole pile came tumbling down as you threw me through the wall of the storehouse, jumped outside and threw me back in through another part of the wall, just as the rest of the logs came tumbling down and covered me.”

He stopped speaking. Bill stared at him for a long moment before he could find his voice.

“Threw you through the wall,
twice?”
echoed Bill, his voice cracking. “How could I? There weren’t any holes made in the storehouse walls!”

“There weren’t!” said Bone Breaker, on a note of surprise, rearing back. “Why, now, that’s true, Pick-and-Shovel! I must be wrong about that part. I’ll have to remember to leave that part out when I tell about our fight. I certainly am obliged to you, Pick-and-Shovel, for pointing that out to me. I guess my memory must have gotten a little mixed-up-just like yours did.”

“Er—yes,” said Bill.

Suddenly, a great light burst upon Bill. Anything a Dilbian said had to be interpreted—and he had been looking for Bone Breaker to admit the truth about the duel in a different way.
This,
then, was the admission—in the shape of a story about Bill’s prowess too wonderful to believe. So he had picked up this nine-hundred-pound hulk before him and thrown it through a wall of logs, not once, but twice, had he?

“But, after all,” Bone Breaker was going on, easily, “there’s no reason for us to go picking on each others memories. Why don’t I just remember the fight the way I remember it, and you remember it your way, and we’ll let it go at that?”

Bill grinned. He could not help it. It was a violation of the rules of Dilbian verbal fencing, which called for a straight face at all times, but he hoped that his human face would be alien enough to Bone Breaker so that the Dilbian would not interpret the expression.

Whether this was the case or not, Bone Breaker did not seem to notice the grin.

“All right,” said Bill. Bone Breaker nodded in satisfaction. “Well, I guess I’ll be rolling home for dinner, then,” he said. “You know, Pick-and-Shovel, you’re not bad for a Shorty. Something real manly about you. Pleased to have met you. So long!”

He turned and left—as abruptly as had the Hill Bluffer. Watching him go, Bill saw him stop to speak to another male Dilbian who had been examining the courier ship, but who now hurried to intercept the ex-outlaw chief.

There was something undeniably respectful about the way the other Dilbian approached the big, black-furred figure. Whatever other changes had occurred in Bone Breaker’s life as a result of his losing the fight to Bill and taking up innkeeping, it was plain to see that he had not lost anything of his local stature and authority in the process.

But just at that moment, out of the corner of his eye, Bill caught sight of the tall, lean man who had been talking to Anita by the open hatch of the ship, picking up what was evidently a suitcase and turning as if to head off through the woods.

“Hey!” shouted Bill, starting to run toward him. “No, you don’t! Hold up, there! I’ve got some talking to do to you!”

Chapter 26

The man stopped and turned as Bill ran up to the ship. Anita, who had been just about to go in through the hatch, also stopped, turned, and waited—thereby presenting Bill with a small problem. He had wanted a clear ring for his encounter with the tall man.

“If … you don’t mind,” said Bill, stammering a little with breathlessness from his run, “this is a little private …”

“Oh, all right!” she exploded furiously. “Go on, make a perfect fool of yourself! See if I care!”

She turned and stamped up the steps, through the hatch and into the ship. Bill looked after her, unhappily. There was the sound of a chuckle behind him.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the voice of the tall man. “She’ll come around shortly.”

Bill turned sharply. Facing him was the same lean, long-nosed figure he had first met as the reassignment officer who had changed his course from Deneb-Seventeen to Dilbia. The man was smiling with an altogether unjustified cheerfulness. Bill did not smile back.

“What makes you so sure?” Bill snapped.

“For one thing,” answered the tall man, “the fact I know her better than you do. For another, I know some other facts you don’t know. For one thing, it’s a pretty fair guess she’s in love with you.”

“She—
what
?” said Bill, jerking himself up in mid-sentence. He goggled at the tall man.

“She can’t help it,” said the tall man, the smile spreading across his face under the long nose. “You see, at heart she’s a Dilbian. And so are you.”

“Dilbian?” Bill was completely adrift on a sea of bafflement. “Oh, your body and mind are human enough,” said the tall man. “But you’re strongly Dilbian—especially you, Bill—in your personality characteristics. Both of you were carefully chosen for that. You’ve got roughly the personality of a Dilbian hero-type, as closely as a human can have it. And Anita has a complementary Dilbian heroine-personality. You can hardly help being attracted to each other—”

“Oh?” interrupted Bill, grimly cutting the other short and hauling the conversation back to the main topic he had in mind. “Let’s forget that for the moment, shall we? You’re Lafe Greentree, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid so,” said the tall man, still smiling.

“You never were a reassignment officer? And you never really did break your leg, did you?”

“No, I’m afraid those were both bits of necessary misinformation we had to give you.” Greentree laughed. “And it was worth it—what you’ve done here is breathtaking. You see, you were being used without your knowing it—”

“I figured that out, thanks,” said Bill harshly. “In fact I figured out a little more than you figured I would. I know what the real story was here, and I can guess from that what kind of a scheme you sold your superiors on, to get me assigned here. Mula-
ay
told me I was thrown in here, all untrained and unbriefed, deliberately to mess up the situation and give you a chance to close down a stalemated project without losing face.
That’s
the idea you sold your superiors on. But what you had in mind was a little bit more than that, wasn’t it?”

The smile faded into a puzzled look on Greentree’s long face.

“More than that—” he began.

“That’s right!” snapped Bill. “You didn’t just want me to mess things up here; you wanted me
killed!”

“I
wanted you killed?” repeated Greentree, in a tone of astonishment. “But Mula-
ay
wouldn’t try anything like that, unless—”

“I’m not talking about Mula-
ay
and you know it,” snarled Bill. “I’m talking about Bone Breaker and the duel!”

“But we never thought you’d actually fight the duel!” protested Greentree. “All you had to do was hole up in the Residency. Bone Breaker and his outlaws wouldn’t have come into the village after you. You’d have been quite safe—”

“Sure,” said Bill, “that’s what you told your superiors, wasn’t it? Only you knew better. You knew that I’d have been gotten to that duel if Sweet Thing had to kidnap me herself and carry me to it!”

“Sweet Thing?” said Greentree. “What’s Sweet Thing got to do with it?”

“Don’t try to pretend you didn’t know. Anita didn’t know— I thought at first she did, but it was plain she didn’t understand the male Dilbians at all. She thought More Jam was just a figure of fun, instead of being the leading male in the Village. And Mula-
ay
didn’t know. But
you
must have figured it out some time before and realized that you’d been doing things exactly the wrong way around with the Dilbians. Officially, the Alien Cultures Service couldn’t fault you for not finding out sooner how the Dilbians worked—but unofficially, the way you’d been made a fool of would have been a joke from one end of the Service rankings to the other. And that joke could just about kill any hopes of promotion for you, later. So you set me up to be killed—so the project wouldn’t merely be closed ‘temporarily’ but hushed up, and its records buried in the files; and that way no one would find out how you’d been fooled!”

“Wait a minute—” said Greentree bewilderedly. “As I said, you’ve been used here without your permission or knowledge. I admit that. But the rest of all this—I give you my word I’m no more a villain than Anita is, except that I knew why you were sent here and she didn’t. Now, what’s all this about Sweet Thing carrying you to that duel with Bone Breaker?”

“As if you don’t know!” snapped Bill, getting hold of himself just in time as his voice threatened to scale upward to a shout that would be heard inside the courier ship. “Do you think you can talk me out of what I know? You set me up too beautifully for it to be an accident; and if you set me up, you had to have the Dilbians figured out; and if you’d figured them out, you couldn’t help knowing just what Bone Breaker was after!”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, cut it out!” said Bill. “You know it as well as I do. Bone Breaker wanted to quit outlawing and settle down before he began to lose his speed and strength. He wanted to quit and become a villager while he was still on top, but he couldn’t just abdicate as outlaw leader without a good reason—unless he wanted to lose face, tremendously—and face is what the Dilbian community runs on. So he settled on marrying Sweet Thing; and More Jam, by way of dowry, cooked up a scheme to get him out of being outlaw chief without loss of face.”

“What scheme?” Interest had begun to dawn on Green-tree’s face beneath the frown of bafflement.

“You know!” growled Bill. “All Dilbia knew that a Dilbian—the Streamside Terror—had once fought a human and lost, so, More Jam planned to get Bone Breaker in a duel with a human, so Bone Breaker could pretend to lose, too. Since it would be a human he’d be losing to, he’d still be top dog among his fellow Dilbians; but he could use the loss as an excuse to give up outlawing, and go to live in Muddy Nose. It was you More Jam planned on Bone Breaker fighting, but you saw the duel coming, so you ducked out and got me stuck with it instead. That was supposed to kill two birds with one stone—get the project closed up, and also get you off Dilbia before the duel took place. Because if you went through with the duel and survived, you’d have to explain to your superiors how you did it—and the whole business of your understanding the Dilbians and keeping the fact a secret would come out!”

Bill stopped. Greentree was staring at him strangely.

“Admit it!” demanded Bill. “I’ve got you cold and you know it!” But, though his words were angry as ever, a slight uneasiness was beginning to stir in Bill. It was incredible that Greentree could go on pretending to be innocent this way, in the face of what Bill had told him. Unless he really was innocent—but with what Bill knew, that was impossible.