Spacepaw

by Gordon R. Dickson

  However, now that he was safely on his feet again, he began to work his way along the base of the cliff until he reached a spot where he was completely hidden by the undergrowth. Here he waited until the moon once more emerged from its cloud, and, looking up, he was able to make out the notch at the top of the cliff from which his rope decended.

  It was still a little farther to his right. He continued on and came at last to the rope itself, nearly invisible in the moonlight against the light-colored rock of the cliff-face.

  The climb required a number of stops to rest along the way. Whenever he found a spot where he could lean or crouch against the cliff-face to rest those muscles of his arms and legs which had been bearing his weight during the climb, he did so. In spite of this, by the time he could look up and see the bottom of the notch only ten or twelve feet above him, Bill was as exhausted as he could remember being.

  He had no idea, as he paused for a final rest upon a ledge of rock outcropping from the vertical face, how long the upward climb had taken. It seemed to have taken hours. However, no alarm had so far been raised that would indicate anyone had caught sight of him. After resting on the rock ledge as long as he dared, without risking the stiffening of his weary muscles, Bill geared up his courage and his remaining energy for the last stretch to the bottom of the notch. Then he began to climb.

  It was hard work. With each foot gained upward, he felt the already shallow reserves of his strength ebbing away. Eventually, the bottom of the notch came within view, but still more than an arm’s reach away. Bill locked his feet in the rope and started to let go with his right hand in order to reach upward.

  —And his exhaustion-weakened left hand almost let go.

  Clutching desperately at the rope with both hands, Bill clung to his position. There seemed to be no strength left in him. For a second, a giddy picture of his grip finally loosening on the rope as he hung here, and his plunge to certain death at the foot of the cliff swam through his mind.

  —And then he moved.

  He moved upward. He and the rope together lifted a good four feet until the notch was almost level with his eyes. Before he could grasp what had happened, the rope lifted again, carrying him with it. Someone above was hauling it upward, pulling him to the safety of the cliff-top.

  Wildly and unexpectedly it came to him that possibly the Bluffer had returned, although he was not due until dawn— or had stayed in position above the cliff, and was now bringing him up to safe and level ground. Bill looked upward, expecting to see the dark, furry mass of the Dilbian postman staring down at him. But it was not the Bluffer he saw.

  He stared instead into the moonlit, Buddha-like countenance of Mula-ay. The hands of the Hemnoid had hold of the rope. The great, heavy-gravity muscles of the alien were bringing it easily in, and there was a smile of pure, gentle joy on Mula-ay’s face. Like a hooked fish, Bill was being drawn helplessly upward into the hands of his enemy.

  If the shock and dismay that Bill felt were strong, they were overridden just at that moment by the .prospect of getting off the cliff-face and onto the level top of the cliff, no matter with whose help. He clung desperately to the rope and let himself be pulled in, until at last he was hauled over the edge of the notch and collapsed weakly upon the soft ground above the vertical rock-face.

  For a moment, he simply lay there, almost too weak to move, his arms and legs trembling from the strain they had just endured. Then, painfully, he let go of the rope and struggled to his feet.

  Directly in front of him, and less than six feet away, with his arms now folded across his chest within the voluminous sleeves of his yellow robe, Mula-ay continued to smile contentedly at him in the moonlight.

  “Well, well, my young friend,” said Mula-ay, with a heavy, liquid chuckle. “And what are you doing here at this time of night?”

  Bill had had a chance to collect his wits. As it had in the moment at the foot of the cliff when he first found himself facing Bone Breaker, his mind was racing swiftly, turning up conclusions rapidly as it went.

  “Why, I was just out,” said Bill, panting slightly in spite of his attempts to appear calm, “for a little sport rock-climbing. Suppose you tell me what you’re doing here,”

  Mula-ay laughed again.

  “Why, of course I could tell an untruth just like you, my young friend,” replied the Hemnoid, “and say I just happened to be out for a moonlight stroll. But people like myself are always truthful—particularly when the truth hurts—and I’ll tell you the truth. I was out here looking for you, and, behold, I have found you.”

  “Looking for me?” queried Bill. “What made you think you might find me here? Particularly, what made you think you might find me here at this time of night?”

  “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 wordagainst 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 the 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 lift 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 h
ead.

  “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 from 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.

  Bill shook himself abruptly and stood up. A complete silence held the forest. He turned, and moving with a silence that was the result of his long practice and competitions, he found his way back to the cliff edge and followed it around to the valley’s entrance. There, working along by moonlight, he measured the angle of the drop from the turn in the trail leading to the stockade gates some fifty yards away and then paced off the distance from the turn to the gates, in order to measure it exactly. Having done this he returned up around the cliff edge to the top of the notch, where Bone Breaker had left him. Hauling up his rope and once more rewinding it around his waist under his shirt, he scooped out with his hands a small depression in the lea of a large boulder at the cliff top, built a rough bower of branches around it, and then curled up inside the primitive shelter he had so created. It was no worse and a good deal better than many of the same shelters he had created in Survival School, back on Earth. Curled up within it, his own body heat, reflected from the rock behind him and trapped by the enclosing branches, soon made him comfortable … and he slept.

  Chapter 20

  Bill woke to the confused impression that he was flying through the air. The jolt with which he landed brought him fully awake. He found himself being carried. For a moment he hung there, trying to puzzle things out as the mists of sleep evaporated.

  Then it came to him. Evidently the Bluffer, coming and finding him asleep, had simply picked him up and plunked him in the saddle without further notice. This was entirely in line with the Dilbian way of doing things. There was even a sort of horrible humor to the situation. Bill opened his mouth and laughed—only the laugh came out more like a croak.

  “Alive up there, are you?” queried the Bluffer, without turning his head, or slowing his pace. “You were really sleeping it up, when I found you back there. Have a good night?”

  For answer, Bill let go of the Bluffer’s straps with his right hand, fumbled under his belt, and brought out the hammer to the outlaw gong, which he held out in front of the Bluffer’s eyes.

  “Well, well!” said the Bluffer cheerfully. “Thought you were going to bring the gong itself, though?”

  “This was easier to carry,” said Bill, as indifferently as he could manage. “I suppose it’ll do as well as the gong, to prove that I was down in the valley last night?”

  “Why, I guess it would,” replied the Bluffer judiciously. “You couldn’t get either one without going in and out.”

  The Bluffer’s tone of approval it seemed to Bill, however, left something to be desired.

  “Why?” asked Bill. “Something wrong with getting into Outlaw Valley by climbing down the cliffs and climbing back up them to get out again?”

  “Wrong? No, I wouldn’t say so,” replied the Bluffer thoughtfully, “but it’s just another thing that a Shorty might be able to do that a man couldn’t do—not because the Shorty wasn’t being better than a man at doing it, but because the Shorty was so small that it was easier for him to do it. Like crawling into a little hole in the ground, one that’d be too small for a real man to crawl into.”

  “Oh,” said Bill, suddenly deflated. He himself knew how hard it had been to get up and down that cliff. It had never occurred to him that the difficulties and dangers involved would mean nothing to a Dilbian—simply because a Dilbian would have no means of duplicating them himself. That took climbing a sheer cliff out of the heroic class and put it into the class of magic to Dilbians. No one expected a human, back on Earth, to swim as well as a fish. After all, he wasn’t a fish.

  “You see,” said the Bluffer, after a moment. “I just thought I’d let you know how things sta
nd, Pick-and-Shovel. It’s all very well doing tricks—everybody knows you Shorties have got all kinds of tricks up your sleeves. But what kind of good is it going to do us real men and women and children? That’s what we want to know! So if you’ll go around and climb up on my back again, we’ll get going toward the village.” Bill did as the Bluffer suggested, in silence. And that same thoughtful silence he maintained until they entered the main street of the village itself. Nor did the Bluffer seem disposed to interrupt him.

  However, when they came in sight of the Residency, and the Bluffer seemed headed past that building on toward the blacksmith shop, Bill roused himself to protest.

  “Hey!” he said, leaning forward toward the Bluffer’s right ear. “Let me down here. I’ve got some things to do before I start talking to people—and one of them is getting something in the way of breakfast. I suppose you didn’t think of the fact I haven’t had anything to eat yet today?”

  “You know,” said the Bluffer in a tone of wonder, “it did slip my mind at that. Well, I suppose it’s natural. If a man’s had breakfast himself, he naturally assumes everybody else has too.”

  “I’ll see you in about half an hour, up at the forge,” said Bill, heading in toward the Residency.

  There were some things he desperately needed to learn before he faced any assemblage of villagers. That was his main reason for stopping—but it was nonetheless true that he did need breakfast. He went first to the kitchen therefore, and it was not until he had surrounded a meal that was almost Dilbian in its proportion that he turned to his search for the information he wanted.

  He found it easily enough in the information computer—a complete account of the nursery tale of the Three Little Pigs, and a concise account of methods and tactics in medieval warfare. Having absorbed this information, he put the gong handle through his belt—from which he had removed it for the sake of comfort, while eating breakfast—and went out of the Residency and up the street toward the blacksmithy.