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.
“Maybe you’ll tell me,” said Greentree in an odd voice, “just what it was—this understanding of the Dilbians you say I have?”
“You know!” snarled Bill.
“Tell me anyway,” urged Greentree.
“All right, if you want it spelled out, so you can be sure I’ve seen through the whole thing!” said Bill furiously. “What you found out was what I finally figured out—just in time to tip off Bone Breaker that I understood, by pushing the duel through after all. If he hadn’t understood that I understood, he might have had to make a real fight out of it. Just to make sure I didn’t tell the other Dilbians afterward that he’d deliberately lost to me. And that a real duel would have left me very dead indeed!”
“But,” said Greentree, “you still haven’t told me what this knowledge about the Dilbians was.”
“Why, it’s their different way of doing everything, of course!” burst out Bill, exasperated. “A Dilbian never lies, except in desperate circumstances—”
“We know that—” began Greentree. “It’s a capital offence under the tribal laws in the mountains—”
“—But he never tells the exact, whole truth, either, if he can possibly twist it or distort it to give a different impression!” said Bill. “He admits nothing, and acknowledges nothing. He exaggerates in order to minimize, and minimizes in order to exaggerate. He blusters and brags when he wants to be modest, and he practically quivers with modesty and meekness when he’s issuing his strongest warning to another Dilbian to back off or prepare for trouble. In short—the Dilbians do everything backward, inside out, and wrong-way-to, on principle!”
Greentree’s face lit up.
“So that’s how—” he broke off, sobering. “No, that can’t be the answer. We concluded a long time back that the Dilbians had some kind of overall political system, or understanding, that they wouldn’t admit to—they worked too well together as individuals and communities for them not to have something like that. But what you’re talking about can’t be the answer. No political system could exist—”
“What’re you talking about?” said Bill harshly. “They’ve got a perfect political system. What they’ve got here on Dilbia is a one hundred percent, simon-pure, classic democracy. Nobody tells anybody else what to do among the Dilbians. Under cover of a set of apparently iron-clad visible rules like that one about not lying, there’s a set of invisible, changeable rules that really govern their actions. Also, no matter what the circumstances, every Dilbian has an equal right to persuade any other Dilbian to agree with him. If he gets a majority to agree, the new invisible, unacknowledged rule that results is applied to all Dilbians. That’s what makes More Jam and Bone Breaker top dogs in their community— they’re champion persuaders—in short, makers of invisible laws.”
Greentree stared.
“That’s hard to believe,” he said, at last, slowly. “After all, as chief outlaw, Bone Breaker headed a strong-arm band—”
“Which only took from the villagers what the villagers could spare!” snapped Bill. “And if they took more, the villager complained to Bone Breaker, who made the outlaws who took it give it back.”
“But obviously—”
“Obviously!” Bill snorted. “The whole point of the way the Dilbians do things is that whatever is obvious is a smoke screen for the real thing—” he broke off suddenly. “What’re you doing here? Trying to make me sound as if I’m telling you all this? You know as well as I do the Dilbians were running a test case on you and Mula-ay, to see which of you would win out in the end—instead of you and he competing to sway the primitive natives to your side, as you thought at first—and that was the joke you wanted so badly to bury. Even if you had to get me killed to do it.”
“A test case?” Greentree had stared at Bill before during this conversation, but not the way he stared now. “A test case?”
“You know that,” said Bill, but with suddenly lessening conviction. Either, he began to think, Greentree was telling the truth—or he was the best actor ever born.
“Tell me,” said Greentree in a hushed voice.
“Why … the whole idea of the agricultural project in updating Dilbian farming methods was a debatable question. The Dilbians wondered if the advantages you claimed for it were all true, or if there weren’t hidden disadvantages. So they took sides—the way they always do. The villagers took your side, and those who took the other joined the outlaws and cosied up to Mula-ay. Then they all sat back to see which one—human or Hemnoid—would break the stalemate wide open in his own favor. Look,” said Bill, almost pleading now. “You know this. You know all this!”
Greentree slowly shook his head.
“I swear to you,” he said, slowly, “I give you my
word—I didn’t know it. No one in the Alien Cultures Service knew it!”
It was Bill’s turn to stare now.
“But—” he said after a long moment, “if you didn’t know, how could I find out—”
He checked, baffled. Looking again at Greentree, he saw the beginnings of a smile starting to dawn again beneath the long nose.
“I’ll tell you—if you’ll listen now,” said Greentree.
“Go ahead,” said Bill, cautiously.
“You found out—” began Greentree, and the smile was breaking out now like gleeful sunshine across the tall man’s face, “because you’re the most unique subject of the most important experiment in the duplication of alien psychologies that’s ever been tried!”
Bill scowled suspiciously.
“It’s the truth!” said Greentree energetically. “I was going to tell you all about it—but you started talking and now it turns out that you’re even more of a success than we dreamed you’d be. You see, you were sent here to Dilbia to break up a stalemate between the project and Hemnoid opposition. And you’ve done that—but you’ve also given us a whole new understanding of Dilbian nature, and proved that we’ve got a tool in dealing with other alien races that the Hemnoids can’t match!”
Bill scowled harder. It was all he could think of to do, in view of the tall man’s words.
“You weren’t just pitched into the Dilbian situation without consideration,” Greentree said. “But somebody else once was. It was John Tardy, the one the Dilbians called the Half-Pint-Posted. It was sheer accident, and our lack of understanding of the Dilbians, that caused him to be caught in an impossible situation—faced with a fight against the Streamside Terror, and the Terror really wanted to win his fight.”
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