The good old stuff, p.37
The Good Old Stuff, page 37
He blinked and started to roll over, out of its glare, into—And grabbed in a sudden cold sweat for the stubby trunk of a dwarf tree growing right out of the cliffside.
For a second then, he hung there, sweating and looking down. He lay on a narrow ledge and the gorge was deep below. How deep, he did not stop to figure. It was deep enough.
He twisted around and looked up the distance of a couple of meters to the ledge on which the inn was built. It was not far. He could climb it. After a little while, with his heart in his throat, John Tardy did.
When he came back around the front of the inn, in the morning sunlight, it was to find the Bluffer orating at a sort of open-air meeting, with the four who had harried John standing hangdog between two axemen and before an elderly Dilbian judgelike on a bench.
“—the mail!” the Hill Bluffer was roaring. “The mail is sacred!
Anyone daring to lay fist upon the mail in transit—” John, tottering forward, put an end to the trial in progress.
Later on, after washing his slight scalp-wound and having taken on some more food concentrates and flat beer for breakfast, John Tardy climbed back up on the Bluffer’s back and they were under way once more.
Their route today led from Brittle Rock through the mountains to Sour Ford and the Hollows. The Hollows, John had learned, was clan-country for the Terror, and their hope was to catch him before he reached it.
The “trail now led across swinging rope suspension bridges and along narrow cuts in the rock—all of which the Hill Bluffer took not only with the ease ‘of one well accustomed to them, but with the abstraction of one lost in deep thought.
“Hey!” said John, at last.
“Huh? What?” grunted the Hill Bluffer, coming to suddenly.
“Tell me something,” said John, reaching out for anything to keep his carrier awake. “How’d the ambassador get the name Little Bite?”
“You don’t know that?” exclaimed the Hill Bluffer. “I thought you Shorties all knew. Well, it was old Hammertoes down at Humrog.”
The Bluffer chuckled. “Got drunk and all worked up about Shorties.
‘Gimme the good old days,’ he said, and went down to just make an example of Little Bite—Shorty One, we called him then. He pushes the door open far as it’ll go, but Little Bite’s got it fixed to only open part way. So there’s Hammertoes, with only one arm through the door, feeling around and hollering, ‘All right, Shorty! You can’t get away!
I’ll get you—’ when Little Bite picks up something sharp and cuts him a couple times across the knuckles. Old Hammertoes yells bloody murder and yanks his hand back.
Slam goes the door.”
The Hill Bluffer chortled to himself. “Then old Hammertoes comes back uptown, sucking his knuckles. ‘What happened?” says everybody.
‘Nothing,’ says Hammertoes. ‘Something must’ve happened—look at your hand,’ everybody says. ‘I tell you nothing happened!” yells Hammertoes.
‘He wouldn’t let me in where I could grab hold of him, so I come away.
And as for my hand, that’s got nothing to do with it. He didn’t hurt my hand hardly at all. He just give it a little bite!’” The Hill Bluffer’s laughter rolled like thunder between the mountain walls.
“Old Hammertoes never did live that down. Every time since, whenever he goes to give somebody a hard time, they all tell him, ‘Look out, Hammertoes, or I’m liable to give you a little bite!’” John Tardy found himself laughing. Possibly it was the time and place of the telling, possibly the story, but he could see the situation in his mind’s eye and it was funny.
“You know,” said the Bluffer over one furry shoulder when John stopped laughing, “you’re not bad for a Shorty.” He fell silent, appeared to wrestle with himself for a moment, then came to a stop and sat down in a convenient wide spot on the trail.
“Get off,” he said. “Come around where I can talk to you.”
John complied. He found himself facing the seated Dilbian, their heads about on a level. Behind the large, black-furred skull, a few white clouds floated in the high blue sky.
“You know,” the Bluffer said, “the Streamside Terror’s mug’s been spilled.”
“Spilled?” echoed John—then remembered this as a Dilbian phrase expressing loss of honor. “By me? He’s never even seen me.”
“By Little Bite,” the Bluffer said. “But Little Bite’s a Guest in Humrog and the North Country. The Terror couldn’t call him to account personally for speaking against Shaking Knees giving the Terror Boy-Is-She-Built. He had to do something, though, so he took Greasy Face.”
“Oh,” said John.
“So you got to fight the Terror if you want Greasy back.”
“Fight?” John blurted.
“Man’s got his pride,” said the Bluffer. “That’s why I can’t figure you out.
I mean you aren’t bad for a Shorty. You got guts—like with those drunks last night. But you fighting the Terror—I mean hell?” said the Bluffer, in deeply moved tones.
Silently, John Tardy found himself in full agreement with the postman.
“So what’re you going to do when you meet Streamside?”
“Well,” said John, rather inadequately, “I don’t exactly know—”
“Well,” growled the Bluffer in his turn, “not my problem. Get on.”John went around behind his furry back. “Oh, by the way, know who it was tried to pitch you over the cliff”
“Who ?” asked John.
“The Cobbly Queen—Boy-Is-She-Built!” translated the Bluffer as John looked blank. “She heard about you and got ahead of us somehow ...”
The Bluffer’s voice trailed off into a mutter. “If they’re thinking of monkeying with the mail ...”
John paid no attention. He had his own fish to fry, and very fishy indeed they smelled just at the moment. Swaying on top of the enormous back as they took off again, he found himself scowling over the situation. Headquarters had said nothing about his being expected to fight some monstrous free-style scrapper of an alien race—a sort of gargantuan Billy the Kid with a number of kills to his credit. Joshua Guy had not mentioned it. Just what was going on here, anyway?
Abruptly casting aside the security regulation that recommended a “discreet’’ use of the instrument, John lifted the wrist that bore his wrist-phone to his lips.
“Josh—” he began, and suddenly checked. A fine trickle of sweat ran coldly down his spine.
The phone was gone.
He had the rest of the morning to ponder this new development in the situation, and a good portion of the afternoon. He might have continued indefinitely if it had not been for a sudden interruption in their journey.
They had crossed a number of spidery suspension bridges during the course of the day, and now they had come to another one, somewhat longer than any met so far. If this had been the only difference, John might have been left to his thoughts. But this bridge was different.
Somebody had fixed it so they couldn’t get across.
It happened that their end of the bridge had its anchors sunk in a rock face a little back and some seven or eight meters above their heads.
All that had been done, simply enough, was to tighten the two main support cables at the far end. The sag of the span had straightened out, lifting the near end up above them, out of reach.
The Hill Bluffer bellowed obscenely across the gap. There was no response from the windlass on the far side, or the small hut beyond.
“What’s happened?” John Tardy asked.
“I don’t know,” said the Bluffer, suddenly thoughtful. “It isn’t supposed to be tucked up except at night, to keep people from sneaking over and not paying toll.”
He reached as high as he could, but his fingertips fell far short.
“Lift me up,” suggested John.
They tried it, but even upheld by the ankles, at the full stretch of the Bluffer’s arms, John was rewarded only by a throat-squeezing view of the Knobby River below.
“It’ll take five days to go around by Slide Pass,” growled the Bluffer, putting John down.
John went over to examine the rock face. What he discovered about it did not make him happy, though perhaps it should have. It was climbable. Heart tucked in throat, he began to go up it.
“Hey! Where’re you going?” bellowed the Hill Bluffer.
John did not answer. He needed his breath; anyway, his destination was obvious. The climb up the rock was not bad for someone who had had some mountain experience, but a reaction set in when he wrapped his arms around the rough six-inch cable. He inched his way upward and got on top, both arms and both legs wrapped around the cable, and began a worm-creep toward the bridge end, floating on nothingness at a rather remarkable distance—seen from this angle—ahead of him.
It occurred to him, after he had slowly covered about a third of the cable-distance in this fashion, that a real hero in a place like this should stand up and tightrope-walk to the bridge proper. This, in addition to impressing the Bluffer, would shorten the suspense considerably. John Tardy concluded he must be a conservative and went on crawling.
Eventually he reached the bridge, crawled out on it and lay panting for a while, then got up and crossed the gorge. At the far end, he knocked loose the lock on the windlass with a heavy rock, and the bridge banged down into position, raising a cloud of dust.
Through this same cloud of dust, the Hill Bluffer was shortly to be seen advancing with a look of grim purpose. He stalked past John and entered the hut—from which subsequently erupted thunderous crashes, thuds and roars.
John Tardy looked about for a place of safety. He had never seen two Dilbians fight, but it was only too apparent now what was going on inside.
He was still looking around, however, when the sound ceased abruptly and the Hill Bluffer emerged, dabbing at a torn ear.
“Old slaver-tongue,” he growled. “She got at him.”
“Who?” asked John.
“Boy-Is-She-Built. Well, mount up, Half Pint. Oh, by the way, that was pretty good.”
“Good? What was?”
“Climbing across the bridge that way. Took guts. Well, let’s go.”
John climbed back up into his saddlebag and thought heavily.
“You didn’t kill him?” he asked, as they started out once more.
“Who? Old Winch Rope? Just knocked a little sense into him. Hell, there’s got to be somebody to work the bridge. Hang on now. It’s all downhill from here and it’ll be twilight before we hit the ford.”
It was indeed twilight before they reached their stopping place at Sour Ford. John Tardy, who had been dozing, awoke with a jerk and sat up in his saddle, blinking.
In the fading light, they stood in a large, grassy clearing semicircled by forest. Directly before them was a long low log building, and behind it a smooth-flowing river with its farther shore shrouded in tree shadow and the approaching dusk.
“Get down,” said the Bluffer.
Stiffly, John Tardy descended, stamped about to restore his circulation, and followed the Bluffer’s huge bulk through the hide-curtain of the doorway to the building’s oil-lamp lit interior.
John discovered a large room like that at the Brittle Rock Inn—but one that was cleaner, airier, and filled with travelers a good deal less noisy and drunken . Gazing around for the explanation behind this difference, John caught sight of a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat, seated like a patriarch in a huge chair behind a table at the room’s far end.
John and the Bluffer found a table and set about eating. But as soon as they were through, the postman led John up to the patriarch.
“One Man,” said the Bluffer in a respectful voice, “this here’s the Half Pint Posted.”
John Tardy blinked. Up close, One Man had turned out to be even more awe-inspiring than he had seemed from a distance. He overflowed the carved chair he sat in, and the graying fur on top of his head all but brushed against a polished staff of hardwood laid crosswise on pegs driven into the wall two meters above the floor. His massive forearms and great pawlike hands were laid out on the table before him like swollen clubs of bone and muscle. But his face was almost Biblically serene.
“Sit down,” he rumbled in a voice so deep it sounded like a great drum sounding far off somewhere in a woods. “I’ve wanted to see a Shorty.
You’re my Guest, Half Pint, for as long as you wish. Anyone tell you about me?”
“I’m sorry—” began John.
“Never mind.” The enormous head nodded mildly. “They call me One Man, Half Pint, because I once held blood feud all by myself—being an orphan-with a whole clan. And won.” He looked calmly at John. “What you might call an impossible undertaking.”
“Some of them caught him on a trail once,” put in the Hill Bluffer.
“He killed all three.”
“That was possible,” murmured One Man. His eyes were still on John.
“Tell me, Half Pint, what are you Shorties doing here, anyhow?”
“Well—” John blinked. “I’m looking for Greasy Face—”
“I mean the entire lot of you,” One Man said. “There must be some plan behind it.
Nobody asked you all here, you know.”
“Well—” said John again, rather lamely, and proceeded to try an explanation.
It did not seem to go over very well, a technological civilization being hard to picture with the Dilbian vocabulary.
One Man nodded when John Tardy was through. “I see. If that’s the case, what makes you think we ought to like you Shorties?”
“Ought to?” said John, jolted into a reactive answer, for he did not have red hair for nothing. “You don’t ought to! It’s up to you.”
One Man nodded. “Pass me my stick,” he said.
One of the Dilbians standing around took down the staff from its pegs and passed it to him. He laid it on the table before him—a young post ten centimeters in thickness—grasping it with fists held over two meters apart.
“No one’s ever been able to do this but me,” he said.
Without lifting his fists from contact with the table, he rotated them to the outside. The staff sprang upward in the center like a bow, and snapped.
“Souvenir for you,” said One Man, handing the pieces to John. “Good night.”
He closed his eyes and sat as if dozing. The Bluffer tapped John on a shoulder and led him away, off to their sleeping quarters.
Once in the inn dormitory, however, John found himself totally unable to sleep. He had passed from utter bone-weariness into a sort of feverish wide-awakedness, through which the little episode with One Man buzzed and circled like a persistently annoying fly.
What had been the point of all that talk and wood-breaking?
Suddenly and quietly, John sat up. Beside him, on his heap of soft branches, the Bluffer slept without stirring, as did the rest of the dormitory inhabitants. A single lamp burned high above, hanging from the rooftree. By its light, John got out and examined the broken pieces of wood. There was a little node or knot visible just at the point of breakage.
A small thing, butJohn frowned. He seemed surrounded by mysteries.
The more he thought of it, the more certain he was that One Man had been attempting to convey some message to him. What was it? For that matter, what was going on between humans and Dilbians, and what had his mission to rescue Greasy Face to do with the business of persuading the recalcitrant Dilbians into a partnership? If that was indeed the aim, as Joshua Guy had said.
John swung out of the pile of boughs and to his feet. One Man, he decided, owed him a few more—and plainer—answers.
He went softly down the length of the dormitory and through the door into the common room of the inn.
There were few Dilbians about—they went early to bed. And One Man was also nowhere to be seen. He had not come into the dormitory, John knew. So either he had separate quarters, or else he had stepped outside for some reason ...
John Tardy crossed the room and slipped out through the inn entrance.
He paused to accustom his eyes to the darkness and moved off from the building to get away from the window light. Slowly the night took shape around him, the wide face of the river running silver-dark in the faint light of the stars, and the clearing pooled in gloom.
He circled cautiously around the inn to its back. Unlike Brittle Rock, the backyard here was clear of rubbish, sloping gradually to the river.
It was given over to smaller huts and outbuildings. Among these the darkness was more profound and he felt his way cautiously.
Groping about in this fashion, quietly, but with some small, unavoidable noise, he saw a thin blade of yellow light. It cut through the parting of two leather curtains in the window of a hut close by him. He stepped eagerly toward it, about to peer through the crack, when, from deep wall shadow, a hand reached out and took his arm.
“Do you want to get yourself killed?” hissed a voice.
And, of course, it was human. And, of course, it spoke in Basic.
Whoever had hold of him drew him deeper into the shadow and away from the building where they stood. They came to another hut whose door stood ajar on an interior blackness, and John was led into this darkness. The hand let go of his arm. The door closed softly. There was a scratch, a sputter, and an animal-oil lamp burst into light within the place.
John squinted against the sudden illumination. When he could see again, he found himself looking into the face of one of the best-looking young women he had ever seen.
She was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than he, but at first glance looked taller by reason of her slim outline in the tailored coveralls she wore.
To John Tardy, after two days of Dilbians, she looked tiny—fragile.
Her chestnut hair swept back in two wide wings on each side of her head. Her eyes were green above sharply marked cheekbones that gave her face a sculptured look. Her nose was thin, her lips firm rather than full, and her small chin was determined.
John blinked. “Who—?”
“I’m Ty Lamorc,” she whispered fiercely. “Keep your voice down!”
“Ty Lamorc? bu?”
