"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 lip 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 head.
"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 for 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 hel
d 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 stand, 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.
He found not only the blacksmith there with the Hill Bluffer but a fair sprinkling of other citizens of the village, and others began to come out of their various houses and follow him up as he approached the blacksmith shop, until he had quite a crowd surrounding him as he stepped in under the roof of the open shed to greet the Bluffer and Flat Fingers.
"Morning, Pick-and-Shovel," the blacksmith replied, his eyes fastened on the object tucked under Bill's belt. "I've got your blade and buckler ready. Want to try them out?"
"In a minute," replied Bill, with elaborate casualness. "You don't have a nail and a hammer you could lend me, do you?"
"Why, I guess so," replied the blacksmith. He turned to one of the tables nearby, searched among the litter that covered it, and came up with something rather like a short sledgehammer and one of the nails he had made himself from the native iron.
The sledgehammer was difficult to handle with one hand, while holding the nail. The nail itself was some eight inches in length, a triangular sliver of gray native iron, with a bulge at one end for a head and a rather blunt point at the other. Nonetheless, Bill managed to knock it partway into one of the upright posts supporting the shed roof. Then he returned the sledgehammer to the blacksmith, took the gong hammer from his belt, and hung it by the hole in one end of its handle from the nail he had just driven into the pole.
A pleased mutter of deep-voiced and admiring comment went through the crowd that now surrounded the blacksmith shed closely. The blacksmith squinted at the gong hammer.
"Yes," he said, after a minute. "I remember cutting that piece of iron for Bone Breaker, myself. That must have been eight-ten years ago. Before that they were sounding their gong with just a chunk of wood."
He turned to face Bill. Behind and above the singed fur of the blacksmith's broad right shoulder, Bill saw the face of the Hill Bluffer looking at him expectantly.
"So I guess you really were down in outlaw territory last night, were you, Pick-and-Shovel?" said the blacksmith. "How did you do it?"
"Well, I'll tell you," said Bill. The crowd around the shed had quieted down, and Bill realized that something more than an ordinary relating of the night's activities was expected. This was not a time for modesty. Modesty, in fact, was not considered highly among the Dilbians—except as a cloak for secretive boasting. The Dilbians were like good fishermen, who made it a rule always to exaggerate the size, weight, and number of their catch.
"Well, I'll tell you," he said. "You all know how that valley is. High cliffs all the way around it, the only entrance blocked up by the stockade. And the gates in the middle of the stockade barred shut at sundown. You wouldn't think a fly could get into that valley. But I did. But I'm not boasting about it. You know why?"
He waited for somebody to ask him why. The blacksmith obliged.
"Why, Pick-and-Shovel?" asked Flat Fingers.
"Because it was easy for a Shorty like me," Bill said, keeping in mind the reaction to his climb shown by the Hill Bluffer on the way back to the village. "Even if it would be hard for a real man, the fact that it was easy for me makes it something that I don't need to feel particularly proud about. You asked me how I got into the valley? I'll tell you in just two or three words how I got into that valley. I climbed down one of the cliffs until I was on the valley floor. And when I was ready to leave again, I climbed back up that cliff!"
There was a moment's absolute silence and then a gratifying mutter of incredulity from the audience. Bill interrupted it with an upheld hand.
"No, no—" he said. "As I say, I'm not particularly proud of it. Well, then, you may say—I could be a little puffed up over having walked into that outlaw camp all alone, with nobody to help me in case I was discovered. How many of you would like to do that, especially after dark?"
Bill paused for an answer. But no volunteers from the audience spoke up to say that they would have enjoyed such an excursion.
"But again," went on Bill, after a moment, "I can't take any credit for that either."
There was a hum of amazement at this new statement that abruptly suggested to Bill the rather ludicrous picture of the bass droning of a swarm of enormous bumblebees. He waited for it to die down before he continued.
"No, I can't feel very proud about that," he said. "Because I really wasn't worried about going in among those outlaws all by myself to get this gong handle you see hanging there. You see, I knew that if I ran into any of them, I could handle him with no
trouble at all."
"What if you ran into a whole bunch of them?" demanded a voice from the crowd. "How about that, Pick-and-Shovel?"
"That didn't bother me either," replied Bill. "I could've handled any number I might've run into." There was a slight stir in the ranks of the crowd directly before him, and he saw the incredibly rotund form of More Jam unobtrusively squeezing into the front rank. "We Shorties know these things. That's why I'm not afraid to face Bone Breaker in a duel. That's why, in spite of the fact that we're so much smaller than real men and Fatties, we Shorties don't have to take a back seat to anybody. It's because of what we know. And it was because of what I knew that it didn't bother me to go into that valley and bring that gong handle out."
Bill stopped. The crowd around the shed, he could now see from his superior position on top of the barrel, was as large or larger than it had been the day before when he had lifted weights with the blacksmith. They were all staring at him in fascinated interest. He let them stare, waiting for the question that one of them must ask if he was to go on. Finally, it was More Jam in the front rank who put it to him.
"That sounds might interesting, Pick-and-Shovel," said More Jam mildly. "Maybe you wouldn't mind telling us what it is you Shorties know that makes so much difference in handling outlaws? Because," went on More Jam, looking back over his shoulder briefly at his fellow villagers for a moment, and then turning back to Bill, "I don't 'spose most of the real active men around here would like to admit it, but an old fat, decrepit man like myself doesn't mind letting it out. We haven't been able to handle those outlaws, when you get right down to it. They come in a gang all at once upon some single farmer, and there's not much one man can do against a crowd. We never know when they're coming, and by the time we get together to go after them, they're back safe in their valley. So we've just about given up trying to handle them. But you say, Pick-and-Shovel, that there is a way? Maybe you'd like to tell us what that way is?"