The Right to Arm Bears (8 page)

The bridgekeeper still showed no eagerness to take the Bluffer up on this invitation. Small wonder, thought John privately, standing prudently back out of arms reach of the wrought-up postman.

The Bluffer stopped shouting and looked up at the bridge overhead. He made a half-hearted motion as if to try reaching for it; but it was obviously many feet beyond even the stretch of his long arms. He dropped them, defeatedly.

"All right!" he roared once more, shaking his fist across the gorge. "I'll climb up the gorge. I'll go along the cliff. I don't need a trail. I'll get to the Hollows before Streamside does! And then I'm coming back for you!"

John stirred suddenly, pricked for the first time out of his mental lethargy.

"Go up the gorge?" he said.

"You heard me!" growled the Bluffer. "Who needs a trail? It's the shortest route. We'll get there in half the time."

John glanced over the Bluffer's shoulder at the sheer walls of the gorge on the edge of which they were standing. There were footholds along it, all right, but even for someone of the Bluffer's skill. And then there was that business of catching up with Streamside faster than expected. John came fully awake.

"Lift me up," he said to the postman. "If I can reach, and climb across and let the winch out—"

The Bluffer's eyes lit up.

"Sure," he said, enthusiastically. He picked up John and they tried it. John, upheld by the ankles and holding his body stiff, stretched upward toward the bare cable near the end of the bridge's flooring slats, but was rewarded only by a throat-squeezing view of the Knobby River, nine hundred feet below.

"Put me down," he said at last. The Hill Bluffer put him down.

John, not in the most cheerful mood in the universe after his scenic view of the gorge, went over and examined the cliff face leading up to the anchor points of the bridge cables. He possessed a fair amount of rock climbing experience and the granite face before him was not too bad, although no one of the bulk and necessary clumsiness of a Dilbian could have made it. It was not that, so much, that was giving him cold shivers, as the fact that once he had reached an anchor point, he would have to work out along the bare cable some twenty-odd feet before he came to the bridge proper.

Oh, well, he thought.

"Hey! Where're you going?" shouted the Bluffer.

John did not answer. He needed his breath and anyway his destination was obvious. After a little time, he reached the near anchor point, and got his arms over the rough, three-inch cable. He rested for a moment and surveyed the situation. The Bluffer was just below him, staring up and looking foreshortened by the angle of John's vision. So was the ledge. John did not look down into the gorge.

After a while, he got his breath back and he climbed up with both arms and legs wrapped around the cable, himself on top, and began to inch his way toward the bridge end, floating in an absurdly large amount of space at a remarkable distance from him. It occurred to him, after he had covered about six or eight feet in this fashion, that a real hero in this situation would undoubtedly have got to his feet and tightrope-walked the really rather broad cable to the end of the bridge proper. This, in addition to impressing the watching Hill Bluffer, would have shortened the time of personal suspense considerably.

John concluded that evidently he was just not the stuff out of which real heroes are made, and continued to inch along.

Eventually, he reached the bridge, crawled out on it and lay panting for a while, then got up and crossed to the far side of the gorge. The far ledge of the gorge was still the home of somebody dodging a process server. John walked over to the winch, and utilizing a handy rock, managed to knock loose the lock-ratchet.

The winch roared loose, the cables boomed like gigantic bowstrings; and the far end of the bridge slammed down, raising a temporary cloud of dust through which the Hill Bluffer was shortly to be seen advancing with a look of grim purpose. He stalked past John and entered the bridgekeeper's abode. Without knocking.

There was a moment of silence; and then sound erupted like a bomb exploding inside the hut.

John looked hastily around for something to climb up on or inside of, where he would be out of harm's way. He had never seen a pair of Dilbians fight; but it was remarkable how accurately his ears interpreted what was going on inside the hut right now.

After a little while, abruptly, there was peace. The Hill Bluffer emerged, dabbing with one big hand at a torn ear, but otherwise looking not unsatisfied.

"What happened?" asked John.

The Bluffer went over and washed off his ear in a large stone trough that ran along side the shack.

"Said it was
his
bridge. Hah!" replied the Bluffer. "Nobody stops the mail. I fixed him." He paused, water dripping from one side of his big head and looked at John. "You did all right, too, Half-Pint."

"Me?" said John.

"Climbing up and out across that cable to the bridge. Never thought I'd see a Shorty, even a good one, doing something like that. Actually took a little guts, I'd say. All right. Climb up and let's get going."

John complied.

"You didn't kill him?" he asked as they headed off up their original fork of the trail toward the Hollows.

"Who? Old Winchrope? Just knocked a little sense into him. Hell, there's got to be somebody around here keep the bridge up and in repair. Hang on. It's all downhill from here, and we're late. But it'll be twilight in two hours and I think we can just make Sour Ford by then."

And the Hill Bluffer, swinging once again into his six-foot, ground-devouring stride, was once more hot on the trail of the Terror.

They made good time.

As the Bluffer had said, from there on it was all downhill. They descended almost immediately into the treed sections of the mountains, the forest part. The trees among which they now traveled were lofty and thick-topped. All underbrush between them had been killed off by the lack of sunlight and they traveled, through what seemed to be an endlessly, sloping, pillared land, dimly lit by no particular source of illumination.

Sound was less where they were, too. There were no insects to feed on the nonexistent small vegetation; and no birds to live off the insects. Occasionally, from high overhead, eighty to a hundred and twenty feet up in the loftily remote crowns of the trees, there would float down a distant chitter or chirp of some unseen animal or winged creature. Otherwise, there was only the trail, an occasional boulder, looking lost here in the wooded dimness, and the unending carpet of dead leaf forms from the trees.

The Bluffer said nothing; and the steady rocking of his body as he swung along over the trail, now soft with earth, swayed John into a dreaminess in which nothing about him seemed real. Not the present scene, and not the whole business in which he had become engaged, seemed to have anything to do with reality. What was he doing here, strapped up on the back of an alien individual as large as a horse and headed for a duel to the death with another horse-sized individual of the same race? Such things did not happen to ordinary people.

But, come to think of it, were there any ordinary people? When you got right down to it, thought John sleepily, nobody was ordinary.

John dozed. An indeterminate, grey time went past; and then he was awakened by the jerk of the Hill Bluffer stopping. He straightened up, blinking, and looked about him.

He saw that it was already dusk. In the fading light, they stood in a large grassy clearing semi-encircled by the forest trees. Directly before him was a long, low log building at least double the size of anything he had seen yet, outside of Humrog. At some short distance behind it, a broad, smooth-surfaced river gurgled, swiftly flowing around a chin of stones that led across it to be lost in the twilight and the tree shadow on the far side of the stream.

"Light down, Half-Pint," said the Bluffer.

Stiffly, John climbed down from the harness. His scrapes and bruises of the night before, had found time to set during his long hours in the saddle. The soft turf felt odd under his bootsoles and his calves were wooden with a mild cramp. He stamped about, restoring his circulation; and then followed the Hill Bluffer's great back as, for an instant, it blocked out the yellow light of an open doorway, in passing into the building's interior.

Inside he found himself in a common room both much larger and much cleaner than he had been in before. The customers here at Sour Ford Inn also seemed to be quieter and less drunk than those he had encountered in other Dilbian inns, Brittle Rock for example. Gazing around for some explanation of the reason behind this difference, John caught sight of a raised dais at the far end of the room, where in a huge chair was seated a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat.

Staring at this Dilbian as he walked behind the Bluffer, John ran into a table, recovered himself, and was admonished by the Hill Bluffer.

"Don't go starting any trouble now, Half-Pint."

"Me?" said John, so overwhelmed at the suggestion that someone his size could start trouble with lumbering Dilbians—even if he was crazy enough to want to—that he found himself at a loss for words to protest properly that he had no such intention.

"That's right," said the Bluffer, some moments later, after they had been seated and ordered beer and food (beer only, still, for John). "This here's treaty ground, belonging to a clanless man. Nobody starts trouble here."

"Treaty ground?"

"Yep," said the Hill Bluffer. "One Man, he—" the food, arriving just then, put a cork in the postman's flow of words. He devoted himself to bread, cheese and beer, merely grunting when John tried to continue the conversation.

John sat back, and sipped on his beer. He was cautious with it, this evening. He tried to catch a glimpse of the big Dilbian at the room's end, through the shifting bodies passing in and about the tables in the room, but the way was never clear long enough for him to get a good look.

Suddenly, however, John dropped his mug with a bang on the table and sat bolt upright.

"Hey!" he said, punching the Bluffer.

The Bluffer took another large bite of meat.

"
Hey!
" said John, punching harder.

The Bluffer growled something unintelligible with his mouth full.

"Look up!" said John. "Look over there! Quick!"

The Hill Bluffer looked up, in the direction John was pointing. He did not seem disturbed to see a Hemnoid accompanied by a relatively short, plump Dilbian female, threading their way between the tables toward the enormous patriarch in the chair on the dais.

The Bluffer swallowed.

"Sure," he said casually. "That's that Fatty, Tark-
ay
. The one I was telling you about claims to be quite a scrapper back on his home world?" The Bluffer discovered he needed to dispose of one more swallow, and did so. He pointed with a large finger, while picking up a large chunk of bread with his other hand. "That's Boy Is She Built with him."

"Boy Is She Built?" John stared.

"That's what they all say," muttered the Bluffer through a mouthful of bread. "Like `em a little skinnier, myself."

"I mean—" said John. "What's she doing here? Let's go get her and make her tell us about Greasy Face, and if Greasy Face is all right—"

"Now, there you go," said the Bluffer.

"Go?" John turned to blink at him.

"Starting trouble."

"Starting trouble?"

"Didn't," said the Bluffer, "I just finish telling you this here's treaty ground? Man's got to be polite on treaty ground. Everybody, even Shorties got to respect the rules."

John fell silent. The Bluffer went back to his eating. John watched the Hemnoid, Tark-
ay
, and Boy Is She Built who proceeded up to the dais, sat down; and evidently fell into a friendly conversation with the oversize patriarch seated there.

John wished he could hear what they were saying.

He looked over at the Bluffer, eating away; and began to try to evolve some kind of scheme which would inveigle the Bluffer into taking him over to meet the giant Dilbian, in turn. And as soon as the Bluffer was finished, John took a cautious sip of beer and went to work.

"Who did you say is that man down in the chair at the end?" he asked.

"Why, don't you know? No, I guess you don't," said the Bluffer. "Why, that's One Man, Half-Pint. This here's all his, at Sour Ford."

"Quite a man," said John.

"You can say that," replied the Bluffer judiciously, draining the last drops from his beer mug.

"I'd like to meet a man like that," said John. "Now, back home—"

"That's good," said the Bluffer, standing up. "Because the waitress passed word I was to bring you over, soon as we were through eating. Come on, Half-Pint."

He headed off between the tables. John shook his head ruefully and followed. The next time, he though, I'll ask first and scheme afterwards.

When they got close to the individual in the chair, John discovered that sometime during their passage across the room, the Hemnoid and Boy Is She Built had disappeared. He did not have much opportunity to wonder about this, however; because his attention was immediately completely taken up by the Dilbian he was about to meet. One Man was that sort of a being.

It was definitely disconcerting, after John had spent a couple of days adjusting to the idea of Dilbian size, to have that adjustment knocked for a fresh row of pins. He was rather like a man who having gotten used to measuring with a yardstick instead of a foot-rule, suddenly finds the yardstick replaced by a fathom line. And he, himself as a fraction of that measurement getting smaller and smaller.

John had accustomed himself to standing about armpit high on the ordinary male Dilbian. Now, here along came a specimen on which John could hardly hope to stand more than midrib height. John's reaction was rather like Gulliver's with the Brobdingnagians. He felt like standing on tiptoe and shouting to make himself heard.

One Man overflowed the massive chair in which he sat; and the greying hair on the top of his head almost brushed against a polished, six-foot staff of hardwood laid crosswise on pegs driven into the wall six feet above the floor, behind him. His massive forearms and great pawlike hands were laid out on the small table in front of him, like swollen clubs of bone and muscle. Attendant Dilbians stood respectfully about him. He looked like some overstuffed, barbaric potentate. Yet his large, grey eyes, meeting John's suddenly and sharply as John and the Bluffer came to stand before him, were alight with an unusual quality of penetrating intelligence.