Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

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The Right to Arm Bears

Gordon R. Dickson

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and

any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31959-0

Cover art by Richard Martin

First Baen printing, December 2000 Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

THE BEAR TRUTH

The Dilbian called The Hill Bluffer opened his large mouth again, and put a further aspect of the

matter out for John's consideration.

"You know," said the Bluffer, "you can't get Greasy Face back from the Terror without fighting

him?"

Greasy Face, John remembered, was the Dilbian's nickname for the human woman the Streamside Terror

had kidnapped. "Fighting him??" he echoed.

"Yep," said the Bluffer. "Man-to-man. No weapons. No holds barred."

John blinked. He looked past the Dilbian postman's head at the puffs of white clouds. They had not

moved. They were still there. So were the mountains. It must be something wrong with his ears.

"Fighting him?" said John again, feeling like a man in a fast elevator which has just begun to

descend. "A man's got his pride," said the Bluffer. "If you take Greasy Face back, his mug's spilt

all over again." He leaned a little toward John. "That is, unless you whip him in a fair fight.

Then there's no blood feud to it. You're just a better man than he is, that's all. But that's what

I haven't been able to figure in this. You aren't bad for a Shorty. You pulled a good trick with

that beer on those drunks last night. You got guts."

He looked searchingly at John. "But I mean— Hell, you can't fight the Terror. Anybody'd know that.

I mean— Hell!" said the Bluffer.

John was wishing he could express to the postman how much he agreed with him.

"So what," inquired the bluffer, "are you going to do when I deliver you to Streamside?"

John thought about it. . . .

BAEN BOOKS by Gordon R. Dickson

The Magnificent Wilf

Mindspan

Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! (with Poul Anderson)

Hokas Pokas! (with Poul Anderson)

Spacial Delivery

CHAPTER 1

The Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, was smoking tobacco in a

pipe, an old-fashioned, villainous habit for such a conservative and respected gentleman. The

fumes from the pipe made John Tardy cough and strangle. Or perhaps it was the fumes combined with

what the Rt. Hon. Josh Guy had just said.

"Sir?" wheezed John Tardy.

"Sorry," said the dapper little diplomat. "Thought you heard me the first time." He knocked his

devil of a pipe out in a hand-carved bowl of some native Dilbian wood, where the coal continued to

smoulder and stink only slightly less objectionably than it had before. "What I said was that,

naturally, as soon as we knew you were safely drafted for the job, we let out word to the Dilbians

that you were deeply attached to the girl. In love with her, in fact."

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John gulped air. Both men were talking Dilbian to exercise the command of the language John had

had hypnoed into him on his way here from the Belt stars, and the Dilbian nickname for the missing

Earthian girl sociologist came from his lips automatically,

"With this Greasy Face?"

"Miss Ty Lamorc," corrected Joshua, smoothly slipping into Basic and then out again. "Greasy Face

to Dilbians, of course. But you mustn't pay too much attention to the apparent value of these

Dilbian nicknames. The two old Dilbian gentlemen you're about to meet—Daddy Shaking Knees, Mayor

of Humrog, here, by the way, and Two Answers—aren't at all the sort they might sound like from

name alone. Daddy Shaking Knees got his name from holding up one end of a timber one day in an

emergency. After about forty-five minutes someone noticed his knees starting to tremble a bit. And

Two Answers is not a liar, as you might expect, but a wily sort who can come up with more than one

solution to a problem."

"I see," said John.

"Miss Lamorc is quite a fine young woman. I would not at all be ashamed to have her for a

daughter, myself. Lots of character."

"Oh, I'm sure she has," said John, hastily. "I'm not objecting to the situation here. I don't want

you to think that. After all, the draft is necessary in emergency situations, particularly in

areas where we're in close competition with the Hemnoids. But I don't understand what this has to

do with my decathlon record? I thought I'd put all that sports business behind me after the last

Olympics. As you know, I'm actually a fully qualified biochemist, and . . ."

"Names," said Joshua, "have their chief value around here as an index to what the Dilbians think

of you. I, myself, now, am referred to as Little Bite; and you will undoubtedly be christened

yourself with a Dilbian nickname, shortly."

"Me!" said John, startled. He thought of his own red hair which surmounted an athletically stocky

body. He had always hated to be called Red.

"It should not be too humiliating, provided you are careful not to make yourself ridiculous.

Heinie, now—"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I beg yours," said Josh, starting to refill his pipe. "I should have used his full name of Heiner

Schlaff." He puffed fresh clouds of smoke into the air of the small, neat office with the log

walls. "He lost his head first time he stepped out alone on the street. A Dilbian from one of the

back-mountain clans who'd never seen a human before, picked him up. Heinie lost his head

completely. After all, he was never able to poke his nose outdoors without some Dilbian picking

him up to hear him yell for help. The Squeaking Squirt, they named him; very bad public relations

for us humans. Particularly when Gulark-ay, the Hemnoid in charge of their embassy locally here,

gets an advantageous handle hung on him like the Beer-Guts Bouncer. There he goes now, by the

way."

Joshua pointed out the office window that fronted on the main street of Humrog. Coming down its

cobblestones, John saw, a sort of enormous robed, Buddha-like parody of a human being. The Hemnoid

was a good eight feet in height, enormously boned, and while not as tall as the Dilbians

themselves, fantastically padded with heavy-gravity muscles. The Hemnoids, John remembered, came

from an original world with one-fourth again the gravity of Earth. Since Dilbia's gravity was

about a sixth less than Earth's, that gave humanity's chief and closest competitors quite an

advantage in this particular instance.

"He may stop—no, he's going past," said Joshua. "What was I saying? Oh, yes. Keep your head in all

situations. I assume someone who's won the decathlon in the All-Systems Olympics can do that."

"Well, yes," said John. "Of course, in biochemistry, now—"

"You will find the Dilbians primitive, touchy, and insular."

"I will?"

"Oh, yes. Definitely. Primitive. Touchy. And very much indifferent to anything outside their own

mountains and forests; although we've been in touch with them for thirty years and the Hemnoids

have for nearly twenty."

"I see. Well, I'll watch out for that," said John. "It struck me they wouldn't know much about

chemistry, to say nothing of biochemistry—"

"On the other hand," Joshua brushed the neat ends of his small grey mustache with a thoughtful

forefinger, "you mustn't fall into the error of thinking that just because they look like a passel

of Kodiak bears who've decided to stand on their hind legs at all times and Dilbian system, as

I'm sure your hypno training didn't omit to inform you, is absolutely necessary as a supply and

reequipment stage for further expansion on any large scale beyond the Belt Stars. If the Hemnoids

beat us out here, they've got the thin end of a wedge started that could eventually chop our heads

off. Which they would be only too glad to do, you know."

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John sighed. It was the sigh of a very human, young, recent graduate in biochemistry who would

have liked nothing better than to live and let live.

"You'd think there'd be room enough in the universe for both of us."

"Apparently not, in the Hemnoid lexicon. You must read up on their psychology sometime.

Fascinating. They're actually less like us than the Dilbians are, in spite of their greater

physical resemblance."

"I understand they can be pretty dangerous."

"They've an instinctive streak of cruelty. Do you know what they used to do to the elderly among

their own people until just the last hundred years or so of their history—"

Beep, signaled the annuciator on Joshua's desk.

"Ah, that'll be Shaking Knees and Two Answers, in the outer office now," said the diplomat. "We'll

go on in." He knocked out his pipe and laid it, regretfully, in the carved wooden bowl among the

ashes.

"But what's it all about?" said John desperately. "I just got off the spaceship four hours ago.

You've been feeding me lunch, and talking about background; but you haven't told me what it's all

about!"

"Why, what's what all about?" asked Joshua, pausing halfway to the door to the outer office.

"Well—everything!" burst out John. "Why was I drafted? I was all set to trans-ship to McBanen's

Planet to join my government exploration outfit, and this girl from the local embassy on Vega

Seven where I was, came up and pulled my passport and said I was drafted to here. Nobody explained

anything."

"Dear me! They didn't? And you just came along to Dilbia here by courier ship, without asking—"

"Well, I'm as good a citizen as anyone else," said John, defensively. "I mean I may not like the

draft, but I realize the necessity for it. They said you needed me. I came. But I'd just like to

know what it's all about before I start getting into the job."

"Of course, of course!" said Joshua. "Well, it's really nothing. Miss Lamorc, this young

sociologist girl, the one I was talking about, got kidnapped, that's all. By a Dilbian. We want

you to go bring her back. Old Shaking Knees in the next room is the father of Boy Is She Built.

And it was the fact that the Streamside Terror wanted Boy Is She Built that caused all this ruckus

which ended up with the Terror kidnapping Miss Lamorc. You'll see," said Joshua, starting off

toward the door again, "it's all very simple. It'll all straighten out for you once you get into

it."

"But I don't see—" insisted John, doggedly, following him.

"What?" Joshua hesitated with his hand on the door latch.

"What all this has to do with my work. Why do you want a biochemist to bring back some woman who'd

been kidnapped?"

"But we don't particularly want a biochemist," said Joshua. "What we want is a rough, tough laddie

with excellent physical reflexes of the kind that would take top honors in a decathlon

competition. It isn't your brains we want, Mr. Tardy, it's your brawn." He opened the door.

"You'll find it's all very simple once you get the hang of it. Come along, my dear boy. After

you."

CHAPTER 2

Politely but firmly herded forward by the little diplomat, John found himself pushed into the

large outer office of the Human Embassy on Dilbia, at Humrog, his head still spinning from

Joshua's last words and the odd Dilbian names. Who, he wondered confusedly and in particular, was

Boy Is She Built? The obvious conclusion, in terms of a seven foot-plus Dilbian female accoutered

in little more than her natural furry pelt, was a little mind-shaking to imagine.

The moment, however, was not the proper one for imaginings, no matter how mind-shaking. Reality

was being too overpowering to leave room for anything else. The first thing to strike John as the

door closed behind him, was the scale of the room he was entering. The inner office had been a

reassuringly human cell tucked away in a corner of gargantuan Dilbian architecture. Desk and

chairs had been to John's own fit.

This outer office, for reasons of diplomatic politeness, was furnished in the outsize Dilbian

scale. The heavy wall logs allowed for headroom up to fifteen feet below the log rafters. The

bottom of the crudely glazed windows were on a level with John's chin. Several tables and straight-

backed chairs fitted the rest of the furnishings by being of the same uncomfortable (by human

standards) largeness. A quart-sized ink pot, and a hand-whittled pen holder about sixteen inches

long on one of the tables, completed the picture.

Not this, though, nor the hypno training, quite served to prepare John adequately for his first

close-up encounter with a pair of the Dilbian natives. These two were standing not a dozen feet

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inside the door as John came through it; and their appearance assaulted his senses in all ways,

immediately, and without warning.

To begin with, they smelled. Not overpoweringly, not even unbearably, in fact rather like dogs

that have been out in the rain for the first time in several weeks during which they had not had a

bath. But, definitely, they smelled.

It did not help, either, for John to notice that the two were faintly wrinkling their large black

noses at him, in turn.

And on top of this odor, there was the fact of the bigness of the room; which, after ten seconds,

pulled a double switch on the senses; so that, instead of John feeling that he was the same size

he had always been and the room was unnaturally big, the first thing he knew he was feeling that

it was normal in dimensions and he had shrunk, all of a sudden, to the stature of a six-year old

boy.

But last and not least was the center of all this, the two adult male Dilbians themselves, looking

indeed like a pair of Kodiak bears who had stood up on their hind legs and gone on a diet. True,

their brows were higher and more intelligent than bears. Their noses were shorter, their lower

jaws more human-like than ursinoid. But their thick coats of brownish-black hair, their lumbering

stance, massive shoulders and forearms and the fact that they wore nothing to speak of beyond a

few leather straps and metal ornaments, shouted bear at you, any way you looked at it. If it was

up to me, thought John . . .

"Ah, there, Little Bite!" boomed the larger of the two furry monsters in native Dilbian, before he

could finish the thought. "This is the new one? Two Answers and I shook a leg right over here to

give him the eye. Kind of bright colored up top there, ain't he?"

"Hor, hor, hor!" bellowed the other, thunderously. "Belt me, if I'd want one like him around.

Liable to burn the house down! Hor, hor, hor!"

"Some of we humans have hair that color," replied Joshua. "Gentlemen, this is John Tardy. John,

this gentleman with the sense of humor is Two Answers. And his quiet friend is Shaking Knees."

"Quiet!" roared the other Dilbian, exploding into gargantuan laughter. "Me, quiet! That's good!"

He shook the heavy logs with his merriment.

John blinked. He glanced incredulously from the imperturbable Joshua to these oversize clowns in

fur. What kind of goof-up, he wondered, could have put Guy in an ambassadorial post like this. A

sharply tailored, fastidious little dandy of a man—and these lolling, shouting, belching, king-

sized, frontier-type aliens. It was past belief.

For the first time there crept into John's mind the awful suspicion that the whole thing—Joshua

Guy being ambassador in a post like this, the kidnapping of the female sociologist, and his being

drafted to do a job that he was in no way experienced or prepared for—all this just part of one

monstrous blunder that had its beginnings in the Alien Relations Office, back in Governmental

Headquarters on Earth. "Haven't laughed like that since old Souse Nose fell into the beer vat in

the Mud Hollow Inn!" Two Answers was snorting, as he got himself back under control. "All right,

Bright Top, what've you got to say for yourself? Think you can take the Streamside Terror with one

paw tied behind your back?"

"I beg your pardon?" said John. "I understood I was here to bring back—er—Greasy Face, but—"

"Streamside won't just hand her over. Will he, Knees?" Two Answers jogged his companion with a

massive elbow.

"Not that boy!" Shaking Knees shook his head, slowly. "Little Bite, I ought never have let you

talk me out of a son-in-law like that. Tough. Rough. Tricky. My little girl'd do all right with a

buck like that."

"I merely," said Joshua, "suggested you make them wait a bit, if you remember. Boy Is She Built is

still rather young."

"And, boy is she built!" said her father, fondly. "Yep, I know it made sense the way you put it

then." He shook his head a little. "You sure got the knack for coming up on the right side of the

argument with a man. Still, now I look back on it, it's hard to see how that little girl of mine

could do better." He peered suddenly at Joshua. "You sure you ain't got something hidden between

your claws on this?"

Joshua spread his hands expressively.

"Would I risk one of my own people?" he said. "Maybe two, counting John, here? All for nothing but

the fun of making the Terror mad at me?"

"Don't make sense, does it?" rumbled Shaking Knees. "But you Shorties are tricky little

characters." His words rang with an honest admiration.

"Now, you people are pretty sly yourselves," said Joshua. They both turned and spat over their

left shoulders. "Well, now," went on Joshua, "compliments aside, anybody know where the Terror

is?"

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"He headed west through the Cold Mountains," put in Two Answers. "He was spotted yesterday a half

day's hike north, pointed toward Sour Ford and the Hollows. He probably nighted at Brittle Rock

Inn, there."

"Good," said Joshua. "We'll have to find a guide to there for my friend here."

"Guide? Ho!" chortled Shaking Knees. "Wait'll you see what we got for your friend." He shouldered

past Two Answers, opened the door and bellowed. "Bluffer! In here!" There was a moment's wait. And

then a Dilbian even leaner and taller than Shaking Knees shouldered his way through the outer

doorway into the office, which with this new addition, and in spite of its original size, began to

take on the air of being decidedly crowded.

"Here you are, Shorties!" said Shaking Knees, waving an expansive furry hand at the newcomer.

"What more could you ask for? Walk all day, climb all night, and start out fresh next morning

after breakfast. Right, Hill Bluffer?"

"Right as rooftops in raintime!" sonorously proclaimed the newcomer, rattling the windows about

the walls. "Hill Bluffer, that's my name and trade! Anything on two feet walk away from me? Not

over solid ground or living rock! When I look at a hill, it knows it's beat; and it lays out flat

for my trampling feet!"

"Well, how do you like that, Little Bite? Eh? How?" boomed Shaking Knees.

"Mighty impressive, Knees," replied Joshua. "But I don't know about my friend keeping up if the

Hill Bluffer here moves like that."

"Keep up? Hah!" guffawed Shaking Knees. "No, no, Little Bite, don't you recognize the Hill

Bluffer? He's the government postman from Humrog to Wildwood Peak. We're going to mail your Shorty

friend here to the Terror. Guaranteed delivery. Postage: five pounds of nails."

"Nobody stops the mail." The Hill Bluffer swept the room with a glare that had a professional

quality about it. "Nobody monkeys with the mail in transit!"

"Well . . ." said Joshua, thoughtfully. "Five pounds, of course, is out of the question."

"Out of the question?" roared Shaking Knees. "A guaranteed, absolutely safe government mailman—!"

"I can hire five strong porters off the street for that."

"Sure you can. Sure!" jeered Shaking Knees. "But can any of them catch up with the Terror?"

"Can the Bluffer catch up?"

The Hill Bluffer bellowed like a struck bull.

"Well," said Joshua, "a pound and a half. That's fair."

The bargaining continued. John began to get a headache. He wondered how Joshua had kept from going

deaf all these months in the embassy, or however long he had been billeted here. Then he noticed

the older man was wearing a sound dampening coil behind each ear. It had not of course, thought

John a trifle bitterly, occurred to him to suggest the same protection for John.

The price was finally settled at three and a quarter pounds of steel nails, size and type to be at

Shaking Knees' discretion, at some future date.

"Well, now," said Joshua, "the next thing is—how's the Bluffer going to carry him?"

"Who? Him?" boomed the Bluffer, focusing down on John. "Why, I'll handle him like he was a week-

old pup. Wrap him up real careful in some soft straw, tuck him in the bottom of my mail pouch

and—"

"Hey!" cried John.

"I'm afraid," said Joshua, "my friend's right. We're going to have to find some way he can ride

more comfortably."

The meeting adjourned to the embassy warehouse adjoining, to see what could be rigged up in the

way of a saddle.

* * *

"I won't wear it!" the Hill Bluffer was trumpeting, two hours later. They were all standing in the

Humrog main street by this time, in front of the warehouse; and the cause of the Bluffer's upset,

a system of straps and pads arranged into a sort of shoulder harness to carry John, lay on the

cobblestones before them. A small number of local Dilbian bystanders had gathered; and their

freely offered basso comments were not of a sort to bring the Hill Bluffer to a more reasonable

frame of mind.

"Now, that's a real good system for my old lady to tote the youngest pup around," one Dilbian with

a grey scar jaggedly across his black nose, was saying.

"Good training for the Bluffer, too," put in another blackfurred monster. "Have pups of his own,

one of these days."

"Unless," said the scar-nosed one, judiciously, "this here little feller actually is a pup of the

Hill Bluffer's, already."

"You don't mean to actually tell me!" said the other. He squinted at John. "Yep, there's a

resemblance all right."

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