Chapter 10

Bill did not sit for long, thinking in front of the console. A glance at his watch woke him to the fact that he had less than four hours until the noon meal, and it was right after that meal that he had promised to outdo the village blacksmith. It was high time he was getting busy. He got up from his chair before the power console panel of the communications equipment, and went out of the room. He headed toward the storeroom containing the battery set at the back of the Residency, where he hoped he would find what he needed.

Bill had very little trouble finding what he looked for first. He discovered a coil of quarter-inch rope among the farming tools, and measured out and cut off forty feet of it. Then he started to look for a second item—an item he was pretty sure he would not find.

Indeed, he did not. What he was looking for was nothing less than a ready-made block-and-tackle. But after some forty minutes had gone by without his finding one, he realized he could spend no more time looking for it. He would have to make his own block-and-tackle.

This was not as difficult as it might have seemed to someone with both a theoretical and practical knowledge of such a simple machine. Earlier, as he had stepped into the dim storeroom with its warehouselike smells of plastic wrappings and paper boxes, he had identified a self-programming lathe over against the wall in the one corner that seemed to be a general work area, fitted out with several machines and a multitude of tools racked and hung about the walls.

Now he hunted for some metal stock, but was not able to find what he wanted. He would have to use something else. The outer walls of the Residency, like the walls of most Dilbian buildings, were made of heavy logs. Detaching a power saw from the tool rack on the work-area wall, Bill took it over to a doorway in the back wall of the building. Opening the door, he used the power saw to cut off a four-foot section of one of the logs that ended against the frame of the doorway.

Bill took the log back to the lathe and cut it up into four sections, approximately one foot in length and a foot in diameter. Then he put the sections aside, and turned on the programming screen of the lathe. Picking up the stylus he began to sketch on the screen the pulley-wheel sections that he wanted to construct.

The parts took shape with approximate accuracy in three dimensions, and the programming section of the lathe took it from there. Eventually a red light lit up below the screen, revealing the black letters of the word "ready." Bill pressed the replay button, and before him on the screen there appeared completed and corrected, three-dimensional blueprints of the components for a block-and-tackle.

The lathe was now prepared to go to work. Bill fed his log sections to it, one by one, and ended up fifteen minutes later with twelve lathe-turned, wooden parts which he proceeded to join into two separate units by wood-weld processing. The first unit consisted of two double pulleys welded together, or four movable pulleys. This was the fixed block and had a brake and lock as well as a heavy wooden hook welded to the top of it. The other unit was the movable block which contained three pulleys. The two units, combined with the rope, together should give Bill a block-and-tackle with a lifting power seven times whatever pull he could put upon the fall rope. Flat Fingers, being a little bigger than most Dilbians, outweighed Bill by—Bill calculated—about five to one. In other words, the village blacksmith could probably lift about his own body weight of nine hundred pounds. However, the block-and-tackle Bill had constructed gave him a seven-times advantage. Therefore, if he could put upon the rope he would be holding a pull equal to his own human body weight of a hundred and sixty-five pounds, he should be able to lift well over a half-ton. Bill looked at what he had constructed, feeling satisfied.

He looked at his wristwatch. The hands, recalibrated to Dilbian time, stood at about half an hour short of noon. He was reminded, suddenly, that he had had no breakfast, and no evening meal the day before except for the Dilbian fare he had choked down in Outlaw Valley. He remembered seeing a well-stocked kitchen in his earlier exploration of the Residency. He turned away from the block-and-tackle, leaving it where it was on the workbench, and opened the doorway to the hallway leading back to the living quarters of the building. The hallway was dim, but as he stepped into it he thought he saw a flicker of movement from behind the door as it opened before him.

But that was all he saw. For a second later a smashing blow on the back of his head sent him tumbling down and away into spark-shot darkness.

When he opened his eyes again, it was at first with the confused impression that he was still asleep in his bed at the Residency. Then he became conscious of a headache that gradually increased in intensity until it seemed to fit his head like a skullcap, and, following this, he was made aware of a sickly taste in his nose and mouth, as if he had been inhaling some sort of anesthetic gas.

Cautiously he opened his eyes. He found himself seated in a small woodland clearing, by the banks of a stream about fifteen or twenty feet wide. The dell was completely walled about by underbrush, beyond which could be seen the trunks and the trees of the forest.

He blinked. For before him, seated crosslegged like an enormous Buddha on the ground with his robe spread about him, was Mula-ay. Seeing himself recognized, the Hemnoid produced one of his rich, gurgling chuckles.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, ah—Pick-and-Shovel," said Mula-ay cheerfully. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to come to."

"What do you mean, knocking me on the head and bringing me here—" Bill was beginning, when the thunder of his own voice and the working of his own jaw muscles so jarred his skullcap of headache pain that he was forced to stop.

"I?" replied Mula-ay, in a tone of mild, if unctuous surprise, folding his hands comfortably upon his cloth-swathed belly. "How can you suspect me of such a thing? I give you my word I was simply out for a stroll through these woods, and noticed you tied up here."

"Tied up—?" began Bill, too jolted by the words to pay attention to the stab of pain that the effort of speaking sent through his skull, from back to front. He became aware that his hands were pulled around behind him, and a moment's experimentation revealed that his wrists were tied together on the opposite side of the narrow tree trunk that was serving him for a backrest.

"You can't get away with this sort of thing!" he stormed at Mula-ay. "You know no Dilbian would do something like this. You're breaking the Human-Hemnoid treaty on Dilbia. Your own superiors will have your hide for this!"

"Come now, my young friend," chuckled Mula-ay. "As I say—my superiors are reasonable individuals. And where are the witnesses who can call me a liar? I was merely wandering through the woods and happened to see you here, and sat down to wait for you to wake up."

"If that's true," said Bill, his headache by this time completely disregarded, "how about untying my hands and turning me loose?"

"Well, now, I don't know if I could do anything like that!" said Mula-ay thoughtfully. "That might be interference in native affairs—expressly forbidden, as you yourself point out, by the Hemnoid-Human agreements. For all I know you've been caught in the act of committing some crime, and the local inhabitants have tied you up here, until you can be taken back to face their native justice." He shook his head. "No, no, my dear Pick-and-Shovel. I couldn't take it on myself to untie you—much, of course, as I'd like to."

"You can't get away with claiming something like that!" exploded Bill. "You—" He became aware abruptly of a sheer look of enjoyment on the round face opposite him, and checked himself with sudden understanding. He was rewarded by seeing a slight shade of disappointment overshadow the smile with which Mula-ay had been regarding him up until now.

"All right," said Bill, as coolly as he could. "You've had your fun. Now suppose you tell me what this is all about. I suppose you want to make some kind of deal with me, and your idea in kidnapping me and tying me up here is to start me out at a disadvantage. Is that right?"

Mula-ay chuckled again and rubbed his large hands together.

"Very good," he said. "Oh, very, very good, young Pick-and-Shovel! If you'd only had a little more training and experience, you might have made quite a decent undercover agent—for a human, that is. Of course, that was the last thing your superiors wanted, in this case—someone with training and experience. Oh, the last thing!"

He chuckled once more.

"Cut it out!" said Bill in a level voice. "I told you, you've had all the enjoyment out of me you are going to have. Quit hinting and come right out with whatever it is you've got to say. I'm not going to squirm just to please you."

Mula-ay shook his head, and his smile evaporated.

"You really are uninformed, aren't you, Pick-and-Shovel?" he said seriously. "Your knowledge of my race is only that kind of half-rumor that circulates among humans who have never done anything but listen to tall tales about Hemnoids. Do you seriously think that my business here on Dilbia would allow me to engage in that special and demanding art form among my people which you humans consider to be merely the exercise of a taste for deliberate cruelty? To be sure, I'm mildly pleased by your responses when they verge on sana, as our great art is known among us. But any serious consideration of such is impossible in this time and place."

"Oh, is that a fact?" said Bill ironically.

"Indeed," said Mula-ay steadily, "it is so. Let me try to draw you a parallel out of your own human experience. You humans have a response called empathy—the emotional ability to put yourself in another's skin and echo in your own feelings what that other is feeling. As you know empathy, we Hemnoids do not have it. But our sana is a comparable response, among us, even though you humans would consider it quite the opposite. Sana, like empathy, is a response that puts two individuals into a special relationship with one another. Like your empathy, it requires a powerful involvement on the part of the individual engaging in it."

"Only you don't happen to feel like engaging in it right now, I suppose?"

"Your skepticism," said Mula-ay steadily, "shows a closed mind. You humans do not empathize lightly, and neither do we engage in sana easily or casually. I would no more consider you a subject of sana on the basis of our casual acquaintance here, than you would be likely to empathize with—say—Bone Breaker, or any of the Dilbians, on the slight basis of the acquaintanceship you have with them so far."

Bill stared at the Hemnoid. Mula-ay was apparently being as frank and honest as it was possible for him to be, in his own terms. And the Hemnoid's argument was convincing. Only, just at that moment, something inside Bill suddenly clamored like an alarm bell in denial of something Mula-ay had just said.

"So—you understand," Mula-ay was going on, "and you can put your own interior human fears to rest on that subject. Just as," Mula-ay chuckled again briefly, "you can abandon the idea that I brought you here to make some kind of deal with you. My dear young human, you are not one of those with whom deals are made. You are only a pawn in the game here on Dilbia—an unconscious pawn, at that."

He stopped speaking and sat beaming at Bill.

"I see," said Bill, while the back of his mind was still busily digging, trying to identify the note of misstatement he had sensed in Mula-ay's earlier explanation. Suddenly he wanted very much to hear more from the Hemnoid. "I'm supposed to ask you why I'm here, then? Well, consider I've asked it."

"Oh, but you haven't, you know," chuckled Mula-ay, gazing upward at the fleecy clouds spotting the blue sky above the treetops surrounding their clearing.

"All right!" said Bill. "Why did my superiors send me here—according to you?"

"Why," Mula-ay brought his gaze back from the clouds to Bill's face, "to get you killed by Bone Breaker in a duel, of course!"

Bill stared at him. But Mula-ay did not seem ready to offer any more conversation without prompting.

"Oh, sure!" said Bill at last. "Do you think I'll believe that?"

"Eventually. Eventually, you will . . ." murmured Mula-ay, still watching Bill's face. "Once you let the idea sink in and consider the fact that you are alone here, with no communication off-planet to your superiors. Yes, I know about that. And committed to the duel I mentioned. Don't you think it strangely coincidental that the Resident should be off-planet with a broken leg just when you get here, and that your young female associate should be an involuntary house-guest, so to speak, in Outlaw Valley? Don't you think it strange that you should be placed in the almost identical position of that earlier young human whom the Dilbians call the Half-Pint-Posted, who had a hand-to-hand battle with a native champion in another locality? Come, come now, Pick-and-Shovel; surely your intelligence is too adequate to blink those facts away!"

In fact . . . in spite of himself a distinctly cold feeling was forming somewhere under Bill's breastbone. The facts were overwhelming—and they were the very facts he had been facing as he had sat in front of the communications console earlier this day. It was unbelievable that there could exist an official human conspiracy to get Bill himself killed. But nonetheless the facts were there and . . .

"Why?" said Bill, as if to himself. "What reason could they have? It doesn't make sense!"

"Oh, but it does, Pick-and-Shovel," said Mula-ay. "The situation here between Resident Greentree and myself has become—how shall I put it—stalemated." Mula-ay chuckled again, softly, as he used the very word Anita had used to Bill the night before. "There's no further gain to be gotten from this Muddy Nose Project for you humans. The local farmers won't accept your help, and the outlaws under Bone Breaker are only enjoying the situation—with my modest help."

He beamed at Bill.

"The best thing for your superiors, in fact," he went on, "is to close this ill-planned project before it turns even more sour. But how to do that without losing face, both with the Dilbians and on an interstellar level? It would be like acknowledging we Hemnoids have won a round here at Muddy Nose. The answer, of course is to close the project—but first to find a suitable excuse for doing so. And what would make the most suitable excuse?"

He stopped and beamed once more at Bill.

"All right," said Bill grimly. "I'll ask. What would?"

"Why, for some untrained, unfortunate youngster to join the project, and—through no fault of his own, but through a series of unlucky accidents—make an irretrievable mess of the situation with the local Dilbians. To the extent, in fact, of getting himself involved in a duel and killed by the local champion, Bone Breaker."

Mula-ay stopped and chuckled so heartily that his whole heavy shape shook.

"What a perfect situation that would be!" he said. "For one thing, it would require the humans to close down the project and withdraw its personnel, temporarily—of course, it would never be started up again, nor would they return. For another, there would be no loss of face with the Dilbians; for, even though their foolish young man got himself killed, still he did show the combativeness necessary to tangle with Bone Breaker, and therefore the Shorties' record for personal courage on this world would not be impaired."

Bill stared at him.

"You seem pretty sure I'm bound to lose," he said although the cold feeling was back under his breastbone again. "The Half-Pint-Posted didn't."

Mula-ay chuckled, undisturbed.

"To be perfectly frank, Pick-and-Shovel," he said, "that is one small caper pulled off by you humans that we haven't been able to figure out, yet. But we have no doubt—and you need have no doubt either—that there was something more at work in that victory than simply one of you small creatures outgrappling a Dilbian. In fact, you hardly need the assurance of our belief. I ask you—can you picture a human who could win such a victory, without some unseen, unethical advantage?"

It was true, Bill could not. The cold feeling under his breastbone increased.

"No, no . . ." Mula-ay shook his head. "The very thought of a human winning any physical fair fight between himself and a Dilbian is unthinkable to the point of ridiculousness. But don't worry, little Pick-and-Shovel. I'm going to save you from your cruel and heartless superiors, as well as from Bone Breaker."

Bill stared at him.

"You . . . ?" he began, and then remembered to hide his emotions just in time.

"To be sure," said Mula-ay, rising softly to his feet and cocking his ear toward the noises of the forest behind him. "And here, unless I am mistaken, comes the means of that rescue, now. Reassure yourself, Bone Breaker won't kill you."

"Oh, he won't?" said Bill, speaking as coldly and unconcernedly as he could. For at that moment, he had heard what Mula-ay had just heard. It was the noise of heavy Dilbian feet approaching.

"No, indeed," said Mula-ay, "you will lose your duel and your life, instead, to the most feeble and decrepit Dilbian that the local area provides. Let your superiors try to save face, after that—following your foolish challenge of the best fighter for miles around!"

He half-turned from Bill. At that moment there burst into the clearing two female Dilbians and a scrawny, tottering male so old that his body fur was gone in patches. Of the two females with him, one was short and plump—and disturbingly familiar-looking, and the other was younger, somewhat statuesque of build, and almost tall enough to be a male.

They came to a halt, their eyes roaming the little dell, and fastened all together on Bill.

"There he is!" said the old male with a (for a Dilbian) high-pitched cackle of satisfaction. "Right where we want him!" And he rubbed his hands with glee.

"I leave you in good hands, Pick-and-Shovel," murmured Mula-ay. With a wink and a nod, but no words spoken, in the direction of the three Dilbians who had just arrived, he glided softly off into the surrounding brush and disappeared.