“No. No,” said John, coughing discreetly. “Not at all.”
“Have to put it out shortly when we meet Daddy Shaking Knees and Two Answers. Dilbians are quite sensitive about human odors, even mild ones like tobacco. To get back to what I was saying: We must influence Dilbians like that chap or the Hemnoids are going to get the inside track on this planet. And the 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.”
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 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.”