The footfalls approached. They came right up behind John and stopped. John heard the slow, even sound of deep breathing, above and behind his head.
Then the feet moved whoever it was around in front of John and he saw a great yellow moon-face beaming down at him from eight feet above the ground.
“Well, well,” said a heavy, liquid voice, “so, here’s our quarry, trussed and ready for roasting. How should we season him, Tark-ay?”
It was the Hemnoid ambassador to Dilbia, Gulark-ay.
CHAPTER 13
“You’ll think of something, Mr. Ambassador, I’m sure,” replied Tark-ay and the two Hemnoids chuckled together like a couple of gallon jugs of machine oil poured out on the ground.
The sound woke up Boy Is She Built. She sat up.
“Here you are!” she said to Gulark-ay.
“Absolutely right, Boy Is She Built,” replied the Hemnoid ambassador. “Here, indeed, I am. You don’t look pleased?”
“I don’t know why we had to wait for you,” she said.
“Because,” said Gulark-ay, “there’s more to this than simply throwing someone you don’t like over a cliff. Remember? You were only supposed to take his wrist radio there at Brittle Rock, not drop him into a five hundred foot canyon.”
“It would have saved a lot of trouble,” said Boy Is She Built. She looked rebellious.
“So you think. But, as you would have found out, if you’d been successful, what it actually would have done would have been to cause a lot of trouble. Do you think the Shorty authorities are going to let one of their people get killed here on your world and not want to know what happened?”
“They wouldn’t dare make a fuss,” said Boy Is She Built. “They need to make friends with us real people. Just like you Fatties do. If they attacked us, you’d just like the excuse to back us up.” She snorted. A curiously feminine version of the Hill Bluffer’s favorite emotional outlet. “They wouldn’t dare make trouble over one little Shorty.”
“Never mind,” said Gulark-ay. “Life’s a little more complicated than you think, Boy Is She Built. You don’t get things without paying for them. And, believe me, you can’t just kill a Shorty on a whim without paying for that, either.”
“Oh, you sound just like my father!” said Boy Is She Built, furiously.
“Thank you,” said Gulark-ay, dryly. He turned away from her and sat down by John on the ground, spreading his robes over his enormous knees.
“And how is our cat’s-paw doing?” he asked.
“You’re talking to me?” said John.
“Of course,” said Gulark-ay. “Didn’t you realize that’s what you’ve been all along?”
“To tell you the truth,” said John, “and now that you ask me, no, I didn’t.”
“Such trust,” said Gulark-ay.
“And faith,” said John. “To say nothing of experience.” He pointed out something. “I’m a little bit older and more widely traveled than Boy Is She Built, for example.”
“What’s he saying about me?” said Boy Is She Built, lifting her head up. “What’s travel got to do with it?”
“But I’m only telling you what’s true,” said Gulark-ay, bassly and liquidly. “How do you think Tark-ay here, and Boy Is She Built happened to be waiting for you on the trail your first day out? How do you think Boy Is She Built happened to know enough to deprive you of your wrist phone?”
“Now, that’s an interesting point,” said John. “You say she took my wrist phone off. Why? When she was going to throw me over the cliff, anyway?”
“She wasn’t supposed to do anything but get the wrist phone,” said Gulark-ay. “As to why she still bothered to do that after deciding to kill you, is something you’d have to ask her.”
“They told me to,” said Boy Is She Built sulkily.
“But you miss the point,” said Gulark-ay to John, “which is how we knew where you were going to be and when. Aren’t you going to ask me who tipped off Boy Is She Built?”
“You did.”
“Not at all. Your ambassador, Joshua.”
John looked at him sourly.
“You expect me to believe that, don’t you?”
“Why not?” Gulark-ay spread his enormous hands.
“For one reason, because you wouldn’t have any reason for telling it to me unless to convince me of something that wasn’t true.”
“Not at all,” said Gulark-ay. “Don’t you know about us Hemnoids? We’re a cruel people. We enjoy seeing others suffer. I enjoy dashing your faith in Joshua Guy—particularly because I’ve no doubt in the back of your mind, you’ve been planning on using action by him, in the event of your death, as a threat to make me let you go.”
John had. But he kept his face bland.
“Seems to me,” he said, “you protest your cruelty too much.”
Gulark-ay shook his head. He seemed to be quite earnest and enjoying the conversation.
“That’s because,” he said, “according to your mores it is immoral to make someone else suffer. But according to my mores it is not only moral, but eminently respectable. It is a skill, a high art.”
“Do you jump up in the air and click your heels before beginning?” asked John, sourly.
For the first time, Gulark-ay looked slightly baffled. Tark-ay, busily poking the fire with his head down, did not offer to interpret the remark for his ambassador.
“We seem to be drifting off the subject,” said Gulark-ay. “The point I am laboring to get across to you is that your Joshua Guy is to be no help to you. He had you written off from the beginning.”
“Are you sure you aren’t judging according to Hemnoid mores?” said John. “Human ambassadors usually operate a little differently.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Gulark-ay chuckling richly. “But there are special reasons in the case of Mr. Guy. You’re a draftee, aren’t you, my friend?”
“That’s right,” said John. “A willing draftee, I might point out.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Gulark-ay chuckling richly, and chuckled again. “Well, so is your ambassador to Dilbia.”
“Guy? Drafted?”
John blinked in spite of himself. There was, of course, no technical reason why you couldn’t draft a man with the proper talents into a diplomatic post. It was just kind of farfetched, that was all.
“Quite right,” said Gulark-ay. “Joshua Guy, three years ago, had retired after a full lifetime in the diplomatic service. He was planning to spend the rest of his life cultivating certain species of your native flora—I don’t remember just what. Roses, or some such name. However, his government thought they needed him on Dilbia, and so they sent him here.”
John accepted this in silence, without arguing or accepting. But he was busy thinking.
“Of course,” went on Gulark-ay,—and he did, indeed, seem to be enjoying himself—“Joshua has been very eager all this time to get relieved of his duties and be allowed to return to his roses, or his turnips, or whatever. And of course you realize, the only way for anyone like him to get relieved would be to—how do you put it?—goof up so badly that he would have to be replaced. He fomented this whole fuss with Boy Is She Built just to create the proper kind of trouble.”