The Right To Arm Bears - Gordon R. Dickson, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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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.
Spacial Delivery copyright (c) 1961 by Ace Books, Inc., Spacepaw copyright (c) 1969 by Gordon
Dickson, "The Law-Twister Shorty" copyright (c) 1971 by Ben Bova. First unitary edition.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
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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