John opened his eyes to bright sunlight.
Dilbia's sun, just above the snow-gilt peaks of the mountain horizon, was shining its first clear rays of the day directly into his eyes. He blinked sleepily, and started to roll over onto his side, turning his back to the penetrating dazzle of the light—
—and grabbed with every ounce of strength he could summon at the rough trunk of a stubby tree growing sideways out of the granite rock beside him.
For a long second, he hung there sweating. Then he wriggled back a ways, but without releasing his grip on the little tree, until he felt himself firmly wedged in among the rocks around him. Then—but still not letting go of the tree—he risked another look.
He lay on a narrow ridge several hundred feet above a mountain river and eternity. The water was far below. How far, he did not take the time or trouble to estimate. It was far enough.
He turned over and looked up. Just above him, a slight overhang came to an end, than there was about fifteen feet of jagged rock cliffside, then a steep slope, and some small sweaty distance beyond that, the haven that was the edge of the inn's backyard. A bit of rusty hoop overhanging the edge identified it as such.
Swallowing a little convulsively, John relaxed his grip on the tree.
He was wide awake now, and in condition to notice a number of scrapes and gouges. There was one plowed groove that started up from his wrist and almost made it to his elbow. For a second John almost regretted not being back comfortably asleep again. Then he remembered the gorge below and was glad he was not. He looked up at the cliff face above him once more, and began to pick out a route by which he could ascend it.
He found it easily enough. The climb was not one which called for mountaineering experience, though John had that, along with other sports qualifications. But, thought John as he climbed, it was not exactly what everybody would pick for exercise before breakfast.
He made it up over the lip of the yard and lay there for a second, panting. In the daylight, the yard looked very small and ordinary. It was hard to believe that it had been the lengthy and dangerous arena where he skulked and fought for his life the night before. John got to his feet, brushed himself off, and limped around to the front of the inn, where some commotion seemed to be in process, and stumbled upon a scene that made him blink.
The entire populace of the inn, guests and help alike, were drawn up in the road before it. They stood in fairly orderly ranks before an open space in which a grizzled and lean old Dilbian sat on a bench placed on top of a table. Between this individual and the crowd—among which John recognized the inkeeperess in a clean apron—were John's three tormentors of the night before, looking hangdog between two large Dilbians carrying axes over their shoulders. What, from its stained and gouged appearance looked ominously like a chopping block, was in position a little in front of the prisoners.
Across from the prisoners, the Hill Bluffer was windmilling his arms and orating in tones of outrage.
"The mail!" he was roaring, as John tottered around the corner of the inn into the full sight of everybody. "The mail is sacred. Anyone laying hands upon the mail in transit—"
At that moment, he caught sight of John; and broke off. The total assemblage, including the judge, turned and stared at John as he limped forward into their midst.
"There!" burst out the inkeeperess. "Didn't I say it? The poor little fellow—probably frightened out of his wits. Been up a tree all this time, no doubt. No reason at all for chopping three poor men who're just having a friendly drink. But, that's it for you, a man can't get beyond his middle years but he has to be playing judge at every opportunity. And every man who ever wore a mail pouch ranting and raving as if there wasn't anything in the world but letters—much good letters do anyone, anyway. And those who can't wait to waste their good time standing around at a trial and an execution not much better. Poor little Shorty." She swooped down on John, fluttering her apron at him. "Now you just get right inside there and have your morning beer. Men!"
John let himself be herded inside. In addition to all his other aches and pains, he had just discovered himself to be the possessor of a walking hangover. And the Dilbian beer was at present the quickest—and only—cure for that.
Later, after John had drunk his breakfast and washed off a certain amount of dried blood, he and the Hill Bluffer got under way again. The long-legged Dilbian had fizzed and popped with the effervescence of throttled outrage for the first fifteen minutes or so following John's return. But on being shut up by the inkeeperess, he had lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and he continued to be silent during the first few hours of their trip.
Meanwhile, thanks to a generally good physical condition and possibly in some measure to the beer and the food concentrates, John was recovering rapidly. Their way from Brittle Rock led through the highlands toward Knobby Gorge, the Bluffer had informed John, earlier. After that they would begin the gradual descent down the far, forested side of the Cold Mountains to Sour Ford and the Hollows. The Hollows was clan-country for the Streamside Terror, and their hope was to catch up with him before he reached it.
The first part of the day's trailing after they left Brittle Rock led by narrow mountainside paths and across swinging suspension bridges over deep cuts in the rock that ended, far below, in rushing currents of white water. The Hill Bluffer trod this way for the first couple of hours, not merely with the casualness of someone well-used to it, but with the actual absent-mindedness of a person in deep thought.
"Hey!" said John, finally, when for the fifth time that morning the Hill Bluffer had shown signs of intending to walk off the path on to several hundred feet of thin air.
"Huh? What?" grunted the Hill Bluffer, saving them both with a practiced twist of an ankle. "What's that? Something on your mind, Half-Pint?"
As a matter of fact, thought John, there was. The notion born out of the fumes of the beer the previous evening when he had sat in what he thought was momentary safety in the inn's backyard—before whoever it was had come out the kitchen door to hunt him—had returned to mind this morning as not a bad idea after all. Why not, he thought again, find out an honest Dilbian point of view about the human-Hemnoid struggle to make friends with the natives of this world? It was something that might not only rate him a commendation after all this was over; but might furnish him some valuable pointers on his present situation. These first two hours of no conversation had given him a chance to turn the matter over in his mind and try to think of how to frame the question.
He had finally come to the conclusion that, considering the Dilbian character, a direct approach was probably the best.
"Yes," he said to the Hill Bluffer now. "I've been trying to figure out why you Dilbians like the Hemnoids better than us Shorties."
The Bluffer did not rise to the bait, as John had half-hoped by immediately denying that the Dilbians played favorites.
"Oh, that," said the Hill Bluffer, as calmly as if they were talking about a law of nature. "Why, it stands to reason, Half-Pint. Take the Beer-Guts Bouncer, now; or that new little one—"
"What new little one?" asked John, sharply, remembering the Hemnoid back in the woods when they had stopped to talk to Tree Weeper.
"What's his name—Tark-ay, I guess they call him. The one who's supposed to have been quite a scrapper back on his own home territory. You take someone like him, for example."
"What about him?" asked John.
"Well, now," said the Bluffer, judiciously, "he's nowhere near the proper size of a man, of course. But he's not ridiculous, like you Shorties. Why, two of you wouldn't make a half-grown pup. And if people don't lie, he's strong enough to stand up to a man and holler for his rights—yes and back them up, too, if he had to, win or lose."
"That's important?" said John. "To you Dilbians?"
"Why, of course it's important to any man!" said the Bluffer. "A man might lose. Bound to lose sometime, to someone, of course. But if he stands up for his rights, then there can't be anything worse happen to him but get killed. I mean, he's got standing in the community."
"We Shorties stand up for our rights, too," said John.
"Sure. But—hell!" said the Bluffer. "Besides, what do you mean, you all stand up for your rights? What about the Squeaking Squirt?"
"Well . . ." said John, uncomfortably.
He had, for the moment, forgotten Heiner Schlaff, that blot on the human escutcheon where Dilbia was concerned. Now, here Schlaff was being thrown in his face, as he must have been to Joshua on a number of occasions. For the first time, John felt a twinge of sympathy with the dapper little ambassador. How do you go about explaining that one man's reactions are not typical of a race's?
Attack, thought John.
"Oh, you never knew a man from Dilbia, here, who lost his head or got scared?" he said.
"I never knew one who yelled just because he was picked up!" snorted the Bluffer.
"Who'd pick one up? Who's big enough to?" said John.
That apparently stopped the Bluffer for a moment. He did not immediately answer.
"You just imagine something big enough to pick you up and tell me if there aren't some men just as big as you who'd lose their head if something like that picked them up?"
"They'd be pretty poor if they did," growled the Bluffer. He muttered to himself for a minute. "Anyway," he said, "that's not the point. The point is, it doesn't matter. It's just plain ridiculous, even if a Shorty like you'd try to stand up for his rights. Any idiot could see you wouldn't have a chance against a real man."
"Oh, you think so," said John; wondering what in the galaxy was making him pretend that the Bluffer was not a hundred per cent correct. After a second's thought, he concluded it was probably much the same human-type reaction that had sent Rudi Maltetti diving for the javelin in Brisbane, on the occasion with the Hemnoid ambassador.
The Bluffer snorted with laughter.
"Now," he said, when he had got his humor off his chest, "one of those Fatties, there's be some point to an argument. But someone like you, why I couldn't take a shove at someone like you. It'd be like swatting a bird."
He brooded for a second.
"Besides," he said. "Some of you Shorties may not be too bad; but a real man doesn't take kindly to critters that got to go around using all kinds of tools for things. Fighting with tools, taking advantage with tools, getting ahead of somebody else by using tools. But particularly fighting with them—that's just plain, downright yellow; the way we see it!"
"Is that so?" said John. "Well, listen to me for a minute—"
"Hold on. Hold on." The Bluffer held up a pacific lump of a hand. "I can't go fighting with my own mail; besides, didn't I say some of you Shorties weren't too bad? Why, you know how Little Bite got his name, and—"
"Who?" said John. And then his hypno training informed him that Little Bite was the Dilbian nickname for Joshua Guy. But the hypno training was silent on how the name had been selected. "Oh, no, I don't."
"You don't?" ejaculated the Bluffer.
"No," said John, suddenly cautious and wondering what he had blundered into.
"Everybody knows that," said the Bluffer.
There was no help for it.
"I don't," said John.
Slowly, the Bluffer turned his head to look back over his shoulder. The eye that met John's was alight with sudden puzzlement and suspicion.
"You're pretty strange, even for a Shorty," said the postman slowly. "What're you trying to pull? Everybody knows how Little Bite got his name. And you're a Shorty yourself and you don't?"
He stopped dead in the trail and stood, still staring back at John.
"What're you trying to pull?" he said again.