“Certainly not! It’d look like I was giving in to him!” said Gentle. “It may be all right for any old ordinary girl to go chasing a man, but not me. Folks know me better than that. They’d laugh their heads off if I suddenly started going all soft on Bender. And besides—”
“Here we are, Postman—Law-Twister,” interrupted One Punch, stopping by the heavy wooden door of a good-sized log building. “This is Gentle’s place. The orphans are inside.”
“Don’t you go letting them out, now!” snapped Gentle, as Mal, relieved to be out of the saddle after this much time in it, began sliding down the Bluffer’s broad back toward the ground.
“Don’t worry, Granddaughter,” said One Punch, as Mal’s boots touched the earth. “Postman and I’ll wait right outside the door here with you. If one of them tries to duck out, we’ll catch him or her for you.”
“They keep wanting to go back to their flying box,” said Gentle. “And I know the minute one of them gets inside it, he’ll be into the air and off like a flash. I haven’t gone to all this trouble to lose any of them, now. So, don’t you try anything while you’re inside there, Law-Twister!”
Mal went up the three wooden steps to the rough plank door and lifted a latch that was, from the standpoint of a human-sized individual, like a heavy bar locking the door shut. The door yawned open before him, and he stepped through into the dimness. The door swung shut behind him, and he heard the latch being relocked.
“Holler when you want out, Law-Twister!” One Punch’s voice boomed through the closed door. Mal looked around him.
He crossed the room and tried the right-hand door at random. It gave him a view of an empty, kitchenlike room with what looked like a side of beef hanging from a hook in a far corner. A chopping block and a wash trough of hollowed-out stone furnished the rest of the room.
Mal backed out, closed the door, and tried the one on his left. It opened easily, but the entrance to the room beyond was barred by a rough fence of planks some eight feet high, with sharp chips of stone hammered into the tops. Through the gap in the planks, Mal looked into what seemed a large Dilbian bed chamber, which had been converted into human living quarters by the simple expedient of ripping out three cabin sections from a shuttle boat and setting them up like so many large tin boxes on the floor under the lofty, log-beamed roof.
At the sound of the opening of the door, other doors opened in the transplanted cabin sections. As Mal watched, three middle-aged people—one woman and two men—emerged each from his own cabin and stopped short to stare through the gaps in the plank fence at him.
“Oh, no!” said one of the men, a skinny, balding character with a torn shirt collar. “A kid!”
“Kid?” echoed Mal, grimly. He had been prepared to feel sorry for the three captives of Gentle Maiden, but this kind of reception did not make it easy. “How adult do you have to be to wrestle a Dilbian?”
“Wrestle…!” It was the woman. She stared at him. “Oh, it surely won’t come to that. Will it? You ought to be able to find a way around it. Didn’t they pick you because you’d be able to understand these natives?”
Mal looked at her narrowly.
“How would you have any idea of how I was picked?” he asked.
“We just assumed they’d send someone to help us who understood these natives,” she said.
Mal’s conscience pricked him.
“I’m sorry—er—Mrs….” he began.
“Ora Page,” she answered. “This—” she indicated the thin man, “is Harvey Anok, and—” she nodded at the other, “Zora Rice.” She had a soft, rather gentle face, in contrast to the sharp, almost suspicious face of Harvey Anok and the rather hard features of Zora Rice; but like both of the others, she had a tanned outdoors sort of look.
“Mrs. Page,” Mal said. “I’m sorry, but the only thing I seem to be able to do for you is get myself killed by the local harnessmaker. But I do have an idea. Where’s this shuttle boat you came down in?”
“Right behind this building we’re in,” said Harvey, “in a meadow about a hundred yards back. What about it?”
“Good,” said Mal. “I’m going to try to make a break for it. Now, if you can just tell me how to take off in it, and land, I think I can fly it. I’ll make some excuse to get inside it and get into the air. Then I’ll fly back to the ambassador who sent me out here, and tell him I can’t do anything. He’ll have to send in force, if necessary, to get you out of this.”
The three stared back at him without speaking.
“Well?” demanded Mal. “What about it? If I get killed by that harnessmaker it’s not going to do you any good. Gentle Maiden may decide to take you away and hide you someplace in the mountains, and no rescue team will ever find you. What’re you waiting for? Tell me how to fly that shuttle boat!”
The three of them looked at each other uncomfortably and then back at Mal. Harvey shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think we ought to do that. There’s a treaty—”
“The Human-Hemnoid Treaty on this planet?” Mal asked. “But, I just told you, that Dilbian harnessmaker may kill me. You might get killed, too. Isn’t it more important to save lives than worry about a treaty at a time like this?”
“You don’t understand,” said Harvey. “One of the things that Treaty particularly rules out is anthropologists. If we’re found here—”
“But I thought you were tourists?” Mal said.
“We are. All of us were on vacation on a spaceliner tour. It just happens we three are anthropologists, too—”
“That’s why we were tempted to drop in here in the first place,” put in Zora Rice.
“But that Treaty’s a lot more important than you think,” Harvey said. “We can’t risk damaging it.”
“Why didn’t you think of that before you came here?” Mal growled.
“You can find a way out for all of us without calling for armed force and getting us all in trouble. I know you can,” said Ora Page. “We trust you. Won’t you try?”
Mal stared back at them all, scowling. There was something funny about all this. Prisoners who hadn’t worried about a Human-Hemnoid Treaty on their way to Dilbia, but who were willing to risk themselves to protect it now that they were here. A Dilbian female who wanted to adopt three full-grown humans. Why, in the name of all that was sensible? A village harnessmaker ready to tear him apart, and a human ambassador who had sent him blithely out to face that same harnessmaker with neither advice nor protection.
“All right,” said Mal, grimly. “I’ll talk to you again later—with luck.”
He stepped back and swung closed the heavy door to the room in which they were fenced. Going to the entrance of the building, he shouted to One Punch, and the door before him was opened from the outside. Gentle Maiden shouldered suspiciously past him into the house as he emerged.
“Well, how about it, Law-Twister?” asked One Punch, as the door closed behind Gentle Maiden. “Those other Shorties say it was all right for you to talk and hassle for them?”
“Well, yes…” said Mal. He gazed narrowly up into the large furry faces of One Punch and the Bluffer, trying to read their expressions. But outside of the fact that they both looked genial, he could discover nothing. The alien visages held their secrets well from human eyes.
“They agreed, all right,” said Mal, slowly. “But what they had to say to me sort of got me thinking. Maybe you can tell me—just why is it Clan Water Gap can’t hold its meeting right away instead of two weeks from now? Hold a meeting right now and the Clan could have an elected Grandfather before the afternoon’s half over. Then there’d be time to hold a regular Clan court, for example, between the election and sunset; and this whole matter of the orphan Shorties could be handled more in regular fashion.”