He stepped up to the stone. There was a dead silence all around him. He could feel the sweat popping out on his face. What if the conclusions he had come to were all wrong? But he could not afford to think that now. He had to go through with the business, now that he’d spoken.
He curled his hands around the two ends of the iron rod from underneath and squatted down with his knees on either side of the rock. This was going to be different from ordinary weight lifting, where the weight was distributed on the outer two ends of the lifting bar. Here, the weight was between his fists.
He took a deep breath and lifted. For a moment, it seemed that the dead weight of the stone refused to move. Then it gave. It came up and into him until the near face of the rock thudded against his chest; the whole stone now held well off the ground.
So far, so good, for the first step. Now, for the second…
He willed strength into his leg muscles.
Up… he thought to himself… up… He could hear his teeth gritting against each other in his head. Up…
Slowly, grimly, his legs straightened. His body lifted, bringing the stone with it, until he stood, swaying, the weight of it against his chest, and his arms just beginning to tremble with the strain.
Now, quickly—before arms and legs gave out—he had to take the ten steps.
He swayed forward, stuck out a leg quickly, and caught himself. For a second he hung poised, then he brought the other leg forward. The effort almost overbalanced him, but he stayed upright. Now the right foot again… then the left… the right… the left…
In the fierceness of his effort, everything else was blotted out. He was alone with the stone he had to carry, with the straining pull of his muscles, the brightness of the sun in his eyes, and the savage tearing of the rod ends on his fingers, that threatened to rip themselves out of his grip.
Eight steps… nine steps… and… ten!
He tried to let the stone down easily, but it thudded out of his grasp. As he stood half-bent over it, it stuck upright in its new resting place in the grass, then half-rolled away from him, for a moment exposing its bottom surface completely, so that he could see clearly into the hole there. Then it rocked back upright and stood still.
Painfully, stiffly, Mal straightened his back.
“Well,” he panted, to the silent, staring Dilbians of Clan Water Gap, “I guess that takes care of that…”
Less than forty minutes later he was herding the three anthropologists back into their shuttle boat.
“But I don’t understand,” protested Harvey, hesitating in the entry port of the shuttle boat. “I want to know how you got us free without having to fight that big Dilbian—the one with the name that means Iron Bender?”
“I moved their law stone,” said Mal, grimly. “That meant I could change the rules of the Clan.”
“But they went on and elected One Punch as Clan Grandfather, anyway,” said Harvey.
“Naturally,” said Mal. “He’d given the most accurate judgment in advance—he’d foretold I’d win without laying a hand on Iron Bender. And I had. Once I moved the stone, I simply added a law to the ones Mighty Grappler had set up. I said no Clan Water Gapper was allowed to adopt orphan Shorties. So, if that was against the law, Gentle Maiden couldn’t keep you. She had to let you go and then there was no reason for Iron Bender to want to tangle with me.”
“But why did Iron Bender and Gentle decide to get married?”
“Why, she couldn’t go back to being just a single maiden again, after naming someone her protector,” Mal said. “Dilbians are very strict about things like that. Public opinion forced them to get married—which they wanted to do anyhow, but neither of them had wanted to be the one to ask the other to marry.”
Harvey blinked.
“You mean,” he said disbelievingly, “it was all part of a plot by Gentle Maiden, Iron Bender, and One Punch to use us for their own advantage? To get One Punch elected Grandfather, and the other two forced to marry?”
“Now, you’re beginning to understand,” said Mal, grimly. He started to turn away.
“Wait,” said Harvey. “Look, there’s information here that you ought to be sharing with us for the sake of science—”
“Science?” Mal gave him a hard look. “That’s right, it was science, wasn’t it? Just pure science, that made you and your friends decide on the spur of the moment to come down here. Wasn’t it?”
Harvey’s brows drew together.
“What’s that question supposed to mean?” he said.
“Just inquiring,” said Mal. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that the Dilbians are just as bright as you are? And that they’d have a pretty clear idea why three Shorties would show up out of thin air and start asking questions?”
“Why should that seem suspicious to them?” Ora Page stuck her face out of the entry port over Harvey’s shoulder.
“Because the Dilbians take everything with a grain of salt anyway—on principle,” said Mal. “Because they’re experts at figuring out what someone else is really up to, since that’s just the way they operate, themselves. When a Dilbian wants to go after something, his first move is to pretend to head in the opposite direction.”
“They told you that in your hypnotraining?” Ora asked.
Mal shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t told anything.” He looked harshly at the two of them and at the face of Rice, which now appeared behind Harvey’s other shoulder. “Nobody told me a thing about the Dilbians except that there are a few rare humans who understand them instinctively and can work with them, only the book-psychiatrists and the book-anthropologists can’t figure out why. Nobody suggested to me that our human authorities might deliberately be trying to arrange a situation where three book-anthropologists would be on hand to observe me—as one of these rare humans—learning how to think and work like a Dilbian, on my own. No, nobody told me anything like that. It’s just a Dilbian sort of suspicion I’ve worked out on my own.”
“Look here—” began Harvey.
“You look here!” said Mal, furiously. “I don’t know of anything in the Outspace Regulations that lets someone be drafted into being some sort of experimental animal without his knowing what’s going on—”
“Easy now. Easy…” said Harvey. “All right. This whole thing was set up so we could observe you. But we had absolute faith that someone with your personality profile would do fine with the Dilbians. And, of course, you realize you’ll be compensated for all this. For one thing, I think you’ll find there’s a full six-year scholarship waiting for you now, once you qualify for college entrance. And a few other things, too. You’ll be hearing more about them when you get back to the human ambassador at Humrog Town, who sent you here.”
“Thanks,” said Mal, still boiling inside. “But next time tell them to ask first whether I want to play games with the rest of you! Now, you better get moving if you want to catch that spaceliner!”
He turned away. But before he had covered half a dozen steps, he heard Harvey’s voice calling after him.
“Wait! There’s something vitally important you didn’t tell us. How did you manage to pick up that rock and carry it the way you did?”
Mal looked sourly back over his shoulder.
“I do a lot of weight lifting,” he said, and kept on going.
He did not look back again; and, a few minutes later, he heard the shuttle boat take off. He headed at an angle up the valley slope behind the houses in the village toward the stone of Mighty Grappler, where the Bluffer would be waiting to take him back to Humrog Town. The sun was close to setting, and with its level rays in his eyes, he could barely make out that there were four big Dilbian figures rather than one, waiting for him by the stone. A wariness awoke in him.