Spacepaw by Gordon R. Dickson Page A

message to Bone Breaker that you were coming, you’d have been committed to a duel with Bone Breaker right now! Do you know why you aren’t? Because the moment I heard, I went to Bone Breaker and told him that I was enjoying my visit here with the females and I wasn’t going to leave for anybody! You couldn’t very well fight over my being here after that!”
    “No,” said Bill grimly. “But as it happens, I wasn’t planning to. Meanwhile, you’re still stuck here, Greenleaf is off-planet, and I’m left with a Residency and a project I’ve been drafted to and don’t know anything about. I’m not one of your agricultural or sociological trainee-assistants. My field’s mechanical engineering. What do I do—”
    “Well, you find that out for yourself,” she said. “Just call Lafe and ask him—”
    “The communications equipment’s dead. It won’t work.”
    She stared at him.
    “It can’t be,” she said at last. “You just didn’t get it turned on right.”
    “Of course I got it turned on right!” said Bill stiffly. “It’s not working, I tell you!”
    “Of course it’s working. It has to work! Go back and try it again. And that’s the point—” she said, checking herself suddenly. “The point is, you shouldn’t ever have come here in the first place. Common sense should have told you—”
    “Sweet Thing said you needed rescuing from Bone Breaker.”
    “Did you have to believe her, just like that? Honestly!” said Anita, on an exasperated note. “You should have immediately called Lafe—”
    “I tried to. I tell you—” said Bill, almost between his teeth, “the communications equipment doesn’t work!”
    “I tell you it does! It worked when I left for the valley here, two days ago—and what could have happened to it since? Wait—” Anita held out a hand in the gathering dusk to stop him as he was about to explode into speech. She lowered her own voice to a more reasonable tone. “Look, let’s not fight about it. The situation here is too important. The point is, I’ve saved you from fighting Bone Breaker. Now, the thing for you to do is get back to the village as fast as you can, and stay there. Get busy at your real job.”
    “What real job?” ejaculated Bill, staring at her.
    “Organizing the villagers to stand up all together to the outlaws, of course!”
    “What!”
    “That’s right.” She lowered her voice still further, until it barely carried to his ears. “Listen to me—ah—Mr. Waltham—”
    “Call me Pick-and-Shov—I mean, Bill,” answered Bill, lowering his own voice in turn. “What are we whispering for?”
    She glanced around them at the gathering dusk.
    “That Hemnoid understands English as well as you or I understand Hemnoid,” she murmured. “Let me explain a few things to you about Project Spacepaw—Bill.”
    “I wish you would,” said Bill, with deep emotion.
    “Oh, stop it! There’s no need to keep getting a chip on your shoulder!” said Anita. “Listen to me now. This started out here as a perfectly ordinary agricultural project, taking advantage of the fact that when the original Human-Hemnoid Non-Interference Treaty on Dilbia was signed, neither the Hemnoids nor we knew that there were any sizable Dilbian communities that weren’t organized and disciplined by the clan structure you find among the Dilbians in the mountains—where ninety percent of the native population lives.”
    “I know that,” interrupted Bill. “I spent five days on the way here wearing a hypno-helmet. I can even quote the part about the project aims. The project name ‘Spacepaw,’ refers to the hope of giving technology a foothold among the Dilbians—literally translated into Dilbian, it comes out meaning ‘helping hand from the stars’—except that since the Dilbians consider themselves to be the ones who have hands—Shorties and the Fatties are referred to as having ‘paws.’ I already know all about that. But I was sent here to teach the