The man stopped and turned as Bill ran up to the ship. Anita, who had been just about to go in through the hatch, also stopped, turned and waitedthereby presenting Bill with a small problem. He had wanted a clear ring for his encounter with the tall man.
"If . . . you don't mind," said Bill, stammering a little with breathlessness from his run, "this is a private . . ."
"Oh, all right!" she exploded furiously. "Go on, make a perfect fool of yourself! See if I care!"
She turned and stamped up the steps, through the hatch and into the ship. Bill looked after her, unhappily. There was the sound of a chuckle behind him.
"I wouldn't worry about it," said the voice of the tall man. "She'll come around shortly."
Bill turned sharply. Facing him was the same lean, long-nosed figure he had first met as the reassignment officer who had changed his course from Deneb-Seventeen to Dilbia. The man was smiling with an altogether unjustified cheerfulness. Bill did not smile back.
"What makes you so sure?" Bill snapped.
"For one thing," answered the tall man, "the fact I know her better than you do. For another, I know some other facts you don't know. For one thing, it's a pretty fair guess she's in love with you."
"Shewhat?" said Bill, jerking himself up in mid-sentence. He goggled at the tall man.
"She can't help it," said the tall man, the smile spreading across his face under the long nose. "You see, at heart she's a Dilbian. And so are you."
"Dilbian?" Bill was completely adrift on a sea of bafflement.
"Oh, your body and mind are human enough," said the tall man. "But you're strongly Dilbianespecially you, Billin your personality characteristics. Both of you were carefully chosen for that. You've got roughly the personality of a Dilbian hero-type, as closely as a human can have it. And Anita has a complementary Dilbian heroine-personality. You can hardly help being attracted to each other"
"Oh?" interrupted Bill, grimly cutting the other short and hauling the conversation back to the main topic he had in mind. "Let's forget that for the moment, shall we? You're Lafe Greentree, aren't you?"
"I'm afraid so," said the tall man, still smiling.
"You never were a reassignment officer? And you never really did break your leg, did you?"
"No, I'm afraid those were both bits of necessary misinformation we had to give you." Greentree laughed. "And it was worth itwhat you've done here is breathtaking. You see, you were being used without your knowing it"
"I figured that out, thanks," said Bill harshly. "In fact I figured out a little more than you figured I would. I know what the real story was here, and I can guess from that what kind of a scheme you sold your superiors on, to get me assigned here. Mula-ay told me I was thrown in here, all untrained and unbriefed, deliberately to mess up the situation and give you a chance to close down a stalemated project without losing face. That's the idea you sold your superiors on. But what you had in mind was a little bit more than that, wasn't it?"
The smile faded into a puzzled look on Greentree's long face.
"More than that" he began.
"That's right!" snapped Bill. "You didn't just want me to mess things up here; you wanted me killed!"
"I wanted you killed?" repeated Greentree, in a tone of astonishment. "But Mula-ay wouldn't try anything like that, unless"
"I'm not talking about Mula-ay and you know it," snarled Bill. "I'm talking about Bone Breaker and the duel!"
"But we never thought you'd actually fight the duel!" protested Greentree. "All you had to do was hole up in the Residency. Bone Breaker and his outlaws wouldn't have come into the village after you. You'd have been quite safe"
"Sure," said Bill, "that's what you told your superiors, wasn't it? Only you knew better. You knew that I'd have been gotten to that duel if Sweet Thing had to kidnap me herself and carry me to it!"
"Sweet Thing?" said Greentree. "What's Sweet Thing got to do with it?"
"Don't try to pretend you didn't know. Anita didn't knowI thought at first she did, but it was plain she didn't understand the male Dilbians at all. She thought More Jam was just a figure of fun, instead of being the leading male in the Village. And Mula-ay didn't know. But you must have figured it out some time before and realized that you'd been doing things exactly the wrong way around with the Dilbians. Officially, the Alien Cultures Service couldn't fault you for not finding out sooner how the Dilbians workedbut unofficially, the way you'd been made a fool of would have been a joke from one end of the Service rankings to the other. And that joke could just about kill any hopes of promotion for you, later. So you set me up to be killedso the project wouldn't merely be closed `temporarily' but hushed up, and its records buried in the files; and that way no one would find out how you'd been fooled!"
"Wait a minute" said Greentree bewilderedly. "As I said, you've been used here without your permission or knowledge. I admit that. But the rest of all thisI give you my word I'm no more a villain than Anita is, except that I knew why you were sent here and she didn't. Now, what's all this about Sweet Thing carrying you to that duel with Bone Breaker?"
"As if you didn't know!" snapped Bill, getting hold of himself just in time as his voice threatened to scale upward to a shout that would be heard inside the courier ship. "Do you think you can talk me out of what I know? You set me up too beautifully for it to be an accident; and if you set me up, you had to have the Dilbians figured out; and if you'd figured them out, you couldn't help knowing just what Bone Breaker was after!"
"I don't"
"Oh, cut it out!" said Bill. "You know it as well as I do. Bone Breaker wanted to quit outlawing and settle down before he began to lose his speed and strength. He wanted to quit and become a villager while he was still on top, but he couldn't just abdicate as outlaw leader without a good reasonunless he wanted to lose face, tremendouslyand face is what the Dilbian community runs on. So he settled on marrying Sweet Thing; and More Jam, by way of dowry, cooked up a scheme to get him out of being outlaw chief without loss of face."
"What scheme?" Interest had begun to dawn on Greentree's face beneath the frown of puzzlement.
"You know!" growled Bill. "All Dilbia knew that a Dilbianthe Streamside Terrorhad once fought a human and lost, so, More Jam planned to get Bone Breaker in a duel with a human, so Bone Breaker could pretend to lose, too. Since it would be a human he'd be losing to, he'd still be top dog among his fellow Dilbians; but he could use the loss as an excuse to give up outlawing, and go to live in Muddy Nose. It was you More Jam planned on Bone Breaker fighting, but you saw the duel coming, so you ducked out and got me stuck with it instead. That was supposed to kill two birds with one stoneget the project closed up, and also get you off Dilbia before the duel took place. Because if you went through with the duel and survived, you'd have to explain to your superiors how you did itand the whole business of your understanding the Dilbians and keeping the fact a secret would come out!"
Bill stopped. Greentree was staring at him strangely.
"Admit it!" demanded Bill. "I've got you cold and you know it!" But, though his words were angry as ever, a slight uneasiness was beginning to stir in Bill. It was incredible that Greentree could go on pretending to be innocent this way, in the face of what Bill had told him. Unless he really was innocentbut with what Bill knew, that was impossible.
"Maybe you'll tell me," said Greentree in an odd voice, "just what it wasthis understanding of the Dilbians you say I have?"
"You know!" snarled Bill.
"Tell me anyway," urged Greentree.
"All right, if you want it spelled out, so you can be sure I've seen through the whole thing!" said Bill furiously. "What you found out was what I finally figured outjust in time to tip off Bone Breaker that I understood, by pushing the duel through after all. If he hadn't understood that I understood, he might have had to make a real fight out of it. Just to make sure I didn't tell the other Dilbians afterward that he'd deliberately lost to me. And that a real duel would have left me very dead indeed!"
"But," said Greentree, "you still haven't told me what this knowledge about the Dilbians was."
"Why, it's their different way of doing everything, of course!" burst out Bill, exasperated. "A Dilbian never lies, except in desperate circumstances"
"We know that" began Greentree. "It's a capital offence under the tribal laws in the mountains"
"But he never tells the exact, whole truth, either, if he can possibly twist it or distort it to give a different impression!" said Bill. "He admits nothing, and acknowledges nothing. He exaggerates in order to minimize, and minimizes in order to exaggerate. He blusters and brags when he wants to be modest, and he practically quivers with modesty and meekness when he's issuing his strongest warning to another Dilbian to back off or prepare for trouble. In shortthe Dilbians do everything backward, inside out, and wrong-way-to, on principle!"
Greentree's face lit up.
"So that's how" he broke off, sobering. "No, that can't be the answer. We concluded a long time back that the Dilbians had some kind of overall political system, or understanding, that they wouldn't admit tothey worked too well together as individuals and communities for them not to have something like that. But what you're talking about can't be the answer. No political system could exist"
"What're you talking about?" said Bill harshly. "They've got a perfect political system. What they've got here on Dilbia is a one hundred percent, simon-pure, classic democracy. Nobody tells anybody else what to do among the Dilbians. Under cover of a set of apparently iron-clad visible rules like that one about not lying, there's a set of invisible, changeable rules that really govern their actions. Also, no matter what the circumstances, every Dilbian has an equal right to persuade any other Dilbian to agree with him. If he gets a majority to agree, the new invisible, unacknowledged rule that results is applied to all Dilbians. That's what makes More Jam and Bone Breaker top dogs in their communitythey're champion persuadersin short, makers of invisible laws."
Greentree stared.
"That's hard to believe," he said, at last, slowly. "After all, as chief outlaw, Bone Breaker headed a strong-arm band"
"Which only took from the villagers what the villagers could spare!" snapped Bill. "And if they took more, the villager complained to Bone Breaker who made the outlaws who took it give it back."
"But obviously"
"Obviously!" Bill snorted. "The whole point of the way the Dilbians do things is that whatever is obvious is a smoke screen for the real thing" he broke off suddenly. "What're you doing here? Trying to make me sound as if I'm telling you all this? You know as well as I do the Dilbians were running a test case on you and Mula-ay, to see which of you would win out in the endinstead of you and he competing to sway the primitive natives to your side, as you thought at firstand that was the joke you wanted so badly to bury. Even if you had to get me killed to do it."
"A test case?" Greentree had stared at Bill before during this conversation, but not the way he stared now. "A test case?"
"You know that," said Bill, but with suddenly lessening conviction. Either, he began to think, Greentree was telling the truthor he was the best actor ever born.
"Tell me," said Greentree in a hushed voice.
"Why . . . the whole idea of the agricultural project in updating Dilbian farming methods was a debatable question. The Dilbians wondered if the advantages you claimed for it were all true, or if there weren't hidden disadvantages. So they took sidesthe way they always do. The villagers took your side, and those who took the other joined the outlaws and cosied up to Mula-ay. Then they all sat back to see which onehuman or Hemnoidwould break the stalemate wide open in his own favor. Look," said Bill, almost pleading now. "You know this. You know all this!"
Greentree slowly shook his head.
"I swear to you," he said, slowly, "I give you my wordI didn't know it. No one in the Alien Cultures Service knew it!"
It was Bill's turn to stare now.
"But" he said after a long moment, "if you didn't know, how could I find out"
He checked, baffled. Looking again at Greentree, he saw the beginnings of a smile starting to dawn again beneath the long nose.
"I'll tell youif you'll listen now," said Greentree.
"Go ahead," said Bill, cautiously.
"You found out" began Greentree, and the smile was breaking out now like gleeful sunshine across the tall man's face, "because you're the most unique subject of the most important experiment in the duplication of alien psychologies that's ever been tried!"
Bill scowled suspiciously.
"It's the truth!" said Greentree energetically. "I was going to tell you all about itbut you started talking and now it turns out that you're even more of a success than we dreamed you'd be. You see, you were sent here to Dilbia to break up a stalemate between the project and Hemnoid opposition. And you've done thatbut you've also given us a whole new understanding of Dilbian nature, and proved that we've got a tool in dealing with other alien races that the Hemnoids can't match!"
Bill scowled harder. It was all he could think of to do, in view of the tall man's words.
"You weren't just pitched into the Dilbian situation without consideration," Greentree said. "But somebody else once was. It was John Tardy, the one the Dilbians called the Half-Pint-Posted. It was sheer accident, and our lack of understanding of the Dilbians, that caused him to be caught in an impossible situationfaced with a fight against the Streamside Terror, and the Terror really wanted to win his fight."
"I don't get it, then," said Bill feebly.
"Well you see," said Greentree, "John Tardy managedalmost miraculouslyto come out on top. He managed to win his battle with the Terror and solve the situation. It was something that by all the rules simply could not have happened. And figuring out how it could have happened became a Number One priority project that took several years. Finally, they came up with an answera sort of an answer."
"What?"
"The one thing that came out of all the investigation," said the tall man, with deep seriousness, "was the fact that John Tardy by accident happened to fit the Dilbian personality very closely with his own. The point was raised that he had perhaps been able to solve his situation on Dilbia because he was able to think more like Dilbians than the rest of us. In short, that perhaps he had been just exactly the right man in the right place at the right moment. And a new concept was born; a concept called the Unconscious Agent."
"Unconscious" even the words sounded silly in Bill's mouth.
"That's right," said Greentree. "Unconscious Agent. A man who's had absolutely no briefingand therefore has no visible ties to his superiors, but who so exactly fits the situation he meets and the personalities in that situation, that he's ideally fitted to improvise a solution to it. The difference between an Unconscious, and an ordinary, Agent is something like that between the old-fashioned sea-diver with his helmet and air hose tethering him to a pump on the surface, and a free-swimming scuba diver of the mid-twentieth century."
Bill shook his head again.
"The Unconscious Agent isn't only free to improvise," went on Greentree. "He's forced to improvise. And, being ideally suited to the situation and the characters in it, he can't failwe hopeto come up with the ideal solution."
The last two words of this penetrated deeply into Bill.
"You hope" he echoed bitterly. "So I was an Unconscious Agent, was I?"
"That's right," said Greentree. "The first oneof what will probably be many, now. Of course, we insured our bet on you by supplying you with a hypnoed storehouse of general Dilbian information and another complementary Dilbian-like human who was Anita. But the solution was all your own. And now I'm finding out you've also come up with an insight into the Dilbian character and culture we've never had before. But best of all is that you've proved the workability of something we have that the Hemnoid can't match."
Bill frowned.
"Why?" he asked. "You meanthey can't find and send in personality-matched Unconscious Agents of their own? Why?"
"Because of a lack in their own emotional structure!" Greentree's smile hardened a little. "Don't you know? The Hemnoid character has a cruel streak (as we would call it) that prohibits their having anything but the most rudimentary capacity for empathy. Empathythe ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes, emotionally. That's what we humans have, that they haven't. And that's why your likeness to the Dilbians paid off the way it did. Your being like them wouldn't have helped, if you hadn't instinctively tried to think the way they did, in order to figure out what they were doing!"
Of course, thought Bill, suddenly. All at once he remembered his first clue to the fact that perhaps there was more to Dilbian nature than even a trained Hemnoid agent like Mula-ay seemed to know. He remembered how Mula-ay had taken it for granted that Bill did not empathize with someone like Bone Breaker, and had even used that as an example in explaining his own, Hemnoid nature. But Greentree was still talking.
"if you only knew," he was saying to Bill, "how many millions of individuals on Earth and even on the newly settled worlds were screened to find you, as the closest Dilbian-like human. And how much of our future dealings with alien races has been riding on your success or failure here. Did you know you can just about write your own ticket as far as future work or study goes, after this? Did you know at the moment you're currently the most valuable man off-Earth in the whole Alien Cultures area . . ."
He went on talking, and slowly Bill's spirits began to rise, in spite of himself, like a cork released in deep water and headed for the surface. Within himselfthough he was far from admitting it to Greentree, yethe had to face the fact that he was not the revengeful type, and if there had been a shadow of an excuse for what he had believed Greentree had done, he would probably never have pushed matters to the point of filing charges against the tall man, anyway. Particularly since, after all, Bill had come out of the situation on Dilbia without harm, and even with some benefits in the way of new knowledge and experience.
Certainly, therefore, now that it was turning out that there were strong extenuating circumstances, there was no reason why he shouldn't sit back and ride with the situation. Was that his Dilbian-like nature counseling him how to act? As he stopped to question himself, suddenly a new aspect of the situation burst upon him like sunlight through an unexpected break in a heavy cover of clouds.
If he was Dilbian-like and Anita was Dilbian female-like, he saw at once why she had been so intractable and upset these last few days. Of course! Here, when he was in charge of the situation, he had been going around pretending he had done nothing, and was nothingat just the time when Anita had expected him to show his authority and strength.
Sweet Thing, now that he stopped to think of it, had provided him with considerable insight into the way Anita's mind might be working. He woke from his thoughts to find that Greentree was shaking his hand and saying good-bye.
" . . . You'll understand in the long run, Bill, I know," the tall man was saying. "I've got to go now. Somebody's got to hold down the situation at the project here, for the moment. But I'll be following you and Anita to Earth shortly. We'll talk some more then. So long . . ."
"Good-bye," said Bill. He watched the tall man move off towards the woods where Barrel BellyWasn't Drunk, that is, Bill corrected himselfwas still standing disconsolately. Poor old Mula-ay, thought Bill; he was the real loserand the only real villain there had been in the whole situation. But then Bill shivered, suddenly, remembering the episode with Grandpa Squeaky; and, later on, the cliff-edge above Outlaw Valley, where only a light shove from the Hemnoid had been needed to send Bill plunging to his death. Mula-ay had been a real enough villain and enemy, at that. Bill shifted his gaze to another part of the meadow. The sun was moving into later afternoon position between the trees, and Bone Breaker, having finished his talk with the smaller Dilbian male, was finally headed off toward Muddy Nose and his dinner table. Bill stared after the big Dilbian, his attention suddenly caught.
"Bill!" It was Anita's voice calling exasperatedly from the open hatch of the courier ship behind him. "Come on! We're ready to go!"
"Just a minute!" he shouted back.
He squinted impatiently against the sunlight, striving to catch the tall figure of Bone Breaker in silhouette again. Yes, there it was. There was no doubt about it.
Marriage was apparently being good to the Bone Breaker. It was visible only when you caught him blackly outlined against the sun this way, but it was undeniably a fact, all the same.
Bone Breaker had begun to put on weight.