Spacepaw by Gordon R. Dickson Read Free Book Online Page B

of bread, and large wooden drinking containers.
    “What’s the matter, Pick-and-Shovel?” Bone Breaker inquired mildly, as the wooden vessels were being poured full of a dark brown liquid, which Bill’s nose told him was probably some form of native beer. “Nothing wrong with the food and drink, is there? Dig in.”
    “Quite right,” Mula- ay echoed the Dilbian with an oily chuckle, cramming his own large mouth full of bread and meat and lifting the wooden tankard to wash the mouthful down. “Best food for miles around.”
    “Not quite, Barrel Belly,” replied Bone Breaker, turning his deceptive mildness this time upon the Hemnoid. “I thought I told you. Sweet Thing is the best cook in these parts.”
    “Oh yes—yes,” agreed the Hemnoid hastily, swallowing with a gulp, and beaming hugely at the outlaw, “of course. How could it have slipped my mind? Good as this is, it isn’t a patch on what Sweet Thing could cook. Why, sure!”
    Bone Breaker, Bill thought, must possess an iron fist within the velvet glove of this apparent mildness of his, judging by the reaction of the Hemnoid. Now the black-furred outlaw’s eyes were coming back to Bill. Bill hastily picked up a chunk of meat and began gnawing on it. Oh well, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
    Conversation in general had ceased, not merely at their own head table, but about the hall, as the Dilbians present settled down to the serious business of eating. Their industry in performing that task was awesome enough from a human’s point of view. Bill had never thought of himself as a particularly light eater—in fact, at Survival School, he had been accused of just the opposite. But compared to these Dilbians, and to the Hemnoid at his left elbow, his performance as a trencherman was so insignificant as to seem ridiculous.
    To begin with, somewhere between six and eight pounds of boiled meat had been dumped upon his wooden plate, along with what looked like about the equivalent of two loaves of bread. The wooden flagon alongside his plate looked as if it could hold at least a quart or two of liquid, and it had been generously filled.
    After a first attempt at trying to keep up with the oversized appetites and capacities of those around him, Bill gave up. He scattered the food around on his plate as much as possible to make it look as if he had eaten, and resigned himself to pretending to be busy with the drinking flagon, which, as it became more and more empty, got easier to handle.
    He had just, somewhat to his own surprise, managed at last to drain the final mouthful of liquid from this oversized utensil and set it back down on the table, when to his dismay he saw Bone Breaker turn and lift a pawlike hand. One of the serving Dilbians came over and refilled the flagon.
    Bill gulped.
    “Very good. Very good,” gurgled Mula- ay , tossing off at a gulp his own refilled flagon, which if anything was a little bit bigger than Bill’s. “Our Shorty is quite an eater and drinker”— he added in a deprecating tone—“for a Shorty.”
    “Man don’t lick the world by filling his belly,” growled the Hill Bluffer.
    An instinct warned Bill against glancing appreciatively in the Bluffer’s direction. Nonetheless, he warmed inside, at this evidence of support by the lanky Dilbian.
    “But a man’s got to lick the world sometime,” said the Hemnoid, chuckling richly as if this was some rare kind of joke. “Isn’t that so, Pick-and-Shovel?”
    Bill checked himself on the verge of answering, and picked up his heavy drinking utensil in order to gain time.
    “Well …” he said, and put the vessel to his lips.
    As he pretended to swallow, over the circular wooden rim of the container, he unexpectedly caught sight of a small slim, non-Dilbian figure moving along next to a far wall, until it reached the big double doors which still stood open to the twilight without. It passed through those doors and was gone. But not before Bill, staring after it