Gordon Dickson The Right to Arm Bears

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watch woke him to the fact that he had less than four hours until the noon
meal, and it was right after that meal that he had promised to outdo the
village blacksmith. It was high time he was getting busy. He got up from his
chair before the power console panel of the communications equipment, and went
out of the room. He headed toward the storeroom containing the battery set at
the back of the Residency, where he hoped he would find what he needed.
Bill had very little trouble finding what he looked for first. He discovered
a coil of quarter-inch rope among the farming tools, and measured out and cut
off forty feet of it. Then he started to look for a second item an item he was
pretty sure he would not find.
Indeed, he did not. What he was looking for was nothing less than a
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ready-made block-and-tackle. But after some forty minutes had gone by without
his finding one, he realized he could spend no more time looking for it. He
would have to make his own block-and-tackle.
This was not as difficult as it might have seemed to someone with both a
theoretical and practical knowledge of such a simple machine. Earlier, as he
had stepped into the dim storeroom with its warehouselike smells of plastic
wrappings and paper boxes, he had identified a self-programming lathe over
against the wall in the one corner that seemed to be a general work area,
fitted out with several machines and a multitude of tools racked and hung
about the walls.
Now he hunted for some metal stock, but was not able to find what he wanted.
He would have to use something else. The outer walls of the Residency, like
the walls of most Dilbian buildings, were made of heavy logs. Detaching a
power saw from the tool rack on the work-area wall, Bill took it over to a
doorway in the back wall of the building. Opening the door, he used the power
saw to cut off a four-foot section of one of the logs that ended against the
frame of the doorway.
Bill took the log back to the lathe and cut it up into four sections,
approximately one foot in length and a foot in diameter. Then he put the
sections aside, and turned on the programming screen of the lathe. Picking up
the stylus he began to sketch on the screen the pulley-wheel sections that he
wanted to construct.
The parts took shape with approximate accuracy in three dimensions, and the
programming section of the lathe took it from there. Eventually a red light
lit up below the screen, revealing the black letters of the word "ready." Bill
pressed the replay button, and before him on the screen there appeared
completed and corrected, three-dimensional blueprints of the components for a
block-and-tackle.
The lathe was now prepared to go to work. Bill fed his log sections to it,
one by one, and ended up fifteen minutes later with twelve lathe-turned,
wooden parts which he proceeded to join into two separate units by wood-weld
processing. The first unit consisted of two double pulleys welded together, or
four movable pulleys. This was the fixed block and had a brake and lock as
well as a heavy wooden hook welded to the top of it. The other unit was the
movable block which contained three pulleys. The two units, combined with the
rope, together should give Bill a block-and-tackle with a lifting power seven
times whatever pull he could put upon the fall rope. Flat Fingers, being a
little bigger than most Dilbians, outweighed Bill by Bill calculated about
five to one. In other words, the village blacksmith could probably lift about
his own body weight of nine hundred pounds. However, the block-and-tackle Bill
had constructed gave him a seven-times advantage. Therefore, if he could put
upon the rope he would be holding a pull equal tohis own human body weight of
a hundred and sixty-five pounds, he should be able to lift well over a
half-ton. Bill looked at what he had constructed, feeling satisfied.
He looked at his wristwatch. The hands, recalibrated to Dilbian time, stood
at about half an hour short of noon. He was reminded, suddenly, that he had
had no breakfast, and no evening meal the day before except for the Dilbian
fare he had choked down in Outlaw Valley. He remembered seeing a well-stocked
kitchen in his earlier exploration of the Residency. He turned away from the
block-and-tackle, leaving it where it was on the workbench, and opened the
doorway to the hallway leading back to the living quarters of the building.
The hallway was dim, but as he stepped into it he thought he saw a flicker of
movement from behind the door as it opened before him.
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But that was all he saw. For a second later a smashing blow on the back of
his head sent him tumbling down and away into spark-shot darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, it was at first with the confused impression
that he was still asleep in his bed at the Residency. Then he became conscious
of a headache that gradually increased in intensity until it seemed to fit his
head like a skullcap, and, following this, he was made aware of a sickly taste
in his nose and mouth, as if he had been inhaling some sort of anesthetic gas.
Cautiously he opened his eyes. He found himself seated in a small woodland
clearing, by the banks of a stream about fifteen or twenty feet wide. The dell
was completely walled about by underbrush, beyond which could be seen the
trunks and the trees of the forest.
He blinked. For before him, seated crosslegged like an enormous Buddha on the
ground with his robe spread about him, was Mula-ay. Seeing himself recognized,
the Hemnoid produced one of his rich, gurgling chuckles.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, ah Pick-and-Shovel," said
Mula-aycheerfully. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to come
to." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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