"Gordon R. Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

back-mountain clans who'd never seen a human before, picked him up. Heinie lost his head
completely. After all, he was never able to poke his nose outdoors without some Dilbian picking
him up to hear him yell for help. The Squeaking Squirt, they named him; very bad public relations
for us humans. Particularly when Gulark-ay, the Hemnoid in charge of their embassy locally here,
gets an advantageous handle hung on him like the Beer-Guts Bouncer. There he goes now, by the
way."
Joshua pointed out the office window that fronted on the main street of Humrog. Coming down its
cobblestones, John saw, a sort of enormous robed, Buddha-like parody of a human being. The Hemnoid
was a good eight feet in height, enormously boned, and while not as tall as the Dilbians
themselves, fantastically padded with heavy-gravity muscles. The Hemnoids, John remembered, came
from an original world with one-fourth again the gravity of Earth. Since Dilbia's gravity was
about a sixth less than Earth's, that gave humanity's chief and closest competitors quite an
advantage in this particular instance.
"He may stopтАФno, he's going past," said Joshua. "What was I saying? Oh, yes. Keep your head in all
situations. I assume someone who's won the decathlon in the All-Systems Olympics can do that."
"Well, yes," said John. "Of course, in biochemistry, nowтАФ"
"You will find the Dilbians primitive, touchy, and insular."
"I will?"
"Oh, yes. Definitely. Primitive. Touchy. And very much indifferent to anything outside their own
mountains and forests; although we've been in touch with them for thirty years and the Hemnoids
have for nearly twenty."
"I see. Well, I'll watch out for that," said John. "It struck me they wouldn't know much about
chemistry, to say nothing of biochemistryтАФ"
"On the other hand," Joshua brushed the neat ends of his small grey mustache with a thoughtful
forefinger, "you mustn't fall into the error of thinking that just because they look like a passel
of Kodiak bears who've decided to stand on their hind legs at all times and Dilbian system, as
I'm sure your hypno training didn't omit to inform you, is absolutely necessary as a supply and
reequipment stage for further expansion on any large scale beyond the Belt Stars. If the Hemnoids
beat us out here, they've got the thin end of a wedge started that could eventually chop our heads
off. Which they would be only too glad to do, you know."


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John sighed. It was the sigh of a very human, young, recent graduate in biochemistry who would
have liked nothing better than to live and let live.
"You'd think there'd be room enough in the universe for both of us."
"Apparently not, in the Hemnoid lexicon. You must read up on their psychology sometime.
Fascinating. They're actually less like us than the Dilbians are, in spite of their greater
physical resemblance."
"I understand they can be pretty dangerous."
"They've an instinctive streak of cruelty. Do you know what they used to do to the elderly among
their own people until just the last hundred years or so of their historyтАФ"
Beep, signaled the annuciator on Joshua's desk.
"Ah, that'll be Shaking Knees and Two Answers, in the outer office now," said the diplomat. "We'll
go on in." He knocked out his pipe and laid it, regretfully, in the carved wooden bowl among the
ashes.
"But what's it all about?" said John desperately. "I just got off the spaceship four hours ago.
You've been feeding me lunch, and talking about background; but you haven't told me what it's all