Link? You can tell Harl all your new ideas when we have dinner! I think it’s wonderful of you to think of things like this! You’ve no idea how important it will be! Excuse me now?”
She bustled away. Link ground his teeth. If Thistlethwaite escaped, he must, too. Thistlethwaite might carry out the bargain with Old Man Addison and try to astrogate back to Trent. The emergency wasn’t that he might not make it, but that he might.
Link made his way in the general direction of the tumult. It was dark inside the big building, now. Once away from the feeble oil-wick lamps, he seemed merely to run into walls and partly-opened doors and heavy, misplaced furniture. Once he heard a heavy clattering of small hoofs indoors, somewhere inside the building. A remarkable number of uffts seemed to be racing madly up stairs and down a hallway to the open air. The sound of their hoofs changed as they went out-of-doors. The noises from outside changed as they left the door open behind them. Link had heard only the background noise, a continual shrill yapping, but now he heard individual voices.
“Down with humans! Down With the Murderers of Interstellar Travelers! Uffts forever! Men go home!” There was a particularly loud outburst. “We want freedom! We want freedom!” Then a squealing from a myriad voices from small pig-like throats. “Yah! Yah! Yah! Men have hands! Yah! Yah! Yah!”
Link reached the open door. Darkness had fallen with the suddenness only observable in the tropics of some ten thousand planets. It occurred to him that the troop of uffts he’d heard in the building was probably Thistlethwaite’s special rescue squad. If they’d had to rush past or through a human guard at the doorway, such a guard would now be in poor condition to resist his own exit. And it was dark and there was enough confusion to cover one man, even a man supposed to be hanged, while he left the householder’s residence.
He was right. Starlight showed hundreds of small, rotund bodies galloping madly up and down the street, shrilling squealed insults at the human race in general and Harl in particular. There was one especial focus of tumult. Three men on unicorns were its center. They were apparently Harl’s retainers returning from a hunt for an alleged new deposit of bog-iron. They’d been caught in the village street by the suddenly erupting disorder. They were surrounded by uffts, running around them like a merry-go-round, squealing denunciations at the tops of their voices.
The retainers’ ungainly mounts tried to find a way through the squealing mob of uffts. But they were timorous. They lifted their large splay feet with a certain fearful suddenness and put them down with an attempt at delicacy. They managed to make their way along the ufft-covered street until they were almost opposite the doorway in which Link waited for a chance to leave without being instantly bowled over.
Then a unicorn made a misstep. A foot came down on an ufft. The galloping small animal squealed, “
The sound of uproar doubled. Link went out into the darkness, to escape. He saw torches burning where men were at work building something which was plainly a gallows. Until this instant they had taken the noise and galloping calmly. They’d continued to work, though from time to time they looked with mild interest at the milling, racing small creatures which raced up and down the street, making all the noise they possibly could.
But the stepped-on shrieking ufft, complaining to high heaven of the indignity put upon him, which did not lessen his speed or his voice, changed everything. Uffts came swarming more thickly than ever about the mounted men. They seemed to climb over each other to get closer to the unicorns and squeal more ferociously than before.
And the unicorns panicked. Link saw a huge, pillowy forefoot lift with an ufft clinging to it, biting viciously. The ufft let go and bounced off its fellows on the ground. Other uffts bit at the unicorns’ feet. One of them went down to its knees and its rider toppled off. The three awkward animals bolted. All three fled crazily from the village with gigantic, splay-footed strides. The man who’d been thrown was buried under squealing uffts, while the greater number of the demonstrators went galloping after the runaway unicorns. The riders of two unicorns tried frantically to control them, but the saddle of the third was empty.
Link heard the covered-up man swearing blood-curdlingly.
He found himself plunging toward his fellow human. Quite automatically, his hands grasped two ufftian hind- legs and threw two uffts away over the heads of their fellows. Two more. Two more. Squealings from the thrown uffts seemed suddenly to terrify those who had been most valiant and most vocal in the attack.
Link again threw away two more and two more still, and suddenly the creatures were running insanely in all directions. Some ran between his legs in wild, shrill terror. They jammed that opening and Link went down with a crash, still hanging on to a kicking hind-leg. The man he’d come to rescue continued to swear, now without uffts to muffle his words, which were remarkable. And there were men running to the scene with torches.
Link let go of the ufft he held captive. He had to, to get up. The ufft went streaking for the far horizon at the top of his voice. Harl came out of the Household, fuming.
“Sput!” he fumed. “Those uffts! They bit through the lashin’s of that whiskery man’s cage an’ let him loose! All this fuss was gettin’ him escaped! Sput! I was figurin’ on havin’ a real spectacular hangin’! An’ he’s got away!”
The man to whose rescue Link had gone now got to his feet. He spoke, with a depth of feeling and aptness of expression that put Harl’s indignation in the shade. His garments were shreds. He’d been nipped at until he was practically nude. The arriving torches even showed places where blood flowed from deeper nips than usual.
“And it was goin’ to be a swell hangin’,” mourned Harl indignantly. “Torchlight an’ stuff! I was just waitin’ for all the fellas to get back, and the fella had to escape! But there’s—”
He stared.
“Link!”
Chapter 6
“This,” said Link, at once with dignity and with passion, “this is no time to be fooling around with hangings!”
Harl blinked at him in the starlight.
“What’s the matter, Link? What’ you doin’ outside the house? That fella got away, but there’s—”
“Me, yes!” snapped Link. “But we can’t spare the time for that now! Get some men mounted! We’ve got to catch Thistlethwaite!”
“We don’t know where he went,” objected Harl.
“I do!” Link snapped at him. “He went to the ship! If for nothing else, to get some pants! Then he’ll go to Old Man Addison’s. The uffts’ll take him. He’ll make a business deal with him! A trade! A bargain!”
It was an absurd time and place for an argument. Men with torches lighted one small part of the street. They’d come to help a fellow human momentarily buried under swarming, squealing uffts. Link had gotten there first. Then Harl. Now Link, with clenched fists, faced Harl in a sort of passionate frustration.
“Don’t you see?” he demanded fiercely. “He was on Sord Three last year! He made a deal with Old Man Addison then! He’s brought a shipload of unduplied stuff to trade with Old Man Addison for dupliers! Don’t you see?”
Harl wrinkled his forehead.
“But that’d be… that wouldn’t be mannerly!” he objected. “That’d be—sput, Link! That’d be… business!”
He used the term as if it were one only to be used in strictly private consultation with a physician, as if it were a euphemism for something unspeakable.
“That’s exactly what it is!” rasped Link. “Business! And bad business at that! He’ll sell the contents of his ship to Old Man Addison and be paid in dupliers! And with the dupliers—”
“Sput!” Harl waved his hands. He bellowed, “Everybody out! Big trouble! Everybody out! Bring y’spears!”
Men came out of houses. Some of them wore shirts such as Link wore no longer. They were pleased with them. Since the article duplicated was relatively new, the replicas of it had all the properties of new shirts, though the raw stuff of the thread involved had previously had the properties of the centuries-old sample from which it had been duplied, and which hadn’t been new since before the art of weaving was forgotten. New-shirted retainers came out of houses to hear Link’s commands.
