The Man In The Mailbag
Gordon R. Dickson
The Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, was smoking tobacco in a pipe. The fumes from it made John Tardy cough and strangle—or, at least, so it seemed.
“Sir?” wheezed John Tardy.
“Sorry,” said Joshua, knocking the pipe out in an ashtray where the coals continued to smolder only slightly less villainously than before.
“Thought you heard me the first time. I said that naturally as soon as we knew you were being assigned to the job, we let out word that you were deeply attached to the girl.”
“To—” John gulped air. Both men were talking Dilbian, to exercise the command of the language John had had hypnoed into him on his way here from the Belt Stars, and the Dilbian nickname for the missing Earthian female sociologist came from his lips automatically—“this Greasy Face?”
“Miss Ty Lamorc,” nodded Joshua, smoothly slipping into Basic and then out again. “Greasy Face, if you prefer. By the by, you mustn’t go taking all these Dilbian names at face value. The two old gentlemen you’re going to meet—Daddy Shaking Knees and Two Answers—aren’t what they might sound like. Daddy Shaking Knees got his name from holding up one end of a timber one day in an emergency—after about forty-five minutes, someone noticed his knees beginning to tremble. And Two Answers is a tribute to the Dilbian who can come up with more than one answer to a problem.”
About to ask Joshua about his own Dilbian nickname of Little Bite, John Tardy shifted to safe ground. “What about this Schlaff fellow who—”
“Heiner Schlaff,” interrupted Joshua Guy, frowning, “made a mistake. You’d think anyone would know better than to lose his head when a Dilbian picks him up. After the first time one picked up Heinie, he wasn’t able to step out onto the street without some Dilbian lifting him up to hear him yell for help. The Squeaking Squirt, they called him—very bad for Earth-Dilbian relations.” He looked severely at John. “I don’t expect anything like that from you.” The ambassador’s eye seemed to weigh John’s chunky body and red hair.
“No, no,” said John hastily.
...
