Lost and Found

by Alan Dean Foster

  As it developed, they had gone to cover just in time.

  “I hear something,” he whispered to her. A tentacular gesture he had come to recognize showed that she heard it as well.

  There were two of them: tall, skin shading from deep purple to lavender on the sucker-lined arm and leg flaps. One wore the same pewter-hued oversuit familiar to George from when he had been abducted. The other was clad in attire that was new to him: a kind of dark orange vestment to which clung via some equivalent of Vilenjjian Velcro an assortment of portable instrumentation.

  From their hiding place, the escapees watched as the two Vilenjji continued on down the accessway. Reaching an apparently blank place in the wall at the end of the corridor, they paused for a moment until an opening appeared, allowing them to step through. The doorway closed behind them, leaving in its wake what appeared to be solid metal.

  “We will have to proceed with far greater caution here.” Sque was carefully edging out from beneath their hiding place. “We have moved from the realm of machines into a part of the vessel that is actually inhabited.”

  As he emerged, George unconsciously sidled closer to the K’eremu. “Do you still think we have a chance of bringing this off? If we try accessing anyplace sensitive, won’t we run into some of them?”

  She eyed him tolerantly. “Despite the size of this craft, I do not believe there are so very many Vilenjji on it. The operational details of travel between the stars remains the province of machines that can carry out the steady stream of requisite intricate functions without the well-meaning interference of clumsy organics. Particularly since they are engaged in a highly illegal enterprise, I would think that the complement of this crew is not very large. When faced with an emergency such as we hope to engender, they will be compelled to rely for rectification, at least at first, on their mechanicals. Properly anticipated, that can be to our advantage.” She moved out into the light.

  George instinctively held back. “Hey, where are you going?”

  Continuing to advance on her tentacles, she turned her upper body to look back at him. “Nothing is to be gained by clinging to the shadows. We seek not places to hide, but places to act. In lieu of access to relevant instrumentation, we must find something of significance that we can break—or break into.”

  Trotting out of the darkness, the dog quickly caught up to her. She was agile, but not very fast. From what he had learned of the K’eremu, boldness was something he had not expected from her. But then, aliens were full of surprises.

  It took several days of searching, occasionally ducking back into the maze of machinery to hide from promenading Vilenjji, before Sque let out a cross between a squeal and a hiss that George later learned was the K’eremu equivalent of an expression of surprise.

  They were standing before what looked like a three-dimensional representation of a neon sign that had collided with a truckload of predecorated Christmas trees. In the course of their cautious explorations they had encountered several similar softly humming fabrications, but without exception they had been much smaller—no larger than mailbox size. This one was big enough for a pair of Vilenjji to enter. It was also the first one to have sparked visible excitement in his companion.

  “What is it?” he asked dutifully.

  Sque’s eyes had expanded slightly in their recesses. “A control box. A significant one. If fortune favors us, the one that we seek.” She started forward.

  “Wait a minute.” The dog looked around nervously. “What if it’s protected by an alarm or something?”

  “Why should it be?” The K’eremu spoke without looking back at him. “Who would it be alarmed against? Escaped captives? There is no such thing as escaped captives. Keep watch while I work.”

  Ready to bolt at the first sign of alarm, George followed her progress as she ambled into the lambent control box. There was a slight frisson in the air as she entered, but that was all. Once inside, she began to study the floating, semisolid lights and lines that constituted the actual controls.

  She need not have asked George to stand watch. He would have done so automatically, since as soon as she entered the control area her attention became totally focused on the airy instrumentation surrounding her. All around them, vast complexes of machinery labored to provide not only for the health and well-being of the abductees held in the enclosures one level above, but for the Vilenjji as well.

  If asked, he could not have estimated how much time passed before Sque turned to call back to him. “I have divined an interesting sequence. I will not explain it to you, since your small mind could not follow the pertinent progressions. You do not need to know or to understand it, anyway. Sufficient to say that I believe I can activate it.”

  “Then what happens?” George demanded to know.

  Those tentacles she did not need to stand upon rose in unison. “If all goes well, chaos.” Expanding slightly, then contracting, she exited the control box. “Now we need to find access to the level above.”

  “What about an air shaft, or something like that?” George asked as he trotted alongside her.

  “Use what minimal mental capacity you have.” She shuffled forward impatiently, eyes scanning the high-ceilinged corridor ahead, ever alert for signs of approaching Vilenjji. “You and I could possibly pass through such small conduits, but our friends who await us above could not. We must find a route back to this place that is satisfactorily large enough for both of them—the more so for the Tuuqalian than for your biped.”

  As it happened, a seemingly solid wall at the end of the corridor provided the kind of evaporating door they had observed in use before. As they approached, an opening appeared that was large enough to easily accommodate a Vilenjji. If he bent slightly and turned sideways, it would also allow entry to the hulking Tuuqalian. As soon as they stepped back, the door “closed.”

  “This will do.” A tentacle reached up to rest on George’s head. Though it was cooler than a human palm, the dog did not shake it off. “Now it is up to you.” Another tentacle gestured. “Once you exit here, turn to your immediate left. A few strides should find you in the inspection corridor that circles the enclosures. Find our friends and bring them back here.”

  “Nothing to it,” George replied boldly. “Then what? We all hide from the Vilenjji together?”

  “A beginning,” the K’eremu admitted, “that may, with luck, lead to better things.”

  Following her back to the control box, tongue lolling nervously, the dog nodded. “Right now I’ll settle for being out of the cage. How will I know when to start my run? Will you give me a wave, or something?”

  “You will know,” Sque assured him. “Just do not get caught.” She gestured at the underlevel maze of machinery. “The thought of wandering all alone through this vessel for the rest of my days does not appeal to me.”

  “What?” he said as she reentered the haze of hovering controls. “You mean you’d actually miss the company of mentally deficient individuals like Marc and myself?”

  “I did not say that—exactly,” she murmured. Then she began thrusting tentacles about, occasionally turning a circle as she worked. To an outsider it appeared as if she was gesticulating aimlessly. Except that when intersected by her weaving appendages, lines of control came alive with different colors, while others shifted position within the box.

  When the lights went out, he was ready.

  As he charged for the doorway, all four legs pumping furiously, he had a bad moment when it occurred to him that Sque might also have shut down automatic portals. But it opened readily for him as soon as he drew near. A high-pitched shrilling filled his ears. Ignoring the screeching Vilenjji klaxon as he burst through the opening, his paws skidding on the slick floor, he rumbled into the first turn and focused on utilizing the emergency glow that emanated from the floor itself to find his way.

  Then it was up the rippling ramp Sque had told him to expect; and before he knew it, he was looking at the enclosures for the first time in many day
s, only with a significant difference. He was looking at them from the outside.

  Which way? He thought he had properly oriented himself before starting out. But the combination of screaming alarm, poor visibility, his own excitement, the first sharp turn, and then the ascent up the ramp to a higher level had disoriented him. Skidding to a halt in front of the Jalalik enclosure, he found himself eye to eye with its bemused monocular occupant. Flexible lower jaw nearly touching the ground, the single Jalalik stared back. The implanted translator conveyed its words.

  “How there, not here, small pleasant one?” Its bewilderment helped to clarify his own.

  Already, the corridor resounded with more than the sounds of the shrill alarm. George knew he could not linger. “Going for a walk!” he shot back as he made a choice and bolted rightward. “Give it a try!”

  As the dog disappeared down the corridor, the willowy figure of the bemused Jalalik flowed to the innermost limit of its enclosure. Tentatively, it thrust a bony, almost skeletal finger outward. It passed through the boundary normally delineated by a curtain of nerve-tingling energy. As it thrust forward, the Jalalik followed, until like the dog it, too, was standing in the previously inaccessible corridor. With a quick look in both directions, it began to run, taking the opposite direction from the small quadruped. Very soon it turned up a rampway, its long, slim legs pumping with the sheer inexpressible joy of the gallop.

  The more enclosures he passed, the more anxious George became. A few still contained their residents. Shocked and mystified, these confused captives refused to abandon their individually engineered ecosystems, unable to grasp the significance of what had happened, of the fact that the seemingly everlasting electrical barriers that had kept them securely penned up ever since their abductions had ceased to function. But most of the enclosures, and presumably the grand enclosure as well, were empty, as their elated occupants scattered in all directions.

  Then he saw Walker. Wearing a harried yet exultant expression, the human stood in the middle of the corridor, striving to avoid being trampled by the stampede of freed captives. When he saw George speeding toward him, his face lit up in a smile the likes of which the dog had never seen before. Without thinking, without hesitation, the mutt bounded into the human’s open arms and began licking his face, wetly and noisily.

  “All right, all right. I’m glad to see you, too. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would, again.” Gently, he set the dog down on the deck and wiped at his face with the back of one forearm. “Couldn’t you just shake hands?”

  “My style of greeting, take it or leave it. At least I didn’t French you.” Reunion over, he resumed his run up the corridor. “We can get soppy later. Right now we need to find Braouk!”

  Walker hurried after him. “Wait a minute! Where’s Sque?”

  “Tickling the light proactive!” the dog yelled back to him. “And waiting for us.”

  “Look out!” George found himself yelling a moment later as the first Vilenjji he had seen since the deactivation burst out of a side corridor and came rushing toward him.

  He sounded the warning just in time. The alien flew over him with room to spare, but had he not called out a warning it would have slammed into Walker, who was working hard to keep up, with crushing impact. As it was, the human threw himself to one side just in time to avoid the flying purplish mass. The Vilenjji, however, was not attacking. It was not even in control of itself. This was shown by the force with which it landed on the corridor floor, bounced, and rolled over several times before lying still, its arm and leg flaps splayed loosely around it. On closer inspection, the panting Walker decided that dislocated might be a better description.

  Joining back up with George, he resumed running up the curving corridor, until a roar that shook the walls brought them up short. It was thunderous. It was overpowering. It was downright poetical.

  “Perish the foul, to the darkness damning, I send!” A steady drumming counterpointed the words.

  Advancing with instinctive caution, man and dog found their friend. As soon as they saw him, the source of the drumming sound as well as the versing became immediately apparent.

  Effortlessly swinging the heavy Vilenjji by one of its under-limbs, the Tuuqalian was repeatedly slamming the alien skull-first against the corridor wall. Or rather, had been, as there was no longer much of the alien’s tapering brainpan remaining. That did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm with which the Tuuqalian continued to swing the broken body.

  “Braouk!” Walker moved as close as he could without getting himself brained by the very airborne, very dead Vilenjji. “It’s me, Marcus Walker! The human.” He indicated the eager quadruped at his side. “George has come back. He says we need to go with him!”

  “Now,” the dog added as sternly as he could.

  Slowly, the Tuuqalian stopped swinging the dead Vilenjji, letting the lifeless mass dangle from one pair of cablelike tentacles. “Walker. George. Much pleasure given, it is to me, seeing again.” He started toward them.

  “You can leave that.” Walker nodded in the direction of the mush-headed Vilenjji whose lower limb the Tuuqalian still gripped unbreakably.

  “Ah, yes.” Letting the flaccid corpse fall limply to the deck, Braouk rejoined his friends.

  Sque’s prediction had been correct. As human and Tuuqalian joined George in retracing the dog’s route, all around them was chaos, the noise and confusion compounded by the unceasing shrieking of the Vilenjji alarm. Vitalized by unexpected freedom, captives ran, crawled, slithered, and in at least one case, glided wherever they could. Their efforts were ultimately futile, of course. Trapped on the ship, with nowhere to go, they were each and every one doomed to recapture and reincarceration. So were Walker and his friends, but they were determined to postpone that seeming inevitability for as long as possible. And unlike their fellow captives, they had discovered a prospective means for doing so.

  The ramp that led downward lay directly ahead. But instead of following George, Walker literally skidded to a halt on the slick floor.

  “What are you doing?” With Braouk looming over him, an anxious George paused at the top of the ramp to look back at his friend.

  “Just a quick piece of unfinished business.” Ignoring the dog’s protesting yips, his expression grim and set, Walker disregarded the ramp as he continued past it and on down the corridor.

  The Ghouaba never saw the human coming. Wandering aimlessly, marveling at both its unforeseen liberty and new surroundings, its large, slightly protuberant eyes were focused on the far end of the corridor. Old skills unforgotten, Walker tackled the much smaller biped from behind, much as he had once brought down opposing quarterbacks.

  Since the Ghouaba could not have weighed more than sixty pounds, the impact of a moderately large biped nearly four times its mass hitting it from behind was devastating. As the much lighter alien gasped from the shock of the concussion, Walker felt slender bones snap beneath his weight. The long, slim arms crumpled, fractured in several places. Rising from the writhing jumble of stretched skin and broken bones, Walker began methodically booting the daylights out of the still-living carcass. A firm tug on his drawn-back leg restrained him.

  It was George, jaws locked firmly but gently on the human’s pants. “Let it go, Marc,” the dog instructed his friend as he released his grip on the increasingly ragged jeans. “You want the Vilenjji to find you here?” He nodded at the trashed Ghouaba. “You want the Vilenjji to find you here doing this?”

  Walker hesitated. It would only take a moment to break the alien’s neck. Then he decided it would be better to leave it the way it was. If the Vilenjji wanted to take the time and trouble to try to fix the damage he had done, the work might keep a few of them busy. Vilenjji occupied with repairing the Ghouaba would be Vilenjji who would not have time to look for him and his friends. Or, he thought, grinning wolfishly, they might decide instead to sell the Ghouaba at a reduced cost and as was: damaged goods. But then, he reflected as he turned to follow Geo
rge back to the top of the rampway, the malicious little alien had been damaged goods from the beginning.

  Braouk had not been bored waiting for them. Racing up the ramp to the enclosure level, a pair of Vilenjji armed with restraining glue guns had been caught looking the wrong way. While preoccupied with immobilizing a comparatively harmless, panicky Aa’loupta from Higraa III, they had forgotten to watch behind them. One only noticed the arrival of the rampaging Tuuqalian when Braouk proceeded to separate its companion’s head from its upper body. Attempting to bring its own weapon to bear on their attacker, the other Vilenjji ended up eating it, courtesy of Braouk’s pistoning tentacles. Walker had to clutch at the Tuuqalian to drag him away from his sport, much as George had been forced to pull Walker off the Ghouaba.

  They encountered no further resistance as they raced down the ramp. With those freed captives who had not yet been rounded up now scattering deeper and deeper throughout the ship, the Vilenjji were being forced to split up as well in order to pursue them. And while the other fleeing prisoners, sadly, fled without direction or purpose, the oddly matched trio that came barreling down the ramp knew exactly where they were going.

  With an excited George reminding Braouk to duck, they passed through the door the dog was getting to know so well. Partway down the corridor on the other side, a frantic Sque was waiting to greet them. Mounting anxiety had caused her to tie several of her tentacles in knots.

  “I was beginning to wonder if your combined paucity of intellect had led you astray,” she told them as they slowed to meet her.

  “We’re glad to see you again, too.” Walker was breathing hard, but with the amount of adrenaline that was surging through him at that moment, he felt as if he could run all the way back to Earth. “I don’t know how you did it, Sque, but you did it.” And leaning over, he planted without hesitation, a loud, echoing kiss smack atop the shiny dome of her head.