For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [49]
Then he was out through the gate, on the smooth surface bordering the depot. In moments, he was concealed by the forest. A touch on a dash control locked the transparent plastic dome over his head, shutting out the mist. Another control set the craft’s heater to thrumming. For the first time since he had left Drallar, he was warm.
He held the mudder’s speed down until he was well away from the town. Then he felt safe in turning on the searchlight. The high-power beam pierced the darkness and revealed paths between the trees. Now he was able to accelerate, and soon the mudder was skipping along over the moist earth. Too fast, perhaps, for night-driving, but Flinx wanted to make up time on his quarry. And he was a little drunk with success.
It wouldn’t have been that easy in Drallar, he told himself. Out here, where there wasn’t much to steal, he had succeeded because thieves were scarce.
The underside of the mudder was coated with a special hydrophobic polyresin that allowed it to slide across a moist but solid surface with almost no friction, propelled by the single electric jet located in the vehicle’s stern. It also made very little noise; not that he could detect any sign of pursuit. The mudder’s compass control kept him headed north.
It was midmorning before Flinx finally felt the need to stop. He used daylight and the canister of red paint to decorate the brown vehicle, adding decorative stripes to side and front. It took his mind off his problems for a little while. Then he was traveling again, in a craft no casual observer would ever have mistaken for a sober government vehicle.
The night before there had been a touch of a mental tingle of almost painful familiarity. As usual, it vanished the instant he sought to concentrate on it, but he felt sure that that touch had reached out to him from somewhere to the north.
Confident and comfortable, he soared along with the dome retracted. Suddenly, the air turned gray with thousands of furry bodies no bigger than his little finger. They swarmed about him on tiny membranous wings, and he swatted at them with his free hand as he slowed the car to a crawl. They were so dense he couldn’t see clearly.
Pip was delighted, both with the opportunities for play and for dining. Soon the storm of miniature fliers became so thick that Flinx had to bring the mudder to a complete halt for fear of running into something ahead. At least now he could use both hands to beat at them.
He hesitated to close the protective dome for fear of panicking the dozens that would inevitably be trapped inside. Besides, except for blocking his view, they weren’t bothering him. Their square little teeth were designed for cracking the hulls of nuts and seeds, and they showed no interest in live flesh. They had large bright-yellow eyes, and two thin legs suitable for grasping branches. Flinx wondered at them, as well as how long it would be before they moved on and he could resume his journey.
Suddenly, the air was full of whooshing sounds. The earth erupted head-sized round shapes. Flinx saw long thin snouts full of needlelike teeth and multiple arms projecting from narrow bodies. The whooshing noise was composed of a long series of explosive popping sounds.
He squinted through the mass of fliers and saw one creature after another emerge from vertical burrows. The poppers were black-bodied with yellow and orange variolitic colorings. They became airborne by inflating a pair of sausage-shaped air sacs attached to their spines—by regulating the amount of air in the sacs, the animals could control not only their altitude but their direction. They lit into the swarm of fliers, utilizing long, thin snouts to snatch one after another froth the air. Once a popper had made several catches, it would deflate its air sacs