Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [11]
“Long journey,” it gargled. “Behave.”
Then it turned and clumped away, followed by its companion.
“Wait!” Attempting to follow them, Walker discovered he could see a short distance down the corridor, or tunnel, or whatever it was through which they were striding. It curved darkly to the left, still dense with pseudo-organic protrusions and swellings. To his immediate left and right he had a glimpse of daylight of differing intensity that emanated from unseen sources. Then he came again into contact with something invisible and biting. It was a more powerful shock than any he had felt thus far. Nerves jangling, he staggered back, holding his right wrist as he tried to shake the pins and needles from his hand.
“‘Long journey,’” the creature had said. How he had understood the alien, Walker did not know. Even as he’d heard the sounds, he was aware that the entity was not speaking and he was not hearing English. But he had understood. A journey implied they were all going somewhere together. Journey. His insides went cold and dull, as if he had suddenly become a hollow shell, devoid of any feeling.
The aliens had not opened a window into his reality. They had transplanted a portion of his reality into theirs. Familiar surroundings. It would not do to stick him in a barren cage, or a box. They intended to keep him comfortable—for what purpose he could not imagine and could not envision. Long journey. To where? And with what at its end? It was clear now what had happened to him. He had been abducted—along with his tent, his gear, a minuscule portion of Cawley Lake, and projections or holograms or fake foreshortened representations of everything that surrounded same.
Shaking, he returned to the tent. A check of his cell phone produced nothing—not static, not even a carrier wave. Talk about your long distance. Marcus Walker, phone home. He started to shake.
This won’t do you any good, he told himself firmly. Get a hold of yourself—or they’re liable to.
He stayed there for a long time, until fake afternoon overtook the fake morning. Only when his legs began to cramp did he feel he had no choice but to step outside.
Nothing had changed except for the position of the sham sun in the fraudulent sky. The corridor beyond his cell, or cage, or whatever it was, was empty. No aliens were to be seen staring back at him, an absence for which he was unaccountably grateful. Not even a little bit of what had happened to him so far could be accounted a hallucination.
He dressed. And having dressed, prepared to make pancakes. Anything to take his mind off what had happened to him. Besides, he doubted that his captors would look kindly, or indifferently, on a hunger strike by a subject they had gone to some trouble to acquire, and he did not want to imagine what methods they might employ to counteract such a demonstration of resistance.
All went well until he tried to fire up the portable propane stove. The self-igniting flame refused to light. Nor would any of the matches he took from his emergency kit work. Snapping them against the striker on the box failed to generate so much as an encouraging spark.
It made sense, he realized when he finally finished cursing and complaining. No matter how advanced, no matter how superior an alien technology, allowing for the presence of uncontrolled open flame was a luxury or a danger that could not be permitted. How the aliens managed to suppress the process of combustion in his stove, let alone a match, he did not know. Finding some satisfaction in private grumbling, he reluctantly put the pancake mix and cooking equipment back inside the tent and settled for opening a box of crackers. This modest nutrition he prepared to supplement with a can of garlic-flavored Cheez Whiz, wondering as he did so if the aliens would permit the can to operate under pressure, or if their life support system would find it as objectionable as it did open flame.
As he prepared to squeeze pasteurized-process cheese