Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [27]
The Ghouaba was looking straight at him and grinning. At least, Walker thought it was a grin. He might be completely misinterpreting the expression. But he was not misinterpreting the Ghouaba’s stance, nor the ease it exhibited in the company of the two withdrawing Vilenjji. It was instantly clear to Walker how his captors had learned of his possession of the device. There was no other reason for the Ghouaba to be there with them.
“You little big-eared bastard!” he growled.
Perhaps the Vilenjji were out of translation range. Perhaps they chose simply to ignore the biped’s angry comment, which was not directed at them in any case. But the Ghouaba heard, and understood, as its own implant deciphered the human’s comment. Despite the fact that Walker was twice its size and many times its mass, it did not appear intimidated.
“Touch-eh me-eh and Vilenjji see-eh,” it countered. “Hurt-eh me-eh and ugly Earth-thing die-eh. Eh-theht!” Turning away, it confidently showed the human its back. Possibly also its backside, though Walker was wholly ignorant of Ghouaban biology.
Rising, ignoring the warning, he started for the grand enclosure, intending to follow the little betrayer until the Vilenjji had absented themselves. Then he remembered George’s story of the Tripodan, who had attacked and killed another of the Vilenjji’s specimens. “Never saw it again,” the dog had concluded the tale by telling him.
As he stood debating what to do, all but shaking with rage, a vista of all-too-familiar mountains and forest and sky appeared, replacing his view of the grand enclosure. No, he thought wildly as he rushed forward. But there was no mistaking the reality of the illusion, if that was not an oxymoron. Sure enough, as he attempted to push through the forced perspective of the restored panorama, he came up against the familiar tingling, and then pain, of a reactivated restraining field.
It took only a couple of moments to confirm what he feared. His access to the grand enclosure—to its rolling terrain, its varied vistas, its running streams and astonishing assortment of alien verdure, his fellow captives and their own enclosures—had been cut off. Over the past weeks the opportunity to converse, to share thoughts and commonalities with other intelligences, had become important not only to his daily routine but to preserving his sanity.
And George. With the reestablishment of the restraining field on all four sides, contact with his only real friend, with his fellow abductee from Earth, was also denied to him. It struck him immediately what was happening.
He was being disciplined.
For finding the ceramic device and not turning it in, though how he was supposed to have done the latter he did not know. In that he was being disingenuous, he knew. He could have waited for a Vilenjji passing down the corridor and waved the device in its direction. That was what a good prisoner would have been expected to do, no doubt. Like that smirking Ghouaba doubtless would have done. Well, Walker wasn’t a good prisoner. A stupid one, maybe.
Whatever happened now, the experience had at least taught him something valuable. Whatever it consisted of, his captors’ surveillance system was not perfect. He had managed to find, uncover, conceal, and slip back to his tent with the ceramic device. If not for the Ghouaba having informed on him, it was entirely possible the Vilenjji would not have known about it.
They were not omnipotent.
Thus slightly encouraged, all the rest of that day and on into the next he waited for the Sierra panorama to vanish, or for the barrier between his enclosure and George’s uprooted urban environment to fall. Neither happened. Nor did it the following day, nor the one after. Bereft of sentient contact, lonelier than he had believed he could ever be, he sat outside his tent or beside