Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [42]
Walker did not respond. But, bending to scoop up another double handful of dirt and gravel, he did finally see the visitors. They towered over him, staring down out of blank, mooning eyes, the knot of fringe atop their tapered skulls fluttering eerily in the absence of any breeze. Each held a small device that made double loops around their sucker-lined arm flaps. The instruments appeared to have been drop-forged out of liquid metal. A few dull yellow lights gleamed on their sides.
Now thoroughly unhinged, Walker wanted to scramble up one of those purplish, pebble-skinned backs, grab a handful of that fringe, and rip it out by its roots. Instead, he settled for throwing the debris he had gathered, deliberately and without warning, straight at the head of the nearest alien. Numbed as he was by now to both the Vilenjji’s dominance and indifference, he did not expect the action to have any effect. Surely the flung double-handful of gravel and dirt would be stopped by some invisible screen, or shattered to harmless dust by an inexplicable field of force.
The rocks and soil struck the Vilenjji square in the face, whereupon it raised both arms toward the affected area, emitted a high-pitched mewling like a cross between a band saw slicing wood and an untuned piccolo, and staggered backward on its sock-encased leg flaps, one of which showed signs of crumpling beneath the thick, heavy body. Behind the tent, George hunkered down as low as possible and whimpered.
Stumbling into a slight depression in the transplanted surface, the assaulted alien dropped the shiny, smooth-sided, double-looped device it had been holding. Without thinking and without hesitation, Walker made a dive for it. He actually had it in his grasp when his entire body turned to pins and needles. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t scratch. The sensation was not especially painful, but the tingling effect threatened to drive him to distraction.
Proof of the seriousness of the encounter took the form of three more Vilenjji—three!—who came lumbering out of the corridor at top speed. They plunged through the deactivated barrier directly into the Sierran compound. Through the agonizing needling sensation that coursed through his body, Walker felt himself being stood upright. Two of them had him, their arm flaps supporting him where his arms met his shoulders. While a pair of newcomers kept their loop weapons trained on his involuntarily twitching body, the lifters proceeded to haul him out of his compartment and back into the grand enclosure. Though all his senses were alert and he was fully aware of what was happening around him, Walker was unable to move. Nervous system frozen in overdrive, he fought to regain control of his uncooperative muscles. Still wiping dirt and grit from its face, the fifth Vilenjji brought up the rear. Other than its initial ululation, it had exhibited no further signs of distress. Though its expression, such as it was, was noticeably contorted from the usual.
Somehow, George managed to find the courage to follow. At a sensible and respectful distance, of course.
Within the grand enclosure, conversation faded. It did not matter if it was a brace of convivial Hexanutes or a bulbous Ovyr locked in soliloquy with itself: all talking ceased as groups and individuals turned to watch the procession traverse the yielding ground cover. In the lead were two stone-faced Vilenjji who between them hauled the unresisting form of a hairless biped from a place called Earth. Behind came two more of the tall, massive-bodied abductors with weapons trained on the human’s inert body. Then a single Vilenjji who occasionally dragged its left arm flap across its face and lastly, the small hirsute quadruped who similarly hailed from the third planet circling the ordinary star known to its local residents as Sol.
It was an unprecedented procession. No one among the watchers could remember seeing so many Vilenjji inside the enclosure at any one time. Here were five. What it augured not even the most perspicacious