Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [70]
George could not argue with that. Though still too excited by their success to really be hungry, he saw the wisdom of eating to keep their strength up. Squeezing out from beneath the heavy metal overhang, he followed Sque as she led the way along the deserted accessway.
It did not remain deserted for very long. Though her eyesight was a degree sharper than his, he was the one who heard the slight whispering of air approaching.
“Something’s coming!” he muttered anxiously, looking around for a hiding place.
“Here.” Sque led the way back into a dark recess between two high metal rectangles. They were warm to the touch, and mewed like kittens trying to hold a high “C.”
The device that came trundling toward them down the accessway had no head and not much of a body. It did have a lot of limbs, a number of which terminated in specialized tools. These concerned George considerably more than the machine’s lack of a clearly defined cranium.
“What if it looks this way?” he whispered to his companion even as he tried to shrink farther back into the unyielding alcove.
“With what?” Sque shot back. “I discern no obvious visual receptors.”
“Maybe it doesn’t need eyes. Maybe it uses other mechanical senses.”
“Maybe it has big ears,” she hissed. George went silent.
Traveling on some sort of air propulsion system, the scooter-sized device approached their place of concealment. Directly opposite, it halted. George wanted to whimper, but held his breath. The machine lingered there for a long moment, hovering less than an inch above the floor, before resuming its programmed itinerary. As it receded down the accessway, both escapees cautiously peered out from within the recess.
“It looked right at us.” George hesitated as he watched the machine disappear around a distant curve. “At least, it seemed like it did.”
Half a dozen of Sque’s tentacles wriggled animatedly. “I do not believe it even saw us, or otherwise detected our presence. I had hoped that would be the case, and logic suggested the possibility. But it is one thing to hypothesize and another to survive.”
“You bet your last limb it is.” A relieved George trotted out into the corridor to join her.
“It is a characteristic of all but the most advanced automatons that they are designed to carry out only those directives that have been entered into their undeviating neural cortexes. Never having been encoded to look for escapees or intruders, assuming no other captives have ever escaped before, it is rational to presume that they would not recognize one such if they ran right into them.”
“So what you’re saying is that we ought to be able to move around freely in the presence of everything but the Vilenjji themselves?” The dog’s tail was wagging briskly again.
“That is what I am saying.” The speaking tube swayed energetically. “What I am going to do, however, is try to avoid contact with automatons wherever possible. I would rather not make the encounter of the one device designed to be the exception. But it appears that we certainly have some flexibility where such encounters are concerned.” She resumed scuttling down the accessway.
“It did stop across from us, though.” George could not get that nagging little fragment of encounter out of his mind. “It must have detected our presence.”
“Detection is nothing. Reaction is everything,” Sque declared meditatively. “I theorize it decided we were other devices, not unlike itself. A useful subterfuge that we hopefully will not have to rely upon too frequently.”
The truth of the K’eremu’s assessment was proven in several successive encounters. Each time they came upon a busy motile device they could not avoid it either ignored them, went around them, or waited for them to pass. Each time, they waited for a posse of armed Vilenjji to come looking for them. And each time, they were left in peace, as before,