Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [75]
“How there, not here, small pleasant one?” Its bewilderment helped to clarify his own.
Already, the corridor resounded with more than the sounds of the shrill alarm. George knew he could not linger. “Going for a walk!” he shot back as he made a choice and bolted rightward. “Give it a try!”
As the dog disappeared down the corridor, the willowy figure of the bemused Jalalik flowed to the innermost limit of its enclosure. Tentatively, it thrust a bony, almost skeletal finger outward. It passed through the boundary normally delineated by a curtain of nerve-tingling energy. As it thrust forward, the Jalalik followed, until like the dog it, too, was standing in the previously inaccessible corridor. With a quick look in both directions, it began to run, taking the opposite direction from the small quadruped. Very soon it turned up a rampway, its long, slim legs pumping with the sheer inexpressible joy of the gallop.
The more enclosures he passed, the more anxious George became. A few still contained their residents. Shocked and mystified, these confused captives refused to abandon their individually engineered ecosystems, unable to grasp the significance of what had happened, of the fact that the seemingly everlasting electrical barriers that had kept them securely penned up ever since their abductions had ceased to function. But most of the enclosures, and presumably the grand enclosure as well, were empty, as their elated occupants scattered in all directions.
Then he saw Walker. Wearing a harried yet exultant expression, the human stood in the middle of the corridor, striving to avoid being trampled by the stampede of freed captives. When he saw George speeding toward him, his face lit up in a smile the likes of which the dog had never seen before. Without thinking, without hesitation, the mutt bounded into the human’s open arms and began licking his face, wetly and noisily.
“All right, all right. I’m glad to see you, too. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would, again.” Gently, he set the dog down on the deck and wiped at his face with the back of one forearm. “Couldn’t you just shake hands?”
“My style of greeting, take it or leave it. At least I didn’t French you.” Reunion over, he resumed his run up the corridor. “We can get soppy later. Right now we need to find Braouk!”
Walker hurried after him. “Wait a minute! Where’s Sque?”
“Tickling the light proactive!” the dog yelled back to him. “And waiting for us.”
“Look out!” George found himself yelling a moment later as the first Vilenjji he had seen since the deactivation burst out of a side corridor and came rushing toward him.
He sounded the warning just in time. The alien flew over him with room to spare, but had he not called out a warning it would have slammed into Walker, who was working hard to keep up, with crushing impact. As it was, the human threw himself to one side just in time to avoid the flying purplish mass. The Vilenjji, however, was not attacking. It was not even in control of itself. This was shown by the force with which it landed on the corridor floor, bounced, and rolled over several times before lying still, its arm and leg flaps splayed loosely around it. On closer inspection, the panting Walker decided that dislocated might be a better description.
Joining back up with George, he resumed running up the curving corridor, until a roar that shook the walls brought them up short. It was thunderous. It was overpowering. It was downright poetical.
“Perish the foul, to the darkness damning, I send!” A steady drumming counterpointed the words.
Advancing with instinctive caution, man and dog found their friend. As soon as they saw him, the source of the drumming sound as well as the versing became immediately apparent.
Effortlessly swinging the heavy Vilenjji by one of its under-limbs, the Tuuqalian was repeatedly slamming