Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [27]
Melnibicon would look for him, he knew. She would ask who had seen him. He doubted she would receive much in the way of response. Everyone in the terminal was busy, intent on his or her own business. No one would have noticed one more thranx striding purposefully through their field of vision. Eventually she would give up, cursing all the while, and reboard the lifter for the return flight to Honydrop. It was not her fault if he missed the departure. Upon her return she would report him as absent, accept whatever chiding was due for taking an unauthorized passenger to Geswixt, and go on about her business.
It troubled Desvendapur, but not to the point of preventing him from engaging in conversation with Ulu. They spoke about alien foodstuffs and their sometimes eccentric preparation, Des giving the impression he knew a great deal while in reality he was utterly ignorant on the subject. But the more Ulu talked, the more Des ‘tested’ and ‘checked’ him, the greater grew the poet’s rapidly burgeoning store of knowledge. By the time they reached the checkpoint, he felt he could have carried on a limited conversation on the subject. Certainly he now knew more about it than any nonspecialist.
It was rare to see a hive tunnel blocked or guarded. Desvendapur supposed that access to military installations was similarly restricted, as was that leading to sensitive scientific installations, but this was the first time in his life he had actually encountered an armed guard. One of the pair recognized Ulunegjeprok immediately. Des tensed when the no-nonsense sentry turned his attention to the truck’s passenger. But it was late in the day and the guard was tired. When Ulu cheerily explained that his passenger was another newly arrived worker assigned to his own section, the body-armored thranx accepted the explanation readily. There was no reason not to. Why would anyone not ordered to do so want to willingly place himself in close proximity to a bunch of soft-bodied, pinch-featured, antenna-less, malodorous mammals? The truck was waved through.
They entered a much longer tunnel, featureless except for periodic electronic checkpoints. Their progress was being monitored, Des realized. The amount of security was daunting. How long he would be able to continue to brazen his way through he did not know. Long enough to gain inspiration for a small volume of stanzas, he hoped. Phrases, at last, that would be underlain with real meaning and significance. After what he had gone through to get this far, he had better accomplish at least that much.
Would Melnibicon notice that the lifter’s navigation system had been accessed? Would it occur to her to recheck a preprogrammed course that the craft had followed faultlessly many times before? If she did, then he would have only hours of freedom in which to seek inspiration. If she did not, and relaxed on board as she had on the flight over, then he might have a day or two in which to interact with the aliens and the storm of exotic sights and sounds they hopefully represented before Security caught up with him. As for Melnibicon, her hastily reprogrammed lifter would set her down automatically among the rilthy peaks, whereupon if he had done his work properly the flight instrumentation would then freeze up and compel her to call for rescue.
It never occurred to him while he had been entering his irate, hasty adjustments that the disoriented craft might simply run into the side of a mountain.
For a service tunnel,