Parker and Brett tightened their hold on the net without being told to. Ripley hefted her tube, switched it on. She moved slowly forward with the tube in her right hand and the tracker in the other. It was hard, oh, impossibly hard, to imagine any three people making less noise than Ripley, Parker, and Brett were making in that corridor. Even the previously steady pantings of their lungs were muted.
They covered five metres, then ten. A muscle in Ripley's left calf jumped like a grasshopper, hurting her. She ignored it. They continued on, the distance as computed by the tracker shrinking irrevocably.
Now she was walking in a half crouch, ready to spring backward the instant any fragment of the darkness gave hint of movement. The tracker, its beeper now intentionally turned off, brought her to a halt at the end of fifteen point two metres. The light here was still dim, but sufficient to show them that nothing cowered in the malodorous corridor.
Slowly turning the tracker, she tried to watch both it and the far end of the passage. The needle shifted minutely on the dial. She raised her gaze, noticed a small hatch set into the corridor wall. It was slightly ajar.
Parker and Brett noted where her attention was concentrated. They positioned themselves to cover as much of the deck in front of the hatch as possible. Ripley nodded at them when they were set, trying to shake some of the dripping perspiration from her face. She took a deep breath and set the tracker on the floor. With her free hand she grasped the hatch handle. It was cold and clammy against her already damp palm.
Raising the prod, she depressed the button on its handle end, slammed herself against the corridor wall, and jammed the metal tube inside the locker. A horrible squalling sounded loudly in the corridor. A small creature that was all bulging eyes and flashing claws exploded from the locker. It landed neatly in the middle of the net as a frantic pair of engineers fought to envelop it in as many layers of the tough strands as possible.
'Hang on, hang on!' Parker was shouting triumphantly. 'We got the little bastard, we . . .!'
Ripley was peering into the net. A great surge of disappointment went through her. She turned off the tube, picked up the tracker again.
'Goddamn it,' she muttered tiredly. 'Relax, you two. Look at it.'
Parker let go of the net at the same time as Brett. Both had seen what they'd caught and were mumbling angrily. A very annoyed cat shot out of the entangling webwork, ran hissing and spitting back up the corridor before Ripley could protest.
'No, no.' She tried, too late, to instruct them. 'Don't let it get away.'
A faint flicker of orange fur vanished into the distance.
'Yeah, you're right,' agreed Parker. 'We should have killed it. Now we might pick it up on the tracker again.'
Ripley glanced sharply at him, said nothing. Then she turned her attention to the less homicidally inclined Brett. 'You go get him. We can debate what to do with him later, but it would be a good idea to keep him around or penned up in his box so he can't confuse the machine . . . or us.'
Brett nodded. 'Right.'
He turned and trotted back up the passageway after the cat. Ripley and Parker continued slowly in the opposite direction, Ripley trying to handle tracker and tube and help Parker with the net at the same time.
An open door led into a large equipment maintenance bay. Brett took a last look up and down the corridor, saw no sign of the cat. On the other hand, the loosely stocked chamber was full of ideal cat hiding places. If the cat wasn't inside, he'd rejoin the others, he decided. It could be anywhere on the ship by now. But the equipment bay was a logical place for it to take refuge.
There was light inside, though no brighter than in the corridor. Brett ignored the rows of stacked instrument pods, the carelessly bundled containers of solid-state replacement modules and dirty tools. Luminescent panels identified contents.
It occurred to him that by now his two companions were probably out of earshot. The thought made him jittery. The sooner he got his hands on that damned cat, the better.
'Jones . . . here, kitty, kitty. Jones cat. Come to Brett, kitty, kitty.' He bent to peer into a dark crevice between two huge crates. The slit was deserted. Rising, he wiped sweat from his eyes, first the left, then the right. 'Goddamn it, Jones,' he muttered softly, 'where the hell are you hiding?'
Scratching noises, deeper in the bay. They were followed by an uncertain but reassuring yowl that was unmistakably feline in origin. He let out a relieved breath and started for the source of the cry.
Ripley halted, looked tiredly at the tracker screen. The red light had gone out, the needle again rested on zero, and the beeper hadn't sounded in a long time. As she stared, the needle quivered once, then lay still.
'Nothing here,' she told her remaining retiarius, 'If there ever was anything here besides us and Jones.' She looked at Parker. 'I'm open to suggestions.'
'Let's go back. The least we can do is help Brett run down that friggin' cat.'
'Don't pick on Jones.' Ripley automatically defended the animal. 'He's as frightened as the rest of us.'
They turned and headed back up the stinking corridor. Ripley left the tracker on, just in case.
Brett had worked his way behind stacks of equipment. He couldn't go much farther. Struts and supports for the upper superstructure of the Nostromo formed an intricate criss-cross of metal around him.
He was getting discouraged all over again when another familiar yowl reached him. Turning a metal pylon, he saw two small yellow eyes shining in the dark. For an instant he hesitated. Jones was about the size of the thing that had burst from poor Kane's chest. Another meow made him feel better. Only an ordinary tomcat would produce a noise like that.
As he worked his way nearer he bent to clear a beam and had a glimpse of fur and whiskers: Jones.
'Here kitty . . . good to see you, you furry little bastard.' He reached for the cat. It hissed threateningly at him and backed farther into its corner. 'Come on, Jones. Come to Brett. No time to fool around now.'
Something not quite as thick as the beam the engineering tech had just passed under reached downward. It descended in utter silence and conveyed a feeling of tremendous power held in check. Fingers spread, clutched, wrapped completely around the engineer's throat and crossed over themselves. Brett shrieked, both hands going reflexively to his neck. For all the effect his hands had on them, those gripping fingers might as well have been welded together. He went up in that hand, legs dancing in empty air. Jones bolted beneath him.
The cat shot past Ripley and Parker, who'd just arrived. They plunged unthinking into the equipment bay. Soon they were standing where they'd seen Brett's legs flailing moments before. Staring up into blackness, they had a last brief glimpse of dangling feet and twisting torso receding upward. Above the helpless figure of the engineer was a faint outline, something man-shaped but definitely not a man. Something huge and malevolent. There was a split second's sight of light reflecting off eyes far too big for even a huge head. Then both alien and engineer had vanished into the upper reaches of the Nostromo.
'Jesus,' Parker whispered.
'It grew.' Ripley looked blankly at her shock tube, considered it in relation to the hulking mass far above. 'It grew fast. All the time we were hunting for something Jones' size, it had turned into that.' She suddenly grew aware of their restricted space, of the darkness and massive crates pressing tight around them, of the numerous passages between crates and thick metal supports.
'What are we doing standing here? It may come back.' She hefted the toy-like tube, aware of how little effect it would be likely to have on a creature that size.
They hurried from the bay. Try as they would, the memory of that last fading scream stayed with them, glued to their minds. Parker had known Brett a long time, but that final shriek induced him to run as fast as Ripley. . . .
XI
There was less confidence in the faces of those assembled in the mess room than last time. No one tried to hide it, least of all Parker and Ripley. Having seen what they w
ere now confronted by, they retained very little in the way of confidence at all.
Dallas was examining a recently printed schematic of the Nostromo. Parker stood by the door, occasionally glancing nervously down the corridor.
'Whatever it was,' the engineer said into the silence, 'it was big. Swung down on him like a giant fucking bat.'
Dallas looked up from the layout. 'You're absolutely sure it dragged Brett into a vent.'
'It disappeared into one of the cooling ducts.' Ripley was scratching the back of one hand with the other. 'I'm sure I saw it go in. Anyway, there was nowhere else for it to go.'
'No question about it,' Parker added. 'It's using the air shafts to move around. That's why we never ran it down with the tracker.'
'The air shafts.' Dallas looked convinced. 'Makes sense. Jones does the same thing.'
Lambert played with her coffee, stirring the dark liquid with an idle finger. 'Brett could still be alive.'
'Not a chance.' Ripley wasn't being fatalistic, only logical. 'It snapped him up like a rag doll.'
'What does it want him for, anyway?' Lambert wanted to know. 'Why take him instead of killing him on the spot?'
'Perhaps it requires an incubator, the way the first form used Kane,' Ash suggested.
'Or food,' said Ripley tightly. She shivered.
Lambert put down her coffee. 'Either way, it's two down and five to go, from the alien's standpoint.'
Parker had been turning his shock tube over and over in his hands. Now he turned and threw it hard against a wall. It bent, fell to the deck, and crackled a couple of times before lying still.
'I say we blast the rotten bastard with a laser and take our chances.'
Dallas tried to sound sympathetic. 'I know how you feel, Parker. We all liked Brett. But we've got to keep our heads. If the creature's now as big as you say, it's holding enough acid to burn a hole in the ship as big as this room. Not to mention what it would do to circuitry and controls running through the decks. No way can we chance that. Not yet'
'Not yet?' Parker's sense of helplessness canceled out much of his fury. 'How many have to die besides Brett before you can see that's the way to handle that thing?'
'It wouldn't work anyway, Parker.'
The engineer turned to face Ash, frowned at him. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean you'd have to hit a vital organ with a laser on your first shot. From your description of the creature it's now extremely fast as well as large and powerful. I think it's reasonable to assume it retains the same capacity for rapid regeneration as its first "hand" form. That means you'd have to kill it instantly or it would be all over you.'
'Not only would that be difficult to do if your opponent were a mere man, it's also virtually impossible to do with this alien because we have no idea where its vital point is. We don't even know that it has a vital point. Don't you see?' He was trying to be understanding, like Dallas had been. Everyone knew how close the two engineers had been.
'Can't you envision what would happen? Let's say a couple of us succeeded in confronting the creature in an open area where we can get a clear shot at it, which is by no means a certainty. We laser it, oh, half a dozen times before it tears us all to pieces. All six wounds heal fast enough to preserve the alien's life, but not before it's bled enough acid to eat numerous holes in the ship. Maybe some of the stuff burns through the circuitry monitoring our air supply, or cuts the power to the ship's lights.
'I don't consider that an unreasonable scenario, given what we know about the creature.?And what's the result? We've lost two or more people and shipwise we're worse off than we were before we confronted it.'
Parker didn't reply, looked sullen. Finally he mumbled, 'Then what the hell are we going to do?'
'The only plan that stands a chance of working is the one we had before,' Dallas told him. He tapped the schematic. 'Find which shaft it's in, then drive it from there into an air lock and blast it into space.'
'Drive it?' Parker laughed hollowly. 'I'm telling you the son-of-a-bitch is huge.' He spat contemptuously at his bent shock tube. 'We aren't driving that thing anywhere with those.'
'For once he has a point,' said Lambert. 'We have to get it to a lock. How do we drive it?'
Ripley's gaze travelled around the little cluster of humanity. 'I think it's time the science department brought us up to date on our visitor. Haven't you got any ideas, Ash?'
The science officer considered. 'Well, it seems to have adapted well to an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That may have something to do with its spectacularly rapid growth in this stage.'
'This "stage"?' Lambert echoed questioningly. 'You mean it might turn into something else again?'
Ash spread his hands. 'We know so little about it. We should be prepared for anything. It has already metamorphosed three times; egg to hand-shape, hand to the thing that came out of Kane, and that into this much larger bipedal form. We have no reason to assume that this form is the final stage in the chain of development.' He paused, added, 'The next form it assumes could conceivably be even larger and more powerful.'
'That's encouraging,' murmured Ripley. 'What else?'
'In addition to its new atmosphere, it's certainly adapted well for its nutritional requirements. So we know it can exist on very little, in various atmospheres, and possibly in none at all for an unspecified period of time.
'About the only thing we don't know is its ability to handle drastic changes in temperature. It's comfortably warm aboard the Nostromo. Considering the mean temperature on the world where we discovered it, I think we can reasonably rule out bitter cold as a potential deterrent, though the early egg form may have been tougher in that respect than the present one. There is precedent for that.'
'All right,' asked Ripley, 'what about the temperature? What happens if we raise it?'
'Let's give it a try,' said Ash. 'We can't raise the temperature of the entire ship for the same reason we couldn't exhaust all the air. Not enough air time in our suits, limited mobility, helplessness while confined in the freezers, and so on. But most creatures retreat from fire. It's not necessary to heat the whole ship.'
'We could string a high-voltage wire across a few corridors and lure it into one. That would fry it good,' Lambert suggested.
'This isn't an animal we're dealing with. Or if it is,' Ash told her, 'it's a supremely skilful one. It's not going to charge blindly into a cord or anything else blocking an obvious transit way like a corridor. It's already demonstrated that by choosing the air shafts to travel about in, instead of the corridors.
'Besides, certain primitive organisms like the shark are sensitive to electric fields. On balance, not a good idea.'
'Maybe it can detect the electrical fields our own bodies generate,' said Ripley gloomily. 'Maybe that's how it tracks.'
Parker looked doubtful. 'I wouldn't bet that it didn't depend on its eyes. If that's what those things are.'
'They aren't.'
'A creature so obviously resourceful probably utilizes many senses in tracking,' Ash added.
'I don't like the cord idea anyway.' Parker's face was flushed. 'I don't like tricking around. When it goes out the lock, I want to be there. I want to see it die.' He went quiet for a bit, added less emotionally, 'I want to hear it scream like Brett.'
'How long to hook up three or four incinerating units?' Dallas wanted to know.
'Give me twenty minutes. The basic units are already there, in storage. It's just a question of modifying them for hand-held use.'
'Can you make them powerful enough? We don't want to run into the kind of situation Ash described, if we were using lasers. We want something that'll stop it in its tracks.'
'Don't worry.' Parker's voice was cold, cold. 'I'll fix them so they'll cook anything they touch on contact.'
'Seems like our best chance, then.' The captain glanced around the table. 'Anyone got any better ideas?'
No one did.
'Okay.' Dallas pushed away from the table, rose. 'When Parker'
s ready with his flamethrowers, we'll start from here and work our way back down to C level and the bay where it took Brett. Then we'll try to trace it from there.'
Parker sounded dubious. 'It went up with him through the hull bracing before it entered the air shaft. Be hell trying to follow it up there. I'm no ape.' He stared warningly at Ripley, but she didn't comment.
'You'd rather sit here and wait until it's ready to come looking for you?' Dallas asked. 'The longer we can keep it on the defensive, the better it'll be for us.'
'Except for one thing,' Ripley said.
'What's that?'
'We're not sure it's ever been on the defensive.' She met his gaze squarely. . . .
The flamethrowers were bulkier than the shock tubes and looked less effective. But the tubes had functioned as they were supposed to, and Parker had assured them all the incinerators would too. He declined to give them a demonstration this time because, he explained, the flamers were powerful enough to sear the decking.