Alien

by Alan Dean Foster

  'Tell me about it.' Parker muttered it so softly only Brett could overhear.

  'You'll all be happy to learn,' Dallas continued, 'that the emergency we've been awakened to deal with does not involve the Nostromo. Mother says we're in perfect shape.' A couple of heartfelt 'amens' sounded in the cramped mess.

  'The emergency lies elsewhere - specifically, in the unlisted system we've recently entered. We should be closing on the particular planet concerned right now.' He glanced at Ash, who rewarded him with a confirming nod. 'We've picked up a transmission from another source. It's garbled and apparently took Mother some time to puzzle out, but it's definitely a distress signal.'

  'Whoa, that doesn't make sense.' Lambert looked puzzled herself. 'Of all standard transmissions, emergency calls are the most straightforward and the least complex. Why would Mother have the slightest trouble interpreting one?'

  'Mother speculates that this is anything but a 'standard' transmission. It's an acoustic beacon signal, which repeats at intervals of twelve seconds. That much isn't unusual. However, she believes the signal is not of human origin.'

  That provoked some startled muttering. When the first excitement had faded, he explained further, 'Mother's not positive. That's what I don't understand. I've never seen a computer show confusion before. Ignorance yes, but not confusion. This may be a first.'

  'What is important is that she's certain enough it's a distress signal to pull us out of hypersleep.'

  'So what?' Brett appeared sublimely unconcerned.

  Kane replied with just a hint of irritation. 'Come on, man. You know your manual. We're obliged under section B2 of Company in-transit directives to render whatever aid and assistance we can in such situations. Whether the call is human or otherwise.'

  Parker kicked at the deck in disgust. 'Christ. I hate to say this, but we're a commercial tug with a big, hard-to-handle cargo. Not a damn rescue unit. This kind of duty's not in our contract.' He brightened slightly. 'Of course, if there's some extra money involved for such work . . .'

  'You better read your contract.' Ash recited as neatly as the main computer he was so proud of. ' 'Any systematic transmission indicating possible intelligent origin must be investigated.' At penalty of full forfeiture of all pay and bonuses due on journey's completion. Not a word about bonus money for helping someone in distress.'

  Parker gave the deck another kick, kept his mouth shut. Neither he nor Brett considered himself the hero type. Anything that could force a ship down on a strange world might treat them in an equally inconsiderate manner. Not that they had any evidence that this unknown caller had been forced down, but being a realist in a harsh universe, he was inclined to be pessimistic.

  Brett simply saw the detour in terms of his delayed paycheck.

  'We're going in. That's all there is to it.? Dallas eyed them each in turn. He was about fed up with the two of them. He no more enjoyed this kind of detour than they did, and was as anxious to be home and offloading their cargo as they were, but there were times when letting off steam crossed over into disobedience.

  'Right,' said Brett sardonically.

  'Right, what?'

  The engineering tech was no fool. The combination of Dallas'ss tone combined with the expression on his face told Brett it was time to ease up.

  'Right . . . we're going in.' Dallas continued to stare at him and he added with a smile, 'Sir.'

  The captain turned a jaundiced eye on Parker, but that worthy was now subdued.

  'Can we land on it?' he asked Ash.

  'Somebody did.'

  'That's what I mean,' he said significantly. ' "Land" is a benign term. It implies a sequence of events successfully carried out, resulting in the gentle and safe touchdown of a ship on a hard surface. We're faced with a distress call. That implies events other than benign. Let's go find out what's going on . . . but let's go quietly, with boots in hand.'

  There was an illuminated cartographic table on the bridge. Dallas, Kane, Ripley, and Ash stood at opposite points of its compass, while Lambert sat at her station.

  'There it is.' Dallas fingered a glowing point on the table. He looked around the table. 'Something I want everyone to hear.'

  They resumed their seats as he nodded to Lambert. Her fingers were poised over a particular switch. 'Okay, let's hear it. Watch the volume.'

  The navigator flipped the switch. Static and hissing sounds filled the bridge. These cleared suddenly, were replaced by a sound that sent shivers up Kane's back and unholy crawling things down Ripley's. It lasted for twelve seconds, then was replaced by the static.

  'Good God.' Kane's expression was drawn.

  Lambert switched off the speakers. It was human on the bridge again.

  'What the hell is it?' Ripley looked as though she'd just seen something dead on her lunch plate. 'It doesn't sound like any distress signal I ever heard.'

  'That's what Mother calls it,' Dallas told them. 'Calling it 'alien' turns out to have been something of an understatement.'

  'Maybe it's a voice.' Lambert paused, considered her just-uttered words, found the implications they raised unpleasant, and tried to pretend she hadn't said them.

  'We'll know soon. Have you homed in on it?'

  'I've found the section of planet.' Lambert turned gratefully to her console, relieved to be able to deal with mathematics instead of disquieting thoughts.

  'We're close enough.'

  'Mother wouldn't have pulled us out of hypersleep unless we were,' Ripley murmured.

  'It's coming from ascension six minutes, twenty seconds; declination minus thirty-nine degrees, two seconds.'

  'Show me the whole thing on a screen.'

  The navigator hit a succession of buttons. One of the bridge viewscreens flickered, gifted them with a bright dot.

  'High albedo. Can you get it a little closer?'

  'No. You have to look at it from this distance. That's what I'm going to do.' Immediately the screen zoomed in tighter on the point of light, revealing an unspectacular, slightly oblate shape sitting in emptiness.

  'Smart ass.' Dallas voiced it without malice. 'You sure that's it? It's a crowded system.'

  'That's it, all right. Just a planetoid, really. Maybe twelve hundred kilometres, no more.'

  'Any rotation?'

  'Yeah. 'Bout two hours, working off the initial figures. Tell you better in ten minutes.'

  'That's good enough for now. What's the gravity?'

  Lambert studied different readouts. 'Point eight six. Must be pretty dense stuff.'

  'Don't tell Parker and Brett,' said Ripley. 'They'll be thinking it's solid heavy metal and wander off somewhere prospecting before we can check out our unknown broadcaster.'

  Ash's observation was more prosaic. 'You can walk on it.' They settled down to working out orbiting procedure . . .

  The Nostromo edged close to the tiny world, trailing its vast cargo of tanks and refinery equipment

  'Approaching orbital apogee. Mark. Twenty seconds. Nineteen, eighteen . . .' Lambert continued to count down while her mates worked steadily around her.

  'Roll ninety-two degrees starboard yaw,' announced Kane, thoroughly businesslike.

  The tug and refinery rotated, performing a massive pirouette in the vastness of space. Light appeared at the stern of the tug as her secondary engines fired briefly.

  'Equatorial orbit nailed,' declared Ash. Below them, the miniature world rotated unconcernedly.

  'Give me an EG pressure reading.'

  Ash examined gauges, spoke without turning to face Dallas. 'Three point four five en slash em squared. . . About five psia, sir.'

  'Shout if it changes.'

  'You worried about redundancy management disabling CMGS control when we're busy elsewhere?'

  'Yeah.'

  'CMG control is inhibited via DAS/DCS. We'll augment with TACS and monitor through ATMDG land computer interface. Feel better now?'

  'A lot.' Ash was a funny sort, kind of coldly friendly, but supremely competent. Not
hing rattled him. Dallas felt confident with the science officer backing him up, watching his decisions. 'Prepare to disengage from platform.' He flipped a switch, addressed a small pickup. 'Engineering, preparing to disengage.'

  'L alignment on port and starboard is green,' reported Parker, all hint of usual sarcasm absent.

  'Green on spinal umbilicus severance,' added Brett.

  'Crossing the terminator,' Lambert informed them all. 'Entering nightside.' Below, a dark line split thick clouds, leaving them brightly reflecting on one side, dark as the inside of a grave on the other.

  'It's coming up. It's coming up. Stand by.' Lambert threw switches in sequence. 'Stand by. Fifteen seconds . . . ten . . . five . . . four. Three. Two. One. Lock.'

  'Disengage,' ordered Dallas curtly.

  Tiny puffs of gas showed between the Nostromo and the ponderous coasting bulk of the refinery platform. The two artificial structures, one tiny and inhabited, the other enormous and deserted, drifted slowly apart. Dallas watched the separation intently on number two screen.

  'Umbilicus clear,' Ripley announced after a short pause.

  'Precession corrected.' Kane leaned back in his seat, relaxing for a few seconds. 'All clean and clear. Separation successful. No damage.'

  'Check here,' added Lambert.

  'And here,' said a relieved Ripley.

  Dallas glanced over at his navigator. 'You sure we've left her in a steady orbit? I don't want the whole two billion tons dropping and burning up while we're poking around downstairs. Atmosphere's not thick enough to give us a safe umbrella.'

  Lambert checked a readout. 'She'll stay up here for a year or so easy, sir.'

  'All right. The money's safe and so's our skulls. Let's take it down. Prepare for atmospheric flight.' Five humans worked busily, each secure in his or her assigned task. Jones the cat sat on a port console and studied the approaching clouds.

  'Dropping.' Lambert's attention was fixed on one particular gauge. 'Fifty thousand metres. Down. Down. Forty-nine thousand. Entering atmosphere.'

  Dallas watched his own instrumentation, tried to evaluate and memorize the dozens of steadily shifting figures. Deep-space travel was a question of paying proper homage to one's instruments and letting Mother do the hard work. Atmospheric flight was another story entirely. For a change, it was pilot's work instead of a machine's.

  Brown and grey clouds kissed the underside of the ship.

  'Watch it. Looks nasty down there.'

  How like Dallas, Ripley thought. Somewhere in the dun-hued hell below another ship was bleating a regular, inhuman, frightening distress call. The world itself was unlisted, which meant they'd begin from scratch where such matters as atmospheric peculiarities, terrain, and such were concerned. Yet to Dallas, it was no more or less than 'nasty'. She'd often wondered what a man as competent as their captain was doing squiring an unimportant tub like the Nostromo around the cosmos.

  The answer, could she have read his mind, would have surprised her. He liked it.

  'Vertical descent computed and entered. Correcting course slightly,' Lambert informed them. 'On course now, homing. Locked and we're in straight.'

  'Check. How's our plotting going to square with secondary propulsion in this weather?'

  'We're doing okay so far, sir. I can't say for sure until we get under these clouds. If we can get under them.'

  'Good enough.' He frowned at a readout, touched a button. The reading changed to a more pleasing one. 'Let me know if you think we're going to lose it.'

  'Will do.'

  The tug struck an invisibility. Invisible to the eye, not to her instruments. She bounced once, twice, a third time, then settled more comfortably into the thick wad of dark cloud. The ease of the entry was a tribute to Lambert's skills in plotting and Dallas'ss as a pilot.

  It did not last. Within the ocean of air, heavy currents swirled. They began buffeting the descending ship.

  'Turbulence.' Ripley wrestled with her own controls.

  'Give us navigation and landing lights.' Dallas tried to sort sense from the maelstrom obscuring the viewscreen. 'Maybe we can spot something visually.'

  'No substitute for the instruments,' said Ash. 'Not in this.'

  'No substitute for maximum input, either. Anyhow, I like to look.'

  Powerful lights came on beneath the Nostromo. They pierced the cloud waves only weakly, did not provide the clear field of vision Dallas so badly desired. But they did illuminate the dark screens, thereby lightening both the bridge and the mental atmosphere thereon. Lambert felt less like they were flying through ink.

  Parker and Brett couldn't see the cloud cover outside, but they could feel it. The engine room gave a sudden shift, rocked to the opposite side, shifted sharply again.

  Parker swore under his breath. 'What was that? You hear that?'

  'Yeah.' Brett examined a readout nervously. 'Pressure drop in intake number three. We must've lost a shield.' He punched buttons. 'Yep, three's gone. Dust pouring through the intake.'

  'Shut her down, shut her down.'

  'What do you think I'm doing?'

  'Great. So we've got a secondary full of dust.'

  'No problem . . . I hope.' Brett adjusted a control. 'I'll bypass number three And vent the stuff back out as it comes in.'

  'Damage is done, though.' Parker didn't like to think what the presence of wind-blown abrasives might've done to the intake lining. 'What the hell are we flying through? Clouds or rocks? If we don't crash, dollars to your aunt's cherry we get an electrical fire somewhere in the relevant circuitry.'

  Unaware of the steady cursing taking place back in engineering, the five on the bridge went about the business of trying to set the tug down intact and near to the signal source.

  'Approaching point of origin.' Lambert studied a gauge. 'Closing at twenty-five kilometres. Twenty. Ten, five. . .'

  'Slowing and turning.' Dallas leaned over on the manual helm.

  'Correct course three degrees, four minutes right.' He complied with the directions. 'That's got it. Five kilometres to centre of search circle and steady.'

  'Tightening now.' Dallas fingered the helm once more.

  'Three kiloms. Two.' Lambert sounded just a mite excited, though whether from the danger or the nearness of the signal source Dallas couldn't tell. 'We're practically circling above it now.'

  'Nice work, Lambert. Ripley, what's the terrain like? Find us a landing spot.'

  'Working, sir.' She tried several panels, her expression of disgust growing deeper as unacceptable readings came back. Dallas continued to make sure the ship held its target in the centre of its circling flightpath while Ripley fought to make sense of the unseen surface.

  'Visual line of sight impossible.'

  'We can see that,' Kane mumbled. 'Or rather, can't see it.' The rare half-glimpses the instruments had given him of the ground hadn't put him in a pleasant frame of mind. The occasional readings had hinted at extensive desolation, a hostile, barren desert of a world.

  'Radar gives me noise.' Ripley wished electronics could react to imprecations as readily as people. 'Sonar gives me noise. Infra-red, noise. Hang on, I'm going to try ultra violet. Spectrum's high enough not to interfere.' A moment, followed by the appearance on a crucial readout of some gratifying lines at last, followed in turn by brightly lit words and a computer sketch.

  'That did it.'

  'And a place to land on it?'

  Ripley looked fully relaxed now. 'As near as I can tell, we can set down anywhere you like. Readings say it's flat below us. Totally flat.'

  Dallas's thoughts turned to visions of smooth lava, of a cool but deceptively thin crust barely concealing molten destruction. 'Yeah, but flat what? Water, pahoehoe, sand? Bounce something off, Kane. Get us a determination. I'll take her down low enough so that we lose most of this interference. If it's flat, I can get us close without too much trouble.'

  Kane flipped switches. 'Monitoring. Analytics activated. Still getting noise.'

  Carefully,
Dallas eased the tug toward the surface.

  'Still noisy, but starting to clear.'

  Again, Dallas lost altitude. Lambert watched gauges. They were more than high enough for safe clearance, but at the speed they were Travelling that could change rapidly if anything went wrong with the ship's engines, or if an other-worldly downdraft should materialize. Nor could they cut their speed further. In this wind, that would mean a critical loss of control.

  'Clearing, clearing . . . that's got it!' He studied readouts and contour lines provided by the ship's imaging scanner. 'It was molten once, but not anymore. Not for a long time, according to the analytics. It's mostly basalt, some rhyolite, with occasional lava overlays. Everything's cool and solid now. No sign of tectonic activity.' He utilized other instruments to probe deeper into the secrets of the tiny world's skin.