Alien

'We'll hit a split pretty soon,' Brett cautioned her.

Several minutes passed. The corridor became two. She used the tracker, started down the right-hand passage. The red light began to fade. She turned, headed down the other corridor. 'Back this way.'

The lights were still scarcer in this section of the ship. Deep shadows pressed tightly around them, suffocating despite the fact that no one trained to ship in deep space is subject to claustrophobia. Their steps clanged on the metal decking, were muffled only when they waded through slick pools of accumulated fluid.

'Dallas ought to demand an inspection,' Parker muttered disgustedly. 'They'd condemn forty per cent of the ship and then the Company would have to pay to clean it up.'

Ripley shook her head, threw the engineer a skeptical look. 'Want to bet? Be cheaper and easier for the Company to buy off the inspector.'

Parker fought to hide his disappointment. Another of his seemingly brilliant ideas shot down. The worst part of it was, Ripley's logic was usually unassailable. His resentment and admiration for her grew in proportion to one another.

'Speaking of fixing and cleaning up,' she continued, 'what's wrong with the lights? I said I wasn't familiar with this part of the ship, but you can hardly see your own nose here. I thought you guys fixed twelve module. We should have better illumination than this, even down here.'

'We did fix it,' Brett protested.

Parker moved to squint at a nearby panel. 'Delivery system must be acting cautious. Some of the circuits haven't been receiving their usual steady current, you know. It was tough enough to restore power without blowing every conductor on the ship. When things get tricky, affected systems restrict their acceptance of power to prevent overloads. This one's overdoing it, though. We can fix that.'

He touched a switch on the panel, cut in an override. The light in the corridor grew brighter.

They travelled farther before Ripley abruptly halted and threw up a cautionary hand. 'Wait.'

Parker nearly fell in his haste to obey, and Brett almost stumbled in the netting. Nobody laughed or came near to doing so.

'We're close?' Parker whispered the question, straining with inadequate eyes to penetrate the blackness ahead.

Ripley checked the needle, matched it to Ash's handengraved scale etched into the metal alongside the illuminated screen. 'According to this, it's within fifteen metres.'

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.