Alan Dean Foster: Alien

'We've got power and lights back,' Kane reported. 'Nice work, you two.'

'All our work is nice,' replied Parker.

'Right.' Brett must have been standing next to the intercom pickup back by the engines, judging from the steady hum that formed an elegant counterpoint to his standard monosyllabic response.

'Don't get too excited,' Parker was saying. 'The new links should hold, but I'm not making any promises. We just threw stuff together back here. Anything new up your way?'

Kane shook his head, reminded himself that Parker couldn't see the gesture. 'Not a damn thing.' He glanced out the nearest port. The bridge lights cast their faint glow over a patch of featureless, barren ground. Occasionally the storm raging outside would carry a large fragment of sand or bit of rock into view and there would be a brief flash produced by reflection. But that was all.

'Just bare rock. We can't see very far. For all I know we could be squatting five metres from the local oasis.'

'Dream on.' Parker shouted something to Brett, closed with a workmanlike, 'Be in touch if we have any trouble. Let us know the same.'

'Send you a postcard.' Kane switched off. .

It might have been better for everyone's peace of mind if the emergency had continued. With lights and power back and nothing to do save stare emptily at each other, the five people on the bridge grew increasingly restless. There was no room to stretch out and relax. A single floor pacer would have used all the available deck. So they moped at their stations, downed inordinate quantities of coffee spewed out by the autochef, and tried to think of something to do that would keep their damnably busy brains from concentrating on the present unpleasant situation. As to what lay outside the ship, possibly close by, they elected not to speculate aloud.

Of them all, only Ash seemed relatively content. His only concern at the moment was for the mental condition of his shipmates. There were no true recreation facilities on the ship for them to turn to. The Nostromo was a tug, a working vessel, not a pleasure craft. When not performing necessary tasks her crew was supposed to be spending its blank time in the comforting womb of hypersleep. It was only natural that unoccupied wake time would make them nervous under the best of circumstances, and the present circumstances were something less than the best.

Ash could run problems in theory through the computer over and over, without ever becoming bored. He found the awake time stimulating.

'Any response yet to our outcalls?' Dallas leaned out from his chair to eye the science officer.

'I've tried every type of response in the manual, plus free association. I've also let Mother try a strictly mechanalog code approach.' Ash shook his head and looked disappointed. 'Nothing but the same distress call, repeated at the usual intervals. All the other channels are blank, except for a faint, steady crackle on oh-point-three-three.' He jabbed upward with a thumb.

'Mother says that's the characteristic discharge of this world's central star. If anything, or anyone, is alive out there, it's unable to do more than call for help.'

Dallas made a rude noise. 'We've got full power back. Let's see where we are. Kick on the floods.'

Ripley threw a switch. A chain of powerful lights, bright pearls on the dark setting on the Nostromo, came to life outside the ports. Wind and dust were more evident now, sometimes forming small whirlpools in the air, sometimes blowing straight and with considerable force across their line of sight. Isolated rocks, rises and falls, were the only protrusions on the blasted landscape. There was no sign of anything living, not a patch of lichen, a bush, nothing. Only wind and dust swirling in an alien night.

'No oasis,' Kane whispered to himself. Blank and featureless, inhospitable.

Dallas rose, walked to a port, and stared out at the continuing storm, watched splinters of rock scud past the glass. He wondered if the air was ever still on this little world. For all they knew of local conditions, the Nostromo might have set down in the midst of a quiet summer's day. That was unlikely. This globe wasn't big enough to produce really violent weather, like on Jupiter, say. He drew some consolation from that, realizing that the weather outside probably couldn't get much worse.

The vagaries of the local climate formed the principal topic for discussion. 'We can't go anywhere in this,' Kane pointed out. 'Not in the dark, anyway.'

Ash looked up from his console. He hadn't moved, evidently content physically as well as mentally. Kane couldn't understand how the science officer could do it. If he hadn't left his own station occasionally to walk around, he'd be going crazy by now.

Ash noticed his stare, offered some hopeful information. 'Mother says the local sun's coming up in twenty minutes. Wherever we decide to go, it won't be in the dark.'

'That's something,' admitted Dallas, grasping at the least bit of encouragement. 'If our callers won't or can't talk further, we'll have to go looking for them. Or for it, if the signal's being produced by an automatic beacon. How far are we from the source of the transmission?'

Ash studied readouts, activated a ground-level plotter for confirmation. 'About three thousand metres, over mostly level terrain as near as the scanners can tell, roughly northeast of our present position.'

'Composition of terrain?'

'Seems to be the same as we determined on descent. Same hard stuff we're sitting on now. Solid basalt with minor variations, though I wouldn't rule out the possibility of encountering some large amygdaloidal pockets here and there.'

'We'll watch our step, then.'

Kane was comparing distance with suit time in his head. 'At least it's close enough to walk to.'

'Yeah.' Lambert looked pleased. 'I didn't fancy having to move the ship. A straight drop from orbit's easier to plot than a surface-to-surface shift in this kind of weather.'

'Okay. We know what we're going to be walking on. Let's find out what we're going to be walking through. Ash, give us a preliminary atmospheric.'

The science officer punched buttons. A tiny port opened on the skin of the Nostromo. It shoved a metal flask out into the wind, sucked in a minute portion of this world's air, and sank back into the ship.

The sample was ejected into a vacuum chamber. Sophisticated instruments proceeded to pick it to pieces. Very shortly these pieces of air appeared in the form of numbers and symbols on Ash's console.

He studied them briefly, requested a double check on one, then reported to his companions.

'It's almost a primordial mix. Plenty of inert nitrogen, some oxygen, a high concentration of free carbon dioxide. There's methane and ammonia, some of the latter existing in the frozen state. . it's cold outside. I'm working on the trace constituents now, but I don't expect any surprises. It all looks pretty standard, and unbreathable.'

'Pressure?'

'Ten to the fourth dynes per square centimetre. Won't hold us back unless the wind really picks up.'

'What about moisture content?' Kane wanted to know. Images of an imaginary off-Earth oasis rapidly fading from his mind.

'Ninety-eight double P. It may not smell good, but it's humid. Lot of water vapor. Weird mixture, that. Wouldn't think to find that much vapor coexisting with the methane. Oh well. I wouldn't advise drinking from any local water holes, if they exist. Probably not water.'

'Anything else we should know?' Dallas asked.

'Just the basalt surface, plenty of cold, hard lava. And cold air, well below the line,' Ash informed them. 'We'd need suits to handle the temperature even if the air were breathable. If there's anything alive out there, it's tough.'

Dallas looked resigned. 'I suppose it was unreasonable to expect anything else. Hope springs eternal. There's just enough of an atmosphere to make vision bad. I'd have preferred no air at all, but we didn't design this rock.'