true, but human nonetheless. He was not pleased, but neither was he angry. There was nothing here to get angry at.
‘Stark raving mad. I’m not saying it was anyone’s fault, but he should have been chained up. Figuratively speaking, of course.’ The superintendent glanced at his medic. ‘Sedated.
You didn’t see this coming, Mr. Clemens?’
‘You know me, sir. I don’t diagnose. I only prescribe.’
Clemens had almost finished his cleaning. Golic looked better, but only if you avoided his eyes.
‘Yes, of course. Precognitive psychology isn’t your specialty, is it? If anyone should have taken note, it was me.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, sir,’ said Aaron.
‘I’m not. Merely verbalizing certain regrets. Sometimes insanity lurks quiet and unseen beneath the surface of a man, awaiting only the proper stimulus for it to burst forth. Like certain desert seeds that propagate only once every ten or eleven years, when the rains are heavy enough.’ He sighed. ‘I would very much like to see a normal, gentle rain again.’
‘Well, you called it right, sir,’ Aaron continued. ‘He’s mad as a fuckin’ hatter.’
‘I do so delight in the manner in which you enliven your everyday conversation with pithy anachronisms, Mr. Aaron.’
Andrews looked to his trustee. ‘He seems to be calming down a little. Permanent tranquilization is an expensive proposition and its use would have to be justified in the record. Let’s try keeping him separated from the rest for a while, Mr. Dillon, and see if it has a salutary effect. I don’t want him causing a panic. Clemens, sedate this poor idiot sufficiently so that he won’t be a danger to himself or to anyone else. Mr. Dillon, I’ll rely on you to keep an eye on him after he’s released.
Hopefully he will improve. It would make things simpler.’
‘Very well, Superintendent. But no full sedation until we know about the other brothers.’
‘You ain’t gonna get anything out of that.’ Aaron gestured disgustedly at the straightjacket’s trembling inhabitant.
‘We have to try.’ Dillon leaned close, searching his fellow prisoner’s face. ‘Pull yourself together, man. Talk to me.
Where are the brothers? Where are Rains and Boggs?’
Golic licked his lips. They were badly chewed and still bled slightly despite Clemens’s efficient ministrations. ‘Rains?’ he whispered, his brow furrowing with the effort of trying to remember. ‘Boggs?’ Suddenly his eyes widened afresh and he looked up sharply, as if seeing them for the first time. ‘I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me. It was. . it was. .’ He started sobbing again, bawling and babbling hysterically.
Andrews looked on, shaking his head sadly. ‘Hopeless. Mr.
Aaron’s right. You’re not going to get anything out of him for a while, if ever. We’re not going to wait until we do.’
Dillon straightened. ‘It’s your call, Superintendent.’
‘We’ll have to send out a search party. Sensible people who aren’t afraid of the dark or each other. I’m afraid we have to assume that there is a very good chance this simple bastard has murdered them.’ He hesitated. ‘If you are at all familiar with his record, then you know that such a scenario is not beyond the realm of possibility.’
‘You don’t know that, sir,’ said Dillon. ‘He never lied to me.
He’s crazy. He’s a fool. But he’s not a liar.’
‘You are well-meaning, Mr. Dillon, but overly generous to a fellow prisoner.’ Andrews fought back the sarcasm which sprang immediately to mind. ‘Personally I’d consider Golic a poor vessel for your trust.’
Dillon’s lips tightened. ‘I’m not naive, sir. I know enough about him to want to keep an eye on him as much as help him.’
‘Good. I don’t want any more people vanishing because of his ravings.’
Ripley rose and approached the group. All eyes turned to regard her.
‘There’s a chance he’s telling the truth.’ Clemens gaped at her. She ignored him. ‘I need to talk to him about this dragon.’
Andrews’s reply was crisp. ‘You’re not talking to anyone, Lieutenant. I am not interested in your opinions because you are not in full possession of the facts.’ He gestured toward Golic. ‘This man is a convicted multiple murderer, known for particularly brutal and ghastly crimes.’
‘I didn’t do it!’ the man in the straightjacket burbled helplessly.
Andrews looked around. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr. Dillon?’
‘Yeah,’ Dillon agreed reluctantly, ‘that part’s right.’
Ripley gazed hard at the superintendent. ‘I need to talk to you. It’s important.’
The older man considered thoughtfully. ‘When I have finished with my official duties I’ll be quite pleased to have a little chat. Yes?’
She looked as if she wanted to say something further, but simply nodded.
VIII
Aaron took charge of the water pitcher, making sure the glasses were filled. He needn’t have bothered. Once Ripley started talking, no one noticed irrelevant details such as thirst.
She explained carefully and in detail, leaving nothing out, from the time the original alien eggs had been discovered in the hold of the gigantic ship of still unknown origin on Acheron, to the destruction of the original crew of the Nostromo and Ripley’s subsequent escape, to the later devastating encounter on Acheron and her flight from there in the company of her now dead companions.
Her ability to recall every relevant incident and detail might have struck an observer as prodigious, but remembering was not her problem. What tormented her daily was her inability to forget.
It was quiet in the superintendent’s quarters for quite a while after she finished. Ripley downed half her glass of purified water, watching his face.
He laced his fingers over his belly. ‘Let me see if I have this correct, Lieutenant. What you say we’re dealing with here is an eight-foot-tall carnivorous insect of some kind with acidic body fluids, and that it arrived on your spaceship.’
‘We don’t know that it’s an insect,’ she corrected him. ‘That’s the simplest and most obvious analog, but nobody knows for sure. They don’t lend themselves to easy taxonomic study. It’s hard to dissect something that dissolves your instruments after it’s dead and tries to eat or impregnate you while it’s alive. The colony on Acheron devoted itself frantically to such studies. It didn’t matter. The creatures wiped them out before they could learn anything. Unfortunately, their records were destroyed when the base fusion planet went critical. We know a little about them, just enough to make a few generalizations.
‘About all we can say with a reasonable degree of assurance is that they have a biosocial system crudely analogous to the social insects of Earth, like the ants and the bees and so forth. Beyond that, nobody knows anything. Their intelligence level is certainly much greater than that of any social arthropod, though at this point it’s hard to say whether they’re capable of higher reasoning as we know it. I’m almost certain they can communicate by smell. They may have additional perceptive capabilities we know nothing about.
‘They’re incredibly quick, strong, and tough. I personally watched one survive quite well in deep interstellar vacuum until I could fry it with an EEV’s engines.’
‘And it kills on sight and is generally unpleasant,’ Andrews finished for her. ‘So you claim. And of course you expect me to accept this entire fantastic story solely on your word.’
‘Right, sir,’ said Aaron quickly, ‘that’s a beauty. Never heard anything like it, sir.’
‘No, I don’t expect you to accept it,’ Ripley replied softly.
‘I’ve dealt with people like you before.’
Andrews replied without umbrage. ‘I’ll ignore that. Assuming for the moment that I accept the gist of what you’ve said, what would you suggest we do? Compose our wills and wait to be eaten?’
