How long to Earth?'
She finished drawing a cup of coffee for herself, slumped into a chair, and said sadly, 'Ten months.'
'Christ.' Ripley stared at the bottom of her cup. Clouds and grass and beach receded farther in her mind, blended into a pale blue-green haze well out of reach. True, ten months in hypersleep was little different from a month. But their minds worked with real time. Ripley would rather have heard six months instead of the projected ten.
The intercom beeped for attention and Dallas acknowledged. 'What's up, Ash?'
'Come see Kane right away.' The request was urgently phrased, yet with a curious hesitancy to it.
Dallas sat up straight, as did the others at the table. 'Some change in his condition? Serious?'
'It's simpler if you just come see him.'
There was a concerted rush for the corridor. Coffee remained steaming on the deserted table.
Horrible visions clouded Dallas's thoughts as he made his way down to the infirmary with the others trailing behind. What gruesome aftereffects had the alien disease produced in the exec? Dallas imagined a swarm of tiny grey hands, their single eyes shining wetly, crawling possessively over the infirmary walls, or some leprous fungus enveloping the rotting corpse of the luckless Kane.
They reached the infirmary, panting from the effort of running down corridor and companionways. There was no cluster of replicated alien hands crawling on the walls. No alien growth, fungoid or otherwise, decorated the body of the executive officer. Ash had greatly understated the matter when he'd reported a change in Kane's condition.
The exec was sitting up on the medical platform. His eyes were open and clear, functioning in proper concert with his brain. Those eyes turned to take in the knot of gaping arrivals.
'Kane?' Lambert couldn't believe it. 'Are you all right?' He looks fine, she thought dazedly. As though nothing had ever happened.
'You want anything?' asked Ripley, when he did not respond to Lambert's query.
'Mouth's dry.' Dallas abruptly remembered what Kane, in his present state, reminded him of: a man just coming out of amnesia. The exec looked alert and fit, but puzzled for no particular reason, as though he were still trying to organize his thoughts. 'Can I have some water?'
Ash moved quickly to a dispenser, drew a plastic cupful, and handed it to Kane. The exec downed it in a single long swallow. Dallas noted absently that muscular co-ordination seemed normal. The hand-to-mouth drinking movements had been performed instinctively, without forethought.
While enormously gratifying, the situation was ridiculous. There had to be something wrong with him.
'More,' was all Kane said, continuing to act like, a man in complete control of himself. Ripley found a large container, filled it brim full, and handed it to him. He downed the contents like a man who'd just spent ten years wandering the deserts of Piolin, then sagged back on the padded platform, panting.
'How do you feel?' asked Dallas.
'Terrible. What happened to me?'
'You don't remember?' Ash said.
So, Dallas told himself with satisfaction, the amnesia analogy was nearer the mark than he'd suspected.
Kane winced slightly, more from muscles cramping from disuse than anything else, and took a deep breath. 'I don't remember a thing. I can barely remember my name.'
'Just for the record. . and the medical report,' asked Ash professionally, 'what is your name?'
'Kane. Thomas Kane.'
'That's all you remember?'
'For the moment.' He let his gaze travel slowly over the assembly of anxious faces. 'I remember all of you, though I can't put names to you yet.'
'You will,' Ash assured him confidently. 'You recall your own name and you remember faces. That's a good start. Also a sign that your loss of memory isn't absolute.'
'Do you hurt?' Surprisingly, it was the stoic Parker who asked the first sensitive question.
'All over. Feel like somebody's been beating me with a stick for about six years.' He sat up on the pallet again, swung his legs over the side, and smiled. 'God, am I hungry. How long was I out?'
Dallas continued to stare at the apparently unharmed man in disbelief. 'Couple of days. You sure you don't have any recollection of what happened to you?'
'Nope. Not a thing.'
'What's the last thing you remember?' Ripley asked him.
'I don't know.'
'You were with Dallas and me on a strange planet, exploring. Do you remember what happened there'
Kane's forehead wrinkled as he tried to battle through the mists obscuring his memories. Real remembrances remained tantalizingly out of reach, realisation a painful, incomplete process.
'Just some horrible dream about smothering. Where are we now? Still on the planet?'
Ripley shook her head. 'No, I'm delighted to say. We're in hyperspace, on our way home.'
'Getting ready to go back in the freezers,' Brett added feelingly. He was as anxious as the others to retire to the mindless protection of hypersleep. Anxious for the nightmare that had forced itself on them to be put in suspension along with their bodies.
Though looking at the revitalized Kane made it hard to reconcile their memories with the image of the alien horror he'd brought aboard, the petrified creature was there for anyone to inspect, motionless in its stasis tube.
'I'm all for that,' Kane said readily. 'Feel dizzy and tired enough to go into deep sleep without the freezers.' He looked around the infirmary wildly. 'Right now, though, I'm starving. I want some food before we go under.'
'I'm pretty hungry myself.' Parker's stomach growled indelicately. 'It's tough enough coming out of hypersleep without your belly rumbling. Better if you go under with a full stomach. Makes it easier coming out.'
'I won't argue that.' Dallas felt some sort of celebration was in order. In the absence of partying material, a final presleep feast would have to do. 'We could all use some food. One meal before bed. .'
IX
Coffee and tea had been joined on the mess table by individual servings of food. Everyone ate slowly, their enthusiasm coming from the fact they were a whole crew again rather than from the bland offerings of the autochef.
Only Kane ate differently, wolfing down huge portions of the artificial meats and vegetables. He'd already finished two normal helpings and was starting in on a third with no sign of slowing down. Unmindful of nearby displays of human gluttony, Jones the cat ate delicately from a dish in the centre of the table.
Kane looked up and waved a spoon at them, spoke with his mouth full. 'First thing I'm going to do when we get back is eat some decent food. I'm sick of artificials. I don't care what the Company manuals say, it still tastes of recycling. There's a twang to artificials that no amount of spicing or seasoning can eliminate.'
'I've had worse than this,' Parker commented thoughtfully, 'but I've had better, too.'
Lambert frowned at the engineer, a spoonful of steak-thatwasn't suspended halfway between plate and lips. 'For somebody who doesn't like the stuff, you're pounding it down like there's no tomorrow.'
'I mean, I like it,' Parker explained, shoveling down another spoonful.
'No kidding?' Kane didn't pause in his eating, but did throw Parker a look of suspicion, as though he thought the engineer might not be entirely right in the head.
Parker tried not to sound defensive. 'So I like it. It sort of grows on you.'
'It should,' Kane shot back. 'You know what this stuff is made out of.'
'I know what it's made out of,' Parker replied. 'So what? It's food now. You're hardly the one to talk, the way you're gulping it down.'
