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ALIENbyAlan Dean FosterScreenplay by Dan O'BannonStory by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald ShusettoWARNER BOOKSA Warner Communications Company5 WARNER BOOKS EDITIONCopyright ª1979 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation All rightsreserved.ISBN: 0-446-82977-3Book design: H. Roberts'Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019a Warner Communications CompanyPrinted in the United States of AmericaNot associated with Warner Press, Inc., of Anderson, IndianaFirst Printing: June, 197910 9 8 7 6 5 46 For Jim McQuade ...A good friend and fellowexplorer of extreme possibilities ...7 Seven dreamers.You must understand that they were not professional dreamers.Professional dreamers are highly paid, respected, much sought-aftertalents. Like the majority of us, these seven dreamt without effort ordiscipline. Dreaming professionally, so that one's dreams can berecorded and played back for the entertainment of others, is a much moredemanding proposition. It requires the ability to regulate semiconsciouscreative impulses and to stratify imagination, an extraordinarily,difficult combination to achieve. A professional dreamer issimultaneously the most organized of all artists and the mostspontaneous. A subtle weaver of speculation, not straightforward andclumsy like you or I. Or these certain seven sleepers.8 Of them all, Ripley came closest to possessing that special potential.She had a little ingrained dream talent and more flexibility ofimagination than her companions. But she lacked real inspiration and'the powerful maturity of thought characteristic of the pro dreamer.She was very good at organizing stores and cargo, at pigeonholing cartonA in storage chamber B or matching up manifests. It was in the warehouseof the mind that her filing system went awry. Hopes and fears,speculations and half creations slipped haphazardly from compartment tocompartmentWarrant officer Ripley needed more self-control. The raw, rococothoughts lay waiting to be tapped, just below the surface ofrealization. A little more effort, a greater intensity ofself-recognition and she would have made a pretty good pro dreamer. Orso she occasionally thought.Captain Dallas now, he appeared lazy while being the best organized ofall. Nor was he lacking in imagination. His beard was proof of that.Nobody took a beard into the freezers. Nobody except Dallas. It was apart of his personality, he'd explained to more than one curiousshipmate. He'd no more part with the antique facial fuzz than he wouldwith any other part of his anatomy. Captain of two ships Dallas was: theinterstellar tug Nostromo, and his body. Both would remain intact indreaming as well as when awake.So he had the regulatory capability, and a modicum of imagination. But aprofessional dreamer requires a deal more than a modicum of the last,and that's a deficiency that can't be compensated for by adisproportionate quantity of the first. Dallas was no more realistic prodreamer material than Ripley.9 Kane was less controlled in thought and action than was Dallas, andpossessed far less imagination. He was a good executive officer. Neverwould he be a captain. That requires a certain drive coupled with theability to command others, neither of which Kane had been blessed with.His dreams were translucent, formless shadows compared to those ofDallas', just as Kane was a thinner, less vibrant echo of the captain.That did not make him less likable. But pro dreaming requires a certainextra energy, and Kane had barely enough for day-to-day living.Parker's dreams were not offensive, but they were less pastoral thanKane's. There was little imagination in them at all. They were toospecialized, and dealt only rarely with human things. One could expectnothing else from a ship's engineer.Direct they were, and occasionally ugly. In wakefulness this deeplyburied offal rarely showed itself, when the engineer became irritated orangry. Most of the ooze and contempt fermenting at the bottom of hissoul's cistern were kept well hidden. His shipmates never saw beyond thedistilled Parker floating on top, never had a glimpse of what wasbubbling and brewing deep inside.Lambert was more the inspiration of dreamers than dreamer herself. Inhypersleep her restless musings were filled with intersystem plottingsand load factors canceled out by fuel considerations. Occasionallyimagination entered into such dream structures, but never in a fashionfit to stir the blood of others.Parker and Brett often imagined their own systems interplotting withhers. They considered the question of load factors and spatialjuxtapositions in a manner that would have infuriated Lambert had10she been aware of them. Such unauthorized musings they kept tothemselves, securely locked in daydreams and nightdreams, lest they makeher mad. It would not do to upset Lambert. As the Nostromo's navigatorshe was the one primarily responsible for seeing them safely home, andthat was the most exciting and desirable cojoining any man could imagine.Brett was only listed as an engineering technician. That was a fancy wayof saying he was just as smart and knowledgeable as Parker but lackedseniority. The two men formed an odd pair, unequal and utterly differentto outsiders. Yet they coexisted and functioned together smoothly. Inlarge part their success as both friends and coworkers was due to Brettnever intruding on Parker's mental ground. The tech was as solemn andphlegmatic in outlook and speech as Parker was voluble and volatile.Parker could rant for hours over the failure of a microchip circuit,damning its ancestry back to the soil from which its rare earthconstituents were first mined. Brett would patiently comment, ?right.?For Brett, that single word was much more than a mere statement ofopinion. It was an affirmation of self. For him, silence was thecleanest form of communication. In loquaciousness lay insanity.And then there was Ash. Ash was the science officer, but that wasn'twhat made his dreams so funny. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Hisdreams were the most professionally organized of all the crew's. Of themall, his came nearest to matching his awakened self. Ash's dreams heldabsolutely no delusions.That wasn't surprising if you really knew Ash. None of his six crewmatesdid, though. Ash knew himself well. If asked, he could have told you why he11 could never become a pro dreamer. None ever thought to ask, despitethe fact that the science officer clearly found pro dreaming morefascinating than any of them.Oh, and there was the cat. Name of Jones. A very ordinary housecat, or,in this instance, shipcat. Jones was a large yellow tom of uncertainparentage and independent mien, long accustomed to the vagaries of shiptravel and the idiosyncrasies of humans who traveled through space. Ittoo slept the cold sleep, and dreamt simple dreams of warm, dark placesand gravity-bound mice.Of all the dreamers on board he was the only contented one, though hecould not be called an innocent.It was a shame none of them were qualified as pro dreamers, since eachhad more time to dream in the course of their work than any dozenprofessionals, despite the slowing of their dream pace by the coldsleep. Necessity made dreaming their principal avocation. A deep-spacecrew can't do anything in the freezers but sleep and dream. They mightremain forever amateurs, but they had long ago become very competent ones.Seven of them there were. Seven quiet dreamers in search of a nightmare.While it possessed a consciousness of a sort, the Nostromo did notdream. It did not need to, anymore than it needed the preserving effectof the freezers. If it did dream, such musings must have been brief andfleeting, since it never slept. It worked, and maintained, and madecertain its hibernating human complement stayed always a step ahead ofever ready death, which followed the cold sleep like a vast gray sharkbehind a ship at sea.12Evidence of the Nostromo's unceasing mechanical vigilance was everywhereon the quiet ship, in soft hums and lights that formed the breath ofinstrumental sentience. It permeated the very fabric of the vessel,extended sensors to check every circuit and strut. It had sensorsoutside too, monitoring the pulse of the cosmos. Those sensors hadfastened onto an electromagnetic anomaly.One portion of the Nostromo's brain was particularly adept at distillingsense out of anomalies. It had thoroughly chewed this one up, found theflavor puzzling, examined the results of analysis, and reached adecision. Slumbering instrumentalities were activated, dormant circuitsagain regulated the flow of electrons. In celebration of this decision,banks of brilliant lights winked on, life signs of stirring mechanicalbreath.A distinctive beeping sounded, though as yet there were only artificialtympanums present to hear and acknowledge. It was a sound not heard onthe Nostromo for some time, and it signified an infrequent happening.Within this awakening bottle of clicks and flashes, of devicesconversing with each other, lay a special room. Within this room ofwhite metal lay seven cocoons of snow-colored metal and plastic.A new noise filled this chamber, an explosive exhalation that filled itwith freshly scrubbed, breathable atmosphere. Mankind had willinglyplaced himself in this position, trusting in little tin gods like theNostromo to provide him with the breath of life when he could not do sofor himself.Extensions of that half-sentient electr... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]