Aliens Alien Harvest - By Robert Sheckley Page 0,30

to get her.

She stopped for a moment in midstep, trying to get her bearings. Her hearing extended itself through the darkness, searching. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she made out vast shapes on either side of her. They were machines, made of dark, glistening metal, and they towered above her. Spots of white light from some unknown source winked off metallic surfaces, and reflected from coils and condensers. They didn't even look like objects. They were like the ghosts of objects because their shapes were indistinct, ambiguous, swathed in a darkness that had gradation and depth, and was textured with the layers of silence.

A voice crackled in the tiny radio bug implanted in her ear.

"Julie? Do you see him yet?" It was Stan Myakov sky, calling from the Dolomite's central control room. He wasn't far away, as distances go, but he could have been in another galaxy for all the good he could do her now.

"Not yet," she answered. "But I know he's in here somewhere."

"Be careful, huh?" Stan said. "I still think we should have, delayed this run. I'm still not entirely satisfied with Norbert's control system."

Now was a hell of a time to tell her that. She decided to ignore it. Stan sounded agitated. Was he getting cold feet?

Or was he just having an ordinary attack of nerves?

She snapped on a tiny flashlight. Ahead of her, picked up in the thin beam, she could see more profound glooms, silent caves of blackness where awful things might lurk. Some of these horrors were caused by the power of her imagination, but she was afraid that some were not.

It was not imagination that told her something in this great dark place was tracking her. She knew it was there. But where was it? She strained her senses to the utmost, trying to pick up some clue. Nothing. But she could tell it was out there. She had a sense of presence, almost like a sixth sense. It was what a successful thief needed above all else, and Julie was an extremely successful thief.

She thought back now on her years of training with Shen Hui, the old Chinese master criminal. She first met him when she was a little girl, the youngest one in the Shanghai slave market that morning. She remembered peering at the crowd that had come to attend the auction, trying to catch a final glimpse of her mother. But she had already left, unwilling to watch her only daughter being sold on the open market. The men started bidding, men from different countries. Then one old man had outbid the rest, and had paid the auctioneer in taels of gold. That was Shen Hui.

He brought her to his house and raised her like his own flesh and blood. Shen Hui was a master thief, a master of the zen of thievery. He had taught her to develop her latent senses so that she could register things without literally seeing or hearing them. That ability came to her rescue now.

Yes, it was not just imagination. There was some thing near, and it was situated right over ... there!

She whirled as a great looming thing detached itself from the deep knot of shadows near a gigantic machine that lay shrouded in its own dust. She found it fascinating, the way the shadows moved and grew, like something not human, the way they resolved into one, and that shadow suddenly turned solid and launched itself at her with an explosive hiss.

"Julie! Watch out!" Stan's voice rang in her ears. He had picked up the sudden movement. But late. Stan was always late. What good could his warning do for her now? He never seemed to realize it. Not that she had expected anything more. She was responsible for herself. And June was already in motion as the thing came at her.

Her long legs, clad in skintight black plastic, pumped smoothly as she sprinted down the central aisle of the Dolomite's great central cargo hold. The creature, three times her height, colored an unremitting black, with jaws filled with long closely packed fanglike teeth, came after her. Feeling herself being oyertaken, Julie dodged and swerved around the faintly delineated center line of the hold. This one narrow strip had been set for twenty percent less of the faux gravity that so much resembled the real thing. Running on the light gravity strip made her feel as though she had wings, so rapidly did she move, dodging fixed objects