Read Online Alien Nation #3 - Body and Soul by Peter David - Free Book Online

again. As a result, his neck spasmed again, and this time the pain was something fierce.
    Albert was drawn to suffering like an auditor to a write-off. “I can help you,” he said confidently.
    At least he was confident. Sikes was not remotely so. Albert was walking behind him as Sikes said suspiciously, “What?”
    “Just relax.”
    To Sikes’s horror, Albert quickly put him in a headlock. His eyes widened in panic. He looked to George for succor, but George was just sitting there impassively, with some fur from the damned weasel sticking out the edge of his mouth.
    “Albert, no!” Sikes cried out. He was terrified that the youthful Newcomer was going to rip his head off.
    Albert snapped Sikes’s head around, quickly and efficiently and with a large measure of self-confidence. Sikes let out a compressed shriek of “Niiiiaaagh!”
    He waited for pain to rip through every pore of his body. His skin would doubtless feel as if it were being flayed off. Every nerve ending was . . .
    Was . . .
    Nothing.
    To Sikes’s astonishment, there was nothing. Well, not quite. There was something. But it was nowhere on a par with what he had been feeling before.
    Albert took a step back. “How’s that?” he asked, his open hands still poised at either side of Sikes’s face. For a moment it seemed to Sikes as if Albert was preparing for the possibility that Sikes’s head might roll off its shoulders.
    Slowly he brought his head in a circle. “Better,” he admitted, and then quickly amended, “It’s still sore, but I can move it.”
    As if delivering a public service message, Albert said sagely, “Sexual ignorance is a very dangerous thing.”
    “So is making comments like that around someone who’s armed,” said Sikes. “Remember, Albert, I do have a gun.”
    “Yes, Matt, I think we all remember that,” George said pointedly.
    Sikes glared at him.
    May wisely took that moment to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “George,” she said, “Albert and I want to have a child.”
    George looked amazed. A grin split his face from ear to ear or, at least, what passed for ears on a Tenctonese head. “Really? That’s wonderful!”
    Sikes was still rubbing his neck to work out the last of the kinks. “How?” he asked in a slightly distracted fashion. “You gonna adopt?”
    May looked at Sikes as if he’d just dropped down from Mars . . . which was pretty ironic, considering who was looking at whom. “I’m going to conceive,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why?”
    Now Sikes felt completely flustered. He had been so certain that adoption was a reasonable assumption, based on what he had learned about Tenctonese physiology. That was the problem with these damned people. Every time he thought he had a handle on them, they came up with some new philosophy or some new little biological trick that sent him off kilter once more. Sometimes he had the paranoid feeling that George and his friends were making this up as they went, just to keep the earth guy off balance.
    May was still staring at him, clearly expecting an answer to her question of “Why?” And now Albert and George were also regarding him with open curiosity.
    “Uh . . . well.” He scratched his chin and immediately winced, because he’d rubbed the sore spot. He tried to think of ways this day could possibly get worse, and nothing came to mind . . . which was a bad sign, since Sikes was a pessimist. Nevertheless, he pressed on gamely. “I mean, I know about Newcomers. It takes two men to get one woman pregnant.”
    It wasn’t a statement so much as a question. He looked expectantly at the three of them, and almost as one, they nodded. He felt a slight measure of relief. It meant that they weren’t suddenly going to change the rules on him (“Two men? Matt, what an absurd notion! Where did you get that idea?” his paranoid fantasies had George saying.) Slightly buoyed, he continued, to make sure he understood things. “A Binnaum,