Read In Space No One Can Hear You Scream for Free Online Page A

and stuff did.
    “Why will you turn blue, Aleria?” I asked,
    “I do wish you’d call me Mother, as we discussed.”
    “Why will you turn blue, Mother?”
    “I’m not sure,” she said. “I never was much of a chemist. My specialty is scouting, as you know. But you humans and we Meebs do need oxygen in about the same amounts. That’s why I picked you out at the crèche, of course. You and I can share the same atmosphere.”
    The crèche, I thought with a shudder. It was a collection station, staffed by Meeb robots. I only found that out later.
    One day I went to sleep in my room. Mine was the one over the garage. It was farther from Mom and Da’s bedroom that Dustin’s was, but it was a little bigger than his. Mom and I painted it up with peace signs and flowers and stuff.
    I dreamed about a bright light.
    And when I woke up, I wasn’t in my room anymore. I was in a cage.
    There were other people in there with me from all different parts of the world, like India and Australia and China and like that. Some were kids, some were adults. It was like this white room we couldn’t see the walls of, but we couldn’t get out of. I was the youngest.
    What none of us knew what that we were in a Pet Mart. I mean, an alien Pet Mart.
    I used to love going to Pet Mart. I really liked watching those cuddly looking chinchillas, and the cute little mice running around and around to nowhere in those wheels of theirs. I liked it when they grabbed the wheels and took a ride around and around for a few turns. It made you think that they weren’t completely stupid, and kind of knew what they were doing.
    Or no. The crèche was not like the pet store. It was lots worse. Because I knew now what it meant to be picked out at the crèche. To be the one who gets selected by that floating glob outside the cage window.
    Kind of like a pet store crossed with a grocery store. That was maybe the closest way of looking at it. Kind of, but not really.
    The ones Aleria didn’t pick out of her trap got recycled, of course. Aleria was very big on a recycling.
    I emptied the rest of the balloon then kicked over to the disposal. I stuck my hand into the blister orifice and let it suck away the used balloon skin. The reason the disposal blister didn’t suck me away was because of the mechs in my skin. They got pinged and identified me, my body, as “keep.” The disposal unit then asked the question it always asked.
    “Space or recycle?”
    “Recycle,” I answered.
    And that was all there was to it. The blister didn’t care; it just needed the answer to follow its programming. The ship might be an artificial intelligence of some sort, but it sure wasn’t any kind of genius.
    I pushed off and went back to Aleria. She was conditioned now. All her pseudopods were retracted which I knew meant she was waiting expectantly. It was time.
    I stuck my hands into the globe, into the main opening, and stuck them into her, pushing into her gooey flesh. The outside of her dimpled for a ways, like the plastic wrap on those cases of water bottles did, then it gave away completely, and my hands and arms were within the milky glop that floated inside Aleria, that was Aleria.
    A stream of her speech-mucus twisted past me. It hit the walls and got absorbed and translated.
    “Aaah,” the wall speaker sighed. “That’s it. Deeper, deeper.”
    I plunged in up to my shoulders. I felt the goo of her surround my arms. And then I felt the prickles where she broke the skin and where parts of her slid inside me .
    She wasn’t just feeding on me, she was changing me. Changing me into more of her. One day, when the nodules she left inside me reached maturity, I would be “ripe,” and she would be able to absorb me completely. We would be one.
    “My youth will be restored, darling, and your youth will last forever.”
    She never told me exactly how the process worked. “I’m not a biologist, dear. I’m a scout,” was her only reply when I asked. But I knew a lot