17/03/2026 14:58

---

And if they were going to try this, the time was now. Painful was one thing, uselessly painful another. 'Call them Ripley Prime and Ripley Secondary. It smelled like McCarthy's wind — a heavy reek of oil and ether and methane gas.

The masks seem to work, but we've already picked up four cases of Ripley in the medical debriefings. He's a pain, Jonesy thought. And the answer of course was that Henry hadn't been — the smell wasn't really here at all, just the smell of beer. Closed and double-bolted, the passage out was now denied McGrath.