had been looking at Jupiter through telescopes.
But no more.
It was sending out long reddish streamers, twisting threads that had to be tens of thousands of miles long, like a living thing bleeding underwater. The streamers stretched across the multicolored cloud bands and disappeared around the curvature of the planet, forming a twisted belt at the equator.
“
They watched in frozen silence for long minutes. Then they saw what was causing it.
“There’s our ‘meteorological phenomenon,’ ” Ruiz snorted. “Kerry’s ‘cloudtop disturbance.’ ”
It was sweeping around the curve of the planet, moving at what seemed a crawling pace, but actually traveling at what had to be more than a million miles per hour. At this rate it would circle Jupiter’s 89,000-mile diameter in something like fifteen minutes.
It was an unimaginably huge vortex of churning clouds. As it progressed along the equator it deformed the colored bands of clouds into an elongated eye-shape, with itself at the center. And now they could see that it was gathering a skein of those bloody streamers from the Red Spot around itself, dragging them halfway around the planet.
“Maybury!” Ruiz said sharply. “Is Pierce recording?”
She looked startled. “Yes, Dr. Ruiz,” she said. “I signaled him before we left.”
Jameson briefly considered calling Boyle, but decided not to wake the skipper up. All this had happened hours ago anyway. Boyle and Hsieh could see it in replay.
The tremendous whirling funnel was overtaking the Red Spot. It distorted the shape of the oval feature, making it bulge northward. Twisting ribbons of red stretched in a bloodshot spindle between the two loci.
A great gob of matter, the size of a continent, detached itself from the bulging Spot and was sucked into the whirlpool.
“God help us,” Ruiz breathed.
The sudden infusion of red nitriles briefly colored the gigantic maelstrom. Jameson tried to grasp the scale of the colossal events he was witnessing, and found he couldn’t. Those whipping shapes winding themselves like torn confetti around that spinning vortex were bigger than worlds, and they were covering vast distances in fractions of a second. It was a violence that would have shorn Earth in the blink of an eye and left it a polished ball, glowing with the heat of friction. Now, as Jameson watched, the blurred spirals of cloud were turning pink, showing that ulcerous pit more clearly against the face of the planet.
Something was growing out of it.
“They’re doing it to Jupiter, too,” Ruiz whispered.
Jameson had no time to reflect on what Ruiz meant. The spectacle he was seeing held all his attention. The raging vortex had marched from horizon to horizon, and he had an oblique view of it as it approached the edge of the planet.
He could make it out now against the engulfing darkness: a tenuous pillar of cloud extending thousands of miles into space in a coiling loop. The roots of that spectral rope were stained pink with colored hydrogen. It became more transparent, insubstantial, as it ascended its twisting path, narrowing all the while until it ended as a gossamer thread somewhere inside the orbit of Jupiter V.
A thread whose tip was a glowing blue spark.
The bomb crews began their grim rehearsals the next day. Hollis drove his men hard—too hard in an environment where fatigue could be fatal. Boyle had spoken to him about it, and received an answer in advanced officialese that amounted to “mind your own business.”
It was amazing, Jameson thought, how well Major Hollis got along with his counterpart, People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang, when his relations with his fellow Americans were so distant and grudging. Hollis acted as if he were in enemy territory whenever he ventured out of his spun-foam cocoon on the inner rim of the wheel to see Boyle or confer with Liz Becque about his men’s rations. He was never seen after hours in the lounge. Evidently he drank alone with his executive, a watchful, tight-lipped man named Toscano.
Standing in the observation lounge on the inner side of the rim, Jameson was getting a good view of the latest rehearsal through the overhead bubble.
The long spear of the ship’s drive section, a hundred meters overhead, was aswarm with bulky spacesuited figures, scrambling around a cluster of dart-shaped missiles splayed out in their launching racks at an angle to the hull. The weapons, finned and needle-nosed, obviously had been designed for atmospheric launch, and their presence on this mission showed how hasty the preparations had been.
“So they’re playing with their toys, are they?” a voice said behind him.
Jameson turned. Ruiz was there, looking tired. He was dressed in shorts and sandals and a short-sleeved shirt that for once seemed to be pressed.
“They’re not exactly toys,” Jameson said. “There’s a rumor that they’ve got a gigaton bomb with them. It’s never been tested. Couldn’t be, on Earth. They think it would make a fifty-mile crater, maybe even break through the Earth’s crust.”
“Lunatics!” Ruiz said. “What kind of a crater do they expect to make in space? Or Jupiter, for that matter. No solid surface.”
“The bombs are for the Cygnans, aren’t they?” Jameson asked carefully.
“The Cygnans. Of course, they don’t officially exist. They’re not supposed to have survived ten thousand years of hard radiation.”
“That’s what Dmitri keeps saying.” Jameson grinned.
“They’ve exhibited some remarkable activity for an extinct race, haven’t they? Moving worlds about like that.”
Both men looked up through the bubble. The little spacesuited figures were swarming around a piece of equipment, maneuvering it into place on one of the launching racks. It looked as if they were hooking it into the missile guidance system.
It was late when Jameson returned to his quarters. After leaving Ruiz, he’d bumped into Li and been trapped onto a long technical discussion about using the Callisto lander to land on the Cygnus Object’s moon. The moon was settling into a new orbit around Jupiter, an ellipse that crossed the orbit of its former parent world, and they would have to time their expedition for the eight-day period when the satellite would be outside Jupiter’s most intense radiation zone. The orbital calculations were going to make some difficult work for Maggie and Jen Mei-mei. Jameson finally shook Li off and made his way down to the section of outer ring that held the officers’ living quarters looking forward to a drink with Maggie and a relaxed evening—or what ship’s convention had defined as evening.
His cabin was dark when he let himself in. Maggie was nowhere around. Jameson frowned. She should have come off duty an hour ago. He kicked off his sandals, made himself a drink, and put on some music. With a sigh, he settled down to study some equipment-maintenance reports while he was waiting.
Maggie straggled in an hour later. She looked dispirited and bedraggled. Her orange hair hung down limply, a stray strand across her cheek, and one tail of her shirt had escaped her shorts.
“Is that a martini?” she said. “Gawd, let me have a sip!” She flopped down on the aircouch and drained Jameson’s glass. Silently he got up to mix another batch.
“Thanks,” she said as he handed her a fresh glass. “Jeeks, what a day!”
“What happened?” he said.
She turned a tired face toward him. She looked pale and drained, and her freckles showed more prominently. “I’ve been drafted,” she said. “Me and Mei-mei. We spent the day working for Hollis.” She took a sip of her drink. “Plotting bomb orbits.”
Chapter 12
