Cygnans rose into the air and began to settle down again. He caught a glimpse of Grogan, writhing against a background of stars, a half dozen aliens clinging to him like terriers to a bear. Busy fingers were plucking at Grogan’s hoses, at the latches of his suit. Finally came the horrible sight of Grogan’s helmet being passed from Cygnan to Cygnan like a basketball, while above Grogan’s collar ring a ball of oozing sludge sprayed a fine pink mist into space.
Jameson felt a moment of panic as alien fingers fumbled at his own latches. He managed to slap them away, and they didn’t return. Then suddenly came a heave, like a concerted blanket-toss, and Jameson felt himself sailing into space. Tumbling end over end, he saw himself heading into the mouth of a large transparent sack that was being held open by a circle of hovering Cygnans. There was nothing he could do to change his trajectory, as he discovered when he tried to use his suit jets. Industrious little fingers had managed to disconnect them.
He was ignominiously stuffed, kicking and squirming, into the sack. The neck was drawn shut. He struck out through the tough plastic material at the smooth, shiny bodies around him. All he succeeded in doing was to work up a sweat inside his spacesuit. Can’t fight my way out of a paper bag, he thought. He groped at his belt kit for something sharp. All his tools were missing.
A Cygnan with some kind of tank-and-hose arrangement floated over to him. Jameson studied the creature through the clear plastic. It was holding the tank in its middle limbs, the hose nozzle with one hand. The other hand—or what passed for a hand—began fiddling with a valve. Holding its broomstick negligently with one foot, the Cygnan started to spray him. When it had finished the job, another Cygnan floated over with a bundle of long tubes fitted with a pistol grip. His captors let go of the sack again and left Jameson hanging free. The creature vacuumed the entire surface of the sack industriously. Jameson detected a glow of purple light. Sterilizing me, he thought.
A pair of Cygnans took him then, like a sack of laundry and zoomed off with him. The creature on the right clutched its broomstick with the three right-hand limbs, like an outrigger, and the one on the left hung on to its stick with its three left limbs. They held the stack stretched safely between them, leaning inward to join hands at its neck. Jameson noticed that they kept shifting their grip. They had three choices. And there were never more than two limbs wrapped around the stick. One of them always was resting. Did Cygnans tire easily? Jameson decided that no individual Cygnan limb was as strong as a human arm or leg. But it didn’t have to be.
A mile or two from the ship, he finally stopped struggling. When his air was gone, he was dead. He wanted to postpone that as long as possible. So he settled into the sack and tried to make himself relax. Ruiz had been right. Those flimsy-looking tubes the Cygnans rode stored enough power for constant acceleration. He had weight, dangling between his two captors; it felt like half a g, but it was hard to be sure.
He saw a lot of traffic going in both directions around him. The long brilliant beams of light flashing from the ends of the slender brooms made a jack-straw pattern against space.
They were heading straight toward some invisible target a quarter million miles away. There was no nonsense about trajectories, about matching orbits. The aliens simply plowed through space as if they had all the power in the universe at their disposal. And perhaps they did, if they could move whole planets.
Jameson looked back—“down,” actually—at the Jupiter ship. It was tiny now, a double-pointed thumbtack pinned against the stars.
Then, abruptly, twin threads of light stretched across the black of space. That wasn’t the boron drive. The aliens had attached some kind of propulsive units, to the ship at the head and tail of the shaft. He could see it begin to move sideways, its wheel still turning, as if it were rolling through space.
The Cygnans had gone fishing. Now they were bringing home their catch.
Chapter 15
The alien ship loomed ahead, big as a world. It
Jameson squirmed around in his transparent game-bag for a better view. He’d been cramped inside for more than six hours now, and his suit’s air was almost gone.
His captors were approaching the ship head on, so he couldn’t see much of the long central spar that formed the axis, except for a yawning triangular maw at the hub. That had to be the business end of the drive.
An extraordinary thought occurred to him. He had read once, in a popular book on psychotechnology, that the works of man were influenced by buried images of self. His motile surrogates of himself tended to be cross- shaped—a man with arms outstretched—like early airplanes, or four-limbed like the drive shaft and two axles of a wheeled vehicle at right angles, or, in the ultimate subconscious distillation; male symbols like rockets or female symbols like boats.
But the Cygnans—if Dmitri’s morphology was to be believed—were three limbs spaced equally around a central axis. And so was their ship. There were even three stubby triangular petals—feet?—placed at the opposite end of the shaft. Jameson could make them out on another Cygnan ship hovering some dozens of miles away. They might be miles-thick radiation baffles for the life-support modules when the ship was in its folded mode. They’d be facing forward then, into a howling storm of impinging interstellar hydrogen. This all made eminent sense in engineering terms, but so did the design of their Jupiter ship. Jameson wondered what psychoanalytical innuendos the author would have found to describe
There was one more flash of insight before his mind got busy again with his predicament. Designs evolve past first solutions. Technological phylogeny, the book had called it. The cross-shaped airplane was an early effort of mankind, replaced by delta wings and various lifting bodies. Was this tremendous feat of engineering he saw looming before him a
Then he became lost in wonder. Those fifteen-mile-long jibs that held the environmental pods were anchored at their roots by pins that had to be large enough and strong enough to keep a small world from flying off into space. The grooves along the flat faces of the hull that the jibs were meant to rest in were as deep as the Grand Canyon. And—he sighted along one of the arms until he came to the distant three-sided bucket—that wishbone- shaped tholepin that formed the handle of the bucket was, by itself, of a size to stagger the imagination.
He tried to visualize it—a structure four and a half miles from end to end pivoting on a pair of bearings that alone were bigger than the largest turning structure man had ever made: Eurostation itself. The bolt head he could distantly see was a bright dome the size of a small mountain.
The rotation of the arms, from Jameson’s vantage point, was almost imperceptible. Structures that size didn’t have to turn very fast to provide g forces fifteen miles from the center.
By the same token, the Cygnans seemed to have dispensed with anything resembling a docking hub. Perhaps they didn’t need one at this creeping rate of rotation, depending on their own agility and the feebleness of centrifugal force so close to the spine of the ship.
Jameson shriveled in the sack. Were they going to plunge into the miles-wide pit of the drive tube that was growing before his eyes? He saw a triangular chasm whose interior walls were blackened and pitted with the violent energies that had flung the Cygnans across ten thousand light-years.
Then with a casual flick of their broomsticks, the Cygnans altered course fractionally. The rim of the pit flashed by. Jameson, with nothing to hang onto, found himself falling past a sheer metal wall that stretched on forever.
They barely missed the outstretched arm of one of the jibs. Resolutely, Jameson kept his eyes open, but he found his gloved hands trying to clutch at nothingness. He had a flashing glimpse of the spar’s upper surface before he dropped below its horizon. This was a metal moonscape, pocked with craters and scarred with long furrows, the wounds of forgotten encounters with interstellar debris.
He looked upward as he fell below the knife edge of that strange skyline. The undersides of the spar hung above him like an ax blade fifteen miles long. These were the faces that fit into the canyon-size notch in one of the ship’s flat sides. There were no pockmarks. They were smooth and shiny enough to reflect the stars.
They fell what he judged to be another four or five miles before the laboring broomsticks were able to slow them to a halt. Jameson’s orientation changed. He was no longer falling down the side of an immense cliff. Now he was floating, weightless, above a vast metal plain, incised along its entire length by a triangular gorge. The
