They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior spaces like a space-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying shiny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking glass tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.
A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little horny many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.
Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.
They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick glass cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.
The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.
Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales. Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.
Triad rapped on the glass with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.
The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the glass. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim. They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the glass.
With a shock, Jameson realized that the creature filling his field of view was wearing some kind of harness, shiny leathery straps that were as broad as a roadway. It had limbs of sorts, too, scalloped projections of its outer rim, like the billowing shroud points of a parachute. It had them curled around a barb-tipped bone spear that was a hundred feet long.
With a shudder, Jameson wondered about the size of the animal whose skeleton had provided a one-piece artifact that long. It had to be some kind of a floating island with a kite framework of flexible bone.
There was a bone dagger, too, a honed triangular blade the size of a whaleboat with squiggly symbols inscribed on its flat side. And some kind of a pouch dangling from the harness, a catchall the size of a small barn.
Whatever this looming colossus was, it was intelligent. Primitive, but intelligent.
A hunter. A hunter whose quarry was bigger than it was.
It pressed against the glass, obviously looking him over. Jameson saw no evidence of anything resembling sense organs. No eyes, no flaps or tendrils. Perhaps it sensed with the surface of its entire mountainous body. Chemical senses. But what was it seeing him through the glass with? It could scarcely be infrared under the circumstances. Radar waves? Jameson supposed that even at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum an organism could provide definition by rapid and continuous scanning. Hunters needed keen senses.
“Where in the universe…?” Jameson breathed.
The Cygnans could not have understood him, but perhaps they were thinking their own thoughts. At his elbow, Tetrachord said: “So near. And now the Jamesons will never meet them.”
This time Jameson whistled his response in his imitation Cygnan.
“Where?”
They turned abruptly toward him, as if surprised that their pet was talking again.
“This animal is from the planet you call Jupiter,” Tetrachord offered with careful enunciation.
Jameson stared at the undulating disk of flesh. So there
Then he felt a dawning horror. The Cygnans must have scooped up their Jovian specimens
The thought was all the more horrifying because there was no malice involved. Just selfishness. Thoughtlessness. Lack of empathy. In that respect they were no different from humans, in the mad century that had forever wiped out the humpbacks and the great blue whales.
They prodded him to move again. He took a last backward look at the Jovians before the massive creatures flapped off into the depths of their tank. He felt a pang of overwhelming sympathy for them. They were, after all, his brothers under the Sun.
They seemed to be in some sort of Hall of Bipeds now. Rows of cages along a curving corridor apparently formed the narrow ends of habitats that widened out in a fan beyond. The creatures that Jameson glimpsed as they led him down the corridor were obviously animals, not intelligent beings. He saw a little green bearded creature like a misshapen troll gravely pacing its cage with its knuckles dragging on the ground, and a hulking spiny-skinned thing with a little bullet head growing directly out of a barrel chest. Then there was a pair of delightful feathery humanoids, elfin pink creatures who stared at him with great sad eyes as he passed.
The three Cygnans gave a wide berth to the feathery humanoids’ cage. Augie skittered nervously past it, skipping ahead momentarily and twisting a long neck to look back. There was a wire-mesh arrangement in front of the bars to keep anyone from getting too close, with its own locked gate. Jameson couldn’t see the reason for the extreme security precautions. The humanoids looked harmless enough. They were delicate, attenuated creatures who certainly would be no match for a Cygnan.
They reached the end of the hall, where he saw another locked cage. Beyond, Jameson could see a stark, garishly lit enclosure with wide bare terraces sloping down to a shallow pool filled with brownish water. Figures moved among the branched metal uprights set around the water’s edge. They were obviously human.
Jameson strained toward the bars, trying to see. Tetrachord held him back by the tether while Triad unlocked the cage door with one of her cylindrical keys.
Figures were bounding up the terraces toward him, whooping and yelling. Jameson recognized Mike Berry, gaunt, long-haired, and bearded, wearing only a pair of tattered denim shorts. And one of the Chinese crewmen, a young probe tech.
The three Cygnans jerked their neural weapons upward, fanning them back and forth. The humans skidded to a stop, staying a respectful distance from the bars. New arrivals bumped into them from behind and stayed where they were. The noise died down. They stood silently watching.
Tetrachord unfastened the tether, leaving a foot-long loop of cord dangling from Jameson’s nostrils. Augie backed away, keeping the weapon trained on him. The Cygnans gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the cage, the kitten cradled in his arms.
Mike Berry stepped forward, his face grim. “Welcome to the zoo.”
Chapter 22
“This won’t hurt,” Janet Lemieux said. “Sit still.”
With a deft yank she pulled the severed cord out of Jameson’s nose. There was about a foot of it, crusted with dried blood.
Jameson swallowed experimentally. The back of his throat still felt sore, but it was an immense relief to have the cord out.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said. He put his arm back around Maggie and pulled her close to him on the step. She was painfully thin, even for her. He could feel her ribs through the threadbare cotton shirt she wore. All of the eighty-odd crewmen and crewpersons gathered around him on the terraced slope had lost weight. Jameson had lost weight
