The Jupiter Theft

Outside the port, space was alive with beams of light, flashing on and off as thousands of Cygnans made their final correction maneuvers. They were close enough to be visible through the port, little squirming golden worms clinging to matchsticks.

“Tod, p’eng yu,” Li said, staring straight ahead. He’d used the word for “friend,” not “comrade.” “I want you to know. I’m sorry. None of it was my idea.”

Outside, trapped on the hull, one of the Chinese missile men lost his nerve and threw a wrench at the naked creatures swarming on their broomsticks. It tumbled harmlessly past one of the nearer Cygnans, who oozed sidewise to avoid it.

“What will they do?” Maybury wondered aloud.

Jameson shifted in his seat. “We’ve got nukes aboard,” he said. “We ran through their ship like weasels in a chicken house, killing. What would you do?”

Maybury’s hand, small as a child’s, was clutching his, the nails digging into his palm. Li stared out the window, saying nothing. Outside, Gifford’s work party had drawn together in a small defensive group, their movements hampered by the necessity of using a hand to keep from drifting away under the ship’s gentle acceleration. The Cygnans had no such problem. Some of them already had touched down, anchored to anything handy by whatever hand or foot was convenient, like sea polyps swaying in a current. At the head of the ship they were crawling like maggots all over the observation bubble.

“Oh!” Maybury gasped.

Jameson jerked his head around to see what had startled her. She was staring, wide-eyed, toward the Cygnan fleet in the distance. At this angle it could be seen against the dark. They’d moved far enough by now so that it hung like a cluster of shiny grapnel hooks above the raw and bloody carcass of Jupiter.

The laser light was flashing between them again. The figure of the five-pointed star within the pentagram did not appear again. Instead there was a shifting play of spiky forms as each ship in turn sent out brief tendrils of light to all its companions. A succession of clawed figures, looking like Greek or Hebrew letters, flamed red against the face of night.

Jameson could not guess at the message content. But the flashing signals galvanized the Cygnan horde. Like shiny midges, they rose by the hundreds off the crippled ship and wheeled and darted in a forming swarm. A thousand beacons lit the night, and then they were vanishing, a cloud of distant sparks heading with incredible velocity toward the ships beyond.

“They’re gone!” Maybury said wonderingly.

Jameson looked across at the barbed shapes of the ships hovering over Jupiter’s ripe and swollen orb, still semaphoring their sins and psis and lambdas, drawing fiery scratches in the void.

“Not quite yet,” he said.

They were four million miles out, well past the orbit of Callisto, when it happened. The feeble engines of the probes and missiles had not yet set them free, but had put them in a loose elliptical orbit that would carry them outside the orbit of Jupiter VII. Mike, Quentin, and the three Chinese fusion techs were working round the clock. Everybody pitched in to help: Maggie and Maybury on the engine-room computers, Jameson and Li and Fiaccone unplugging the damaged outside structures. Jameson had passed Maggie a couple of times in the corridors without speaking to her.

Now Jameson slumped, exhausted, in a contour seat on the ship’s bridge. Mike had promised boron fission within a couple of hours. The last missile rocket engine had been expended.

“What if they come back?” Kay asked, looking at him with red-rimmed eyes through a strand of straggling hair. “Even when we get going, we can only accelerate at a hundredth of a g. They can catch up to us in a few hours, any time they feel like it.”

Jameson looked out through the big bubble at Jupiter’s bright sphere. Io, or the sodium glow that surrounded it, was visible as a fuzzy yellow golfball that from this angle seemed to be poised just above Jupiter’s eastern edge. The Cygnan ships were invisible, but they could be seen through a telescope as a glowing pentad hovering close to Io, keeping its bulk between them and the giant planet. They had transferred their orbit from their own moon, the one they had brought with them, to Io with its closer position, a bit over a quarter of a million miles from Jupiter. The pentacle of laser light was evidently a calibrating device as the five ships fine-tuned their new joint orbit.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Jameson said. “They’re ready to move, all right. Those ships started changing their orbit about three seconds after the boarding party got back to them. What worries me is being this close to Jupiter. If we’re still in orbit around it when they start moving, we’ll go right along with them. And we don’t have Io to shield us from radiation once they start moving through interstellar hydrogen at close to light speed.”

“We be dead long before that time,” Yeh grunted from his console. His lumpy face was lined with fatigue. He had worked without rest since reaching the ship.

Jameson nodded. “If we didn’t get torn loose by the sun and fry to death, it would be hunger, decompression, or systems failure. Take your pick. We’ll be lucky to nurse this wreck back to Earth in one piece.”

“Bye dzwe na-yang!” Yeh suddenly bellowed. “Don’t touch that!”

The feathery humanoid snatched its hand away from the control board, its teddy-bear face looking somehow hurt. It rewarded Yeh with a bad smell, something like rotten eggs, and pranced off to join its friend over at one of the scattered monitor screens on the floor.

“Mischievous little devils, aren’t they,” said Kay.

Jameson watched the rosy-furred creatures fiddle with the console. They had somehow managed to conjure up a star chart. Now one of them was making peeping field-mouse noises, rolling the display, while the other one danced around in front of the view window, pointing at constellations.

“These two aren’t the simple hunters they seemed to be, any more than we still are,” Jameson said. “They come from a technologically advanced civilization. They were trying to show Mike something about how the Cygnan broomstick worked until he threw them out of the engine room. I think that before we get back home they’ll be helping us man this ship.”

The pink bipeds had been an invaluable help with the Cygnan prisoner, keeping it tranquilized and getting it settled in a cage—a cage, Jameson reflected, that was probably less comfortable than the one he’d been confined in aboard the Cygnan vessel. The Cygnan was in Kiernan’s care now. It would have a lot of hamsters for company if Kiernan could get a few of the frozen ova in his files to start dividing. The humanoids had painstakingly sniffed every food and biological sample that Kiernan had shown them to try to improvise a diet that would keep the Cygnan alive until they got back to Earth. One of the things it could eat, surprisingly, was turkey, so it was going to get everybody’s portion of frozen Christmas dinner—if everybody lived that long. The humanoids themselves had rejected all terrestrial animal protein, and were putting together a combination of spun vegetable protein that evidently added up to the right balance of amino acids. With the superb analytical laboratories in their noses, they were in no danger of starving.

The Cygnan prisoner, the humanoids had given Jameson to understand, was not just some run-of-the-mill technician, but was an important person they had taken some pains to select. They seemed desperately to want to keep it alive.

The humanoid looking at the stars suddenly bounced into the air and tumbled weightlessly toward Jameson like a giant ball of pink milkweed. Its fluffy tail whipped around the guardrail to anchor it, and it plucked at Jameson’s sleeve, making urgent piping sounds. When it finally had Jameson’s attention, it struck itself on its little chest and flung a slender arm toward the constellation Cygnus.

“What in the world,” Kay said.

“He’s telling us where his home is,” Jameson said.

“Of course. It would have to be somewhere in the volume of space between here and Cygnus, along the Cygnans’ line of flight. But which star? It might not even be visible to the naked eye.”

“It’s not Deneb or Albireo. They’re too far away from the line of sight toward Cyg X-l, and we know the Cygnans came in more or less under its X-ray umbrella. Wait a minute! I think it’s trying to tell me that it’s 61 Cygni! But if that’s so, then—”

Jameson didn’t get a chance to finish. Yeh had risen from his seat so abruptly that he had to grasp an armrest to keep from floating off.

“K’an, k’an!” he said excitedly. “Look! It happens!”

In a moment the three of them were crowding the observation rail, looking out into the dark. An awesome