The Jupiter Theft

very far, the ship would be half buried.

By the time they got ready for turnaround, the snowball would be down to a more manageable size. The ship would be somewhere in the center of the comet by then, firing its photons through a tunnel melted through miles of snow. All that mass around it would be more than adequate to shield it from the diminishing hail of impinging radiation, and the drive beam itself would handily ward off the interstellar hydrogen directly ahead.

There was no spin section. They would be in free fall for only a few weeks, subjective time. Maybe later ships, with farther to go, would work out a spinning cage or some other device pivoted along the axis of the needle.

The forward screen went blank. The ship’s other senses took over. The humanoids had a drink with them to celebrate, then went back to the engine room.

“We’ve got us some friends,” Mike said, watching the pink creatures scamper down the companionway. “Wait till their people start working on their own version of the star drive. In another ten years, we’ll be roaming the galaxy together.”

Jameson switched on another outside pickup, and the viewscreen was suddenly filled with the splendor of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, a whirlpool of stars sparkling with gems of many colors.

Maybury came over for a look. “They won’t get there for two million years,” she said.

“Maybe that’s what they were getting up their nerve for,” Jameson said. “The big jump. It took them six million years to work up to it.”

“They can’t turn back now,” Sue said. “We’ll never see them again.”

Mike gave a short bark of a laugh. “Want to bet? When they reach the Andromeda galaxy, we’ll be waiting for them. They’ve only got a short headstart.”

“Two million years,” Li said thoughtfully. “What will we be by then? What will they be?”

“A partnership with the descendants of the humans aboard,” Jameson said confidently. “The Cygnans lost their purpose when they started running six million years ago. Maybe the humans will substitute theirs.”

“Some day we’ll cross the gulf and rejoin them,” Maybury said, staring at the screen.

Jameson switched off Andromeda. “Some day,” he agreed. “Right now we have a galaxy of our own to discover.”

The engines fired.

About the Author

Donald Moffitt was born in Boston, and now lives in rural Maine with his wife, Ann, a native of Connecticut. A former public relations executive, industrial film maker, and ghostwriter, he has been writing fiction, on and off, for more than twenty years under an assortment of pen names, including his own, chiefly espionage novels, and adventure stories in international settings. The Jupiter Theft is his first full-length science-fiction story and the first book of any genre to be published under his own name. “One of the rewards of being a public relations man specializing in the technical end of large corporate accounts,” he says, “was being allowed to hang around on the fringes of research being done in such widely disparate fields as computer technology, high-energy physics, the manned space program, polymer chemistry, parasitology, and virology—even, on a number of happy occasions, being pressed into service as an unpaid lab assistant.” He became an enthusiastic addict of science fiction during the Golden Era, when Martians were red, Venusians green, Mercurians yellow, and “Jovian Dawn Men” always blue. He survived to see the medium become respectable, and is cheered by recent signs that the fun is coming back to SF.