The Jupiter Theft

anyway.”

The screen flickered, and Ruiz was looking at Horace Mackie’s long, mournful face. In the background was the banked instrument panel of the monitor booth at Farside. An armed guard in NIB green hovered just behind Mackie.

Mackie squinted at him. “Dr. Ruiz, is that you? Listen, I had nothing to do with my being named acting director—”

The NIB chief leaned past Ruiz and shut off the sound. Mackie’s lips continued to move for the next second and a half, until the image from Earth reached the Moon. The armed guard said something to him, and he flushed. The sound went on again.

“Never mind all that, Horace,” Ruiz said gently. “Just give me what you’ve got.”

Another second-and-a-half delay, and Mackie nodded. “We still haven’t picked up the thing optically. It seems to be a dark body, of about two-thirds Jovian mass.”

“Is that all?” Ruiz said, surprised.

“Yes, we’ve had a fix on it for the last four days with the big gravitational wave detector at L-5, and we’ve been taking more or less continuous readings of perturbations of the outer planets, and the computer estimates that the current mass—”

“Horace! Wait a minute! What do you mean by current mass?”

It was another second and a half before Mackie knew he’d been interrupted. He blinked and said: “That was the next thing I was going to tell you. The mass of the Cygnus object seems to be decreasing.”

“Decreasing? By what factor?”

“It’s lost about two percent of its mass in the last four days.”

“What about X-ray and gamma emission?”

“That’s decreasing too.”

“You mean increasing! That mass is turning into something! ”

“No, no, we’re quite sure. X-ray luminosity is definitely decreasing on what seems to be the beginning of a hyperbolic curve.”

The NIB director growled in his throat. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?”

“Shut up,” Ruiz said. He leaned forward into the screen. “Horace, listen to me. Have you checked for parallactic shift since I left?”

Mackie looked uncomfortable. “Uh, no. They won’t let me communicate with Dr. Larrabee. I’m assuming the previous estimate holds—minus, of course, the distance it would have traveled in five days at approximately light- speed.”

Ruiz turned to the NIB director. “I want to talk to Mars,” he said.

Harris hesitated a bare fraction of a second. His craggy face and bald dome looked like something carved out of granite. His Nibs, the press liked to call him. He turned steely eyes on Ruiz. “Write down what you want to ask Dr. Larrabee,” he said.

Ruiz tore off a corner of his robe and scribbled on it. The man in the polka-dot suit left his position by the wall and took the scrap of paper from him. General Harris nodded imperceptibly, and the man left.

“It’ll be at least an hour,” Ruiz said.

“I’ll wait,” the general said. He walked over to the pull-out kitchen and poured two glasses of Brazilian scotch. He handed one to Ruiz. Ruiz switched off Mackie’s face and took a sip.

An hour and a half later the console buzzed and the screen lit up with the words: stand by for voice transmission. Ruiz put down his drink and turned up the sound.

“What the hell is going on, Hernando?” Larrabee’s voice blurted, sounding aggrieved. “One of my chief assistant bottle washers for Io these past three years turns out to be an NIB goon, and he tells me—” There was a faint scuffling sound, and Larrabee’s muffled “Get your hands off me, Grover…” and a fade-out. After a moment, Larrabee came back with “Here are the numbers. I’ve fed them to the Farside computer, as you asked.” He read off the base angles, sounding curt, and then the transmission abruptly terminated.

Mackie came back on the screen, looking anxious. “I assume I’m plugged in to the computer,” Ruiz said. Without waiting for an answer, he began typing his query. He could see Mackie turning to follow the proceedings on some screen out of camera range. The answer came back in the fraction of a second it took Ruiz to lift his fingers from the keys.

“Well?” the NIB director said.

“The Cygnus object is slowing down,” Ruiz said. “That’s what it’s doing with all the mass it’s throwing away. The energies involved would have to be … enormous … for it to decelerate like that.”

“Never mind all that!” Harris snapped. “What does it mean?”

“Mean?” Ruiz passed a hand wearily over his eyes. “It means we’ve got a reprieve. By the time the Cygnus object arrives, it’ll be a good deal more tame. And considerably shrunken.”

“Time,” the general mused. “If it’s slowing down, we’ll have more time to get ready…”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? You can call off your damned national emergency. If the trend of those curves continues, it won’t be shedding any dangerous amount of X-rays and gamma radiation by the time it gets here. It won’t be colliding with interstellar hydrogen at relativistic speeds any more! And it won’t have as large a gravitational scoop. And its cross section will be smaller.”

The NIB director looked at the screen. “Do you verify that, Dr. Mackie?” he said.

There was a three-second delay, and Mackie jerked into response. “Er … we’ll have to continue our observations for some time, of course, but—”

“Why don’t you tell him the Cygnus object’s rate of deceleration, Horace?” Ruiz said.

Mackie maundered on until Ruiz’s words reached him, then said: “Uh … why, approximately nine hundred eighty centimeters per second per second.”

“Is that figure supposed to mean something to me?” Harris said.

“It’s an interesting coincidence, that’s all,” Ruiz said. “The Cygnus object happens to be braking at just about one gravity.”

“I don’t see…”

“Don’t you understand yet, man?” In his impatience, Ruiz had reverted to his New Manhattan accent. “It’s not passing through any more! It’s going to park here!”

Chapter 4

The saloon smelled of fresh paint and new insulation. They were still putting the finishing touches on it. Tubular metal scaffolding was stacked haphazardly against the bulge of the far wall, where carpenters and foam wrights were installing a small stage to be used for concerts and amateur theatricals. Rows of mismatched folding and inflatable chairs had been hastily set up for the meeting. The curving chamber was one of the few places in the American sector of the ship that was roomy enough to seat this many crew members at once.

Jameson filed in with the rest, looking over the heads in front of him. There was a lot of joking and goodnatured jostling. It felt good having weight on his feet again. They’d been spinning the Jupiter ship at a full g for a couple of days now as part of the final shakedown—though during the actual voyage the 200-meter ring would be stressed at only two-thirds of a g.

A small, wiry man in a stained overshirt bumped into him; it was Kiernan, one of the hydroponicists. “What’s the Old Man want?” he said. “I’ve got two hundred trays of wingbean seedlings to set out.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jameson said.

Jameson found an empty seat near the back and sat down. The saloon was filling up fast. A couple of minutes later, Maggie MacInnes slid in next to him. A bony hip bumped his. She turned her head and blinked orange eyelashes. “Hi,” she said. “We haven’t seen much of you these days.”

“Li and I pretty well wrapped up the landing exercises a month ago,” he said. “I’ve been working for Captain Boyle. Got to earn my keep while we’re getting there.”

She brushed a loose strand of red hair from her cheek. “I’m glad you’re going to be one of the execs in