The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 9

“Here they come now,” Captain Boyle said.

Jameson looked out the port. It took him a moment to focus on what the captain was peering at, and when he did, it was sharp with the clarity of space despite the quarter-mile distance. It looked like a string of widely spaced pearls stretched out horizontally, held taut by the spacesuited bosun’s mates at either end. Two more attendants were riding scooters above and below the long tether.

“Good God!” Jameson said. “Don’t they have spacesuits?”

“I’m told they do,” the captain said dryly. “But they haven’t been trained to use them yet. Something to occupy us on the long outward trip, eh?”

Jameson shook his head wonderingly. “Rescue balls! They stuffed them into rescue balls! Skipper, we can’t nursemaid a bunch of beginners like those! Not when they’ll be working with dangerous materials outside the ship and in zero-g conditions! It’d compromise the safety of the ship.”

“We’re not going to nursemaid them, mister,” Boyle said. “We’re going to instruct them in the presence of their executive officer and stay away from them. Those are the orders.”

“Captain, that’s crazy! You can’t let a bunch like that wander around unsupervised! There’s too much trouble they can get into!”

“Look lively now! They’re here!”

There was a bump outside that sent a tiny shiver through the spinlock antechamber. Jameson, sweating in his full-dress greens, drew himself up in an approximation of a formal stance, hands clasped behind his back, feet spread, one toe hooked surreptitiously under a baseboard projection to keep himself from drifting away. The spin for the entire ship had been stopped for several days now so the additional modules could be bonded to the rim without having workers and materials fly off into space. The trim of the ship had been altered by the new, awkwardly placed mass, and the computers were working overtime to shift weights and balance the new stresses.

Kay Thorwald, the second officer, was floating in parade position just beside the captain, her large jaw set firmly, her formidable bust swollen to semiglobular shapes in the absence of gravity, her wide mannish shoulders held back squarely. Like Jameson, she’d been tapped as one of the execs to help Captain Boyle pipe the nuclear-bomb crews aboard.

Clustered against the opposite wall was the Chinese delegation, spruced up for the occasion in fashionably wrinkled blue cotton Mao jackets and baggy trousers. Captain Hsieh was in the middle, a chunky, smallish man with a round, pedantic face, hands held stiffly at his sides, straining to stretch his spine. His first officer, Yeh Fei, was at his left. Yeh was a big, hulking fellow with a sloping shelf of forehead and a lantern jaw. The third member of the welcoming committee was Tu Jue-chen, the new Struggle Group leader sent up from Earth. As unacknowledged political officer, she carried more clout than Captain Hsieh. She was a terrifying harpy with hollow cheeks, malicious monkey-eyes, and a mouth crowded with big square teeth.

All three of them were wearing the round badges that showed a stylized representation of Lady Ch’ang-o ascending to the Moon with the help of the antigravity pill she’d stolen from her husband. The three-thousand-year-old legend had been the symbol of the Chinese space program since their first manned flight, in the 1980s.

The red warning light winked out as the lock was pressurized, and the latch in the center of the door spun round. The hatch swung open. A man in Army fatigues emerged in an apish crouch that probably was his conception of how to move about in no-g conditions. He had a small round head covered with short blond stubble, and very wide shoulders. The leaf on his lapel said he was a major.

Grogan, still in his spacesuit but with his helmet off, was hovering helpfully just behind him. Behind Grogan Jameson could make out the shape of one of the bosun’s mates extracting a ruffled-looking noncom from a collapsed rescue ball. There was a lot of activity inside the lock. They’d probably squeezed a third of the bomb crew inside. The rest presumably were bobbing around outside in their inflated balls while the other bosun’s mate held on to the tether.

“Welcome aboard, Major,” Boyle said. Across the chamber, Captain Hsieh nodded his head just perceptibly; as protocol dictated, and echoed Boyle.

The major saluted smartly—too smartly—and got himself into trouble. Behind him, Grogan shot out a big meaty paw and grasped his upper arm to keep him in contact with the deck.

“Hollis,” the man said, flushing. “Major Dexter B. Hollis, in command of Special Nuclear Strike Group Lambda One, reporting.”

Before one of the Chinese could object, Boyle said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you for your sidearm, Major. No firearms allowed aboard.”

Hollis stared at the captain a moment. A knot of muscle worked at the hinge of his jaw. Finally he said, “I’m under independent orders, Captain. You know that.”

Boyle held out his hand. “And I’m in command of this ship, Major. Along with Captain Hsieh here. Your command comes under our authority in everything concerning the safety of the ship. There’s no use for a handgun here. Hand it over.”

Tu Jue-chen was watching expectantly, her monkey eyes bright. Hollis glanced at her and shrugged. He unbuckled the heavy gun belt and gave it to Boyle.

“Thank you, Major,” Boyle said. “I’ll give you a receipt for that. It’ll stay in my safe. You’ll get it back at the end of the voyage.”

The bomb crew began to file out of the lock, big unfriendly-looking men with hard-bitten faces, shuffling awkwardly in their Velcro socks. They all had specialist ratings, patches with an eagle clutching a missile in one claw sewn to their sleeves. All of them looked miserable from their fetal confinement in the three-foot rescue balls, and one of them had a uniform covered with vomit; the trip across from Eurostation must have been pure hell for him, but he was keeping his head up and his jaw tight.

“I can have one of our officers show this group down while we’re waiting for the rest of your men,” Boyle said to the major. “They’re welcome to use the crew facilities to clean up—we’ve got a few more amenities than in the prefab modules they’ve assigned to you—and we’ve got coffee and refreshments waiting for them in the lounge.”

“We’ll go directly to our own quarters, Captain,” Hollis said tightly. “Thanks anyway. I’ll wait here until they’re all inside. I’ll keep them together, and I’ll see that they stay out of the main part of the ship except on official business.”

“It’s going to be a long trip,” the captain said. Those prefab modules are cramped.”

“We’ll manage,” Hollis said. “And we’ll stay out of your way.”

The antechamber was filling up with the second group. A couple more of the men had been sick on the way over, and the aroma in the enclosed space was getting a little hard to take. Hollis watched through narrowed eyes as his men tried to shape up in a military manner. He’d turned his back pointedly after the initial introductions.

Grogan sidled up next to Jameson. “What d’you think of those apes?” he said in a low tone.

“I don’t like it,” Jameson said. “Twenty-four additional men cooped up with us for a year and a half. It changes the ratio of men to women to about two to one. There’s going to be trouble, you can count on it. I just hope none of those men goes prowling for Chinese women, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to worry, Commander,” Grogan said sardonically. “They brought along a girl with them.”

“A girl?” Jameson said incredulously. “One girl for the bunch of them? What the hell is the Army up to? That’s right out of the dark ages, like the sort of thing they were trying after the first Mars expedition!”

“You should see her, Commander,” Grogan said. “A real tough cookie. Wearing specialist’s stripes, too. Some specialty, huh?”

Jameson tried to suppress a grin. “Let’s hope she doesn’t get sick.”

“Commander, if she gets sick, they get sick too.”

The lock cycled again. Hollis waited long enough to make sure that his group was complete, then herded them in twos and threes toward the lift shaft, where a noncom stoically shepherded them to an assembly point at the rim. It took Jameson a moment to pick out the girl. She was as big and tough-looking as the men, dressed in the same shapeless fatigues, but her cheeks were shiny-smooth and she had a thick braid of blond hair hanging down her back. Then they were gone, Grogan and the bosun’s mates with them, leaving nothing but a smell of sweat and stale vomit behind.

The new astronomer came aboard later that day. His name was Ruiz, and he looked a little old for space, but he handled himself well in no-g. They hadn’t subjected him to the indignity of a rescue ball; he looked too brittle for that, and he was a VIP. He was ferried over from Eurostation in a small passenger gig with an assistant, a grave dark-eyed little girl named Maybury who somehow looked familiar.

She saw Jameson looking at her and said at once, “It was the Eurostation-Texas shuttle a couple of weeks ago, Commander. We were seatmates.”

“Of course. You were wearing a poncho, and you were on your way to Nevada.” He shook hands with the two of them. Ruiz had the knack, but the girl’s feet lost contact, and Jameson had to discreetly plant her again.

Boyle and Captain Hsieh were off somewhere for a meeting with the fusion engineers, making preparations for engine start-up. After Yeh Fei and Tu Juechen had stiffly completed their share of the formalities, and Kay Thorwald had excused herself and disappeared, Jameson volunteered to get Ruiz and Maybury settled.

“Just stay close to a wall and don’t move too abruptly and you’ll be all right,” he said. “There are cords strung along the corridors, and those socks they gave you will stick to the fuzzy strips along the floors. If you do find yourself floating in the center of a compartment, out of reach, don’t get panicky. Air currents will eventually send you drifting up against a surface.”

“Or some friendly passerby will bounce himself off of us, eh?” Ruiz said.

Jameson smiled appreciatively. “Oh, you’ve spent some time in free fall, then? I know you both were stationed on the Moon, but…”

“I put in almost two years at the old L-5 orbital observatory when I was a young man,” Ruiz said. “They spun the living quarters, but I spent my working days in the cage. Big warehouse of a place. Even a small fraction of a g, of course, would have made the big mirror sag out of all usefulness. It was made by stretching a film of molten Merlon across a hundred-meter hoop in the first place, and it was less than a millimeter thick at the center.”

“How about you, Mizz Maybury?” Jameson said. “Have you spent much time in free fall?”

“No,” she responded. “That is, except in the Moon shuttle. But of course you spend most of your time belted in your seat, and they have the flight attendants taking care of you and everything.”

“You’re doing very well,” Jameson said charitably. “At any rate, you’ll only have to put up with it for a few more days. We’ll be putting on spin as soon as we’re sure the new modules are fastened securely. After that, we’ll have two thirds of a g all the way—except for a few hours during engine start-up, as a safety precaution.”

At that point they all had to crowd themselves against the corridor wall as one of Grogan’s angels came sailing toward them, halfway-between floor and ceiling, a bundle of plastic struts cradled in his hairy forearms.

“Sorry, Commander,” he said as he shot past; Jameson had to duck the end of a strut. They turned to watch the man. His line of flight was a chord that intersected the shallow upward curve of the corridor, and at the last possible moment, when his chin seemed about to scrape the floor, he gave an expert push of one foot, like the flick of a goldfish’s tail, and launched himself on a new chord toward the invisible ceiling beyond.

“I’ll never be able to do that,” Maybury said ruefully.

“He shouldn’t be doing it either,” Jameson said. “It’s against the safety rules.”

“How long will we be accelerating?” Ruiz said as they continued walking.

“A bit over two weeks,” Jameson said. “By that time we’ll have reached about a hundred and sixty kilometers per second. Then we coast, for four months, turn the ship’s long axis around, and decelerate for another couple of weeks. We’ll reach Jupiter in five months, thanks to the new boron engine.”

“And you’re going to spin the ship during acceleration and deceleration? Won’t that complicate our sense of up and down?”

“Not enough to notice,” Jameson said. “We’ll only be accelerating at about a hundredth of a g—nine point eight centimeters per second per second. But we’ll be spinning at two-thirds of a g at right angles to the direction of thrust. That’s a distortion factor of less than one to sixty-six. The floor will seem to tilt slightly, of course, but it’ll be almost imperceptible.” He slapped the corridor wall. “About enough of a tilt to start a marble rolling toward the aft bulkhead here, if you gave it a helpful push.”

“I got a good view of the ship through the porthole on the way over,” Maybury said hesitantly. “I didn’t think it would be so big. It was beautiful—like a giant toy top, with that long broomstick sticking through the center of the circle.”

“That’s a good way to think of it, except that the ‘broomstick’ doesn’t spin. It’s more of an axle than a shaft. What we’ve really got is a space station revolving round a rocket. It’s the only sensible design for very long trips. I wouldn’t like to be spinning round a short radius, as they do in those glorified barrels they send to Mars, or try to apply course corrections to two weights tied to each other by a long cord.”

“Commander,” Ruiz said abruptly, “I’d like to see Dr. Pierce first and get it over with.”

“All right,” Jameson said. “I thought you might want to put it off till you’d had a chance to catch your breath.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“I suppose,” Jameson said carefully, “he’s wondering why he’s being superseded as chief astronomer just a few days before the start of the expedition.”

“I suppose you all are,” Ruiz said dryly. “And why the powers that be have grafted a nuclear strike force onto what started out as a purely scientific mission.”

“They explained it to us at the briefing yesterday,” Jameson said in a neutral tone. “The nukes are just a precaution. Like giving an archeologist a pistol to protect himself against snakes. But those thirty-mile-long artifacts from Cygnus have been scrubbed by radiation for thousands—maybe millions—of years, so there aren’t going to be any snakes. Or so they say.”

“Except in this case the archeologist’s pistol has a mind of its own, eh? I don’t suppose your Captain Boyle likes having an officer on board who isn’t under his orders. To say nothing of the Chinese bomb crew.”

Jameson said nothing.

Ruiz sighed. “How do you feel about the bomb crews, Commander?”

“As long as they don’t interfere in the running of the ship or our assigned missions, it’s none of my concern.”

“Prudently spoken, Commander. But I’m going to interfere in your assignments, aren’t I?”

“That’s different.”

“Can you modify your Callisto lander for the Cygnus planet, Commander?” Ruiz asked.

“No. The gravitational field’s too powerful—about one Earth gravity, I’m told. We could get down, but we’d never get up again. We’ll have to study it from close orbit. But we can try a landing on its moon.”

“You can crash an automated probe or two on the planet’s surface, though, can’t you?”

“We can do better than that. We can soft-land some of the little rovers. We’ve got a few to spare. A planet from outside the solar system’s a hell of a lot more interesting than Ganymede or Europa.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Commander.”

Jameson permitted himself to show a little emotion.

“Hell, man, this is my chance! I never thought it would come in my lifetime!”

Ruiz looked pleased. “I suppose not. There’ll be Centauri probes with the new boron engine, but we’ll be waiting the better part of a thousand years to get any answers from them. Our Cygnus visitor’s been masked by radiation from Cygnus X-1 for more than eighty years that we know of. It has to be from a hundred light-years’ distance at the very least.”

“You were the astronomer who discovered it, weren’t you, Dr. Ruiz?”

“Maybury here was the first person to notice it,” Ruiz said. Maybury either lip and blushed. “But I was the nearest stuffed savant. That makes me the agreed-upon expert on the Cygnus object, and that’s why the authorities sent me along to complicate your lives. I’m sure your Dr. Pierce would have done a thoroughly competent job. Well, I’ll try not to interfere with him too much. He and his staff can carry out their Jupiter studies as planned. I have the greatest sympathy for him. It’s going to be a damned awkward situation.”

“Here we are,” Jameson said, stopping at a door marked astronomy. “The observation instruments are in the no-spin axle of the ship, of course. There’s an observatory near the bridge, but the readouts are down here, where the astronomy people can feel some weight on their feet.” He pushed the door open.

The meeting with Pierce went better than expected. The younger man was deferential. Fresh out of the Venusian Studies task force himself, he was awed by Ruiz’s eminence as former Farside director and ingenuously respectful of Ruiz’s pioneering studies on black holes and gravitational entropy. He pledged the full cooperation of himself and his staff, and managed to enlist Ruiz’s help on a problem involving the Jovian atmosphere sampling scoops. All the while he kept stealing sidelong glances at Maybury, looking guilty when he was caught.

Jameson could appreciate Pierce’s feelings. Maybury was a pretty little thing. He wondered if Ruiz was sleeping with her, then decided it was none of his business. He showed them to their quarters, two hastily cleaned out cabins adjoining an office with a computer terminal connected to the ship’s brain and some oddball peripheral equipment Ruiz had requested. If they were sharing a bunk, the old man could stumble through the connecting room.

“Dinner’s at eight, captain’s mess,” Jameson said. “Will we be seeing you?”

“I think not, Commander,” Ruiz said. “We’ll skip tonight. I’m a bit tired after the trip. I see that there’s an adequate kitchenette and a good selection of self-heating instameals. Mizz Maybury and I have some observational data to go through, and then we’ll have an early supper. I’m meeting with my Chinese counterpart, Dr. Chu, first thing in the morning, and I suppose I’d better be prepared.”

“Good night then, sir,” Jameson said, preparing to push himself off against the door frame.

“Good night, Commander,” Ruiz said. As Jameson launched himself down the corridor, he could see Maybury already punching something into a computer peripheral.