The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 10

The Jupiter ship drifted among the stars, a gigantic hoop and stick perforated with light from its blazing ports. A blast from its attitude jets had nudged it a safe distance from Eurostation’s traffic and set it tumbling languidly.

On Earth, almost half the human race took a last look at the majestic image, gathered around holovids in their homes or watching the public viewplates that had been set up in communes and village schools, playing fields and places of work. Then the camera pinnace, hovering a prudent fifty miles away, zoomed in to the limit of its magnification, and the hoop became an enormous puffy doughnut, bumpy with outside structures, and the stick swelled to an immense cylindrical shaft, festooned with spherical tanks and sporting irregular bulges. Little spurts of flame flared from odd places along the shaft. Gradually the tumbling stopped. The ship held rock-steady, poised for flight.

Somewhere inside the long shaft, Chinese technicians bustled around a massive globate housing that bristled like a hedgehog with converging laser assemblies. Towering stacks of capacitors marched endlessly down the arched chamber. Pipes and cables disappeared through a thick bulkhead. On the other side of the bulkhead, a team of American technicians tended the dull bulging shapes of cryogenic storage vats and monitored a bewildering array of computer displays.

A walnut-size pellet of boron dropped into a vat. It was hollow on the inside, and beautifully machined, with twelve precise pinholes slanting through its jacket. It was immediately stuffed with a tiny snowball made of frozen deuterium and tritium.

A computer on the American side of the bulkhead positioned the pellet to within an angstrom and fired it through a long pipe into the chamber of the Chinese device. All the lasers fired at once in a burst that lasted only a few picoseconds. They were computer-controlled by a single oscillator on the American side. This was the point that had caused so much trouble. It had taken two years of diplomatic negotiations at the highest level before a way was worked out for the sensors and timers to be slaved to the U.S. computers through a scrambler program. The Chinese had never seen a pellet, nor was there any way they could extract the vital details of size, density, or timing from their own computer replays—though they had dismantled their own equipment many times in an attempt to gain clues from the pellet delivery pipe and the physical arrangement of the electronics interfaces.

Twelve thread-thin beams of coherent light blasted through the pellet’s pinholes and converged at the center of the snowball. A tiny volume of space turned into hell. A few cubic microns of hydrogen isotopes became ten times hotter than the interior of the Sun. The fusion reaction became self-sustaining. The pressure of the blast crushed superheated plasma to the awesome density of degenerate matter, and held the pellet together for the few picoseconds needed to initiate the next stage of the reaction.

For hydrogen fusion, a mere 200 million degrees Fahrenheit had been sufficient. For boron fission, a temperature in the billions of degrees was needed. Fusion was only the trigger. The raging nuclear fury in that tortured speck of matter stripped hot protons from surrounding hydrogen atoms and drove them with incredible energy into the now-collapsing nuclei of boron-11 atoms. The extra proton was too much for the boron nucleus to hold. Each atom split into three helium nuclei. The energy released was tremendous—far more than the controlled fusion energy that mankind had unlocked a half century before. A stream of electrically charged helium nuclei sought their mad escape rearward through the ship’s nozzles.

The ship trembled and moved.

Another pellet dropped. Another chamber turned into hell. Then, three seconds later, another. And another.

The ship, shuddering, picked up speed. It was accelerating rapidly now, at one percent of a g. On Earth, an estimated seven billion people watched the ship dwindle on their screens.

They watched it until it was small and indistinct, a ghostly target pierced by a glittering arrow. A silver phi sketched against the void. A needle encircled by a wedding ring, pointing itself toward a star.

When Jameson staggered into his quarters after his first twelve-hour watch, Maggie had a mug of steaming coffee and a hot beanie waiting for him. He wolfed the crisp, paste-filled cone down gratefully. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to eat. It was wild on the bridge. The skipper’s still up there. Have you had anything?”

She gestured at a half-eaten beanie, its fragile rice-flour wrapping spilling out a congealing green sludge. “I was too excited. Are we really on our way?”

He nodded. “Everything got straightened out a couple of hours ago, when you felt us put the spin back on. The engine’s working beautifully. We won’t have any more trajectory corrections till tomorrow. By that time the computer should have accumulated enough data to tell us how much longer those damn bomb blisters are going to make us keep the boost on.”

“Want another beanie?”

“No, that’ll hold me till mealtime.”

“Let’s not go down to the mess for dinner. I’ll fix us something here.”

He ruffled her red hair. “That’s fine with me. Let’s put on some music and have a drink.”

She pecked him on the cheek and got up to put a music card in the slot. It was “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame” again. Jameson was getting a little tired of it, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her. They had been careful with each other since making up their quarrel on the shuttle trip, and Maggie had moved in with him. Sue had taken it well. She’d been a little hurt, but she recovered quickly, and her behavior toward Maggie had been warm and friendly.

Maggie returned with some chilled gin and one of the adulterated joints that were all anyone could get from Stores. She lit the joint and passed it to Jameson. She seemed unusually quiet.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Come on, What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s just that Klein.”

“What did he do?”

“Wanted to come by my quarters tonight. Got very insistent about it. Threw rank at me. I told him I was bunking here. He started quoting regulations about pair-bonding during a mission. Said I ought to be spreading myself around. That’s how he put it. Nasty man! Anyway, I’ve only been here about week.”

“And you’re going to stay here,” Jameson said. “I’ll have a talk with Klein.”

“He’s already made trouble for Liz Becque and Omar. They’re reporting for counseling sessions with Janet.”

“I’ll speak to the skipper,” Jameson said. “Nobody’s complained about your work. Or mine. Klein can mind his own damned business.”

She snuggled against his chest. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

The “Dreame” came to an end on a translucent D-major chord, to be replaced by the jolly tones of “Tower Hill.” Maggie pried the drink from Jameson’s hand and pressed herself against him. There was a rapping at the door.

“Damn!” Jameson said, sitting up. Maggie picked up her drink again, and Jameson went to the door.

Mike Berry was standing there, looking tousled and exhausted. “Could I talk to you?” he said.

“Mike! I thought you’d locked up and sacked out.”

Berry glanced over at Maggie and nodded apologetically at her. Maggie looked away and gathered her robe more closely around her. Berry turned back to Jameson.

“Yeah, I did. I left Quentin in charge, and Caffrey put a guard on the door, and Tu Jue-chen put one of her Struggle Brigade mugs on guard outside their door, and … look, could you come back to the engine room with me? I haven’t said anything to Boyle yet. I don’t want to make a big thing of it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Look, Po Fu-yung’s techs and my techs have got to talk to one another, don’t they? We’ve got a good working relationship. When something comes up, we get together in one of the nonrestricted areas off the cryo department. Now Caffrey’s goon won’t let Quentin out of the computer room to work with Po’s man and the Struggle Brigade goon is throwing his weight around too. Could you come down and smooth things over before it develops into anything official?”

Jameson sighed and got to his feet. “Let’s go.”

He slipped a pair of stickysocks over his bare feet and followed Mike into the corridor. Maggie looked sulky and turned her face to the wall as he closed the door behind him.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “But I thought we’d better stop it before it got out of hand. I didn’t think we’d have this kind of a problem so soon after launch.”

Jameson nodded. “And we’ve still got half a billion miles to go.”