The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 11

They were a quarter of a billion miles beyond the orbit of Mars when the message came.

Jameson was standing on the bridge, admiring the stunning view around him through the vast comforting bulge of clear plastic that kept space outside. Jupiter hung against the night, a yellow lantern that outshone the crystal stars. It was by far the brightest light in the sky, except for the chill shrunken golfball of the Sun behind them, but it still showed no disk to the naked eye.

That fact alone brought home the immensity of the distances they were traveling. In the past three months they had journeyed farther and faster than any manned spacecraft before them had ever gone, but Jupiter still seemed as far away as when they had started.

Jameson indulged himself with a final long look at the brilliant dot of light, then turned reluctantly toward the command chair on the balcony above, where he could hear a buzzer sounding. He was tempted to jump for it, but he had to set an example. Some half dozen personnel of both nations were scattered among the paired consoles and the mostly empty seats rimming the circular deck. Most crewpersons preferred to serve their watches in the spin section’s duplicate bridge, connected to this one by electronic ganglia, but some jobs required direct observation here in the ship’s spearhead, and of course there were always one or two free-fall freaks. So Jameson dutifully clipped his jump line to the proper nylon cord in the spider web that crisscrossed the hemispherical chamber.

He soared upward to the catwalk, his trajectory perfectly parallel to the line. It was a point of pride with him never to get a corrective yank from the safety when crew were watching. He caught the rail and swung himself easily over.

He flipped a toggle. The buzzing stopped and his screen lit up. At the horseshoe console opposite his, Yeh Fei nodded formally at him and flipped his own switch. He’d been waiting. The big, shambling Chinese second officer looked like a gorilla hacked out of a block of wood with a dull chisel, but he had a fine sense of the niceties.

Sue Jarowski and little narrow-faced Chang-ho stared out at him from a split screen. He could see a tangle of communications equipment around them. “Commander,” Sue said, “there’s a laser message coming in.”

Beside her Jameson could see Chang-ho’s thick purple lips move, saying the same thing in Chinese to Yeh Fei. This would be a joint message, in clear, for both commands, then.

“Okay,” he said. “Put it on our screens.”

“Commander,” Sue said. “I think you’d better get the astronomers. They won’t want to wait for a replay. Something’s happening on Jupiter.”

Jameson could feel the hair on the nape of his neck prickle. “All right, he said. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ruiz.”

Chang-ho’s small face glared ferociously at him from the other half of the screen. “You must to notify Dr. Chu, you must to notify Dr. Chu!” he said stridently.

“Yi-ding,” Jameson said soothingly. “Of course.”

Dr. Ruiz arrived in a bathrobe. It was not an ideal garment for free fall. Maybury trailed behind him, still buttoning a man’s shirt that was too large for her. Dr. Chu arrived moments later. He’d managed to get himself dressed in shorts, a blue tunic with his astronomer’s rating on the collar, and a cotton cap with a Mao badge pinned to it. He was a frail, fussy man with two large chipmunk teeth peeping through a mossy mustache. When he saw Maybury, he frowned.

“Sit down, everyone,” Jameson said. “We’ll crank it back to the beginning for you.”

Data in computer script was flowing across the big display screen that Jameson and Yeh Fei had plugged in. Ruiz craned toward it with hawklike intensity until it stopped. Then he noticed that his robe had ridden up on his fleshless shanks and absent-mindedly pushed down at it. He sat down next to Dr. Chu, and Maybury handed him a lightpad that had been slaved via FM to the astronomy computer.

“They’re still transmitting,” Jameson said. “We’ll play it at twice real time till it catches up.” He pressed the button that would alert Sue Jarowski.

Random flashes of light appeared on the screen. That was when the ship’s laser ranging retroreflector first noticed that it was being hit by coherent light and locked in on the laser beam from the Moon transmitter. The light it bounced back served both as a ready-to-receive acknowledgment and as a guide to the sender for more accurate aim—though multiple redundancy of the digital pulses meant that the ship’s computers could reconstitute even a badly scattered message. At the speed of light, the back-and-forth exchange would have taken the better part of an hour—mercifully condensed now to a few seconds by a very conservative computer that wasn’t taking any chances of leaving out any information content.

Now the message itself began:

What followed was a lot of astronomical gobbledygook to the effect that the 500-inch reflector on the Moon had observed an inexplicable vortex forming in the upper Jovian atmosphere. It was different from the usual eddies and swirls caused by high-speed turbulence in Jupiter’s equatorial region. It was a whirlpool-like disturbance larger than Earth, and almost as large as the Great Red Spot. Coordinates with respect to other atmospheric features followed in lengthy detail.

Ruiz fidgeted, occasionally using his lightpad to do some figuring. He stared balefully at the screen, fingers drumming on the armrest of his chair. Finally he exploded.

“Why don’t they give us the pictures instead of wasting time with all this slush? It’s that jackass Kerry! ‘Verification requested!’ What does the fool expect us to see at almost two hundred million miles with the ship’s telescopes that he can’t see at less than three times the distance with the five-hundred-inch mirror?”

“It should only be a few more minutes, Dr. Ruiz,” Maybury said timidly.

Ruiz subsided a little. “Damned posturing idiot,” he grumbled. “I never should have approved his second tour of duty. I should have shipped him back to Earth when I had the chance.” He lifted a grizzled head. “I won’t tell him what I think of him, Commander. I don’t want to burn out your laser sender.”

Jameson grinned. “Mizz Maybury’s right, Doctor. Nothing to do but wait it out. Your pictures are probably somewhere past the asteroid belt by now, anyway. The fellows at Farside probably knocked off for a beer a half-hour ago.”

“Here it comes now,” Dr. Chu said. They all leaned forward to look at the screen. Down below, curious faces were looking up at the balcony.

Bit by bit the computer began to assemble the first picture. At more than five hundred lines to the inch, it was quite detailed. The color, corrected by a digital code nestled among the billions of pulses, was vivid. It began at screen left and unrolled until, seconds later, the screen was filled. The first frame was the only one they saw entire. After that, new frames were transmitted at the rate of two per second, peeling on from the left, so that there was an illusion of flickering motion.

It was overwhelming.

Jameson heard Maybury sigh, “O-o-oh!” Chu sucked in his breath sharply. Ruiz’s breath came in a ragged wheeze.

Jupiter filled the screen, a great swollen luminescent ball, striped in orange-reds and yellows. The image wasn’t holo—couldn’t be, even with high-density laser transmission—but somehow it didn’t matter. Looking at that fantastic orb, they could sense its tremendous bulk, feel the existence of a mass that could swallow up the entire Earth with scarcely a splash, even with nothing to scale it by.

Jupiter had a mole, a malignant black dot at rest on the rushing ocher cloudtops. The shadow of one of its moons, probably Io. That black speck was probably a couple of thousand miles across.

And there, across the cloud decks, was the Great Red Spot, a bloody egg that was twice the width of Earth. An immense eddying froth of organic molecules that had held its oval shape for the four hundred years that mankind had been looking at Jupiter through telescopes.

But no more.

It was sending out long reddish streamers, twisting threads that had to be tens of thousands of miles long, like a living thing bleeding underwater. The streamers stretched across the multicolored cloud bands and disappeared around the curvature of the planet, forming a twisted belt at the equator.

“Ya i!” Chu gasped. He was half out of his chair, his hands gripping the arms. Ruiz was motionless, staring at the screen with fierce concentration.

They watched in frozen silence for long minutes. Then they saw what was causing it.

“There’s our ‘meteorological phenomenon,’ ” Ruiz snorted. “Kerry’s ‘cloudtop disturbance.’ ”

It was sweeping around the curve of the planet, moving at what seemed a crawling pace, but actually traveling at what had to be more than a million miles per hour. At this rate it would circle Jupiter’s 89,000-mile diameter in something like fifteen minutes.

It was an unimaginably huge vortex of churning clouds. As it progressed along the equator it deformed the colored bands of clouds into an elongated eye-shape, with itself at the center. And now they could see that it was gathering a skein of those bloody streamers from the Red Spot around itself, dragging them halfway around the planet.

“Maybury!” Ruiz said sharply. “Is Pierce recording?”

She looked startled. “Yes, Dr. Ruiz,” she said. “I signaled him before we left.”

Jameson briefly considered calling Boyle, but decided not to wake the skipper up. All this had happened hours ago anyway. Boyle and Hsieh could see it in replay.

The tremendous whirling funnel was overtaking the Red Spot. It distorted the shape of the oval feature, making it bulge northward. Twisting ribbons of red stretched in a bloodshot spindle between the two loci.

A great gob of matter, the size of a continent, detached itself from the bulging Spot and was sucked into the whirlpool.

“God help us,” Ruiz breathed.

The sudden infusion of red nitriles briefly colored the gigantic maelstrom. Jameson tried to grasp the scale of the colossal events he was witnessing, and found he couldn’t. Those whipping shapes winding themselves like torn confetti around that spinning vortex were bigger than worlds, and they were covering vast distances in fractions of a second. It was a violence that would have shorn Earth in the blink of an eye and left it a polished ball, glowing with the heat of friction. Now, as Jameson watched, the blurred spirals of cloud were turning pink, showing that ulcerous pit more clearly against the face of the planet.

Something was growing out of it.

“They’re doing it to Jupiter, too,” Ruiz whispered.

Jameson had no time to reflect on what Ruiz meant. The spectacle he was seeing held all his attention. The raging vortex had marched from horizon to horizon, and he had an oblique view of it as it approached the edge of the planet.

He could make it out now against the engulfing darkness: a tenuous pillar of cloud extending thousands of miles into space in a coiling loop. The roots of that spectral rope were stained pink with colored hydrogen. It became more transparent, insubstantial, as it ascended its twisting path, narrowing all the while until it ended as a gossamer thread somewhere inside the orbit of Jupiter V.

A thread whose tip was a glowing blue spark.

The bomb crews began their grim rehearsals the next day. Hollis drove his men hard—too hard in an environment where fatigue could be fatal. Boyle had spoken to him about it, and received an answer in advanced officialese that amounted to “mind your own business.”

It was amazing, Jameson thought, how well Major Hollis got along with his counterpart, People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang, when his relations with his fellow Americans were so distant and grudging. Hollis acted as if he were in enemy territory whenever he ventured out of his spun-foam cocoon on the inner rim of the wheel to see Boyle or confer with Liz Becque about his men’s rations. He was never seen after hours in the lounge. Evidently he drank alone with his executive, a watchful, tight-lipped man named Toscano.

Standing in the observation lounge on the inner side of the rim, Jameson was getting a good view of the latest rehearsal through the overhead bubble.

The long spear of the ship’s drive section, a hundred meters overhead, was aswarm with bulky spacesuited figures, scrambling around a cluster of dart-shaped missiles splayed out in their launching racks at an angle to the hull. The weapons, finned and needle-nosed, obviously had been designed for atmospheric launch, and their presence on this mission showed how hasty the preparations had been.

“So they’re playing with their toys, are they?” a voice said behind him.

Jameson turned. Ruiz was there, looking tired. He was dressed in shorts and sandals and a short-sleeved shirt that for once seemed to be pressed.

“They’re not exactly toys,” Jameson said. “There’s a rumor that they’ve got a gigaton bomb with them. It’s never been tested. Couldn’t be, on Earth. They think it would make a fifty-mile crater, maybe even break through the Earth’s crust.”

“Lunatics!” Ruiz said. “What kind of a crater do they expect to make in space? Or Jupiter, for that matter. No solid surface.”

“The bombs are for the Cygnans, aren’t they?” Jameson asked carefully.

“The Cygnans. Of course, they don’t officially exist. They’re not supposed to have survived ten thousand years of hard radiation.”

“That’s what Dmitri keeps saying.” Jameson grinned.

“They’ve exhibited some remarkable activity for an extinct race, haven’t they? Moving worlds about like that.”

Both men looked up through the bubble. The little spacesuited figures were swarming around a piece of equipment, maneuvering it into place on one of the launching racks. It looked as if they were hooking it into the missile guidance system.

It was late when Jameson returned to his quarters. After leaving Ruiz, he’d bumped into Li and been trapped onto a long technical discussion about using the Callisto lander to land on the Cygnus Object’s moon. The moon was settling into a new orbit around Jupiter, an ellipse that crossed the orbit of its former parent world, and they would have to time their expedition for the eight-day period when the satellite would be outside Jupiter’s most intense radiation zone. The orbital calculations were going to make some difficult work for Maggie and Jen Mei-mei. Jameson finally shook Li off and made his way down to the section of outer ring that held the officers’ living quarters looking forward to a drink with Maggie and a relaxed evening—or what ship’s convention had defined as evening.

His cabin was dark when he let himself in. Maggie was nowhere around. Jameson frowned. She should have come off duty an hour ago. He kicked off his sandals, made himself a drink, and put on some music. With a sigh, he settled down to study some equipment-maintenance reports while he was waiting.

Maggie straggled in an hour later. She looked dispirited and bedraggled. Her orange hair hung down limply, a stray strand across her cheek, and one tail of her shirt had escaped her shorts.

“Is that a martini?” she said. “Gawd, let me have a sip!” She flopped down on the aircouch and drained Jameson’s glass. Silently he got up to mix another batch.

“Thanks,” she said as he handed her a fresh glass. “Jeeks, what a day!”

“What happened?” he said.

She turned a tired face toward him. She looked pale and drained, and her freckles showed more prominently. “I’ve been drafted,” she said. “Me and Mei-mei. We spent the day working for Hollis.” She took a sip of her drink. “Plotting bomb orbits.”