The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 14

The three orange-ringed eyes of the creature from Cygnus stared into Jameson’s face from less than a foot away. Two of them were where you’d expect eyes to be. The third, surprisingly, was under the jaw. They were extended on stubby polyps that twitched like a puppy’s nose, as if the thing were trying to sniff at him rather than see him.

Jameson switched on his flashlight for a better look. The creature blinked—if that sudden reflexive puckering around the eyes could be called a blink—and then, too fast for any movement to be seen, the Cygnan was simply gone.

Almost immediately it was replaced by another. This one clung to the outside of the observation bubble for a moment, giving Jameson a brief, palpitating scrutiny, and then it too darted off, clambering across the transparent plastic in quick little fits and starts. The Cygnans moved in a sequence of disconcerting skips, like a stop-action film. You’d be looking at them and then, abruptly, they’d be in a new position.

They’d been crawling all over the outside of the ship for nine or ten minutes now, like ants over a picnic ham. More were arriving every minute on their queer broomsticks. They were sleek, elongated creatures, a little smaller than men with six slender limbs. Incredibly, they weren’t wearing spacesuits, just transparent sheaths stretched over their narrow heads and their clubbed tails. For the rest of it, their mottled hides were as shiny and naked as a lacquered snake.

“I feel like a goldfish in a bowl,” Ruiz said. “Why can’t we get their attention?”

People were lined up along the rail, waving at Cygnans, gesturing to them, trying vainly for some response. The communications teams were knocking themselves out with hand signals and easel pads. But the Cygnans didn’t seem at all interested in communicating. They’d stare for a moment, then dart away.

“Maybe we’re not intelligent enough for them,” Jameson said. “Maybe they just came over to look at the animals.”

“Or maybe they’re not intelligent enough,” Ruiz said. “Maybe they’re just the Cygnans’ equivalent of trained hounds, sent over to sniff us out. Look at those narrow heads. You couldn’t fit much of a brain into them.”

Jameson squinted at the nearest alien. It squinted back at him with its three stalked eyes. He shivered, glad it was on the other side of the Lexiglass. Ruiz was right. There was something primitive about that tapering, arrowhead-shaped skull. The jaws split it down the middle in a permanent reptilian smile. There were no teeth. The inside of the mouth, when it opened, was an unpleasant-looking rasp. The Cygnan put its mouth around its food, whatever it was, and filed it down. There was a tubular, needle-spined tongue way back in the gullet to go with it.

Dmitri pushed past Jameson to take a close-up picture. He shot off a second’s worth of high-speed frames on full automatic before the Cygnan twitched its body around and ran off. He was in biologist’s paradise.

“You’re wrong,” he burbled happily. “The brain doesn’t have to be in the head. The head may just be an extended structure for the mouth and the sense organs. Take a closer look. There’s nothing like a proper, rigid braincase. Just some kind of tough cartilaginous material.”

Jameson peered up again at the undersides of scurrying Cygnans. Dmitri was right. Those long narrow heads were flexible. They tended to bend in the direction the Cygnan was looking, like an elephant’s trunk.

“Where’s the brain, then?” Jameson said.

“In the most sensible place, I imagine—at the top of the nerve cord. That would put it between where its shoulders would be, if it had shoulders instead of that almost-round cross section. The nerve cord probably runs through the center of the body—not dorsally, like us vertebrates, or ventrally, like terrestrial insects. Because…” Dmitri’s face flushed in triumph. “Because Cygnans aren’t bilaterally symmetrical. They’re built on a radial plan, like hydras or starfish. They’re descended from something like coelenterates, not flatworms.”

Ruiz looked at him sharply, then out the observation bubble again. Jameson said, “Radial? But their limbs are paired!”

“Are they? Look again.”

Jameson tried to focus again on the scampering aliens. It was hard, because they were never still. But then he saw what Dmitri was driving at. There was something odd about the placement of the Cygnans’ limbs.

There were two arms and four legs, or four arms and two legs, depending on how you looked at it. The middle pair functioned as either arms or legs, as the Cygnans’ whim dictated, so that they were continually shifting from centaurlike beings to four-armed bipeds. The three splayed fingers—or toes, if you preferred—were monkey-clever. All the joints bent in a rubbery curve, showing that evolution had provided a flexible alternative to the ball-and-socket joint.

But that wasn’t where the impression of strangeness came from.

The limb arrangement was asymmetrical. When you looked closely, you saw that the limbs were staggered—one placed noticeably forward of its mate on the opposite side. The middle pair in particular were lopsided. The attaching muscles on the middle limbs seemed to be placed higher, too—Jameson would have said they were rooted near the spine, except that there was no visible spine, just rippling bands of muscle ringing the creature’s body.

But once the eye got used to the asymmetry, there was no sense of wrongness. It was just … different.

“You see, the limbs have been displaced by evolution,” Dmitri said smugly. “Once there were two sets of three equidistant limbs or tentacles, like a double-ended hydra. But when it became a land creature, it had to choose an up and a down. They probably evolved the same way we did—took to the trees and came down again a few million years later. Only more deft and agile than us monkeys—with a choice of four hands for making tools or four legs for running away from their enemies.”

“Or chasing their prey,” Ruiz said sourly.

“Maybe. I’ll have to think about that dentition. Closest thing on Earth is a parasite—the lamprey. Rasps its way into a fish and sucks the juices.”

Jameson looked at the swarm outside and shuddered.

“Sounds unpleasant.”

Dmitri looked pleased with himself. “The only difference between a parasite and a predator is the size of the prey. A mosquito’s a parasite, a tiger’s a predator. When the predator gets too big for its victim, it tends to kill it, that’s all. Maybe these creatures’ ancestors ate on the run, like Cape hunting dogs.”

Hastily, Jameson changed the subject. “Wouldn’t the extra limbs just atrophy? Would evolution really displace them so drastically?”

“Sure,” Dmitri said. “Happens all the time. It doesn’t even have to wait for evolution. Take the asymmetrical sole. Flounders and other flatfish on Earth start life with the usual bilateral symmetry, with an eye on either side, like free-swimming fish. When they get older and decide to lie on one side, the eye on that side moves around to the other side of the head.”

Dmitri paused to snap a picture of a Cygnan applying some instrument to the bubble. Perhaps it was taking a picture of him.

“The clincher is those three eyes,” he said after a moment. “What’s one doing under the jaw? Simple! No jaw! It’s just learned to open like one. It started as three eyestalks around a central orifice.”

“So the creature’s’ just a glorified tube?” Ruiz ventured.

“Well … so are we. But yes.” He frowned. “I wonder what’s so important about the other end, that the Cygnans have to wrap them up like their heads.”

“What I’d like to know,” Jameson said, “is how they matched orbits with us. And just by eyeballing it, too!”

“And how do they manage without spacesuits?” Ruiz asked.

“Maybe a very tough outer cuticle, like nematodes,” Dmitri said.

“What are nematodes?”

“Most numerous animal on Earth. Little parasitic roundworms. Every species of higher plant or animal has at least one species of nematode living off it. Human beings have about fifty. Most you never notice. They can live in vacuum. Some even live in boiling water, in hot springs.”

“Where do you get all these nasty facts?” Ruiz said.

“My specialty was parasitology,” Dmitri said with a self-satisfied smirk. “Good training for an exobiologist. You’d be surprised at some of the adaptations—”

“Later,” Ruiz said hastily. He turned to Jameson. “Tod my boy, what are we going to do about our visitors? Can we let a delegation of them inside for a talk?”

“Some of us may go outside,” Jameson said. “The skipper’s talking it over with Captain Hsieh now.”

At that moment a mild sensation washed through his body, as if he were on a descending elevator. He’d suddenly lost his one percent of weight. Ruiz noticed it too. He looked up questioningly. Only Dmitri seemed oblivious. He was opening his mouth for another little lecture, his slippers hooked into the fuzzy surface of the deck.

“Drive’s off,” Jameson said. “That’s odd. We still have another couple of hours of braking to do.”

“Mister Jameson!” Boyle was bawling his name from the control balcony.

“Excuse me” Jameson said. He circled the nearest guideline loosely with thumb and forefinger and kicked off into the air. He reached the balcony in a great swoop and swung himself over.

Boyle and Hsieh were hunched over a communicator screen, looking worried. Mike Berry’s face looked out at them, grimy and lined. In the background a Chinese technician, illegally present in the American section, was going over a computer display with Quentin.

Boyle looked up at Jameson. “Listen to this,” he said.

“…reaction just damped out,” Berry was saying. “We can’t seem to get it started again. There seems to be a strong magnetic field interfering with the shape of the field squeezing the plasma. And it’s playing hell with the computers. Timing’s all out of whack.

Kay Thorwald, looking grim, was pointing through the bulge of the observation port down along the length of the hull.

“Look!” she cried.

Jameson sighted down the shaft. At the far end a dozen Cygnans were clustered together, engaged in purposeful activity. He could make out some kind of lattice attached to the ship, encircling the hull.

“That’s how they did it, Captain,” he said.

Kay’s hand flew to her throat. “They’ll kill us! Don’t they know that? If we don’t kill our momentum, we won’t go into orbit around Callisto. We’ll crash into Jupiter!”

“Captain!” Jameson said. “We’ve got to damage that structure they’ve attached to the ship. I’m betting that it won’t take much to do it. Smash it up with pry bars wherever the thing looks most fragile. Toss the loose parts into space. By the time they could replace it, Berry would be able to get the drive working. If we could buy a couple of hours that way, we’d have time to get into a stable orbit.”

Grogan gestured at the scurrying hordes of six-limbed creatures outside. “We’d have to get past them.”

Jameson drew a breath. “From the spinlock to that point on the hull is about half the length of a football field,” he said. “If I have a dozen good people running interference for me, I think I can make it.”

“I can’t risk it, Tod,” Boyle said.

“Captain, it’s the only way.”

Boyle and Hsieh exchanged a glance. “All right,” Boyle said at last. “Let’s round up some volunteers.”

Jameson kissed Maggie good-bye and gathered the volunteers around him. “Let’s go.”

There was a strangled cry from Kay. “Look, look! What are they doing to the air lock?”

Jameson glanced out the bubble. Down at the hub of the ship, aliens were clustered all over the surface of the concentric cylinders that contained the spinlocks, thick as bees on honeysuckle. They were centering their attention on one of the outside doors.

A Cygnan with an implement that looked, at this distance, like an Easter egg at the end of a shovel handle was tracing the crack where the door was sealed. In its wake, other Cygnans were inserting toothpicks. When the eye adjusted for distance, the toothpicks became perfectly ordinary-looking crowbars. The Cygnans were already leaning on them, two or three feet hooked somehow into the surface of the hull, the remaining two or three hands bearing down on the bar.

“They’re prying the damn door open!” Boyle howled.

“Let’s get going!” Jameson yelled, starting toward the exit. “Caffrey’ll need help.”

“Stay where you are, Commander,” Boyle ordered.

“But—”

“There’s no time.”

The hatch flew off. It seemed to catch the Cygnans by surprise. They rose off the ship like a swarm of flies being disturbed. One of them appeared to have been injured by the hatch. After a moment they settled. There was a frosty explosion of air glittering against space, a white cloud growing larger. Alarms were going off all over the board.

Human bodies were floating out there. Jameson counted three.

“Caffrey must have had the inside door open, trying to get outside to stop them in time,” Jameson said. “The whole middle of the shaft between bulkheads’ll be open to vacuum.”

Kay glanced at her-instruments. “It is.”

The Cygnan with the Easter-egg tool slithered into the opening. Its assistants oozed after it.

Grogan was beside Jameson, clutching the edge of Kay’s console with raw knuckles. “Caffrey would’ve had the spin matched to the shaft, then. The wheel’s still safe. It’d be too hairy for them to try to get through the interface while it’s grinding around. They’ll come through this way first.”

He was wrong. There was another explosion of frost, a big one this time. A couple of hapless Cygnans came tumbling out of the lock, squirming round on their broomsticks to get back to the ship.

“Somebody was riding the cage, trying to get up here.” Jameson said. “The bulkhead at the end of the spoke must have been open.”

“Who was in that section of the wheel?” Boyle asked, his voice tight.

“That was spoke number three,” Kay said, reading the board. “Sickbay.”

“How many patients did Doc Brough and Dr. Nyi have?”

“Four, I think,” Kay said in a shaken voice.

Jameson asked, “What about Berry and his people? And Po Fu-yung’s team? Are they still alive?”

“Yes. The engine section was sealed off. But there’s only enough air there to last a few hours.”

Grogan’s big knuckles were working “We can get ’em out in spacesuits, a few at a time. Or carry enough air bottles to them to last until they finish their work.”

Kiernan was pushing his way through the crowd. “The hydroponics section!” he said. “Did it lose its air?”

Yeh Fei answered him. “Yes. But the no-gravity farm is still alive. The bulkhead forward of the spinlock was sealed.”

“Can that keep us going?” Boyle asked.

Kiernan put his head together with Dmitri. After a mumbled exchange, he looked up again. “Yes. If nothing else happens we can get some new algae tanks going. We may have to spread out into the observatory and bridge. And if we can pressurize the ring again, I can reestablish a hydroponics section there with transplants from the banks in no-g. We won’t be eating well for a while, but we’ll breathe.”

“Unless…” Everybody turned to look at Jameson. “Unless they kill off the rest of our greenery before we can stop them.”

“All right,” Boyle said. “We’re under siege. Grogan, we’re going to need all the spacesuits from the spinlock lockers. And somebody’s going to have to go through vacuum to get them. How many suits can we scrape up here in the forward part of the ship?”

“Captain, there’s just four. They’re in the auxiliary air lock near the observatory. At least they were last time I checked. But we can’t send anyone to the spinlock until I jury-rig some kind of air lock south of the no-g farm.”

“How long will that take you?”

Grogan thought it over. “I can make it out of a water tank. A couple of hours.”

Jameson looked out the window. He could see a general movement of Cygnans toward the breached lock. Frozen air was still misting out into space.

“Skipper,” he said, “we don’t have a couple of hours”

Boyle brooded at him from under heavy eyebrows. “No, we don’t. Once they get into the ship…”

He didn’t need to finish the thought. Everybody there was thinking about what would happen if the Cygnans breached any more bulkheads. The humans were trapped in their own ship, in two fragile bubbles of air at either end of the long shaft that pierced the wheel. Even if they all could get into spacesuits—those unreachable suits in the spinlock—it would only prolong their death sentence.

Kiernan bit his lip. “Come on, Wang,” he said. “Let’s get down to the farm and get as much seed stock as we can into airtight lockers.”

“Do you know how dangerous that is, Mr. Kiernan?” Boyle interrupted. “You’ll be one bulkhead closer to vacuum. Assuming we can get the ship repressurized, is there really going to be enough time to reestablish an ecology before the reserve air runs out?”

“I don’t know,” Kiernan admitted. “But we’ve got to try.”

“I’ll go with you,” Dmitri volunteered abruptly. “You’ll need a lot of help. You’d better have a biologist along.” The boyish face didn’t look weak any more. Dmitri’s voice was shaking, but his self-indulgent mouth was set in firm lines now. Jameson had to admire his guts.

“I go too,” a harsh voice said. “I am biologist.” They looked up. Tu Jue-chen was there, biting her lip. Her homely face was tight and unreadable.

“Thank you, Tongzhi Tu,” Boyle said.

“I’d better get started,” Jameson said. “I’ll have to try to run the gauntlet with just two men. I’d better leave the fourth spacesuit here. Somebody may still be able to make it to the spinlock storage lockers for some more suits if Grogan can rig up that air lock before the Cygnans decide to come inside.” He turned to Grogan. “You’d better get cracking, Chief.”

“The hell I will,” Grogan rumbled. “I’m coming with you. One of my boys’ll volunteer to rig the lock.” He called out over the crowd. “Fiaccone, that’s you!”

“Right you are, Chief,” Fiaccone said, grinning. He headed toward the exit in a no-gravity shamble.

Yeh Fei rose from his chair, looming over the rest of them. “I am third man,” he said. Nobody argued with him.

Jameson said good-bye to Maggie again, clasping her thin body in his arms. He felt her tremling. “I’ll be back,” he said, whispering. “Nothing says the Cygnans have to be malicious. Maybe they’re just curious.”

She was wound around him with all her strength. He broke free gently and turned to Grogan and Yeh. “All set,” he said.

The three of them suited up in the auxiliary lock behind the observatory. Yeh had armed himself with a wicked-looking cargo hook. Grogan had his fist wrapped around the handle of a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, just behind its head. The short handle was forward. He could poke with it, or swing his fist with the heavy lump of metal in it. Jameson had along pry bar.

Just before they spun the outer door open, there was a disconcerting moment when a Cygnan peered in at them through the small safety window. Its three orange pupils expanded from a narrow slit, like an unfolding fan. Then the creature blinked and was gone.

If Dmitri was right, there was no brain behind those three strange eyes. What unimaginable thoughts went on between what passed for a Cygnan’s shoulders?

“Go!” Jameson commanded.

The hull immediately outside the airlock was a crawling carpet of mottled flesh. A sea of pikes bobbed and waved above it: the Cygnans’ flying broomsticks. They held them absent-mindedly, passing them from hand to middle limb to foot as they jostled one another to converge on the opening lock. The clever little toes clung to any projection or surface irregularity on the hull.

Jameson scrambled forward, Yeh and Grogan flanking him in a flying wedge. The carpet of alien life opened up ahead of them and closed again behind them. Yeh was swinging his long hook in circles to keep them at a distance. Grogan poked with his sledge handle. Cygnans skipped nimbly out of the way.

My God, we’re going to make it! was Jameson’s first thought. But then, before they had gone twenty feet, the Cygnans began closing in.

Yeh made a swipe with his hook and ripped the balloonlike sheath over a Cygnan’s long snout. Vapor puffed out into space, and the Cygnan died. Jameson could see orange blood oozing out of the eyestalks.

Then, before the swing could be completed, Cygnan fingers closed on the shaft of the cargo hook. Yeh shook the grip off with his enormous strength, but the Cygnan simply shifted its grip to a middle limb. A companion came to, help it and easily snatched the hook out of Yeh’s grasp; Yeh’s weapon passed from Cygnan to Cygnan until it was out of sight.

Grasping hands and feet were all over Jameson now. He swung out with his crowbar and felt it thud into the closely packed bodies. But dozens of three-fingered paws began tugging at it, anticipating his every move.

He could see Grogan floating belly-up above the hull beside him, being borne away by Cygnans, like a grub carried by ants. Grogan’s struggles did him no good. When he shook a Cygnan claw off, two or three more were there to take its place. With their six limbs and unencumbered bodies, they just kept changing hands in a blur of motion. There was nothing to fight against.

Clumsy in his spacesuit, Jameson tried to strike out, to grab. The crowbar had been plucked away before he realized what was happening. Whenever he caught hold of a Cygnan, deft, slender fingers pried his grip loose. Dozens of hands snatched at his sleeves, keeping him from hitting hard.

Ahead of him he saw an explosion of packed bodies. Grogan had somehow broken free for a moment. Cygnans rose into the air and began to settle down again. He caught a glimpse of Grogan, writhing against a background of stars, a half dozen aliens clinging to him like terriers to a bear. Busy fingers were plucking at Grogan’s hoses, at the latches of his suit. Finally came the horrible sight of Grogan’s helmet being passed from Cygnan to Cygnan like a basketball, while above Grogan’s collar ring a ball of oozing sludge sprayed a fine pink mist into space.

Jameson felt a moment of panic as alien fingers fumbled at his own latches. He managed to slap them away, and they didn’t return. Then suddenly came a heave, like a concerted blanket-toss, and Jameson felt himself sailing into space. Tumbling end over end, he saw himself heading into the mouth of a large transparent sack that was being held open by a circle of hovering Cygnans. There was nothing he could do to change his trajectory, as he discovered when he tried to use his suit jets. Industrious little fingers had managed to disconnect them.

He was ignominiously stuffed, kicking and squirming, into the sack. The neck was drawn shut. He struck out through the tough plastic material at the smooth, shiny bodies around him. All he succeeded in doing was to work up a sweat inside his spacesuit. Can’t fight my way out of a paper bag, he thought. He groped at his belt kit for something sharp. All his tools were missing.

A Cygnan with some kind of tank-and-hose arrangement floated over to him. Jameson studied the creature through the clear plastic. It was holding the tank in its middle limbs, the hose nozzle with one hand. The other hand—or what passed for a hand—began fiddling with a valve. Holding its broomstick negligently with one foot, the Cygnan started to spray him. When it had finished the job, another Cygnan floated over with a bundle of long tubes fitted with a pistol grip. His captors let go of the sack again and left Jameson hanging free. The creature vacuumed the entire surface of the sack industriously. Jameson detected a glow of purple light. Sterilizing me, he thought.

A pair of Cygnans took him then, like a sack of laundry and zoomed off with him. The creature on the right clutched its broomstick with the three right-hand limbs, like an outrigger, and the one on the left hung on to its stick with its three left limbs. They held the stack stretched safely between them, leaning inward to join hands at its neck. Jameson noticed that they kept shifting their grip. They had three choices. And there were never more than two limbs wrapped around the stick. One of them always was resting. Did Cygnans tire easily? Jameson decided that no individual Cygnan limb was as strong as a human arm or leg. But it didn’t have to be.

A mile or two from the ship, he finally stopped struggling. When his air was gone, he was dead. He wanted to postpone that as long as possible. So he settled into the sack and tried to make himself relax. Ruiz had been right. Those flimsy-looking tubes the Cygnans rode stored enough power for constant acceleration. He had weight, dangling between his two captors; it felt like half a g, but it was hard to be sure.

He saw a lot of traffic going in both directions around him. The long brilliant beams of light flashing from the ends of the slender brooms made a jack-straw pattern against space.

They were heading straight toward some invisible target a quarter million miles away. There was no nonsense about trajectories, about matching orbits. The aliens simply plowed through space as if they had all the power in the universe at their disposal. And perhaps they did, if they could move whole planets.

Jameson looked back—“down,” actually—at the Jupiter ship. It was tiny now, a double-pointed thumbtack pinned against the stars.

Then, abruptly, twin threads of light stretched across the black of space. That wasn’t the boron drive. The aliens had attached some kind of propulsive units, to the ship at the head and tail of the shaft. He could see it begin to move sideways, its wheel still turning, as if it were rolling through space.

The Cygnans had gone fishing. Now they were bringing home their catch.