The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 15

The alien ship loomed ahead, big as a world. It was a world, thirty miles from tip to splayed tip. From this angle it was a slender triskelion, a three-bladed pinwheel with a triangular bucket dangling from the end of each arm.

Jameson squirmed around in his transparent game-bag for a better view. He’d been cramped inside for more than six hours now, and his suit’s air was almost gone.

His captors were approaching the ship head on, so he couldn’t see much of the long central spar that formed the axis, except for a yawning triangular maw at the hub. That had to be the business end of the drive.

An extraordinary thought occurred to him. He had read once, in a popular book on psychotechnology, that the works of man were influenced by buried images of self. His motile surrogates of himself tended to be cross-shaped—a man with arms outstretched—like early airplanes, or four-limbed like the drive shaft and two axles of a wheeled vehicle at right angles, or, in the ultimate subconscious distillation; male symbols like rockets or female symbols like boats.

But the Cygnans—if Dmitri’s morphology was to be believed—were three limbs spaced equally around a central axis. And so was their ship. There were even three stubby triangular petals—feet?—placed at the opposite end of the shaft. Jameson could make them out on another Cygnan ship hovering some dozens of miles away. They might be miles-thick radiation baffles for the life-support modules when the ship was in its folded mode. They’d be facing forward then, into a howling storm of impinging interstellar hydrogen. This all made eminent sense in engineering terms, but so did the design of their Jupiter ship. Jameson wondered what psychoanalytical innuendos the author would have found to describe that!

There was one more flash of insight before his mind got busy again with his predicament. Designs evolve past first solutions. Technological phylogeny, the book had called it. The cross-shaped airplane was an early effort of mankind, replaced by delta wings and various lifting bodies. Was this tremendous feat of engineering he saw looming before him a first try for the Cygnans?

Then he became lost in wonder. Those fifteen-mile-long jibs that held the environmental pods were anchored at their roots by pins that had to be large enough and strong enough to keep a small world from flying off into space. The grooves along the flat faces of the hull that the jibs were meant to rest in were as deep as the Grand Canyon. And—he sighted along one of the arms until he came to the distant three-sided bucket—that wishbone-shaped tholepin that formed the handle of the bucket was, by itself, of a size to stagger the imagination.

He tried to visualize it—a structure four and a half miles from end to end pivoting on a pair of bearings that alone were bigger than the largest turning structure man had ever made: Eurostation itself. The bolt head he could distantly see was a bright dome the size of a small mountain.

The rotation of the arms, from Jameson’s vantage point, was almost imperceptible. Structures that size didn’t have to turn very fast to provide g forces fifteen miles from the center.

By the same token, the Cygnans seemed to have dispensed with anything resembling a docking hub. Perhaps they didn’t need one at this creeping rate of rotation, depending on their own agility and the feebleness of centrifugal force so close to the spine of the ship.

Jameson shriveled in the sack. Were they going to plunge into the miles-wide pit of the drive tube that was growing before his eyes? He saw a triangular chasm whose interior walls were blackened and pitted with the violent energies that had flung the Cygnans across ten thousand light-years.

Then with a casual flick of their broomsticks, the Cygnans altered course fractionally. The rim of the pit flashed by. Jameson, with nothing to hang onto, found himself falling past a sheer metal wall that stretched on forever.

They barely missed the outstretched arm of one of the jibs. Resolutely, Jameson kept his eyes open, but he found his gloved hands trying to clutch at nothingness. He had a flashing glimpse of the spar’s upper surface before he dropped below its horizon. This was a metal moonscape, pocked with craters and scarred with long furrows, the wounds of forgotten encounters with interstellar debris.

He looked upward as he fell below the knife edge of that strange skyline. The undersides of the spar hung above him like an ax blade fifteen miles long. These were the faces that fit into the canyon-size notch in one of the ship’s flat sides. There were no pockmarks. They were smooth and shiny enough to reflect the stars.

They fell what he judged to be another four or five miles before the laboring broomsticks were able to slow them to a halt. Jameson’s orientation changed. He was no longer falling down the side of an immense cliff. Now he was floating, weightless, above a vast metal plain, incised along its entire length by a triangular gorge. The landscape was tilting, moving past him. Long minutes later, the sharp edge of the landscape swam past and he was hovering above an identical plain with an identical incised groove stretching toward the vanishing point.

Jupiter dipped, then rose again above that strange, flat horizon. It was a great, reddish moon, filling the ship’s sky. It was the sky, or most of it: a vast arch stretching from side to side, showing only a fraction of its curvature, with a band of night on its border. Here, this close, you could see the violent turmoil of the planet’s atmosphere, a boiling sea of multicolored clouds rushing toward an invisible equator.

The two creatures loafed along on their sticks, the sack stretched between them, until they found an entrance. This proved to be a squarish hatch the size of a barn door, with a perfectly ordinary-looking T-bar handle precisely in the center. The handle was surrounded by a circle of what looked like doorknobs.

They hovered a few feet above it, dangling Jameson ignominiously between them. The sheer mass of the tremendous ship was enough to produce a minute but noticeable gravitational tug; Jameson guessed that he weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of an ounce.

Then the Cygnans touched down, clinging lizard-like to the knobs with two or three spare feet.

Instantly, Jameson’s weight was reversed. He soared upward in his sack as if he were a captive balloon, while the Cygnans kept him moored with infuriating nonchalance. Again, the spin was slow enough to keep his pseudo-weight down to a few ounces, but his stomach did a flip-flop. What if the Cygnans let go?

One of them did. The other, its toes wrapped around knobs, stretched its sleek body toward the handle in the center. Jameson wondered how the creature proposed to open the door with the three of them clinging to it. Did it swing outward, inward, or slide open?

It did none of these. To Jameson’s mild astonishment, when the Cygnan pulled on the handle, the handle got longer. Then he realized that the door was riding downward on a central shaft, of which the handle was the end. Bottom was five feet down. The creatures stepped off the door, pulling Jameson unceremoniously with them. The door flew up on its shaft, falling into place in the opening with its own weight. It settled into place in the beveled frame. It seemed a careless way to seal a ship’s air in.

Clinging upside down to what was now the ceiling, the Cygnans scurried toward a circular door in a wall. This one opened like a bank vault. It didn’t go anywhere. Inside was a honeycomb of three-foot metal disks that looked like a wall of storage drums.

One of the creatures chose a lid and it popped open. Before Jameson knew what was happening, it slithered inside. The other Cygnan stuffed the sack into the opening and followed. Jameson was being hustled down a narrow, looping tube. It was transparent, and he could see other tubes branching out on all sides, each going to some unknown destination.

It was an efficient way to travel—for Cygnans. They reverted to their six-legged mode, hardly caring which direction was up. Jameson was getting some painful bumps, even through the spacesuit.

They emerged into an enormous space—a forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. No, not quite. About a mile away was a mile-high ridge, stretching on to infinity. This had to be, he realized, the underside of that tremendous canyon-size trench he had seen on the outside of the hull. The sky was a tent—two walls converging at an apex miles above. The sky was forested too, and each had its own central ridge.

He had time for a quick look at what he had taken for trees before they hoisted him aloft. It was a tangle of thick twisting boles, intertwined like a banyan tree, with thick blue-green foliage. If there were any vertical trunks, they were accidental. The growth seemed to spread out sideways, like some enormous creeping vine. He couldn’t tell if they were individual growths or one interconnected entity.

The Cygnans scurried up the nearest trunk like six-legged squirrels, taking Jameson with them. Soon they were about fifty feet up, and Jameson was getting dizzy. He knew that at his present weight a fall couldn’t hurt him, but all his instincts were screaming at him. The Cygnans passed the sack back and forth to each other, and from hand to foot, as they scampered along the tremendous branches, but always there seemed to be at least one clever little paw wrapped around the neck of the sack.

After about half a mile of being towed through the branches in this offhand fashion, Jameson found himself draped over a branch, dizzy and bruised. He lay there in his bag, not daring to move. His captors had evidently stopped to catch their breath—even Cygnans had to do that, it seemed—and to tear the plastic wrappings off their heads and beaverlike tails.

They let the torn plastic flutter down to the forest floor and tossed their globular air canisters down after it. Jameson was shocked in spite of himself. In the closed economy of a spaceship, littering was a capital sin.

The Cygnans stretched and preened themselves. They groomed one another as monkeys would, scratching away transparent flakes of what he took to be dead skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for a tail was actually three tails, a petaled structure that folded in on itself.

For a moment, as one of the creatures turned away, he had a glimpse of the orifice the petals enclosed, a moist, tender surface that was the same bright orange as the lining of the Cygnans mouth and the mucosa of their eyes. He had an impression of hairlike projections pointed inward, in the manner of a fish trap, and then the three petals closed up again.

Jameson studied his captors curiously. This was the first time he had had a really good look in strong light. They were naked except for tubular harnesses festooned with soft oval pouches. Their hides were clothing enough, a mottled pattern of golds and rusts that reminded him of something between a diamondback rattlesnake and a reticulated giraffe. Under other circumstances he might have found the pattern beautiful.

He was unable to decide on their sex. They seemed to have nothing resembling external sexual organs. Hidden between the two hindmost limbs where he was unable to get a clear view of it was something that might have been a secondary sexual characteristic like a breast or a cockscomb—a soft, palpitating ovoid the color of dried blood. It seemed squashy and vulnerable from its placement and the automatic manner in which the Cygnans seemed to shield it, and for some reason—though Jameson told himself he was being irrational—it disgusted him.

As the Cygnans continued to groom each other with their fingers and their vegetable-grater mouths, Jameson twisted in his sack to look at the life around him. He’d gradually become aware that the strange tangle of vegetation was alive with darting, twittering creatures. He could see an odd three-winged bird—or flying creature, at any rate—in brilliant, jewellike colors. Its three petallike wings, transparent membranes through which Jameson saw shadowed supporting spines, were arranged helicopter-fashion around its stubby neck, and at the bottom of its streamlined body were three delicate clawed feet. They were about the size of hummingbirds. One of them hovered in front of his face, looking at him, then fluttered off.

There was a squirrel-size creature that strikingly vindicated Dmitri’s theory. Its six limbs were definitely not paired. Instead, they were arranged in two radiating arrays, fore and aft. It had three eyes, spaced like the Cygnans’, around a central orifice. It wasn’t bothered by any sense of the upright, but scampered along the branches, its body giving a quarter turn or rotating entirely from time to time as it nibbled the fat bluish leaves. In spite of its bizarre configuration, Jameson found the creature delightful, with its busy movements and its bright goldfishlike colors.

It came too close. There was a flash of movement, and one of Jameson’s captors had the little creature trapped in a three-fingered hand. It chirped and twittered, squirming to get free. But the Cygnan held it out to its companion, as if offering it for inspection. The other Cygnan made an odd, nonhuman gesture—a sort of corkscrewlike drawing in of its long head. A refusal?

Then, to Jameson’s horror, the first Cygnan popped the little animal into its mouth, hind end first. The snout with its rasplike lining rotated around the tiny golden body. The creature shrieked, still alive. Inch by inch, the Cygnan sucked it in. By the time the head disappeared, the little eyes had become glassy and the circular mouth was open in a slack O. The Cygnan’s spined tubular tongue came out, made a circular swipe, and was gone.

Jameson made an effort not to be sick. Being sick in a space helmet was a disaster, and every spacefarer learned how to fight down nausea. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitter bile in his throat. So much for the theory that advanced civilizations had to be morally superior!

Abruptly the Cygnans snatched up the sack again and oozed along the twisting branches, passing Jameson back and forth between them like a basketball. They were heading for the edge of the forest, that acute corner where the overgrown sky came down to meet the land.

As feeble as the pseudo-gravity was, Jameson could feel the downhill tug. Of course! The ground would only be relatively “flat” near the central ridges. Visualize a triangle drawn inside a circle; “up” is always the center of the circle. It got steeper and steeper as they approached the artificial horizon. Jameson, despite the blurry motion, noticed the tendency of the vegetable growths to point toward that center. As they advanced the gnarled trunks were leaning farther and farther backward.

Earth blended into sky with no visible break in the forest. Everything was intergrown in thick profusion. The Cygnans made a wild leap, trailing the light puff of the sack, and caught at the wall of branches opposite. All at once, instead of plunging downhill they were climbing toward another of the mile-high central ridges. The jungle they had just left behind became their sky.

Why hadn’t the Cygnans built on sensible circular plan, like human beings? Again, Jameson could merely guess that it simply didn’t matter to them. This flat-sided plan was more convenient to them in other ways. It simplified the engineering of the folding spar arrangement. Straight lines made for easier construction. And as for the gravity gradient, perhaps the Cygnans lived in three dimensions, like monkeys or birds. Or—the thought came to him—perhaps they lived along surfaces, like so many small, clinging terrestrial creatures.

With startling suddenness, the forest ended. Jameson was looking through the branches at a flat metal prairie studded with surrealistic structures. They were placed at random along the plain: silolike cylinders of shiny metal, skyscraper-size prismoids set with gemlike facets, flaring hyperboloids with barber-pole skirts, enormous lattices of translucent colored materials. They were connected by looping transparent tubes, like some crazy gigantic chemistry apparatus, and there were dark specks moving fittingly through the tubes.

Everything leaned.

As the geometric shapes retreated from the vast tent of the central ridge, they leaned farther and farther toward center, until, at the knife-edge crease where ground met sloping ceiling, structures hundreds of feet high were tilting drunkenly. The mad architecture continued along the metal sky until it disappeared into the mists.

For there was a vast tubular cloud running down the spine of the empty space above. As the mists swirled and parted, Jameson could catch glimpses of a gleaming pipe stretching the length of the no-gravity center of this artificial world. Condensation? Escaping gases? Jameson shuddered. One thing was clear. That pipe—wide as the Mississippi River—had something to do with the mighty drive that had carried the Cygnans across the universe. Humans kept such relatively feeble things as nuclear power plants out of sight, if possible! What manner of creatures were the Cygnans to live and work, unconcerned, in such proximity to their engine?

As the Cygnans jostled him along, he could see what supported the pipe: a row of slender metal pillars raised from the apex of the central ridge—from all three of the ridges. They didn’t look half massive enough to hold up the pipe. But then, he realized, it was in zero-g up there, and the pillars need do nothing but brace it lightly in place.

Jameson found himself being stuffed through a rubbery membrane into a circular port. The membrane closed behind him—he couldn’t tell how—and he was with his two keepers in a crazy rotating drum. They scuttled round its walls while a lens-shaped aperture widened into the shape made by two intersecting circles. Before it was quite a full circle they picked up Jameson’s sack and heaved him through. He struck another of the rubbery membranes. He expected to bounce back in time to be snipped in half by the closing edges, but in some mysterious fashion he oozed through and settled to the floor like a toy balloon.

He found himself in an immense warehouse of a place with acres of spongy floor. The ceiling hung distant and shadowy above. The walls leaned inward. Dim shapes bulked against the walls and in random piles all over the floor. These sacks and bales and queer pyramid-shaped boxes were stenciled with odd cursive symbols that, instead of following one another in straight lines like human script, wandered in random peaks and valleys up and down.

There was a sound like a maniac trying to play Bartok on the harmonica, and Jameson realized it had been made by one of the Cygnans. The other Cygnan answered with an incredibly rapid fragment of twelve-tone solfège.

Jameson came to full attention. There had been chords in all that quick passage-work, transitory but unmistakable, as if the Cygnans possessed multiple larynxes.

Whatever those brief cadenzas had meant, the Cygnans picked him up again and toted him to a cluster of what looked like manholes in the spongy floor. One of them lifted a lid, apparently at random, and, legs tucked in, dropped through. Another one of those damned tubes! Jameson was tossed in next, and the other Cygnan dove through after him, head first.

They were hurtling at dizzying speed down a corkscrew spiral. Outside the transparent walls of the tube was an enormous dim void, hung round with the ghostly outlines of fantastic shapes. If they had entered one of the spars, they were plunging down a shaft fifteen miles deep, with a boxed world at the bottom.

He could feel gravity starting to take hold after a mile or two; It didn’t amount to much yet, but it would be a third of an Earth g at the bottom, if Ruiz’s figures on the rotation had been correct. Enough to smash him to a bloody paste if he’d gone tobogganing down the spiral by himself without the Cygnans twelve busily pedaling legs to brake him.

His eyes began getting used to the dimness and he could see other transparent spirals in the hugeness around him, wrapped round slim silvery shafts. Other many-legged shapes were scooting up or down them. He peered down through the coils of his own tubeway and suddenly went rigid with fear.

A column of Cygnans was scurrying up the spiral, at the same fantastic speed. They and his own warders surely must see one another! But they weren’t slowing down. Without doubt, they were going to collide with bone-crunching force. He had a split second to see the first shadowy shape, two coils below, flash around the shaft. He braced himself.

Nothing! Jameson looked upward. The ascending Cygnans were streaking through the tubes above. How the hell had they gotten past without a collision?

He looked across at the other tubes. The same trick was going on all around him. Ascending and descending Cygnans on a collison course in the same spiral tubeway passing one another without meeting!

Then he understood. He almost laughed, in spite of the gravity of his situation. The solution was ridiculously simple. A double spiral, like the elevators at the MacDonald. You could even find the same thing in that French château in the Loire valley with the famous double-spiral staircase. Chambord. He’d seen it in a holo travelogue. People going up never met the people coming down—a handy trick in the sixteenth century for getting out of the place.

They took more than an hour to reach bottom, an hour of being whipped round and round the central shaft at breakneck speed, while the remote walls of the murky chasm whirled dizzyingly around him and the indistinct structures that filled it blended into a tornado blur. Jameson passed out somewhere along the way. When he regained consciousness, he was out of the sack, but still in his suit, lying on a bare floor whose surface bristled with minute rubbery villi. He was alone.

He tried to stand up and immediately lost his balance and fell down again. The blood rushed through his head and the room wheeled and tilted.

He waited until the dizziness passed, then cautiously sat up. He was in a small room with an odd shape. It was a parallelogram rather than a rectangle. It was a shape that would have made sense to Cygnans if they’d built rows of chambers along one of the three sides of an environmental pod and kept the dividing walls parallel to the bulkhead at the end.

He struggled shakily to his feet, his hands groping for support along the wall. The wall was a mass of the same rubbery projections. He cast no shadow. Light seemed to exist in the room without an apparent source. It was a dim reddish light that turned his spacesuit the color of blood.

How long had he been unconscious? Reluctantly he lifted his eyes to the luminous squares of the helmet telltales. It was worse than he’d thought. Barely ten minutes worth of air was left.

“Are you afraid?” Maggie said.

“Terrified,” Maybury said. Her dark eyes were big. “What’s going to happen now?”

Around them the big hemispherical chamber was alive with subdued conversation and purposeless moving to and fro. The air was already beginning to taste stale. Some seventy people were crowded into the bridge and observatory areas. Everything below hydroponics was hard vacuum.

Another twenty people were trapped in the tail of the ship: the Chinese and American engine techs and the erstwhile Chinese guards. The bridge was still in communication with them. Mike Berry had reported that everything forward of them was vacuum, and presumably swarming with Cygnans. They had one spacesuit down there, but no place to go with it.

Grogan’s man, Fiaccone, had managed to bring back a half-dozen spacesuits from spinlock storage before Captain Boyle had vetoed any further forays. He’d reported dead bodies floating around everywhere.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, brushing back a strand of wilted hair. It was warm and steamy in the bridge. “It’s stalemate, I guess. We’re under house arrest. We can’t get out, and those creatures don’t seem to want to get in. God, look at them! They move like weasels! They’re never still!”

Maybury followed her gaze to the glassy curve of the outside wall. It was covered with sleek six-legged shapes that stared and darted away, to be replaced by others. By this time most of the crew had moved uneasily away from the observation wall, leaving a clear space of about ten feet.

“They’re afraid to come inside,” Maybury said. “After what happened in hydroponics.”

On his last trip for spacesuits Fiaccone had been pursued by Cygnans coming through the breached spinlock. He’d barely made it through the improvised air lock into the farm. One of the Cygnans had gotten through after him before Kiernan managed to slam the lid shut. Other Cygnans were coming through, leaving the outside hatch open, but Kiernan barricaded it before too much air whooshed through. He turned to find Fiaccone hanging on to slippery thing that was twisting and squirming in his embrace. Kiernan stabbed it with a spading fork. It writhed on the three tines, oozing an orange ichor, and expired. Its friends were rattling the inside lid of the lock. Against Dmitri’s anguished protests, Kiernan and Fiaccone opened the lid and, aided by the outward explosion of air, tossed the body outside and slammed the lid shut again, leaving a Cygnan finger inside.

There had been no further attempts by the Cygnans to get through the lock. Dmitri had had to be content with the severed finger. He and Louise Phelps were dissecting it now in the observatory.

“There’s something going on up on the balcony,” Maggie said.

Boyle was conferring with Hsieh. After a moment he came to the rail and rapped for attention. The bridge became silent. Everybody looked up, waiting.

“The Cygnans are through into the farm,” Boyle said without preamble. “The instruments show vacuum there.”

There was a confusion of voices. Kiernan, just behind Maggie in the jostling crowd, said, “The wingbeans! The algae! Everything! If only the captain had let me work down there for another half-hour I, could’ve saved more…”

Boyle rapped for attention again. “You might as well know the worst,” he said. “The air plant’s gone. We’re living on reserves now.”

Maggie looked up at the ventilators. The little ribbons on the grilles had stopped fluttering. Somewhere in the crowd a woman became hysterical.

“Somebody get the people out of the observatory,” Boyle went on. “We’ll have to make a last stand here. Seal off all the exits. Gifford, break out some emergency patches and stickum and get them ready.”

“Captain!” a voice boomed from the floor. One of Grogan’s men. “We’ve got seven suits. Let me and some of the boys get out there now. We can do it without losing too much air. We’ll go through the door fast, and Gifford can slap a patch on after us. We can hold ’em off as long as our air lasts.”

Boyle conferred in whispers with Hsieh. He turned back to the rail, and said: “It’s no good. You wouldn’t have a chance. You saw what happened to Jameson and Chief Grogan and Comrade Yeh. We’ll use the suits in here.”

“Captain,” the man said, standing his ground. “Seven suits aren’t going to go very far with seventy people.”

“Seven people will have a chance to stay alive a little longer,” Boyle said firmly. “We’re going to draw straws. Only crewpersons are eligible.”

Beth Oliver stood up, straight and beautiful. “Captain,” she said in a clear voice. “Once upon a time, ‘crewpersons’ meant people of both sexes. Well, I think I’m speaking for the rest of the ‘crewpersons’ when I say we won’t have anything to do with that sexist nonsense. The men will have an equal chance with us.”

A female murmur of agreement came from the crowd. Sue Jarowski yelled, “Damn right!”

Boyle held up his hands for quiet. “All right,” he said. “I’m proud of you all. The men will be in the drawing. But of course any man who wins a suit will be free to decline it and throw his chance into the pot again.”

There was a groan from the women. Throughout the crowd, men were looking stubborn, nodding agreement with the captain. Klein stepped forward, waxy-faced. “Captain,” he began in a strained voice.

A horrifying whistling sound came from the observation wall. Everybody fell silent and stared at the bubble. A woman screamed.

The Cygnans had cleared a twelve-foot circle at the center of the port. Their packed bodies darkened the rest of the Lexiglass. At the fringes of the circle a dozen of the creatures were busy with glowing cutting tools. Plastic was melting and bubbling along the entire twelve-foot circumference.

There was a sudden rush toward the exits. But before anybody had gone more than a few steps, the heavy circle of plastic tumbled with nightmare slowness to the deck and a ring of long-snouted Cygnan faces was around the edges of the opening, peering in at the humans.

Maggie sucked in a last desperate lungful of air before it was gone, and waited to die.