The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 21

Tetrachord tugged gently at the leash. Jameson gagged as the loop of cord, threaded through his nostrils and dangling down his throat, tickled his pharynx. Then the moment of nausea passed, and he ambled obediently down the concave sidewalk after the two aliens.

The kitten was in his arms. He’d managed to scoop the animal up before they led him off in disgrace. He damn well wasn’t going to leave it to Augie’s tender mercies.

The tether wasn’t too uncomfortable once he got used to it. Jameson once had been fed by a tube through his nose in the hospital, and he’d found that it looked worse than it felt. It made the back of his throat feel sore, that was all, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen to his septum if he resisted the tug of the leash. But all the same, he was glad he hadn’t been conscious when the cord was inserted, and he dreaded its removal.

Perhaps it was the usual practice for Cygnans, with the peculiar anatomy of their planet’s life forms, to fetter their domestic animals through some analagous body cavity. It was a damned effective way to lead a human being around.

They had decided Jameson could no longer be trusted. He’d proved to be a dangerous animal, no longer fit to be a house pet. As with a puppy gone bad, they might feel some lingering affection for him, but they were regretfully taking him away all the same.

He trudged along behind the hand-holding pair, trying to keep the cord slack as much as possible. Augie, sans poncho, was slithering along behind him at a safe distance, holding the electric prod.

Around him the Cygnan city swarmed with mottled life. He was being led through something akin to a commercial district, with the Cygnan equivalent of shops and restaurants and perhaps theaters. Vividly colored angular structures soared crazily up to a luminescent approximation of a sky a quarter mile above. The faces of the buildings were alive with thousands of busy Cygnans, clinging to latticework perches that extended all the way up. The long tubular snouts turned in Jameson’s direction as he passed, and the twittering noise level went up as they caught sight of him and paused in their activities. The scurrying crowds parted to make way for the dangerous procession, and a swarm of the curious trailed in Jameson’s wake, keeping a respectful distance and piping questions at a sullenly silent Augie.

A little Cygnan the size of a beagle skittered up to him and was pulled back out of harm’s way by an adult, exactly as a human parent might snatch a curious child out of the way of a circus animal. Jameson lost his step, trying to avoid tripping over the thing, and was rewarded by a painful yank of the cord snubbed around his septum. There was a sickening sensation inside his head as a loop of the tether scraped the walls of the nasal cavity, and he had a fit of coughing and choking.

His feet stumbled along automatically. When the tears cleared from his eyes the path was emerging from the overhanging cliffsides of the vertical structures into a parklike stretch with pale blue lawns of packed fuzzballs and contorted shrubs like tangles of red spaghetti on either side.

Jameson looked across an open plaza spoked with transparent travel tubes clogged with Cygnans entering or leaving the area. The tubes snaked at every level through walls, through enormous aquarium tanks, through enclosed habitats, through cages.

Cages.

A frightful stench was in the air, a fetid compound of rotting straw and halogens, of barnyard odors and ammonia, as if a menagerie had been set down in a chemical factory. The place was noisy, too—a hubbub of screeches and bellows and clicks and yaps and howls.

Jameson could make out some of the creatures in the nearby cages. He saw a tall insectoid thing like a cluster of milky bubbles on a tripod. And a thing like a fluffy dishrag that flapped miserably along a filthy cage floor. A pair of tendriled sacs that dangled like hanging baskets from the wire roof of their enclosure. A shaggy pear-shaped cyclops that scratched itself with its single long arm.

Here and there across the plaza random groups of Cygnan sightseers paused to stare in Jameson’s direction, then turned their attention to the more interesting exhibits. Tetrachord made encouraging noises. When Jameson didn’t move, the Cygnan pulled gently at the nose tether and urged him like a trained bear across the graveled plaza into the main body of the zoo.

They stopped at what must have been Tetrachord and Triad’s living quarters at the back of a warehouse area. They rated an apartment all to themselves, a musty cubical—if “cubical” was the word for an interior space shaped like a crazily leaning polyhedron—crammed with peculiar objects on spoon-shaped shelves. Jameson recognized a couple of resting perches, side by side beneath—beneath?—a hanging trifoliate screen. On a raised platform nearby was a graduated set of what looked like miniature resting perches. It made Jameson think of doll furniture.

They made him wait in the center of the room. Tetrachord went to a cupboard and came back with three of the bulb-handled, shotgun-size neural weapons with the flaring muzzles. He handed two of them to Triad and Augie and kept the third for himself.

Jameson found that not at all comforting.

They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior spaces like a space-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying shiny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking glass tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.

A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little horny many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.

Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.

They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick glass cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.

The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.

Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales. Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.

Triad rapped on the glass with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.

The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the glass. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim. They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the glass.

With a shock, Jameson realized that the creature filling his field of view was wearing some kind of harness, shiny leathery straps that were as broad as a roadway. It had limbs of sorts, too, scalloped projections of its outer rim, like the billowing shroud points of a parachute. It had them curled around a barb-tipped bone spear that was a hundred feet long.

With a shudder, Jameson wondered about the size of the animal whose skeleton had provided a one-piece artifact that long. It had to be some kind of a floating island with a kite framework of flexible bone.

There was a bone dagger, too, a honed triangular blade the size of a whaleboat with squiggly symbols inscribed on its flat side. And some kind of a pouch dangling from the harness, a catchall the size of a small barn.

Whatever this looming colossus was, it was intelligent. Primitive, but intelligent.

A hunter. A hunter whose quarry was bigger than it was.

It pressed against the glass, obviously looking him over. Jameson saw no evidence of anything resembling sense organs. No eyes, no flaps or tendrils. Perhaps it sensed with the surface of its entire mountainous body. Chemical senses. But what was it seeing him through the glass with? It could scarcely be infrared under the circumstances. Radar waves? Jameson supposed that even at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum an organism could provide definition by rapid and continuous scanning. Hunters needed keen senses.

“Where in the universe…?” Jameson breathed.

The Cygnans could not have understood him, but perhaps they were thinking their own thoughts. At his elbow, Tetrachord said: “So near. And now the Jamesons will never meet them.”

This time Jameson whistled his response in his imitation Cygnan.

“Where?”

They turned abruptly toward him, as if surprised that their pet was talking again.

“This animal is from the planet you call Jupiter,” Tetrachord offered with careful enunciation.

Jameson stared at the undulating disk of flesh. So there was life in Jupiter’s planetwide ocean after all. The speculations had been correct. Under that crushing atmosphere, in a sea that was twelve thousand miles deep before it turned to something else, there was plenty of room for life to develop. A sea of hydrogen laced with organic molecules, with a volume at least 300,000 times the volume of all Earth’s oceans! For an instant Jameson’s imagination ran riot. He saw vast herds of dirigiblelike grazers browsing at the rich nitrile pastures that welled up to become the Great Red Spot and the lesser spots, while these leviathans of the hydrogen deeps stalked them with hundred-foot bone spears.

Then he felt a dawning horror. The Cygnans must have scooped up their Jovian specimens before their Einsteinian siphon had churned Jupiter’s atmosphere into a homogenized maelstrom. They’d known there was intelligent life there. Yet they’d gone on to make all life on Jupiter extinct.

The thought was all the more horrifying because there was no malice involved. Just selfishness. Thoughtlessness. Lack of empathy. In that respect they were no different from humans, in the mad century that had forever wiped out the humpbacks and the great blue whales.

They prodded him to move again. He took a last backward look at the Jovians before the massive creatures flapped off into the depths of their tank. He felt a pang of overwhelming sympathy for them. They were, after all, his brothers under the Sun.

They seemed to be in some sort of Hall of Bipeds now. Rows of cages along a curving corridor apparently formed the narrow ends of habitats that widened out in a fan beyond. The creatures that Jameson glimpsed as they led him down the corridor were obviously animals, not intelligent beings. He saw a little green bearded creature like a misshapen troll gravely pacing its cage with its knuckles dragging on the ground, and a hulking spiny-skinned thing with a little bullet head growing directly out of a barrel chest. Then there was a pair of delightful feathery humanoids, elfin pink creatures who stared at him with great sad eyes as he passed.

The three Cygnans gave a wide berth to the feathery humanoids’ cage. Augie skittered nervously past it, skipping ahead momentarily and twisting a long neck to look back. There was a wire-mesh arrangement in front of the bars to keep anyone from getting too close, with its own locked gate. Jameson couldn’t see the reason for the extreme security precautions. The humanoids looked harmless enough. They were delicate, attenuated creatures who certainly would be no match for a Cygnan.

They reached the end of the hall, where he saw another locked cage. Beyond, Jameson could see a stark, garishly lit enclosure with wide bare terraces sloping down to a shallow pool filled with brownish water. Figures moved among the branched metal uprights set around the water’s edge. They were obviously human.

Jameson strained toward the bars, trying to see. Tetrachord held him back by the tether while Triad unlocked the cage door with one of her cylindrical keys.

Figures were bounding up the terraces toward him, whooping and yelling. Jameson recognized Mike Berry, gaunt, long-haired, and bearded, wearing only a pair of tattered denim shorts. And one of the Chinese crewmen, a young probe tech.

The three Cygnans jerked their neural weapons upward, fanning them back and forth. The humans skidded to a stop, staying a respectful distance from the bars. New arrivals bumped into them from behind and stayed where they were. The noise died down. They stood silently watching.

Tetrachord unfastened the tether, leaving a foot-long loop of cord dangling from Jameson’s nostrils. Augie backed away, keeping the weapon trained on him. The Cygnans gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the cage, the kitten cradled in his arms.

Mike Berry stepped forward, his face grim. “Welcome to the zoo.”