The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 24

There was a commotion within the crowd, and Tu Jue-chen came pushing her way through. They parted to make way for her, the Americans with somewhat more alacrity than the Chinese. She stood panting on the step below Ruiz and the ship’s officers, shaking a liver-spotted fist at him.

“You are lie!” she shrilled. “You are lie!”

Beside Jameson, Maggie whispered, “What’s this all about?”

“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “She’s got some ideological bee in her bonnet.”

Ruiz’s expression was absolutely correct. “Why do you say that, Comrade Tu?” he said.

She showed her horse’s teeth. “Because,” she said triumphantly, “after six million years they would be socialists!”

Ruiz appeared to ponder the matter. “How do you know they’re not?” he said finally.

“No!” she spat. “They are degenerate society!”

“I should think so,” Ruiz said, “after six million years in their circumstances.”

“Six million years is impossible!” Tu insisted.

Maggie nudged Jameson. “I don’t follow her logic. Either they’ve been around long enough to become degenerate, or they’ve been around long enough to be socialists.”

“Don’t bother about the logic, Maggie,” Jameson said. “It’s just her way of getting across to the troops that the Cygnans are no longer their socialist buddies from the stars. We’re having a change of line.

“But why?”

“Comrades don’t lock the chosen up in a cage. They can’t communicate with the Cygnans, and they know it now.” He frowned. “I wonder if they’re planning some kind of action.”

“They are not travel for six million years,” Tu was screaming. “You tell them, Comrade Chu!”

The Chinese astronomer had been standing off to one side, going over figures on the lightpad with Maybury. He stirred uneasily and said: “You see, Comrade Tu, the interval of time—”

“Tell them, tell them!”

Dr. Chu looked unhappy. “Of course there is always the possibility of error in Dr. Ruiz’s computations, bu—”

Unexpectedly, Captain Hsieh broke in. His round face was stern, his short stocky body stretched to full height. “We must listen to Dr. Ruiz,” he said. “He has learned an important thing about the hsing-ch’ung.” The word he’d chosen meant, literally, “star-worms.” “We must try to understand, so that we may act correctly.”

“What’s happening?” Maggie whispered.

Jameson said, “There’s some kind of shift in power going on. We’re a long way from New Peking. I think Captain Hsieh and his supporters have decided they’re never going to see it again.”

People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang spoke out from the crowd. “Go ahead, Dr. Ruiz. We would like to hear you.”

Ruiz nodded at him. He waited until the tumult died down. Tu Jue-chen wormed her way through the milling crowd and went off to sulk.

“Comrade Tu is right, in a sense,” Ruiz said, watching her go. “The Cygnans haven’t been traveling six million years. They left six million years ago.”

Dr. Chu put down the lightpad, took a nervous glance at Captain Hsieh for reassurance, and said: “We can be sure about the figures. You see, after the supernova explosion it would have taken the system another six million years to become an X-ray source. The X-ray stage is brief. It could not last more than fifty thousand years. But we know that Cygnus X-1 is an X-ray source now!”

“Or has been within the last ten thousand years,” Ruiz said.

“Of course,” Chu said apologetically. “It is ten thousand light-years away.”

“Go on, Dr. Chu,” Ruiz said. “You’re doing fine.”

“When the helium star exploded, its remnant collapsed. It became a black hole. Cygnus X-1, in fact, was the first black hole to be positively identified, back in the twentieth century. Now, the black hole continued to circle its companion—waiting, as Dr. Ruiz might say, for a chance to take back its stolen mass. “It must wait for six million years, till its companion burns up its ill-gotten hydrogen and becomes a blue supergiant. Blue supergiants are almost always associated with such X-ray sources. A blue supergiant some—oh, twenty times larger than the sun will begin to lose mass in the form of a solar wind, at the rate of about a millionth of a solar mass per year. Some of the mass falls into the black hole. It disappears from the universe forever. But during that fall to infinity, the gas accelerates to tremendous speed, and is heated to a temperature of tens of millions of degrees Kelvin. It is this envelope of falling gas that generates X-rays. For a brief period—not more than fifty thousand years—it will shed X-rays burning with the radiance of ten thousand suns.”

Chu stopped and mopped his brow. His eyes roved toward Hsieh, then to the People’s Deputy Commander.

“After that,” Ruiz said, “the newly formed blue supergiant overflows its Roche lobe and pours its mass down the black hole at a rate that extinguishes it as an X-ray source.”

Mike Berry was facing the two astronomers, hands on hips. “So you say our six-legged friends left home six million years ago, before all this happened?”

“There’s no doubt of it,” Ruiz said.

“Then tell me this—if Cygnus X-1 is ten thousand light-years away, and they’ve been traveling at the speed of light, where have they been all this time?”

Ruiz looked pleased at the question.

“That’s obvious,” he said. “Making stops.”

Mike was a very bright person. He chewed it over a few moments, then said: “Dr. Ruiz. You’ve deduced a hell of a lot about our little buddies from the mass of a star and the mass of a black hole. Now this ought to give us a clue about how long—”

“It does,” Ruiz said.

Boyle got to his feet. “Dr. Ruiz, I think—”

“Let him go on,” Hsieh said. “Our people have a right to know.”

“You’re right,” Boyle said. “Go on, Dr. Ruiz.” He sat down.

Ruiz looked round the crowd. Almost the whole human colony was there now. In the artificial starlight their faces were a pointillist cobble of silver blobs. Here and there a firefly darted as a glowing joint was passed from hand to hand.

“The average distance between stars in our part of the galaxy is about six light-years,” he said. “If the Cygnans traveled a more or less straight line getting here, zigzagging from star to star, they encountered sixteen or seventeen hundred of them. If they stopped to refuel at every star, they would have stayed for an average of three thousand six hundred years each time.” He paused. “If they stopped at, let us say, every tenth star each visit would have lasted some thirty-six thousand years.”

“But why?” Mike pushed away the joint that someone offered him. “Tod Jameson says the Cygnans aren’t interested in the systems they visit! They never make planetfall. Even granting that they’d have to do some robot mining from time to time, refurbish their ships, they ought to be able to travel more than six light-years on a gas giant! Once they got coasting at close to light-speed, they ought to be able to reach another galaxy, for God’s sake, without refueling—even with the inefficiency you mentioned before. Just shut off their robot siphon and let it careen away into infinity. Make another one when they want to brake. Why waste two years out of six accelerating and braking if they’re going somewhere—”

“They’re not going anywhere,” Ruiz said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve forgotten. After six million years, they’ve forgotten. Their pattern of travel—hopping from star to star—made sense when they started out. They were looking for a new home. They didn’t find one they liked soon enough. So after a few thousand years, I imagine, they got used to living in ships. They were safe in the ships. A real world might not be safe. But their pattern of travel persisted. Degenerate societies cling to old habits, just like degenerate organisms.”

“Okay,” Mike said. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m still asking why they hang around a system they’re not interested in for three thousand years.”

Ruiz looked around at the dappled faces. He sighed. He turned back to Mike. “Maybe they’re getting up their courage for the next jump.”

There was a growing murmur in the crowd. Ruiz held up a hand.

“We don’t know what it’s like to travel between the stars,” he said. “All that empty space must be a terrifying thing. Our own mariners in the ancient world and Middle Ages never braved the open sea, even when they knew their destination. They island-hopped, stayed within sight of land, traveled coastwise from point to point.”

“Scared? After six million years in space?” Mike said. “Minus—how much time for time dilation? You figure it out, but even if they’d come nonstop, it couldn’t have saved them more than ten thousand years.”

“That’s the point exactly,” Ruiz said. “If they’d covered the ten thousand light-years at—let’s say—ninety-eight percent of the speed of light, then time is slowed … hmm … fivefold, and they have to spend two thousand years in the empty space between the stars. Even at ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of light-speed, the jump takes them a hundred years. Lifetimes for millions of Cygnans who never get to come in out of the dark! But if they star-hop, then with a year to boost, a year to brake, hmm, a few weeks or months to cover the intervening light-years, then they never have to spend more than three years adrift. Then they spend the next three thousand years or more getting brave enough to do it again.”

A tremulous voice came out of the silver dark: Liz Becqued “Dr. Ruiz, are you saying that we’re—that the Cygnans are going to remain here, in this solar system, that long?”

Ruiz shrugged. “There’s no reason to assume anything different.”

Maggie turned quickly to Jameson. “I thought you said—”

“Shhh—the old fox knows what he’s doing.”

“But—”

Jameson leaned to whisper in her ear. “Something’s up with the Chinese. I don’t think Ruiz believes they’ll do anything precipitous, but he’s taking the pressure off anyway. This buys time for the Cygnans.”

Maggie looked around, made sure no one was listening. Everybody was intent on Ruiz. “But what he said about their stopping and staying at almost every star … that’s true?”

“It has to be,” he said with an uneasy glance around. “Either that or they parked somewhere for the whole six million years.”

Maggie wouldn’t let go. She seemed agitated. She tugged at his hand. “But you said they’re leaving in a few days. Why is this solar system any different?”

Jameson said, “Maybe the Cygnans have finally got their courage back.”

“Tod, answer me!”

“All right. Maybe they’re afraid of people. Maybe every once in a while, when they run across a system that looks unhealthy, they grab their hydrogen planet and hightail it out of there.”

“The nuclear bombs we brought with us?”

Jameson glanced around again. “Perhaps. Or whatever else the human race might dream up in the next few thousand years.”

Up on his platform, Ruiz was still talking. “…So perhaps the Cygnans aren’t the formidable civilization we thought they were. As Dr. Berry pointed out, even their mass conversion engine might not be beyond our own capabilities in a century or two. We’re still developing. They stopped, long ago. They’re beginning to look like timid, fearful creatures. But fear can be more dangerous than confidence. We mustn’t forget that the Cygnans have great powers, the capacity to do great mischief. So I’d urge us all not to do anything to panic them. Earth is still in a vulnerable position.”

Maggie was nodding in agreement. “Their orbit out of here…” she began.

“Maggie, shut up,” Jameson said. He gave her hand a warning squeeze. Klein was shouldering his way through the crowd, about to pass close to them. There was movement in other parts of the crowd as three or four people tried to maneuver themselves to the forefront to get closer to Ruiz. There was the sound of good-natured protest as people got shoved.

Ruiz had a debate going with young Dmitri Galkin. Dmitri was going on ponderously about fear and aggression in gray lag geese. “The mechanism of redirected behavior…” he was saying.

Klein had reached the front of the crowd. With a lithe movement he vaulted the final terrace and sprang to his feet in front of Ruiz.

“That’s enough talk,” Klein said. He faced the crowd. “Everybody listen to me!”

Dmitri started forward. “Now just a minute,” he began.

“I said shut up!” Klein said. He gave Dmitri a shove that sent him sprawling. Dmitri was saved from toppling over the edge of the step by two or three people who caught him and propped him on his feet. There was a growl from Omar Tuttle, who let go of Liz and started forward. Omar stopped in mid-stride.

Klein was standing in a little cleared space where Ruiz and the ship’s officers had backed off from him. He was waving a flat, ugly object whose silhouette was unmistakable, even in the dim light. How he had obtained it was a puzzle.

It was a gun.

“All right,” Klein said. “Everybody calmed down?”

He stood rocking on the balls of his feet, the gun held dangling at his side. He looked remote and feral, with the narrow face and the sleek ferret head and the oversize arms meaty as thighs, sticking out of the chopped-off sleeves.

The packed throng was silent except for the whisper of shuffling feet. Nobody moved.

“Better,” Klein said. “I’m taking command of all American personnel here under the provisions of the National Security Act and the authority vested in me by Articles 42b, 46a, and subsections C and D.” He delivered the words in a mechanical, singsong tone. “I am officially identifying myself as a special surveillance officer of the Reliability Board, with full authority over all SRA employees for the duration of this emergency.”

“An arbee fink!” Omar spat. A murmur went through the crowd.

Klein flinched, but stood his ground. “Full compliance with my lawful orders is enjoined on this group under penalties of the Act. I will deputize such persons as I deem suitable. I will be assisted in these endeavors by security personnel attached to the Chinese crew under treaty provisions between the United States and the People’s Republic.”

Little Chia Lan-ying was making her way to Klein’s side, followed by the hulking form of Yeh Fei.

“Hear me,” she said stridently. “I am cultural officer of She-hui pu, the Social Affairs Department, and chief loyalty fighter here. Comrade Yeh knows this. Remember the Four Bigs! Grasp the Revolution! Obey the People!”

The Chinese contingent looked at one another uneasily and began to draw together in little groups. One of Tu Jue-chen’s people nodded vigorously and shouted, “Grasp the Revolution! Obey the People!” The cry was taken up by others.

Jameson said angrily to Maggie: “Caffrey and Tu weren’t enough. They had to send types like those to keep an eye on us!”

He started forward. Maggie grabbed his sleeve. “Wait.”

Several more people emerged from the boundary of the crowd and formed a loose phalanx around Klein and Chia. Jameson recognized the spare, lean form of Yao Hu-fang and one of the members of his bomb crew. One of the maintenance engineers, Fiaccone, was there with some kind of pipe in his hand. Gifford took his place with the group, bouncing and clowning around, his clasped hands raised above his head like a boxer.

“The Giff?” Jameson said. “I don’t believe it!”

“He’s a true-blue,” Maggie said. “If Klein told him the government wanted him to lift both feet at once, he’d hang there in the air until he was told to come down.”

Captain Boyle stepped forward. “Where did you get that gun?” he said gruffly to Klein.

Klein looked him over coolly. “All right, Captain, I’ll tell you,” he said. “The chamber was inside the heel of a pair of my boots. The grip was in the other heel. The barrel was the handle of my safety razor. The spare clips were stacked in the bottom two thirds of a bottle of aftershave lotion, under a false reservoir. I was able to retrieve it this morning, thanks to Commander Jameson, along with the rest of the equipment concealed in my kit.”

Boyle stuck out a big hand. “Give it here, mister,” he said.

Klein lifted the gun slightly, not pointing it anywhere in particular. “It’s a very compact piece of ordnance,” he said conversationally, “barely three eighths of an inch through the grip, but it’s fully automatic. It’ll fire under any conditions—no lubricants, just a double-chain fluorocarbon film bonded to the moving parts. It’s designed for riot control. It fires a stream of explosive microflechettes, one hundred rounds to a clip. It could cut a man in half.”

“You’d have to be crazy to take a thing like that aboard a spacecraft,” Boyle rumbled. “Hand it over.”

“Captain Boyle,” Klein said. “You are hereby directed to render all assistance and cooperation to an authorized agent of the Reliability Board under the directive governing the conduct of officials in the employ of GovCorp.”

Boyle continued to look Klein in the eye until Klein averted his gaze slightly. Then, with a contemptuous glance at the slim, squarish weapon, he dropped his outstretched hand and stood, legs apart, with his hands clasped behind his back.

“What is it you have in mind?” Boyle asked.

Klein looked around at the group clustered on the broad ledge behind Boyle: Kay Thorwald and Captain Hsieh, Ruiz and Maybury and Dr. Chu, with Mike Berry pressing forward to hear. He looked over at the silent and attentive crowd. Then he said, “Captain, perhaps we’d better go to the far side of the enclosure with one of the Chinese representatives and discuss it there.”

“Spit it out, mister,” Boyle said. “We’re all waiting to hear.” He stood fast, solid as a rock.

Chia said, “We will need volunteers. Go on, you say it.”

Reluctantly Klein said, “We’re going to carry out our contingency orders.”

“What are you talking about?” Boyle said.

“Major Hollis and his men are dead—in the line of duty. But Deputy Commander Yao’s men are capable of carrying out the mission. It coincides with their own orders.”

“Nuke the Cygnan ships? You’re insane. You’d never even make it to the air lock of this tin can we’re in, let alone cross empty space to our own ship!”

“You’re wrong, Captain. Loyalty Officer Chia and I have worked it out very carefully. We’ve reconnoitered the immediate area personally, on our outing with Commander Jameson. We’ve spent weeks interrogating every member of the crew as to their recollections of the layout of the enemy ship—many of them were conscious or semiconscious when they were brought in—and we’ve pieced together an escape route. You yourself drew such a map, if you recall. We’ll want that too, by the way.”

Jameson flinched as he listened to Klein. So that was why the man had been so friendly, so inquisitive about his experiences in Cygnan territory!

Boyle growled, “There’s fifteen miles to cover—uphill—before you even get to the hub of the ship. And the areas as densely populated as Hong Kong.”

“The Cygnans don’t like to travel across open spaces. There are service routes. If we encounter any of the enemy, we’re armed. Captain, it’s no different from crossing any other enemy territory. I was a counterguerrilla during the Baja uprising—”

“A fine piece of butchery that was,” Boyle said curtly.

“I don’t like your attitude, Captain,” Klein said.

“You’re not required to, Mister Klein. You were giving me the information I’ll need to evaluate your plans. Get on with it.”

The encircling crowd listened neutrally to the exchange, jockeying for position. Jameson managed to force his way to the forefront, Maggie at his back. His further progress was blocked by a grinning Gifford.

“Sorry, Commander,” Gifford said. A muscular young Chinese from the Struggle Brigade was backing him up with a fist wrapped around a chunk of the cementlike terrace material.

“You’re flirting with mutiny, Giff,” Jameson said.

“Nothin’s happened yet,” Gifford said. “In the meantime, why don’t you just stay put.” He gave Jameson a friendly wink.

Up on the next ledge Klein was saying: “I don’t have to do this, Captain, but I could use your help, so I’ll tell you. Our chances are reasonable. We’ve got weapons and we can get more. Between Chia and me, we’ve got a full range of electronic surveillance equipment we brought aboard as buttons, zippers, uniform tabs, and the like. We can drop spy-eyes and acoustic detectors to guard our rear, and we have subminiaturized mobile probes we can send ahead for reconnaissance.” He was holding something invisibly small out in his palm to show Boyle.

“And then?” Boyle said. “How do you get across to our ship?”

“It’s less than a hundred miles away, according to Yeh. He got a look through an outside port when they had him sequestered. We can make it on suit jets, and our suits are right outside in that warehouse section.”

“What’s to keep the Cygnans from coming after us?”

Jameson heard the “us” and didn’t like it. Was Boyle starting to take all this seriously? “Captain, he called out.

Boyle paid him no attention Gifford and the Chinese strongarm made a warning gesture.

Klein waved his flat little pistol. “We’ll keep them busy with a few nuclear bombs. Then they won’t have time to worry about us.”

Boyle shook his head authoritatively. “We’d be sitting ducks. It would take hours to get the boron reaction going, even if our engines are still undamaged, and in the meantime—”

Chia leaned past Klein. “We have thought of that. We will have Comrade Li with us. He can use the Callisto lander to get us moving. The chemical engines will fire immediately.”

Klein nodded. “And the automatic probes by themselves provide enough thrust to break us out of Jupiter orbit and start us coasting sunward. We checked with Gifford.”

Boyle stared at his feet for a while, his hands clasped behind his back. Finally he lifted his head. “You seem to have thought it all out. I don’t think the odds are good, but we’re duty bound to escape if we can. Captain Hsieh and I will be in command, of course. I’ll take your weapon. We can’t order everyone to go with us—it’s going to be a farfetched gamble—but I imagine a majority of the crew will elect to take the chance—”

“Hsieh will not go,” Chia hissed. “He is traitor. Comrade Yeh can operate ship with you.”

“Captain,” Klein said softly. “You don’t understand the situation. We can only take essential personnel. The bomb crew and a minimum number to get the ship back in operation. Any more will slow us down.”

From the crowd, Omar Tuttle shouted: “What happens to the rest of us? Scientific personnel and the like? We stay here and get nuked with the Cygnans?”

Klein’s otter head jerked around, trying to identify the speaker. “We won’t bomb this pod of the ship,” he said smoothly. “We can cripple the ship with a low-yield bomb in the drive section, placed fifteen or more miles down the shaft. With any luck you can stay alive until Earth can rescue you. In the meantime you’ll all be no worse off than you are now.”

“Crud!” a peppery voice yelled. “It’d take years to get up another Jupiter expedition. What the hell do you think the Cygnans will be doing all that time? And then what? You think the crew is going to fight a billion Cygnans hand to hand and get us out alive? We’re stuck here and we’d better make the best of it!”

Klein located the voice. “You’re one of the ones who’s coming with us, Kiernan. You’ll be needed to reestablish a shipboard ecology.”

“The hell I am! I’m needed right here!”

“You’ll shut up and obey orders!” Klein snapped. “Or I’ll have you up on Reliability Board charges when we get back!”

Kiernan started to say something, then thought better of it as Fiaccone appeared next to him with a length of pipe. People had started to edge away from Kiernan, leaving a clear space around him, Jameson noted wryly. They didn’t want to get involved. Mention of the Reliability Board had done that, though Earth was half a billion miles away. You had that kind of prudence embedded in your bones when you grew up working for GovCorp.

Not Boyle, though. “Mr. Kiernan has a point,” he said deliberately. “Let’s not raise any false hopes. Those who stay behind will stay for good, unless Earth gets some kind of communication going with the Cygnans.”

He turned to Klein. “And we’re not going to jeopardize their safety by initiating hostile action. I want that clearly understood. This is an escape attempt, not a military action. The decision to attack these aliens with nuclear weapons is one that can only be made on Earth. You couldn’t do anything except antagonize the creatures. How many missiles do you think you could get off before they retaliated? And how any missiles do you think would get to their targets when they can match velocities freehand on those broomsticks of theirs?”

“I don’t know,” Klein admitted. “But we can inflict as much damage on the enemy as we can before we leave.”

Jameson had heard enough. Before Gifford realized what he was up to, Jameson gave him a shove that bowled him over. The Chinese strongarm made a swipe with his fistful of artificial rock, but missed. In the low gravity, Jameson vaulted to the ledge and ended up standing beside Boyle.

“Captain,” he said. “Before you go along with this, you’d better listen to what Dr. Ruiz has to say.”

“Shut up,” Klein said.

Yeh made a move toward Ruiz, but Boyle said sharply, “Hold it right there. I think we all better hear this.”

Yeh halted, and Klein lost the chance to control the situation. The crowd had started rustling again, straining to get close. Klein evidently was nervous about the impression that rough stuff might make.

“The Cygnans are going to leave this system in about six days,” Ruiz said.

There was a moment of shocked silence; then pandemonium broke out. When it died down, Mike Berry shouted, “You told us they’d be here for over three thousand years!”

Ruiz passed a hand wearily over his eyes. “That was the averaged figure,” he said. “It still holds. But Earth seems to be one of the exceptions.”

“You withheld this information?” Boyle asked in a hard voice.

“Yes. I had very good reasons.”

“Captain, this was my doing,” Jameson began.

“We’ll discuss that later,” Boyle said. “You said you had reasons. Go on.”

“Discussion’s ended,” Klein said, raising his little gun. “I already know all about it.”

Ruiz looked at the gun with pointed contempt. “How do you know?” he said. “Have the two of you been planting your eavesdropping devices around this enclosure?”

Chia broke in breathlessly, half addressing the crowd. “Six days, sure! Means we must hurry! No time left!”

“Shoot if you’re going to,” Ruiz snapped. “Otherwise put the silly thing down.”

“I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt for the moment, Dr. Ruiz,” Boyle said harshly, “but don’t try my patience. We’re all waiting to hear your explanation.”

Ruiz took his time about it. He ran through his computations in a dry lecture-hall voice. “So we can be reasonably certain,” he finished, “that if the Cygnan fleet is allowed to leave on schedule, Earth will escape with no more than a bad case of the surface hiccups. But if Mr. Klein and his overzealous friends manage to delay the Cygnan departure by as much as a month, the human race stands a good chance of being seriously depleted, or entirely wiped out. In the worst case, the Earth would fall into the sun.”

“You don’t know,” Boyle temporized. “You’re only guessing. There’s no way of predicting how long the Cygnans might be delayed. Earth could be at the other side of its orbit.”

“The Cygnan route crosses Earth’s orbit twice—on opposite sides of it. The combined strike zone adds up to at least one hundred twenty degrees out of three hundred and sixty. At least! Are you a gambling man, Captain? Do you want to bet that the human race has a two-to-one chance of staying alive?”

Boyle was silent a long time. He stood in his bulldog position, his lower lip thrust out, a frown on his wide forehead.

“We’re wasting time,” Klein said. “In about six hours that overhead plumbing’s going to be filled with those vermin-ridden snakes.”

Heads swiveled involuntarily to fix on the darkened tubes that twisted through the zooscape. Some of them looped down almost to ground level. They’d been pried and hammered and hacked at by some of the more belligerent younger men, but nobody had been able to so much as scratch them.

So many people in the crowd missed Boyle’s first step toward Klein. The captain’s hand was extended. “We’re not going anywhere,” Boyle said in a level voice. “That’s an order. I’ll take that gun now.”

Klein actually began backing away. “Don’t make waves, Captain,” he said. “We can get along without you if we have to.”

Jameson tensed, gauging his distance from Klein, from Yeh and Chia. The others were too far away to bother about. A few yards away he could see Mike Berry stirring uneasily.

“Hand it over,” Boyle said, and lunged forward, making a grab for it.

There was a fluttering sound in the thin air, like someone riffling the pages of a book, and Boyle was suddenly writhing on the ground, his leg almost severed at the knee.

A woman screamed, and there was a general scramble among the spectators to get out of the way. Jameson, off balance, fought to stay still.

Klein swung the tiny gun around in an arc. “Anybody else?” he said.

Boyle was still conscious, but looked as if he was going into shock. The sliver-sized microflechettes had stitched across his leg, almost blowing it off. Blood spurted from the pulpy mess, black in the chalky light.

Down in the struggling throng, the voice of Janet Lemieux sounded, high, clear, and indignant. “You get out of my way, Jack Gifford! Move!” In a moment she was kneeling next to the captain, taking off her blouse and making a tourniquet out of it. She looked up impatiently. “Somebody get me my medical bag,” she ordered. “Hurry!” The kit had been among the priority items Jameson had managed to bring back with him that morning.

Klein and his gang had drawn into a tight, cohesive group and were edging their way from the scene along the broad apron of the terrace. They’d made a mess of it, and they knew it. People got out of their way hastily, parting to let them through. Jameson watched them go, along the rim of the stepped bowl, all the way to the opposite side, toward the entrance. He could see their forms, tiny and dim, gathered in a circle, having some kind of conference.

Maggie had found him again. She hung on to his arm, “Tod, what’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Janet was thumbing back one of Boyle’s eyelids, looking at it with a coldlight stick. She’d got Maybury to help her. The little astronomy tech was elevating a plastic bag with a tube leading down to a needle in Boyle’s arm.

“Is he going to lose the leg?” Jameson inquired, bending over.

Janet gave him a look of tight fury. “Probably,” she said. “And there’s no way to clone a new one for him here.”

Maybury said, her voice shaking, “Isn’t there anything you can do, Commander?”

Jameson shook his head. “I could rally some of the men. We could arm ourselves with the garden tools and pipes from the hydroponics equipment. But Klein has the upper hand. We can’t get near him with that automatic weapon of his. Those things have a range of a couple of hundred yards in this gravity, and aim doesn’t count.”

“But you’ve got to stop them! They’re crazy!”

Ruiz limped over and rested a hand on Maybury’s shoulder. She looked up at him with quick gratitude.

“Commander Jameson’s right,” Ruiz said. “Chia has a hand-laser, too. I saw it. And the devil knows what other weapons they smuggled in here.”

People had started to drift across to the gateway to see what Klein and his friends were doing there. There was quite respectable crowd now, keeping a wary distance, watching silently. Then there was the sound of a scuffle, and some angry shouting. The crowd started to disperse, then changed its mind and came uncertainly together again.

“Something’s going on,” Jameson said to Maggie. “I’d better…”

He stopped and strained to see in the dim light. Somebody was running toward him, bounding in huge swoops in the one third gravity down the shelved bowl. As the figure drew closer, he saw that it was Beth Oliver, her blond hair disheveled and flying.

“Tod!” she panted, drawing near. “They’re taking people with them! By force! They’ve got Kiernan, and Kay Thorwald—they say she can handle the ship with Yeh! And Sue Jarowski!”

“I’d better see what I can do,” Jameson said. He turned and started to go. Maggie hung on to his arm, trying to drag him back.

“Tod,” she said. “Don’t go.”

He disentangled her gently. “With Boyle out of it, and if Kay’s being held, then I’m in charge. I’d better see—”

“You can’t do anything,” she cried, oddly agitated for someone as usually self-assured as Maggie was. “You said so yourself. You’ll only get hurt.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, turning again.

“You don’t know what Klein and that—that Chia are capable of!”

“I’m afraid I do,” he said, nodding toward where Boyle lay sprawled. Janet had the bleeding under control, and she had a rolled-up blanket under Boyle’s head. Dmitri and Kiernan’s opposite number, Wang, had taken over from Maybury and had set up a tripod of garden tools to hold the drip bag. The leg hung by shreds, and Janet was removing pieces of bone with a pair of tweezers.

“I’ll go with you,” Mike Berry said, falling in beside him.

“All right, Mike, but keep out of trouble. Where’s Ruiz? Maybe he can try to talk to Klein again.”

“He went over there a few minutes ago,” Mike said. “Mayb’s with him. You aren’t going to get anywhere with that bastard, Tod. You know that type. If he blew up the world, he’d say he did it to keep America free.”

Jameson nodded grimly. He ascended the tiers of synthetic stone, past the metal trees and the random tumbled blocks the Cygnans had put there for variety. To his left a miniature waterfall was sluicing down the steps toward the murky pool at the bottom. Mike hopped along beside him, trying to keep up, bouncing too high in the low gravity and then having to take another giant step when his foot touched bottom.

As Jameson drew close, he could see people milling around uncertainly, keeping well beyond an invisible line. On the other side of the line were the people in Klein’s party. Most of Yao’s bomb crew were there—a score of powerfully built young men and bandy-legged girls who had armed themselves with a miscellany of slats, garden shears and trowels, and what must have been branches of the iron trees, clandestinely filed to the snapping-off point during weeks of captivity. Only one of Tu Jue-chen’s Struggle Group fighters was there—the one who’d helped Gifford. The rest must have been dismissed as unreliable, despite their attempt to switch sides. Jameson’s own partner, Li, was in the party, apparently voluntarily, as was Maggie’s opposite number from the computer section, Jen Mei-mei. They were talking to three Chinese fusion techs.

Kay, Kiernan, and Sue were backed up against the inward-leaning wall of the zoo enclosure, guarded by Gifford and Fiaccone. Gifford was holding Kiernan, pinioning the smaller man’s arms behind his back. Kiernan looked dazed, as if he’d been hit on the head. Mike’s young assistant, Quentin, under no apparent restraint, was talking volubly at Sue, who averted her head, refusing to look at him.

Chia and Yao were on their knees, doing something to the lock mechanism of the massive barred door. It was an armor-plated disk, big as a wagon wheel, half buried in a slot in the metallic sill. There was a neat array of tiny electronic instruments and miniature tools spread out on a quilted jacket whose cotton stuffing oozed from a dozen slashes. Jameson made out the flickering blue glow of a CRT display no larger than a thumbnail, and then, from beneath Chia’s hand on the lock, a flash of laser light. Klein was standing over them, negligently facing the crowd, the wicked little gun in his hand.

“Quent!” Mike bellowed as they approached. “What the hell are you doing there?”

The boy broke off his recitation to Sue and turned to face Mike and Jameson. “Jeez, Mike, I mean what was I supposed to do? Klein, he told me I hadda obey orders.”

Klein’s sleek head quested in Mike’s direction, then paused to examine Jameson. “Thanks for bringing him over, Commander,” he said. “It saves me from having to send someone to get him.”

“Listen, Klein,” Jameson began, fighting down anger.

“We’re going to need him to activate the boron reaction. Quentin says he can’t do it by himself.”

“Berry’s not going. And neither are those other people.”

Klein lifted the gun and pointed it at Mike. “He’s going. Berry, get over there with the others. That’s an order.”

“The hell I’m going!” Mike said.

Klein said, “If you don’t get over there in about three seconds, you’ll take the consequences.”

“Yeah? When you get back to Earth, tell them to come on out here and arrest me.”

“You’re a traitorous son of a bitch,” Klein said tightly, “and if I can’t use you, I’m going to—”

Jameson stepped quickly between Mike and the gun.

“This has gone far enough,” he said, with as much force as he could muster. “Klein, didn’t you understand a word Dr. Ruiz said? If you interfere with the Cygnans—if you succeed in interfering with them—you’re going to endanger the whole human species.”

Klein’s voice cracked, showing the strain he must have been under. “I’ve had it with you, Jameson! You and Ruiz keeping essential data from me, and then interfering—Step away from that man before I give you the whole clip right in your—”

Mike stepped from behind Jameson. “Hold it,” he said. “Don’t get yeasty. I’m going.” He gave Jameson a ghastly grin. “Say good-bye to our lovely hosts for me, and try to drop a line now and then.” He moved over to the group huddled against the wall. Quentin immediately began haranguing him, gesturing with both hands.

There was the screech of protesting ratchets, and the huge circular lock rolled in its slot, mounting an incline. “Wan pi te,” Chia said, and gathered up her tools. Yao, with the help of a couple of muscular missile men, slid the great barred door open.

“Hurry,” Yao called over his shoulder. He and Chia were pushing their people through the gate into the vast empty exhibition hall outside.

Klein looked thoughtful. “Just a minute,” he said. “We’d better have an astronomer.”