The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 28

Jameson threw the hammer. He threw it a couple of yards to the side of Gifford, reining in the cord that was tied to it as he did so. The six-pound maul caught Gifford in the ribs, knocking him sideways off the ridge. He began his long, slow tumble to the floor of the gorge, helpless to arrest his fall.

Jameson continued hauling in on the cord, imparting further momentum to the hammer. Next it caught one of the Chinese missile men in the side of the head, sending him rolling in slow motion down the steep slope, his crowbar clattering and bouncing along with him.

Jameson kept the hammer twirling like a lariat. It whizzed full circle around him and knocked the girl’s legs out from under her. She toppled backward and floated toward the floor of the metal canyon. Her head hit the cliffside about a hundred feet down. She’d gathered enough inertia by then for a broken skull, despite the low gravity.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jameson saw Ruiz scrambling up the slope with his spear, Dmitri and Maggie behind him. One of the Chinese stepped inside the whirling arc of the hammer. As he raised an ax, the rope twanged into him from the other side and the hammer, its pendulum swing shortened, wrapped him round in a cocoon of rope. Jameson tugged sharply, and the man went sprawling down the slope, taking rope and hammer with him.

In a split-second glance, Jameson saw that Gifford’s feet had made contact with the slope about two hundred feet down. He was running desperately, trying to keep on his feet, unable to stop because of his momentum. He’d have to keep running, faster and faster, all the way to the bottom, hoping that he wouldn’t take a tumble. If he survived without broken bones, he wouldn’t be back up here in a hurry.

With the whirling hammer gone, the other Chinese were closing in on Jameson. One of them was almost on top of him, raising an ax over his head with both hands. Jameson reached for the wrench in his belt, with the sickening realization that he wasn’t going to get it out in time, wasn’t going to be able to dodge out of the way, before the ax blade came crashing down on him.

But then, in a slow-motion dream that was partially pumping adrenalin and partially low gravity, he saw Ruiz scrambling the last few feet to the top and thrusting with his spear. The Chinese screamed as the lashed butcher knife slid into his liver, and the ax went spinning out of his grip.

Then Dmitri was there, wading into the fray with the fire ax. His face looked white and determined. Chopping people up wasn’t in his temperament, but he’d made himself realize that any hesitation, any flinching, could be fatal. He swung the ax two-handed at the nearest Chinese, his eyes closed. The Chinese dodged the ax easily, and one of his friends brought a steel bar crunching down on Dmitri’s shoulder with a force that lifted his feet off the ridge. Probably he’d been aiming at Dmitri’s head, but the blow disabled Dmitri anyway, smashing his clavicle. Dmitri, with a surprised expression on his face, slowly crumpled. He landed in a sitting position on the metal slope and began a toboggan slide back down where he’d started from.

Ruiz was trying to fend off an angry-looking opponent with his fiberglass pole. The knife had broken off in his victim’s body. Jameson crouched, the wrench in his fist, keeping his eye on the other two surviving Chinese.

Where the devil was Maggie?

The question was answered a moment later when a Molotov cocktail came soaring up from the cliffside below. She’d aimed too high. Instead of shattering at the feet of the Chinese, the bottle, trailing a flaming wick, arced high over their heads and began to fall slowly down on the other side of the ridge. It hit about a hundred feet down and exploded in a puff of bright flame. Fiery rivulets coursed their way down the incline.

Shouts and movement came from below. All she had succeeded in doing was to attract attention. Jameson caught sight of her, clambering up the cliff with a knife in her teeth, her red hair billowing, her skinny knees scraped and bloody. And then he was ducking under a blur of metal as a bandy-legged fellow with an earnestly murderous expression swung a pry bar at him. Jameson thrust with his crescent wrench and caught the man under the chin. There was a sickening crunch, and the man folded, choking to death on a crushed larynx.

Ruiz’s opponent got past the fiberglass pole, club raised. Ruiz was still tough and smart, despite his age. He was a graduate—or survivor—of the duckboard streets of the New Manhattan refugee camp, after all. He resisted the natural impulse to back away and give his enemy a clear swing at him, and instead got under the club and started hugging him. The man struggled to stay on his feet as Ruiz began gleefully to bite, gouge, and use a bony knee where it would be most painful.

The remaining Chinese had frozen, club in hand, to look at his dying friend. His image had a snapshot clarity to Jameson as he crouched there with the bloodied spanner still in his hand. The missile man was a big fellow, with a jaw like a pelican’s pouch and a spare tire around his waist. Perhaps they’d chosen him for his size. He didn’t seem to have much stomach for fighting. Jameson reached under his shirt and threw a handful of chisels at the man’s face. The man threw up a thick forearm to protect himself. Jameson unfolded like a jackknife and pushed him heartily in the chest. The man yelled, “Aii!” and lost his balance. He rolled like a barrel down the slope toward his comrades. He was going to be a mass of bruises when he reached bottom.

A couple of people were coming up, scaling the slope. Jumping did no good; you were likely to find no handhold and have to start all over again at the bottom. It would be a while before they got here. There was a movement of blue ants toward the colossal clockwork down at the end of the cave; there must be an alternate route there.

He hurried to Ruiz on one hand and two feet. Ruiz and the missile man were doing their best to strangle each other. The Chinese had dropped his weapon; Ruiz had given him no choice with his gouging and biting. Ruiz was getting the worst of it now. The man was pressing his thumbs into Ruiz’s larynx. Ruiz lost his grip and weakly tried to break the man’s little finger—an old New Manhattan trick. Jameson laid his wrench along the missile man’s skull. Ruiz got up, rubbing his throat. Together they tumbled the stunned Chinese down into the metal valley.

Ruiz tottered unsteadily on his feet. He turned to face Jameson.

“Thanks, I—”

He never finished. There was a sputtering sound from the shadows at the end of the ridge, and Jameson was spattered with Ruiz’s blood.

Ruiz’s body began its nightmare drift down the slope. Jameson went flat and with a convulsive twist levered himself below the opposite side of the ridge. A stream of angry mosquitoes zzzz’d overhead.

“Get down!” he yelled to Maggie, just in time to keep her from sticking her head over the peak.

Before he could do anything, Klein’s thin face rose above the metal rim, about twenty feet away, where the shadowed hugeness of the Cygnan machinery overhung the cliff. Klein aimed his nasty little gun at him.

“Stay where you are, Jameson,” Klein called. “Stay alive a minute. McInnes, move away from him.”

“Do what he says, Maggie,” Jameson said.

Jameson weighed the situation. He could launch himself in a hopeless scramble toward Klein as soon as Maggie was out of the line of fire. He might as well die trying. Or he could stay where he was and wait for Klein to rake him with automatic fire. There was no cover on that featureless metal slope.

He threw the wrench at Klein, not too fast.

Klein unhurriedly moved aside a couple of inches, and the wrench went sailing lazily past him. The aim hadn’t been good.

Klein seemed to be enjoying himself. “Got anything left to throw, Jameson?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Jameson said. “Here, you can have it.”

He reached around to the back of his waistband and drew out the Cygnan cattle prod. His thumb found the recessed stud in the bulbous handle and, with a metal-bending strength impossible to Cygnan fingers, jammed it full on.

He tossed the instrument in a slow underhand pitch toward Klein, setting it spinning. His aim was better this time. Klein, with a ferret’s grin, batted it aside contemptuously.

The prod’s center of gravity was somewhere in its three inches of bulbous grip. The slender prongs spun round it with a radius of fifteen inches. Naturally, whatever it was going to hit, it would hit prong end first.

Klein howled as a thousand wasps stung him. The hand holding the gun jerked upward spasmodically, sending the weapon flying toward the shadows. Klein’s senses were gone, erased by fifty thousand volts.

Jameson launched himself along the ridge in a flat dive and caught Klein’s twitching body before it could fall. “Maggie!” he yelled. “Get the gun!”

Klein was moaning in his arms. He was limp, paralyzed. Jameson could appreciate the pain the man was feeling. He had felt it himself. It was like sticking your finger into a light socket.

He saw Maggie working her way along the rooflike slope toward the looming shapes of machinery. There was a service platform there; the gun would be somewhere on it. With the gun to hold off Chia’s gang, and with Klein as hostage, there would be a chance to throw a monkey wrench into the mad plan to bomb the starship. Eventually a Cygnan would happen along, even in this uninhabited housing for the gigantic mechanism that folded the arm of the ship.

“Maggie, hurry up!” he called.

He could see the little forms of Klein’s reinforcements, halfway up the slope now. Klein stirred in his arms. He’d require another touch of the prod soon. Jameson could see it, just a few feet away. Klein’s convulsive spasm had slammed it against the slope, where it rested in a shallow corroded groove.

“You … bastard,” Klein said weakly.

There was movement in the shadows. Jameson turned his head to see Maggie standing there under the fifty-foot teeth of the gears. She had the gun.

She pointed it at him.

“Let him go, Tod,” she said.

“Good work, MacInnes,” Klein said.

Maggie stood where she was, very sensibly not coming any closer to Jameson. “Are you going to take me with you?” she said.

Klein moved away from Jameson to leave Maggie a clear field of fire along the ridge. “Yes,” he said. “I promise you.”

“What about a suit?”

“You can have Mei-mei’s suit. I’ll fix it up with Chia. You can run a computer as well as Mei-mei can.”

“What’s this all about, Maggie?” Jameson said.

“Go on, tell him,” Klein said.

Maggie faced Jameson defiantly, her knuckles white on the gun. “I work for the Reliability Board too,” she said. “You’ve been my assignment.”

Jameson’s knees felt weak. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered.

“That’s right,” Klein said, amused. “Her first assignment was your friend Berry. She turned in a good report on him—I don’t know why they let him stay on the mission. Then she was told to watch you. You were a tough nut to crack, Jameson. She couldn’t get you to make any Unreliable statements. You were a good little government boy. I told her to keep working on you. I knew you’d slip sometime. And you did. You were a Rad all along, weren’t you?”

“You’re crazy,” Jameson said. He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, how could you do a thing like that?”

She tossed her head. “You wouldn’t know!” she said bitterly. “You’ve had it all, right from the start. Government family, government education, the right friends and the right opinions. How would you like to have a New England code in your passbook, a grandfather who fought in the Secession, and a father who always got you into trouble by talking like a Rad?”

“She turned him in when she was sixteen, Jameson,” Klein said. “That was what got her on our books. We okayed her for the Space Resources Agency training program after that. She’s worked for us ever since.”

“That apartment!” Jameson said. “And the ski weekends at the MacDonald, and the concert tickets, and the collection of antique plastic bottles! No wonder you could afford them!”

The gun never wavered, but her eyes begged him. “You don’t understand! You were born Government! I had to fight for it! It was get into a government program or be a dirty Privie all my life!”

Almost, Jameson was moved. But then he remembered Ruiz’s body tumbling down out of sight, and Boyle, crippled.

“You’re right, Maggie,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Maggie’s face had become ugly. “I’ll tell you something!” she spat. “You’re a bore and a fool, and you’re lousy in bed, and I’m glad I’ll never have to listen to that stupid Giles Farnaby music again!”

“Maggie,” Jameson said steadily. “They left you behind. They wrote you off. Don’t you realize that? Give me the gun.”

Klein stooped and picked up the Cygnan prod. “Good-bye, Jameson,” he said. There was a dreadful searing pain, and then Jameson, blind, deaf, and paralyzed, was falling into an endless abyss.

There was a red darkness with bright sparks of pain drifting through it. There was a hollow silence with the sound of distant surf booming behind it, and over that, the sound of a woman sobbing.

He stirred, and hurts stabbed all through a body that was monstrously stiff and swollen and raw-edged. Presently he became aware that the sound of surf was within his skull, and the woman sobbing was outside it.

His eyes flicked open. He was sprawled, half sitting and half reclining, against the base of the metal slope. Through blurred vision he saw dim figures busily moving about on the floor of a metal plain that bulged with odd protuberances as big as glacial boulders.

The sobbing came from Maybury, a dozen yards to his left. She was huddled over the body of Dr. Ruiz, cradling his broken head. “Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz,” she whimpered. She gulped air. “Her—Hernando…”

Chia was standing a little beyond, looking down at Maybury impatiently. Her smooth, exquisite face was smudged, dark hair straggling around it. She was wearing a quilted blue spacesuit and had one of the cylindrical Chinese helmets tucked under her arm. In her ungloved hand she held a hand-laser.

“Get her into a suit,” Chia said.

Numbly Maybury allowed herself to be led away and stuffed into a spacesuit. Jameson’s vision was clearing. He could see that almost everybody was suited up.

He tried to move, and discovered that he was tied up, wrists and ankles. He wriggled a bit. It hurt a lot, but nothing seemed to be broken.

Gifford came limping over, bent like an old man. “Awake now, you son of a bitch?” he said admiringly. “I’ll bet you have a sore backside. You slid down it like a playground slide and never bounced your head once. That’s more than I can say for a couple of the poor bastards you shoved over the edge. Five dead, all together. Chia wants to burn you, slow. She and Klein are still arguing about it.”

“Why am I still alive?” Jameson said.

“You can thank Maggie. She told Klein there wasn’t any reason to kill you now that it’s over. Said it wouldn’t look good on the report. Ruiz and Boyle—that’s another story. They were shot while attempting to interfere with an arbee officer in the performance of his duty.” He grinned. “Anyway, chum, there are too many witnesses.”

He limped away to join the crowd of spacesuited figures clustered around the air lock. Was one of those bulky blue dolls Maggie? She’d have had a time squeezing into Mei-mei’s suit, even with all the slack that a Chinese spacesuit provided. The Chinese, egalitarians all, didn’t believe in custom fitting, but there were limits.

Jameson tested his bonds. There was no give to them. But what was the use of getting loose anyway? He felt close to despair. They’d be gone—in minutes now. They’d already got through the hardest part of their obstacle course. The Cygnans, even if searching for them, had no idea precisely where they were. Now all they had to do was cross fifty miles of space on their suit jets. How long would it take them? An hour? They’d be spotted, of course. With luck they’d be halfway across by then. Then it would take time for the Cygnans to organize a pursuit. It wouldn’t take long to get the missiles in firing order. They wouldn’t even bother to compute orbits, probably. Just aim them, with a proximity fuse or a radio signal. The Cygnans would snuff them out in short order, of course. But the damage would be done. How long would it take the Cygnans to repair the damage done by just one 100-megaton bomb? They’d have to jettison what was left of a pod, maybe even evacuate a whole ship if the central drive was damaged, and resettle a population of millions.

What had Ruiz said? A delay of a month in the Cygnans’ departure would surely break up Earth’s crust, flood it with radiation, tear it out of its orbit, as the Cygnans sailed past with their Jovian trophy. And that would be by mere oversight! With ten million of their sisters murdered, they might decide to do that very thing on purpose!

Jameson watched helplessly as the first group filed into the air lock, which could hold four or five people at a time.

The air lock was simplicity itself. The Cygnans were profligate with their air, just as they were with other people’s hydrogen. There was no lock mechanism, no vacuum pump. You grabbed a handle on that round door and pulled it toward you manually. It slid forward like a desk drawer on three greased shafts. You had to duck under one of the shafts to get inside, but that didn’t bother Cygnans. Attached to the back end of the shafts was another circular door. Once you were inside the lock, you pushed on it and squeezed through the outer opening into space. When the outside door was projecting out into vacuum, the inner disk sealed the cylindrical lock. When the inner door was pulled inward, as it was now, the outer door stopped up the shaft.

Nobody could possibly goof and leave both doors open at once. If you were polite, you pushed the door shut when you were outside. But, knowing Cygnans, Jameson doubted that they bothered. They just left it for the next fellow.

One of the Chinese was pushing on the door now, sealing the people inside. He kept going, another six feet into the round metal tunnel, waited a minute, then pulled the door back out. It didn’t seem to take much effort.

The next load included a couple of prisoners in American spacesuits. Jameson wondered who they were. Kiernan was one of them, from the bantam size of the suit. The other was a woman—Sue Jarowski or Kay Thorwald. It wasn’t Maybury. She was being half supported by Klein’s girl friend, Smitty, while Fiaccone screwed her helmet on.

Jameson struggled for a better position. Nobody paid any attention to him. He felt a faint breeze on his face and the nape of his neck; there was a movement of air toward the lock. It probably leaked around the edges—more Cygnan sloppiness. He was sitting more or less facing the lock, a little beyond the place where it stuck out of the bulkhead, obliquely facing the rearward jumble of gigantic clockwork and the shadowed ramp up over the ridge that had allowed Klein to take him by surprise. All he could hope for was that some Cygnan maintenance worker might come through there, past the boulderlike protuberances embedded in the floor, in time to set off an alarm.

But it was already too late for that. They were all gone now, except for a final group of five and Klein, who was just getting into his spacesuit. He evidently was going to leave last so that he could guard the rear with his machine pistol. If a Cygnan were to happen along, Klein would simply cut her down and be out the lock a minute later.

Mei-mei was pleading with them. She’d been stripped to her underwear. Her low-slung figure looked dumpier than usual in a coarse cotton singlet and baggy drawers. Maggie had taken the long-john liner the Chinese wore under their quilted spacesuits; Jameson couldn’t help thinking that she was going to have cold wrists and ankles out there.

“No!” Jameson heard Chia say loudly. “Go and wait with the Jameson person and do not bother me any more. You are ordered to stay here. The People’s Coalition will rescue you in due course.”

“Wo p’a te!” the girl wailed. “I am afraid!”

“You are stupid and counterrevolutionary!” Chia said. “The star-worms will not hurt you. They will take you back and put you with the others.”

Mei-mei started whimpering again. Chia raised a dainty hand and gave her a ringing slap across the face. “Go! Do you want to be punished for social contradiction?”

Tears running down her pudgy face, Mei-mei slunk toward him and squatted down a few feet away. She shot him a venomous glance. Her underwear wasn’t very clean. Jameson didn’t envy Maggie her hour in the commandeered spacesuit and liner.

Chia and the four in her party filed into the cylindrical barrel of the air lock, stooping under the extended shafts. One of them was an American—Smitty. Klein shoved on the round manhole cover and sealed the barrel. A moment later, as somebody inside pushed the outer lid, the thick disk slid inward another six feet and stayed there.

Klein sauntered over, his helmet tucked under his arm and the machine pistol dangling at his side. He surveyed Jameson, ignoring the Chinese girl.

“I’m going to enjoy this, Jameson,” he said. “You’ve given me a lot of trouble.”

“I thought you promised Maggie you’d let me stay alive.”

“That Privie bitch! I had to keep her quiet. She’ll be making out her own report when we get back. And they’ll be debriefing the rest of them for months.”

“But now there aren’t any witnesses.”

“Right. Except. Butterball here.”

“You don’t have to shoot her. Nobody on this ship is ever going to see Earth again.”

“She’s just a slimy ChiCom. I wish I could kill them all.”

Mei-mei had just figured out what they were talking about. She began backing away on all fours. “No, no!” she wailed. “Comrade Chia say—”

“Shut up!” Klein ordered.

Jameson raised himself on one elbow. “Listen, Klein—”

“You shut up too. I don’t like you, Jameson. You know you got me a reprimand on my record when you complained to Boyle at the beginning of the mission? When I get back I’m going to be a hero. The man who saved Earth from the Cygnans. I’ve got it all figured out. You and Ruiz say the Cygnans are planning to leave the solar system. I believe you. But not about it being dangerous if they’re delayed. You just want to protect your slimy worm friends. Well, when they start moving out of the system, everybody is going to think it was because they got a taste of a couple of nukes. And I’ll be the man who did it!”

“You’ll never see Earth, you damned fool! It won’t be there when you get there!”

Klein wasn’t bothering to listen. He raised his flat little weapon and moved back about ten feet so he wouldn’t get his suit splattered with blood.

Jameson wanted to sneeze.

While he was making up his mind about it, Klein did sneeze, a huge explosive spasm that jerked his otter-slick head back and made his little eyes water. He rubbed a sleeve across his nose and aimed the gun again.

Jameson felt awful. His throat was sore, and there was a weight like cement on his chest. His eyes itched. Behind him he heard Mei-mei coughing.

Klein staggered backward, still trying to aim the gun. In the space of a few seconds, his face had gone puffy and splotched. His nose was running. His eyes were squeezed to tight slits.

Jameson hardly noticed. He was hacking away, and his vision was blurred by tears. His head felt like a balloon.

Klein dropped his helmet. He clawed at his throat and eyes. He seemed to be having some kind of massive histamine reaction. His swollen tongue protruded like a red rubber ball. He made choking sounds. The skin stretched tight across a face that was so distended as to be unrecognizable. He fell over on his back. The dreadful whooping sounds stopped. The hand that had been clawing at his throat went limp. It too was swollen, looking like a blown-up rubber glove.

Jameson’s vision began to clear. The sneezing fits died down. He felt awful. He looked past Klein’s body toward the shadows of the machinery. He detected movement there. The two pink humanoids stepped out from where they had been hiding.

Behind him, Mei-mei gasped. Then he heard her snuffling. Her head sounded as stuffed as his own.

The elfin beings bounced toward him, their silky coats lifting and falling dreamily, in the weak gravity. When at last they stood before him, he could see that the pink gossamer was being ruffled by a breeze. They exuded a cool mintlike smell. He immediately began to feel better.

They plucked at his bonds with clever fingers. He got shakily to his feet and went over to look at Klein’s body.

The skin had stretched so tight over Klein’s face that it had split like an overripe melon. A straw-colored serum oozed out of the cracks. Klein’s features were invisible, buried in the bloated mass.

“Acute anaphylactic shock,” a voice said. “He died of an allergic reaction.”

Jameson looked up. Dmitri was emerging from behind one of the bulky metal boulders. His right arm dangled limply from his shattered shoulder. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he was sniffling. He approached Jameson in a low-gravity shuffle.

“The humanoids?” Jameson asked.

Dmitri nodded. “Evidently they’ve been around us long enough to manufacture human allergens. A whiff of some exotic protein, probably. Unstable molecular structure that breaks down in seconds—just time enough to make the human body go wild activating chymotrypsin enzymes. You were lucky to be ten feet upwind of him. It was just enough to save you.”

“How about you?”

“I was upwind too—and a good deal farther away from our pink friends. The movement of air must have been toward that lock Klein was standing in front of. These little pixies tested the wind first. So that’s what those feathers are good for. They may be cute as kittens, but they’re dangerous carnivores—or their ancestors were. They not only can tranquilize their pray, they can kill it at a distance, with something a lot more deadly than fang or claw.”

“Why didn’t they help us before Ruiz got killed, then?” Jameson said bitterly.

Dmitri tried to shrug, then went white with pain from his shattered shoulder. When he recovered, he said, “We were out in the open. Nothing to hide behind. And there were probably too many of them.”

“Can you stay on your feet a while longer?”

Dmitri nodded. “I took a couple of Hernando’s pep pills. His stuff was at the bottom at the other side, where I fell. They got me all the way here. It was a hell of a climb with one arm, even if I do weigh only a couple of pounds.”

“Can you use your good arm to help me get Klein out of his suit? Time’s running out.”

Dmitri was aghast. “You’re going after them?”

“I’ll have Klein’s machine pistol.”

Jameson tried to pry the gun out of Klein’s bloated hand. The finger was swollen in the trigger guard. Jameson closed his eyes and pulled, but it was no use. The humanoids saw his problem. One of them made excited chipmunk noises and bit the finger off with its needle teeth. It handed the gun to Jameson.

Dmitri was being sick. When he was finally able to talk he said: “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get Klein out of that suit, Tod.”

The humanoids were trying to be helpful. One of them ran and got a butcher knife that Chia’s party had left behind. It cocked its head and stared at Jameson with its enormous violet eyes, then gravely offered him the knife.

Dmitri, his face ashen, said: “You could butcher him inside the suit, take him out in little pieces.”

Jameson said savagely, “And I’d do it if it would get me through that air lock. But the suit would be unusable.” He sniffed the stench leaking from Klein’s neck ring. “In fact, it’s probably unusable now.”

The humanoids had disappeared while they were talking. When Jameson realized that fact, despair hit him like a fist. They’d probably sensed the proximity of Cygnans. It was going to be all over, any minute now. Chia and Yao’s bomb crew must be miles away by now, jetting toward the Jupiter ship. Without hope or purpose, he continued to try to shoehorn the body out of the spacesuit.

Ten minutes later, Dmitri cried, “Look!”

The humanoids were emerging from the recesses of the machinery again. They were herding a single Cygnan between them. The Cygnan acted drunk. It wobbled toward them on rubbery legs, its tail and head raised in a shallow U-shape, waving in befuddled fashion.

“Oh, fine!” Jameson said.

“Wait a minute,” Dmitri said. “They must have something in mind. They’re very bright—brighter than us, I’ll bet—and they want to get off this ship in the worst way.”

They watched the humanoids put the Cygnan through some incomprehensible exercises. The Cygnan seemed very anxious to please.

“Appeasement syndrome,” Dmitri said. “Every social species has them. Baby-biting inhibitions, submissiveness to the pack leader, food-offering to the young or the helpless. Who knows what the Cygnan equivalent is? But our feathered friends know how to trigger the hormones that cause it. And they’ve doped that creature up to the eyestalks, too. All it wants to do is make us all happy.”

The humanoids walked the Cygnan up to the airlock, pulled it open and hopped inside. They showed her Jameson, trying to pry Klein’s body out of the suit. They patted her and caressed her and ran their feathery fingers over her snout and tail, and chattered at her in their piping voices. They weren’t using any approximation of Cygnan language, Jameson could tell, but somehow they were communicating.

The Cygnan, stumbling and falling, managed to get to one of the bulbous housings near the lock. Jameson had assumed they contained some kind of machinery. But at her manipulations, the whole face of the thing opened up.

“A tool locker!” Jameson breathed. “Look, Dmitri, some of those plastic sacks they ferried us here in. And those globular air canisters. And a rack of those broomstick scooters. And the plastic sheaths they wore over their heads and tails.”

“How are you going to use them?” Dmitri said. “You still need a spacesuit.”

One of the little pink creatures was urging Jameson over to the locker. It plucked at his clothing with little quick movements. In a moment of shock, he realized that it was undressing him.

“Don’t be shy,” Dmitri urged. “It has something in mind. Go along with it.”

Jameson turned his back to Mei-mei and dropped his shorts. The humanoid was peeling off his shirt. When he was stripped to the buff, the Cygnan waddled over to him on four unsteady legs, carrying an object shaped like two cones, one large and one small, joined at their narrow ends. It pointed the open end of the small cone at him.

“What’s it going to do?” Jameson asked uneasily.

“Don’t worry,” Dmitri replied. “It loves you.”

There was a violent hiss, and Jameson felt the shock of something cold on his body. The Cygnan was spraying him with some foaming liquid.

It scooted round and round him, spraying every square inch of his body methodically, all the way up to his chin. It made him lift both feet, one after the other, and did the soles. It paid special attention to the crevices between the toes. Then it sprayed him all over again, with more personal attentions that would have made him blush if the Cygnan had been human. The stuff made all his cuts and scrapes sting. He stood there, feeling foolish, covered with bubbles from neck to foot. In seconds, the bubbles began to collapse. He felt unpleasantly sticky for a few moments, as if he’d been coated with molasses. Then the stings and hurts on his back faded and disappeared. The stuff hardened on the surface of his body, forming a transparent rubbery membrane that showed every mole and freckle. You couldn’t tell the film was there, except for the fact that it gave his skin a silvery cast, like scar tissue, and plastered down his body hair. On a Cygnan’s mottled hide, it would have been entirely invisible.

“So this is why the Cygnans didn’t need spacesuits,” he said.

“A spray-on spacesuit?” Dmitri said admiringly.

“Why not? What’s the function of a spacesuit, except to seal in an atmosphere, regulate temperature, and pressurize the surface of the body so that blood vessels won’t rupture? If Cygnan skin works anything like ours, it’s already a gas-tight membrane and an efficient temperature-regulating system. Except for a breathing mask, all you really need is’ a kind of support hose for the entire body.”

“Why didn’t the Space Resources Agency ever develop some kind of a stretch suit, then?”

“Too hard to get into. It would have to be some kind of shrink plastic that could only be used once. A spray-on’s the perfect disposable!”

“Tod, that thing could kill you! You don’t know if that membrane’s permeable to moisture! I don’t even know if Cygnans sweat!”

“I’ll have to take that chance, Dmitri.” Jameson flexed his arms and legs. The membrane stretched over his joints like a second skin. “I don’t feel overheated. I’m going to trust the Cygnans. I’m betting that the stuff conserves just the right amount of body heat and transmits the rest to maintain a balance.”

The Cygnan was earnestly trying to fit a plastic bag over his head. He waved her off while he stepped back into his shorts, less for modesty than for the built-in support they provided. Human anatomy needed a bit more help than the Cygnans’ smooth contours did.

Jameson turned to Dmitri. “Dmitri, I—”

“I know. I’d only be in the way. Don’t worry about me, Tod. I’ll stay here with Mei-mei until the Cygnans come along and put us back in the zoo. It won’t be a bad life for an exobiologist. It’s a fascinating opportunity, actually.”

He grimaced, then carefully sat down. The pain of his smashed bones was getting through to him, despite the pills.

“Janet will set that for you when you get back. Can you hold on till then?”

Dmitri nodded. “Sorry I can’t help. Sorry I flubbed it up on the ridge with my little hatchet, too.”

Jameson laughed. “You’ve more than made up for it. Thanks.”

Dmitri looked thoughtful. “There’ll be a lot for me to do here. We’re going to have to learn how to get along with the Cygnans. If they don’t have the empathy, we’ll make up for it. They’re going to learn a thing or two about human beings, too. We won’t stay zoo animals forever. We’ll breed—we’ve always been good at that. Too good. In another six-million years, who knows? Maybe there’ll be a new partnership out there among the stars—the descendants of free-living flatworms existing side by side in technological symbiosis with the descendants of parasitic roundworms.”

The tranquilized Cygnan finally put the plastic sheath over Jameson’s head and inflated it from one of the globular canisters. It was a tight fit, rather like a stocking mask, but it stretched. The canister stuck between his shoulder blades with an adhesive disk. A simple transparent hose connection, part of the sheath, plugged in to it. There was no provision for removal of wastes; Jameson suspected that the sheath was selectively permeable to heavier gas molecules. A careful squirt around the neck of the sheath sealed it to him.

Jameson sniffed the air. It smelled good.

The two pink pixies were urging the Cygnan into a sack. It crawled inside and curled up peaceably. The two humanoids crawled in after it, with a collection of air canisters.

They wanted to take it along!

After half a minute of futile gestures, Jameson gave in. He sealed the neck of the sack and turned to Dmitri. Dmitri’s lips were forming the words “Good luck.” Mei-mei was huddled next to him, big-eyed.

Jameson looked over at where Ruiz’s crumpled body lay. The gaunt profile, skin stretched like parchment over the sharp cheeks and the beak of a nose, stared past the metal ceiling, perhaps a mile overhead, to something unseeable beyond.

“So long, Hernando,” Jameson said. “You tried.”

With Klein’s gun in his belt and a Cygnan broomstick in his hand, he picked up the transparent balloon with its two or three pounds of alien life inside, and stepped through the lock into the dark.