The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 30

“Where are the six-legs?” Li asked, sweating inside his helmet. He’d removed his faceplate and mittens so that he could work faster, even though the Callisto landing module wasn’t fully pressurized yet. “They must know for long time now that we here in ship.”

“I don’t know,” Jameson replied tightly. “I just hope that they don’t come after us for at least a couple of hours. By then we ought to be far enough away and moving fast enough so they’ll figure it isn’t worth the bother of chasing us.”

He continued working with his screwdriver on the guts of the dismantled control panel. He’d torn the plastic bag off his head as soon as he safely could. The Cygnan spray-on spacesuit already was starting to flake away in white scales that looked like dead skin—evidently a consequence of being exposed to atmosphere after being in vacuum. When his job in the lander was finished, somebody was going to have to come out with a spare spacesuit to ferry him back to the ship.

Maybury was wedged uncomfortably against him, crouching in front of the luminous squiggles of the lander’s computer console. The cockpit wasn’t really big enough for three people. She had been plotting escape orbits through a radio link to the Jupiter ship’s data banks, but now she was looking through a telescope out the bowl-shaped port.

“Commander, you’d better have a look,” she said.

He took the telescope from her. Jupiter overflowed the port, a billowing globe that now had a distinct rim around it. The sticklike Cygnan ships were black hieroglyphs against its face. They were arranged in a five-pointed figure rotating around a common center of gravity.

Looking at those forked shapes, it was hard to believe they contained worlds.

Jameson lifted the eyepiece to his face. He saw that Maybury had programmed the telescope’s pea brain to damp outmost of the light on Jupiter’s chaotic wavelengths. The tortured planet was a dim ghost among the stars. The five ships were no longer silhouettes. They took on proper three-dimensional shapes, chisel-edged constructions illumined by the amplified light of the distant Sun.

A ruby thread of light stretched between two of the crouched forms. Laser light. Jameson wondered if one of the ships was the one he had been on; he’d lost track of their positions.

Now another thread of light stabbed out, linking with a third ship. From the tips of the inverted V, two more beams joined themselves to ships at the lower points.

“What is it?” Li said, sweat rolling down his face.

“They’re communicating,” Jameson said. “Keep working.”

Cursing in Chinese, Li continued to trace circuits. He ripped out a tiny wire and respliced it elsewhere.

The Cygnan ships had to be shedding a lot of dust and molecular debris to make the laser light that distinct. The invisible cloud that surrounded the fleet must have grown to a radius of thousands of miles in the months they’d been parked here.

“Sloppy housekeeping,” Jameson muttered.

“What?” Maybury said. “Oh, you mean whatever’s scattering light. Cygnan ships are leaky, aren’t they?”

Jameson continued watching. The lines traced a pentagram across Jupiter’s spectral face in filaments of red fire. The angle of vision foreshortened it a little, giving it depth. He knew it was rotating, though he’d have to wait a long time before he saw movement.

An astonishing thing happened next. A perfect five-pointed star etched itself within the pentagram.

Of course, it was a geometric accident, the consequence of every ship being linked up with every other ship, but it was a strange and spellbinding sight all the same.

A pentacle within a pentagram.

He gasped just as the sign erased itself.

“What happened?” Li said.

“They’ve stopped talking. We haven’t much time.”

He handed the telescope back to Maybury and took up his screwdriver again. There was a clipboard of checklists for powering and firing the landing vehicle in an assortment of circumstances, but they were of limited value. None of them included the problem of using the craft’s engines while it was still clamped to the mother ship. Before Jameson dared cut in the engines, he and Li had to disconnect the safety circuits and improvise an entirely new firing sequence.

“What do you think?” he asked Li.

“Another half-hour.”

Jameson punched through to the bridge. Kay Thorwald’s plain, pleasant face showed up on the little screen.

“Ready to blast in a half-hour, Kay,” he said. “What’s the condition of the ship?”

“We’ve finished a preliminary damage survey, Tod. There’s nothing we can’t fix—in time. We’re not going to try to make the whole ring airtight. We’ll all just have to live in close quarters in a few of the compartments. Kiernan says he can get the air plant going—enough frozen seed stock survived.”

“How about the attitude controls? Can we get this ship pointed in the right direction?” He glanced down at the slip of paper Maybury was shoving under his nose. “Maybury says that if we fire in thirty minutes, you’ve got to line the ship up with Vega and keep correcting for the angle of my push.”

“Just a minute.”

She turned away from the screen toward a work table where Yeh was going over some diagrams with Fiaccone. She and Yeh talked a moment.

“Comrade Yeh says that we can do it. Some of our attitude jets are gone, but we can lock the ring and use the thrusters that normally set it spinning. There’s a good distribution of workable ones around the circumference. We’re feeding the problem to the computer now.”

“Thanks, Kay.”

He switched off and got the engine room. A harried-looking Chinese fusion tech said, “Dong-yi-dong, I’ll get him.”

Mike appeared on the screen, his hair and beard disheveled.

“How long?” Jameson said.

Mike scratched his head. “The Cygnans didn’t touch much,” he said. “But they bollixed things up just looking. Quentin will have the boron part of the cycle fixed in a couple of hours. But we can’t get a fusion reaction going for at least a day.”

“It’s up to Li and me, then,” Jameson said.

“You and the Giff,” Mike said and signed off.

Jameson looked out a port at the long shaft of the ship. Gifford’s white spacesuit was visible among the blue-clad Chinese strapping down a scoop-nosed drone that Jameson recognized as one of the Jupiter cloudtop orbiters. Just over the curve of the hull was the stubby shape of the vehicle that contained the radiation-shielded crawler that had been destined for a soft landing on Io. They had represented a bold ambition of the human race. Now, he thought sadly, neither of them would ever be used. Their increment of thrust—that’s all they were good for now.

He tried to attract Gifford’s attention through the port, but failed. He called Communications and got Sue Jarowski. “Sue,” he said, “can you patch me through to Gifford’s suit radio?”

“Right away.” He watched her face as she pushed buttons. The long Cygnan captivity had melted flesh from her wide Slavic cheekbones, making them even more prominent. Her full, bold mouth and strong chin were set in concentration. Absent-mindedly she pushed back a curtain of thick dark hair. Jameson was thinking how striking she looked when Gifford’s voice crackled from the speaker.

“Yeah?”

Outside, Gifford was looking in his direction. He raised a gloved hand and waved toward the window of the Callisto lander.

“How’s it coming?” Jameson said.

Gifford’s voice came over the sound of frying eggs. “Give us another couple hours and we can get one more drone out of its cocoon, pointed in the right direction, and bolted down. Then we gotta come inside. These boys can’t work under acceleration. It ought to be enough to start the push. When we run out of juice, we’ll come out again and strap on a cluster of rocket engines from the missiles.”

“A couple of hours?” Jameson said. “Can you cut that in half?”

“Commander,” Gifford called, sounding aggrieved, “I’ve got only five of these boys to work with, plus Smitty. And she’s still under your boat, bolting on the braces.”

“Can we break out of orbit with just the vehicles you’ve got ready now?”

“Maggie says no. If you want me to, I’ll ask her to run the figures through the computer again.”

Jameson’s face turned to stone. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll take her word for it. Just work as fast as you can.”

Maybury made a small choking sound behind him. “They’re coming,” she announced.

Jameson looked out the other port. Space was filled with a sudden hail of fire. Over a front that must have been a hundred miles across, streaks of light lengthened and shrank to points again, like golden straws tumbling among the stars.

“That was their turnover point,” Jameson said. “They’re halfway across. Decelerating at one g, they’ll be here in minutes.”

Li looked up from the console, his blunt peasant face smeared with grime where he’d wiped away sweat with stained fingers. “All through now,” he said. “Safety override is off. Now we should put it through test sequence.”

“No time,” Jameson responded. “We’ll have to take our chances.” He spoke into the mike pickup. “Gifford, hear this. Tell the men they have thirty seconds to find something to grab on to. We’re moving.”

He switched off before Gifford could object. Some of the men must have been listening through their own circuits. There was a scramble as stuffed blue dolls wrapped themselves around stanchions, hooked themselves onto safety rails. Immediately under the port, Jameson saw Smitty wriggle out from beneath the lander and glide belly-down along the hull until she found a grip.

He settled down in the pilot’s seat beside Li, and the two of them began to run through the newly edited checklist for powering the vehicle. Maybury crouched behind them, lightpad in hand, helping them keep track of all the changes.

It felt strange to be doing it this way, after all the months of training. He and Li had honed themselves for one purpose: to land the spidery craft on the surface of Jupiter’s second-largest moon. The lockers behind them were crammed with geological equipment. The little boxy hovercraft for exploring Callisto’s surface was still folded in its bay. Now the lander would never touch down. It had been turned into a tugboat.

The main engine fired, and the cabin shook with unplanned stresses. A few seconds later, Jameson saw through the port that Gifford had ignited the strapped probes by radio signal. Little jets flared along the shaft of the main ship and along the circumference of the ring, as Kay and Yeh compensated for the irregularities in direction of the thrust.

There was no sensation of movement yet. The buildup was going to be slow, slow.

Maybury’s voice came hesitantly. “Maggie’s calculations were correct, you know. This won’t break us out of orbit.”

Without turning his head, Jameson said, “You checked her figures, then?”

“Yes,” Maybury answered in a small voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jameson. “We’ll get ourselves into a return trajectory later. All I want to do now is get us moving!”

Slowly, like a freight train being pushed along the tracks by an elephant, the great wheel-and-axle of the Jupiter ship responded. Jameson could feel the first faint suggestion of weight on the seat of his pants. There was visible movement against the grid of stars, some of it lateral as the ungainly mass shuddered to align itself.

It wasn’t good enough.

Outside the port, space was alive with beams of light, flashing on and off as thousands of Cygnans made their final correction maneuvers. They were close enough to be visible through the port, little squirming golden worms clinging to matchsticks.

“Tod, p’eng yu,” Li said, staring straight ahead. He’d used the word for “friend,” not “comrade.” “I want you to know. I’m sorry. None of it was my idea.”

Outside, trapped on the hull, one of the Chinese missile men lost his nerve and threw a wrench at the naked creatures swarming on their broomsticks. It tumbled harmlessly past one of the nearer Cygnans, who oozed sidewise to avoid it.

“What will they do?” Maybury wondered aloud.

Jameson shifted in his seat. “We’ve got nukes aboard,” he said. “We ran through their ship like weasels in a chicken house, killing. What would you do?”

Maybury’s hand, small as a child’s, was clutching his, the nails digging into his palm. Li stared out the window, saying nothing. Outside, Gifford’s work party had drawn together in a small defensive group, their movements hampered by the necessity of using a hand to keep from drifting away under the ship’s gentle acceleration. The Cygnans had no such problem. Some of them already had touched down, anchored to anything handy by whatever hand or foot was convenient, like sea polyps swaying in a current. At the head of the ship they were crawling like maggots all over the observation bubble.

“Oh!” Maybury gasped.

Jameson jerked his head around to see what had startled her. She was staring, wide-eyed, toward the Cygnan fleet in the distance. At this angle it could be seen against the dark. They’d moved far enough by now so that it hung like a cluster of shiny grapnel hooks above the raw and bloody carcass of Jupiter.

The laser light was flashing between them again. The figure of the five-pointed star within the pentagram did not appear again. Instead there was a shifting play of spiky forms as each ship in turn sent out brief tendrils of light to all its companions. A succession of clawed figures, looking like Greek or Hebrew letters, flamed red against the face of night.

Jameson could not guess at the message content. But the flashing signals galvanized the Cygnan horde. Like shiny midges, they rose by the hundreds off the crippled ship and wheeled and darted in a forming swarm. A thousand beacons lit the night, and then they were vanishing, a cloud of distant sparks heading with incredible velocity toward the ships beyond.

“They’re gone!” Maybury said wonderingly.

Jameson looked across at the barbed shapes of the ships hovering over Jupiter’s ripe and swollen orb, still semaphoring their sins and psis and lambdas, drawing fiery scratches in the void.

“Not quite yet,” he said.

They were four million miles out, well past the orbit of Callisto, when it happened. The feeble engines of the probes and missiles had not yet set them free, but had put them in a loose elliptical orbit that would carry them outside the orbit of Jupiter VII. Mike, Quentin, and the three Chinese fusion techs were working round the clock. Everybody pitched in to help: Maggie and Maybury on the engine-room computers, Jameson and Li and Fiaccone unplugging the damaged outside structures. Jameson had passed Maggie a couple of times in the corridors without speaking to her.

Now Jameson slumped, exhausted, in a contour seat on the ship’s bridge. Mike had promised boron fission within a couple of hours. The last missile rocket engine had been expended.

“What if they come back?” Kay asked, looking at him with red-rimmed eyes through a strand of straggling hair. “Even when we get going, we can only accelerate at a hundredth of a g. They can catch up to us in a few hours, any time they feel like it.”

Jameson looked out through the big bubble at Jupiter’s bright sphere. Io, or the sodium glow that surrounded it, was visible as a fuzzy yellow golfball that from this angle seemed to be poised just above Jupiter’s eastern edge. The Cygnan ships were invisible, but they could be seen through a telescope as a glowing pentad hovering close to Io, keeping its bulk between them and the giant planet. They had transferred their orbit from their own moon, the one they had brought with them, to Io with its closer position, a bit over a quarter of a million miles from Jupiter. The pentacle of laser light was evidently a calibrating device as the five ships fine-tuned their new joint orbit.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Jameson said. “They’re ready to move, all right. Those ships started changing their orbit about three seconds after the boarding party got back to them. What worries me is being this close to Jupiter. If we’re still in orbit around it when they start moving, we’ll go right along with them. And we don’t have Io to shield us from radiation once they start moving through interstellar hydrogen at close to light speed.”

“We be dead long before that time,” Yeh grunted from his console. His lumpy face was lined with fatigue. He had worked without rest since reaching the ship.

Jameson nodded. “If we didn’t get torn loose by the sun and fry to death, it would be hunger, decompression, or systems failure. Take your pick. We’ll be lucky to nurse this wreck back to Earth in one piece.”

“Bye dzwe na-yang!” Yeh suddenly bellowed. “Don’t touch that!”

The feathery humanoid snatched its hand away from the control board, its teddy-bear face looking somehow hurt. It rewarded Yeh with a bad smell, something like rotten eggs, and pranced off to join its friend over at one of the scattered monitor screens on the floor.

“Mischievous little devils, aren’t they,” said Kay.

Jameson watched the rosy-furred creatures fiddle with the console. They had somehow managed to conjure up a star chart. Now one of them was making peeping field-mouse noises, rolling the display, while the other one danced around in front of the view window, pointing at constellations.

“These two aren’t the simple hunters they seemed to be, any more than we still are,” Jameson said. “They come from a technologically advanced civilization. They were trying to show Mike something about how the Cygnan broomstick worked until he threw them out of the engine room. I think that before we get back home they’ll be helping us man this ship.”

The pink bipeds had been an invaluable help with the Cygnan prisoner, keeping it tranquilized and getting it settled in a cage—a cage, Jameson reflected, that was probably less comfortable than the one he’d been confined in aboard the Cygnan vessel. The Cygnan was in Kiernan’s care now. It would have a lot of hamsters for company if Kiernan could get a few of the frozen ova in his files to start dividing. The humanoids had painstakingly sniffed every food and biological sample that Kiernan had shown them to try to improvise a diet that would keep the Cygnan alive until they got back to Earth. One of the things it could eat, surprisingly, was turkey, so it was going to get everybody’s portion of frozen Christmas dinner—if everybody lived that long. The humanoids themselves had rejected all terrestrial animal protein, and were putting together a combination of spun vegetable protein that evidently added up to the right balance of amino acids. With the superb analytical laboratories in their noses, they were in no danger of starving.

The Cygnan prisoner, the humanoids had given Jameson to understand, was not just some run-of-the-mill technician, but was an important person they had taken some pains to select. They seemed desperately to want to keep it alive.

The humanoid looking at the stars suddenly bounced into the air and tumbled weightlessly toward Jameson like a giant ball of pink milkweed. Its fluffy tail whipped around the guardrail to anchor it, and it plucked at Jameson’s sleeve, making urgent piping sounds. When it finally had Jameson’s attention, it struck itself on its little chest and flung a slender arm toward the constellation Cygnus.

“What in the world,” Kay said.

“He’s telling us where his home is,” Jameson said.

“Of course. It would have to be somewhere in the volume of space between here and Cygnus, along the Cygnans’ line of flight. But which star? It might not even be visible to the naked eye.”

“It’s not Deneb or Albireo. They’re too far away from the line of sight toward Cyg X-l, and we know the Cygnans came in more or less under its X-ray umbrella. Wait a minute! I think it’s trying to tell me that it’s 61 Cygni! But if that’s so, then—”

Jameson didn’t get a chance to finish. Yeh had risen from his seat so abruptly that he had to grasp an armrest to keep from floating off.

“K’an, k’an!” he said excitedly. “Look! It happens!”

In a moment the three of them were crowding the observation rail, looking out into the dark. An awesome event was taking place out there.

Against the burning stars, Jupiter moved!

Jameson could only gape. The scale of what he was witnessing was almost beyond human grasp.

Slowly, ponderously, the colossal bulk of the planet stirred.

It sloshed.

Across its seething face, a great sluggish tidal wave of thickened hydrogen brimmed over hundreds of miles of atmosphere and lapped in an advancing wall that would have tumbled Earth like a cork.

It stretched.

It no longer was the oblate sphere that man had known since he started looking at it through telescopes. The thing spinning around its waist had given it a flying-saucer shape, a hatbrim of raging hydrogen fighting to pour itself into the circling maw of a gnat.

The gnat had strained and swallowed an elephant. By now, zipping around the captive giant at very nearly the speed of light, the robot probe had converted enough of the stolen hydrogen into Einsteinian mass to tug at the remainder of that tremendous corpse.

Just how much of Jupiter was left? To Jameson, it looked no smaller than before. Perhaps it had lost a few thousand miles of diameter, perhaps not. As its outer layers were stripped away, the rest of that compressed hydrogen, relieved of pressure, would tend to boil and swell. And even with half its bulk gone, Jupiter would still be the most massive object in the solar system other than the Sun itself.

“It won’t be there!” Kay said suddenly. “I just realized that from now on when we look up in the sky at night to find Jupiter, it won’t be there!”

Jameson looked around and was amazed to see tears running down her cheeks. “Sorry,” Kay said. “I’m just tired.”

“It’ll be our turn someday, Kay,” he said. “When we’ve used up everything else, we’ll start using up the planets.”

With trembling hands he swung one, of the stubby ship’s telescopes around in its gimbals and turned on the magnetic lens. The computer-controlled fields flexed transparent plastic, shaped a pool of mercury into a reflecting curve. A picture stirred itself into being on the photoplastic plate behind the eyepiece, held steady by the electronic image compensator.

A Cygnan ship stretched toward him like a claw. It had stopped rotating. The three long spars, with their buckets of life at the ends, spread motionless from the tip of the notched beam of the drive section. As Jameson watched, the buckets swiveled in their wishbone cradles and snapped into place, reversed. He tried to imagine what was happening inside those worldlets. Had the lakes with their queer bright sailboats been drained? Were the animals hushed in their cages, waiting for gravity to resume?

The spars folded inward, swinging through their fifteen-mile arcs. Jameson could see how their triangular cross sections and the three-sided buckets fit into the grooved sides of the starship, just as Pierce had said they would.

He lifted his face from the eyepiece. Jupiter was picking up momentum, like a stone rolling downhill. It moved past the stars, dragging its moons with it.

And us too, if we don’t fire our engines soon, he thought.

He called the observatory and got Maybury. She’d finished her work in the engine room a couple of hours go.

“Are you recording?” he asked.

“Yes, Commander.”

“How fast are they accelerating?”

“One gravity, same as before.”

“Their trajectory. Is it going to be what we figured?”

In the screen, Maybury bit her lip. “It’s too early to tell, Commander.”

“Keep tracking them.” He switched off.

Kay had returned to her console, taking instrument readings with Yeh and feeding questions to the ship’s computer. She looked up as Jameson returned to his seat.

“We’re going to have a lot of borrowed momentum when we break loose from Jupiter,” she said. “We may reach Earth in less than four months.”

Jameson nodded. “The astronomers are going to have a merry time figuring out what all that gravitational displacement will do to the balance of the solar system.”

Kay hesitated. “Tod, will … will the Earth be safe?”

Jameson drew a long breath. “We’ll know for sure in just a couple of days. That’s all the time it will take for them to cross Earth’s orbit.”

Before returning to his cabin to collapse in his bunk, Jameson sought out Maybury in the observatory.

The ship’s engines had been firing steadily for a couple of hours now; Mike and Quent, and the three Chinese fusion techs, were taking turns staying awake to monitor the boron-11 fusion/fission cycle. Maggie had calculated an escape orbit from the death-grip of Jupiter, which was now falling toward the Sun at more than a thousand kilometers a second. Enough maneuvering jets had been unplugged so that Kay had even been able to put some spin on the ring. The ship would live until it got back to Earth.

Provided Earth was still there.

Maybury looked up from a computer console as he entered. Her face looked dreadful: a wan porcelain mask with two great dark holes in it. Her head moved as though her neck had gone stiff.

“Still working?” he said.

“I thought I’d just set up some hypothetical programs to calculate gravitational stresses for Earth using various trajectories for Jupiter.”

“You don’t have to stay awake for that. There’s not a damn thing anybody can do to change things.”

“I know. It’s just something to do.”

He settled down in a seat next to her. With the engines firing, he had almost two pounds of weight.

“I found out where the two humanoids came from.”

She was all attention. “Where?”

“61 Cygni.”

She nodded slowly. “It could be. It’s roughly in the line of flight from Cygnus X-1.”

“And it’s close.”

“That’s right. Eleven point two light-years away. There are only a dozen stars that are closer to us.”

“If Dr. Ruiz’s theory was correct…” He stopped till the pain disappeared from her face. “Then that must have been the Cygnans’ last stop before they headed for Earth. Our feathery zoo mates were the Cygnans’ most recent acquisition before us.”

“But 61 Cygni was never considered to be a prime candidate for life.”

“It is now.”

“It’s a double star, actually. The two suns are a K5 and a K7. Very weak. About six percent of the luminosity of our own sun. There wouldn’t be much of a biosphere for habitat planets. Are you sure you understood the humanoids correctly?”

“61 Cygni has a third component,” he prompted her.

“But it isn’t a star,” she said. “It’s a nonluminous body. A planet. Actually, one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered. It’s a superjovian, with a mass about twelve times Jupiter’s. It…” She stopped. “Oh.”

“Exactly.”

She swiveled back to the computer console so quickly that Jameson had to press her shoulder to push her back in her seat. Her hands scrabbled over the keys. Words tumbled out of her as she worked. “Dr. Ruiz transferred big chunks of the Farside computer’s astronomical library to the ship’s memory before we left Earth. He wanted to be sure we had updated data. The third component of 61 Cygni was discovered over a hundred years ago when they noticed some irregularities in the proper motion of the binary. They started to discover a lot of extrasolar superjovians that way about then—most of them among the closer stars, of course. But nobody keeps tabs on them much any more. They get surveyed every few years in the automated sky sweeps, and if anybody wants to pull data out of the record for a graduate paper or anything, they can. Here we are. A check was made on it about five years ago, and then another just about a month before we launched this mission.”

They both stared avidly at the data coming up on the screen. Jameson was unable to interpret the tables of astronomical figures. “What’s it mean?” he said.

“Five years ago 61 Cygni had its usual wobble. Now it doesn’t.”

“The superjovian’s gone, then.”

Maybury was going over the figures. “The Cygnans would have taken it a little more than eleven years ago. Its light ran ahead of them—but not by much of a margin. We would have seen the wobble until just before the Cygnans arrived—if we’d known enough to look for it.”

Jameson looked out the viewport. The cast-off moons of Jupiter were now the brightest objects in the sky. They were tumbled carelessly across the night, like scattered dice, still rather close together. He picked out the biggest of them, a smooth white ball, the apparent size of a golfball, that had captured its own marble-sized moon.

“That’s its core,” he said. “All that’s left of a planet twelve times the mass of Jupiter. It belongs to the feathery folk. Too bad there’s no way to get it back to them.”

Maybury had found something in the figures that interested her. She was making side calculations on a lightpad.

“They were astronauts,” Jameson went on. “They made me understand that with pantomime. They were out quite a distance from their world, exploring asteroids, when the Cygnans scooped them up. They’ve got space flight, the same as we do. But their race doesn’t have star travel yet. They were as excited by the Cygnan broomstick as Mike was. They want to go home.” He paused. “But they don’t have a home to go back to, do they?”

She made a brave effort to smile. “Is that what you came here to ask me?”

“Yes.”

“The third component of 61 Cygni couldn’t have been their home, you know. It’s an unkindled star. Nothing could have lived there except creatures like the Jovians.”

“I know that. But I thought their home planet might have been a satellite of the superjovian—same as the Cygnans’ was. It was big enough to have planets. Big enough, even, to have an Earth-size planet.”

“No,” she said flatly. “That would put their planet too far away from either primary to be warmed by them. It’s not at all the same situation as Cygnus X-1 and its supergiant companion. Those were two hot stars with a joint ecosphere, so close together that they circled one another in only four and a half days.”

“And 61 Cygni is a different story?”

She almost laughed. “Commander, the two stars of 61 Cygni have a period of seven hundred and twenty days! They’re far apart! They’re too far apart to have a joint ecosphere. And they’re both so dim that no matter which one of them the humanoids’ home world orbited, it would have to be very, very close to its star. When the Cygnans made off with the superjovian component of the system, it couldn’t possibly have dragged the humanoids’ planet along with it.”

“So their world is still there?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s still there.”

“Thanks,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder and got up to go.

She stopped him at the door. “Commander Jameson…”

He turned. “Yes?”

“Dr. Ruiz … I mean … what do you think will happen to his body? They won’t just … just throw it away, will they?”

“No,” Jameson lied. “They’ll probably allow the humans to bury it in their compound. It’s a closed ecology. Relatively closed, anyway.”

“That’s good, then,” she said slowly. “He’ll be a part of them forever now, won’t he?”

“Not just them,” he said, and left.

Sue Jarowski looked round the wreckage of Jameson’s cabin, appalled. The Cygnans had torn out everything movable, including the mattress on the bunk, and messed up what was left.

“I suppose we can make it livable,” she said doubtfully. “I’ll bring my own mattress and some cushions from the lounge.” She stared sadly at the empty shelves. “They even took your omnisound and music cards.”

“We can live without music,” Jameson said. “I was getting tired of that damned collection anyway.”

She gave him a probing look. After a moment she said, “Tod, don’t feel bad about Maggie. She isn’t worth it. She tried to get me to send a coded laser message back to Earth today. I refused. I think she was going to report Mike for sharing the Cygnan broomstick with the Chinese.”

“She won’t get very far with that. Not any more. Mike’s going to be a hero when we get back. So are we all—Maggie and Gifford and Fiaccone included. We’re all going to have to smile a lot at each other for the holocasts. The facts are going to be rearranged. Klein never murdered Ruiz. He was just another heroic crewman who died trying to save the human race. I never fought Chia’s crowd. We were all in it together. They’re going to have diplomatic problems enough splitting up the Jovian moons and the new terrestrial planet.”

Later on, he showed her 61 Cygni through the port. “It’s very faint,” he said. “You can just about make it out. Actually it’s two stars.”

“Nice,” she said, nestling up to him. She yawned. “Nice to know that there are a lot of little elves out there, covered with pink feathers.”

The communicator buzzed. Jameson reached out and switched on the audio.

“Commander,” Maybury’s voice said. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Jameson said.

“I just wanted you to know that I accumulated enough observational data. Jupiter’s going to miss the Earth. It’s going to pass through just where Dr. Ruiz said it would.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s very fine. Now go get some sleep.”

A week later they held a modest celebration in the saloon. Jupiter had crossed Earth’s orbit twice, with no more effect than a few earthquakes and typhoons, and the bollixing up of the planetary tables in the Nautical Almanac. It already had passed the orbit of Saturn without incident, and was heading out of the solar system at the rate of six thousand kilometers per second, still picking up speed. It seemed to be heading for the Great Nebula in Andromeda.

“They paid for it, you know,” Mike Berry said.

“What?” Jameson said. He’d been preoccupied watching the antics of the two humanoids. They seemed to like alcohol too. They couldn’t tolerate the sugars in beer or wine, or the congeners in whiskey, but chilled vodka seemed to do very nicely for them, if it wasn’t mucked up with vermouth or lemon peel. Right now one of them was mixing up a new batch in a cocktail shaker, while the other was breaking up the Chinese by doing a wickedly accurate imitation of Yeh’s hulking walk.

“They paid for Jupiter,” Mike said. “They took a planet the human race couldn’t use and left us an Earth-size planet—conveniently sterile—and three of the four Galilean moons. Plus they traded us their own moon for Io. I’ll bet the archeologists will go crazy.”

“We didn’t own Jupiter. The Jovians did,” Jameson said.

Mike went on, oblivious. “That’s five more planets in the solar system that the human race can colonize. And Jupiter’s radiation belt isn’t there to keep us away.”

Jameson took a sip of his martini. Mike was only saying what had been on everybody’s tongue for the last five days. As it hurtled Sunward, Jupiter had failed to hang on to its outer satellites and the two bodies the Cygnans had brought. It had managed to hang on to Io, of course, and the piece of rock known as Jupiter V.

The core of the superjovian gas giant they had ridden into the solar system was now the size of the planet Earth. It was going to be the most valuable piece of real estate in the solar system, surpassing even Mars. It could be terraformed. They could make water out of the remnants of its hydrogen and the oxides in the rocks. It was rich in iron and heavy elements. And it was heavy enough to hold on to the atmosphere that could be squeezed out of its rocks.

“And to top it all off,” Mike was saying, “Jupiter yanked them closer to the Sun before it let go. According to Maybury, it even looks like Ganymede will end up in an elliptical orbit that’ll take it inside the orbit of Mars!”

“You overlooked the biggest gift of all,” Jameson said. “They may have given us the stars.”

Mike nodded vigorously, spilling his beer. “I’ve been going over that Cygnan broomstick with Po’s boys. Do you know that it runs on water? Takes about a pint—we’ve tried it out with the ship’s stuff. Uses the hydrogen. I don’t know what it does with the oxygen! Very efficient—almost a hundred percent conversion to energy. It comes out as very energetic photons. They work like hadrons and scatter a hell of a lot of rho mesons. I think it’s a scaled-down version of their star drive. If they can make it that small, it has to be simple!”

“If the Chinese have been looking at that thing, there’s going to be one great big crash research program on our side. I think you’re going to be at the head of it. That’s how the bureaucratic mind works. You were there first. You’re magic.”

“So are you,” Mike said. “You’re the only person in the world who can talk to Cygnans.”

“For the time being. There must be a few linguists around who have absolute pitch.”

“It’ll be you,” Mike said in a positive tone. “You and our pink feathered friends. With the three of you working on that Cygnan engineer we’ve got in the hamster cages, we ought to get enough clues to have a star drive inside of twenty years. Anyway, if I’m going to be project supervisor I won’t take anybody but you.”

“I accept,” Jameson said, laughing.

Mike leaped to his feet, spilling more beer. “It’ll be the stars, boy!” he declaimed dramatically. “Just think of it—the stars in our lifetime!”

Heads turned in their direction. Mike lifted his glass and toasted the saloon in general.

The humanoid who had been imitating Yeh came tumbling over in a series of cartwheels. Mike scratched it behind the ears. Everybody was doing that now. It was hard to keep your hands off them.

“S-t-t-t-ars!” it chirruped in its songbird voice. “S-t-t-ars, s-t-t-ars, t-t-t-we!” The two of them already had picked up a few English and Chinese words, beginning with “no” and “stop” and “don’t touch,” and you could understand them if you listened hard.

“That’s right,” Mike said, patting the silky crest. “We’ll take you home first. Then we’ll visit Alpha Centauri.”

“Hold on there!” Jameson said. “Don’t go off halfcocked. Alpha Centauri’s only four light-years away, and 61 Cygni’s eleven. If we get a starship out of this, the bureaucrats who finance it are going to want instant gratification.”

People were starting to drift over, drinks in hand. Ears had perked up at the sound of what had become the most popular subject aboard the ship.

“That’s right,” Quentin agreed earnestly. “Baby steps first. That’s been the whole history of the space program, ever since Stafford and Cernan and Young circled the moon before they let Armstrong and Aldrin land.”

“Look,” Mike said. “It’s a five-year trip to Alpha Centauri. Two of that is boosting and decelerating up to light-speed, during which you knock off another light-year, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“And it’s a twelve-year trip to 61 Cygni. Same two years to boost and brake. In between you travel at, say, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.”

“What about it?”

Mike leaned back, looking smug. “So at that speed, the time dilation effect is a hundred to one, right? Subjective time for the crew is maybe two years and two weeks to Alpha Centauri compared to two years and six weeks to 61 Cygni.” He spread his hands. “So what’s the big deal?”

“You’re missing the point,” Jameson said, egging him on. “Back home in the budget department, they’re waiting ten years to show results from an Alpha Centauri round trip versus twenty-four years for a return from 61 Cygni.”

“You’re missing the point,” Mike said, grinning hugely. “61 Cygni’s a sure thing! Nobody can criticize the maiden voyage. We know there’s life there! And intelligent life at that!” He ruffled the humanoid’s silky fur affectionately. “And we’ve got two friends to introduce us.”

Quentin was still trying. “Yeah, but listen, Mike—”

Mike sat up, an astonished expression on his face. “Hey, it just came to me! All distances are the same! Give or take a couple of months, anyway. We can reach any star within a hundred light-years in about three years of travel. The hell with them back home! If you want to spend five years traveling, you can have any star within three hundred light-years. Hell, make that ten years—no, twelve years…”

He stopped and looked round at the circle of faces.

Kay Thorwald said it for him. “We own all the stars in a thousand light-years. That’s what we traded Jupiter for.”

The celebration had grown suddenly quiet. Into the silence, Jameson said: “What’s the price? Do we dismantle Saturn next?”

“Hell no!” Mike said briskly. “The Cygnans spent six million years traveling with a first-generation technology. We’ll have a second-generation technology. We’ll find a better way.”