The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 4

The saloon smelled of fresh paint and new insulation. They were still putting the finishing touches on it. Tubular metal scaffolding was stacked haphazardly against the bulge of the far wall, where carpenters and foam wrights were installing a small stage to be used for concerts and amateur theatricals. Rows of mismatched folding and inflatable chairs had been hastily set up for the meeting. The curving chamber was one of the few places in the American sector of the ship that was roomy enough to seat this many crew members at once.

Jameson filed in with the rest, looking over the heads in front of him. There was a lot of joking and goodnatured jostling. It felt good having weight on his feet again. They’d been spinning the Jupiter ship at a full g for a couple of days now as part of the final shakedown—though during the actual voyage the 200-meter ring would be stressed at only two-thirds of a g.

A small, wiry man in a stained overshirt bumped into him; it was Kiernan, one of the hydroponicists. “What’s the Old Man want?” he said. “I’ve got two hundred trays of wingbean seedlings to set out.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jameson said.

Jameson found an empty seat near the back and sat down. The saloon was filling up fast. A couple of minutes later, Maggie MacInnes slid in next to him. A bony hip bumped his. She turned her head and blinked orange eyelashes. “Hi,” she said. “We haven’t seen much of you these days.”

“Li and I pretty well wrapped up the landing exercises a month ago,” he said. “I’ve been working for Captain Boyle. Got to earn my keep while we’re getting there.”

She brushed a loose strand of red hair from her cheek. “I’m glad you’re going to be one of the execs in charge,” she said.

“I’m just third officer. By the way, that was a nice set of trajectory parameters you sent up yesterday. I recognized your touch.”

She shrugged freckled shoulders. “I want to get to Jupiter in one piece too.”

The buzz of conversation around them died down as Captain Boyle came in and took his place on the little raised platform with the folding Moog and the music stands. He smiled and nodded at a couple of people in the front row, then stood in an easy posture, one thumb hooked into his harness, while he waited for everyone’s full attention.

Boyle was a big, imposing man with a red face and a thick, powerful neck. His cap of tight curls was thinning, and under the harness straps and the fresh uniform blouse donned for the occasion his wide shoulders and bull-like chest were tending toward bulk, but his waist was as trim as it had been when he commanded the expedition that had begun the work of seeding the Venusian clouds with life. Like many big men, he moved well, and in a way that inspired instant confidence.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and all you others,” he began; there was a dutiful laugh. “I won’t keep you long. I just want you all to know that, as of a couple of hours ago, our mission is officially go.” He drew a length of message strip out of the pocket of his shorts and waved it at them. “I’ve just received confirmation from Earth of our original target date—” A ragged cheer went up, and in the second row Mike Berry stood up and raised clasped hands in a victory gesture. Captain Boyle motioned for silence and went on. “I know that there have been times in the last year and a half when some of you thought we’d never make it”—groans from the audience—“but I want to say that I’m proud of you and all your efforts.”

His manner became more serious. “At this moment, over in the opposite side of the ship, Captain Hsieh is giving essentially the same message to his crew. A great new era in the exploration of space is about to begin. As representatives of the human race, we are going to”—he cleared his throat and looked a little embarrassed—“to carry the banner of mankind farther from our home planet than we’ve ever gone before—ten times as far…”

Maggie nudged Jameson. “Some pressec wrote that for him,” she whispered.

Jameson frowned her into subsiding. Boyle’s awkward words had stirred him more than all the slick panegyrics he’d heard on the holoset in the last couple of years. He didn’t think anybody had written them for him.

Boyle was going on more briskly. “We’ll be having a joint party with our Chinese crewmates tomorrow night”—there was a rustle of interest; the Chinese had remained correct but aloof during training, and get-togethers where you could socialize with them were rare—“but tonight I’m inviting you all to a party of our own in the bubble lounge at Eurostation. Drinks and eats are on me.” Somebody whistled appreciatively; the bubble lounge was expensive.

He waved them into silence again. “We’ll be essentially finishing our training sessions in the next week, except for wrap-ups. During the six weeks before countdown, there’ll only be routine maintenance while the Earth crews finish up outfitting. I’m-happy to say that there’ll be Earth furloughs for all of you on a staggered schedule.”

Maggie turned to Jameson, her face shining. “Earth! I’ve been breathing canned air for six months now!”

Jameson drew a deep breath. It was real now. This was what all the hard work had been for. He realized that until this moment he hadn’t really believed in it.

Around them, people had begun to chatter, to move restlessly in their seats. Captain Boyle held up his hand for silence again.

“Before we break this up, there are a couple of people I want you to meet. You’ll be seeing a lot of them.”

There was a stir of interest. Maggie was leaning to her left to see, a skinny thigh pressed against his.

A sandy-haired fellow with boyish, snub-nosed features and well-muscled shoulders under a sleeveless jersey came in through the door behind Boyle, moving in a catlike crouch that showed he’d spent a lot of time in low gravity. He waved at someone in the audience and took his place beside the captain.

“Most of you know Jack Gifford,” Boyle said. “Jack worked right alongside Roy Jenkins as an alternate during the initial training exercises, and SRA’s been keeping him up to date right along. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Roy’s been scrubbed for medical reasons. We’ll all miss him. Jack will take his place as probe tech.”

Gifford smiled and nodded and took his place in the audience, squeezing in next to Sue Jarowski. He immediately struck up a conversation with her, something involving huge gestures. A couple of seats away, Dmitri looked unhappy.

Another man had slipped in through the door behind Boyle. He had a seal’s head, sleek and shiny, and a triangular face with the kind of sallow complexion that always shows a subsurface smear of blue whiskers. The head seemed too small for the massive slope of shoulders and the bunched muscles that stretched the sleeves of his T-shirt. He was wearing a pair of heavy boots with thick gum soles. They struck Jameson as, out of place in space, where the soles of your feet were among your most important sense organs.

“This is Emmet Klein,” Boyle said. “He’ll be replacing Ham Bailey in charge of Stores.” He cleared his throat. “Bailey will be returning Earthside for reassignment. Our new stores exec is fully qualified—he’s had three years at Mars Station and more recently has been working at the shuttle-launch complex at Salt Lake. I’m sure you’ll all get along fine with him.”

Maggie poked Jameson. “What do you think?”

Jameson frowned. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If Bailey had to be reassigned, why didn’t they replace him with Vitali or Michaels—somebody who’s familiar with the mission? Mars and Salt Lake are impressive assignments, but they’re ground-based.”

People were standing up. A small knot of men and women clustered around Klein and Gifford, all talking at once. Klein looked uncomfortable. Jameson felt sorry for him.

“Meeting’s over,” Maggie said, getting up. “Are you going to be at the party tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jameson said. “First I’ve got to go over to China country and talk to Li about closing down the lander and getting it podded.”

Captain Boyle was coming down the aisle, heading for the exit. Jameson stepped out and stopped him.

“What’s all this about reassigning Ham, Skipper?’ he inquired. “He’s the best stores exec we’ve ever had. He’s been checked out for the mission for a year.”

Was Boyle avoiding his eyes? “I don’t know, Commander,” he said brusquely. “I don’t make policy. They do that down at Space Center.”

“Nothing medical, I hope?”

“Bailey’s fine.”

“That’s good to know. I’ll look forward to helping give him a good send-off at the party.”

The captain’s red face seemed to get a shade redder. “He won’t be at the party,” he said. “He’ll be leaving on the next shuttle.” He looked at his watch. “About ten minutes from now.”

Captain Boyle’s party was turning into a noisy success. Most of the crew had made some effort to dress up in Earthside clothes for the occasion, and there was a glitter of bright colors and iridescent fabrics. A couple of the younger dancers of both sexes wore little more than sparklepaint and stickumcups, but Beth Oliver, the beautiful and sought-after chemistry chief, was stunning in a full-length kaleidogown that shifted from endlessly flowering geometric patterns that spilled out of scores of focal points to an eye-boggling infinite-depth effect as she twisted in time to the thrumming slipbeat. The dancers took advantage of the low gravity in the bubble lounge to do complicated midair pirouettes, sometimes joined and sometimes in facing pairs.

The bubble lounge, halfway up one of Eurostation’s main spokes, had a dreamlike quarter-gravity that went with the imaginative decor: space itself. The six enormous lobes of clear Lexan, bunched around the central shaft, brought the universe inside—an illusion that the designers had deliberately fostered by using the barest minimum of silvery, deceptively fragile-looking ribs to support the transparent plastic, and by the hologenerated sparks of light that flickered on and off throughout the interior, like stars passing through. Directly above, you could see the diminishing spoke and the hub of the station, but everywhere else you saw only stars, drifting by like a million Christmas lights.

Jameson, a lidded drink in his hand, was part of the group gathered around the Moog. Mike Berry was at the keyboards, rapping out a creditable slipbeat. He’d dialed in a seventeen-bar ground that the Moog repeated over and over again, with random computer variations of timbre and ornamentation, and there was some kind of raga, also computer generated, weaving in and out of it. He’d punched in three basic beats that slid through one another with hypnotic insistence, and over the whole framework he was improvising a primitive but energetic mélange of chords and runs that contained fragments of some of the more popular recent hits.

“Want to spell me, old chum?” Berry asked Jameson.

“No thanks,” Jameson said. “I’d rather enjoy my drink. I’ll suffer along with you.”

Maggie, leaning over the console, her hand on Berry’s shoulder, looked up and said, “Why don’t you? Mike tells me you’re good.”

Jameson laughed. “I noodle around a little—old music mostly. I’m no good at party stuff. I’d kill the dancing.”

“He’s right,” Berry said. “No sense of rhythm—even with the Moog to help him. He’s better off poking around with Bach and Mozart and Farnaby and all those other ancient foot-tappers he likes.”

“I don’t like committee music,” Jameson said good-naturedly. “At least the Chinese leave out the aleatory computer input.”

“He has a hyper ear for tone, though, I’ll give him that,” Berry went on imperturbably. “Did you know that behind that standard face lurks the gift of absolute pitch?”

“Is that true?” Maggie said.

Berry answered for him. “Of course, absolute pitch has nothing to do with musical talent. It’s just a freak ability.”

“Mike, on the other hand, has talent but a tin ear,” Jameson said. “Haven’t you noticed that the Moog’s out of tune? The last person who used it must have been fooling around with an enharmonic change between F sharp and G flat. I’ve been wincing for the last half-hour. You better clear the instructions and get it back to equal temperament.”

Unabashed, Berry went on playing.

“Can you really tell?” Maggie said.

Jameson’s attention was distracted by the sight of Sue Jarowski drifting over, with the new man, Gifford, in tow like a magnetized particle. Sue was wearing an off-the-bosom chlamys with what seemed to be nothing more than a spray-on on the revealed side. “Sure,” he said absently. “Won a lot of bets with it when I was a cadet—earned my pocket money that way. Used to bet I could tell a fellow what note his boot was squeaking on, or whether somebody had just belched in B flat or B natural.”

“Maggie’s an antiquarian too,” Berry said. “Collects old things.”

“Old physicists, you mean?” Jameson said automatically.

Maggie laughed. “Nothing too really hyper,” she said. “Twentieth-century plastic bottles, mostly.”

“Expensive hobby,” Jameson said.

Sue and Gifford pushed their way through the circle surrounding the Moog. Dmitri was hovering miserably nearby. Sue gave them all a big, earthy smile. Jameson wondered if he could pry Sue away from the party before Gifford did.

Berry lit up a joint and let the Moog do the work while his hands were busy. The dancers didn’t seem to notice. With Berry no longer hammering away, the computer reached into its memory and filled in the gap with a standard contrapuntal theme that would go with the raga. It sounded fine.

“Have a gasp,” Berry said, passing the joint to Gifford. “This is all organic—no synthetic THC added.”

“Thanks,” Gifford said, taking a drag and passing it to Sue. “Too bad about Roy, but his hard luck’s my ticket to Jupiter.”

“Glad to have you aboard,” Jameson said.

“Oh, here’s our other new man,” Sue said. “Hi.”

Jameson looked around and saw Klein standing on the fringes of the group, a plastic-lidded mug in his hand, his eyes roving over the dancers across the way. He turned around and nodded—reluctantly, it seemed to Jameson.

“Hey, you were on Mars,” Gifford said. “Do you know Raul Peterson? Stocky guy. Seismologist assigned to Tharsis.”

“I was at Syrtis Major,” Klein explained. “Excuse me.”

He threaded his way through the crowd and walked in his heavy boots over to the circular bar that skirted the center of the lounge. The two barwomen were both busy, so Klein reached across to help himself. As Jameson watched, Klein thumbed his mug open and started to pour himself a cup of coffee. Just as Jameson was thinking that it was a little odd for Klein to be drinking coffee this early in the party, there was a scream and a little flurry of confusion up at the bar. Klein had managed to spill hot coffee over Beth Oliver, and himself, too. The coffee had streamed right past the rim of the mug and splashed them both. Klein hadn’t allowed for the sidewise curving effect, of the Coriolis force when he poured. It seemed an odd lapse for someone who was supposed to be used to space.

Klein, his sallow face turning livid, was apologizing to Beth, and the United German barmaid was hurrying over with a damp cloth to mop up Beth’s kaleidogown. Jameson craned his neck to see above the heads of the crowd, but then Sue, her voice raised against the din, was saying something to him, and he forgot about Klein.

By the time the intruder from Cygnus crossed the orbit of Neptune, its mass had shrunk to approximately that of the planet Earth. It could be picked up visually now by the 500-inch Sagan reflector on the Moon and the smaller mirror at L-5. With computer-enhancement of the images, its surface features—if you could call them that—could be seen quite plainly.

The Cygnus Object, as the freepie media called it now that its existence no longer could be kept a secret, turned out indeed to be an Earth-size plant, its surface masked by clouds of boiling hydrogen. It even had a moon—a seared, rocky body a couple of thousand miles in diameter—and it also had an inexplicable wobble, as if it were rotating about a common center of gravity with some massive object, one that the telescopes could not detect.

It was going to intersect the plane of the solar system at a shallow angle—about seventeen degrees from the ecliptic—and its speed was now low enough, at some fourteen miles per second, to assure that it would be captured by the Sun.

There was going to be a new planet in the solar system.

There was no hint in any of the stories that the Cygnus Object once had been a dangerous emitter of X-rays whose passage might have wiped Earth clean of life. There was no mention of the fact that it had shrunk from near-Jovian size in a matter of six months. Or that, against all natural law, it had unaccountably slowed to its present sedate speed from a velocity approaching that of light.

Fortunately for the authorities, the wandering planet had been obeying the laws of physics ever since it had come close enough to the solar system for Earthbound observatories and hundreds of amateur astronomers throughout the world to notice it, or its effects.

Independent observers were finding it remarkably difficult to get corroborating data from Farside or the Chinese observatory in the Jules Verne crater—though the Chinese claimed to have discovered the Cygnus Object first. Farside had issued a terse pressfax release just in time to prevent the Greater Japan observatory at Vladivostok from establishing a prior claim, and had said little since. Farside’s new director, Dr. Horace Mackie, was nowhere near as communicative and cooperative as Dr. Ruiz had been, and the man who had succeeded Mackie at the Sagan dome, a young former resident named Kerry, did nothing but spout officialese and academic doubletalk.

The newsies relied mostly on European and Japanese sources. There were enough compulsive talkers with Ph.D.s to give them all the copy and vids they needed about dead planets, torn from their suns, wandering through the void between the stars for millions of years. The story provided a brief circus for the public, and then it began to fade from the news.

Mizz Maybury was the first to notice anything.

She was on duty in the monitoring booth that shift.

For company she had a silent, flat-faced assistant named Sorg, who she knew worked for the NIB. There had been a lot of them ever since Dr. Mackie had become director: extra people, new arrivals from Earth or Mare Imbrium who didn’t seem to be doing anything much, or who, if they did, weren’t very good at their jobs.

“Set up the board for a visual fix on the visitor,” she said, glancing at her worksheet instructions. “I’m supposed to run some spectra tests this shift. You can use the small refractor.”

Sullenly, Sorg moved toward the panel. Maybury shuddered as he passed her. He was a pale young man, short and stocky. She didn’t like the way he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.

Unconsciously her hand strayed to the dollar-sized shaved spot on her skull, where she’d been braindipped. The hair was starting to grow back, and it itched. They had told her that removing the tiny sample of cortical tissue for chemical monitoring during questioning—they took less than a cubic millimeter—couldn’t possibly harm her. She’d hardly felt the prick of the dialytrode needle as it penetrated her scalp. But all the same, she hadn’t felt the same since her arrest. It was more than a little scary to be locked up in a tiny room for a week while those dreadful men shouted at you and asked you questions and made all sorts of terrible accusations just to see how you’d react. They’d even told her that Dr. Ruiz had confessed that she had helped him sell information about the Cygnus Object to the Chinese! She knew that couldn’t be true. And then, when they couldn’t shake her, all the questions about who she’d talked to since the sighting. All of them had been checked out, including her ailing grandmother on Earth. Finally, when they were grudgingly satisfied, all the warnings—threats, really—about not discussing her work with anybody—not even her coworkers at Farside. She hadn’t been allowed her six-month Earth furlough; and even a pass to Mare Imbrium was hardly worth it any more, with the government hassle.

For once, Sorg had managed to talk to the Farside computer without being asked to repeat himself. The photoplastic plate in front of her came to life with the Cygnus Object’s hazy disk. The speck of light off to the side was its moon.

Maybury applied herself to her job. While she was at it, she hooked in the bolometer and took the planet’s temperature.

It was hot, despite its long sojourn in the chilly depths of interstellar space. No walking barefoot on its still-unseen surface unless you wanted to burn your feet! That terrifying blast of X-rays as it plowed its way through the interstellar hydrogen must have warmed it up considerably—and warmed it all the way through. The surface temperature hadn’t dropped by any noticeable fraction of a degree since the last bolometer reading.

She finished her measurements. Another moment and she would have told Sorg to switch off the image. But she just happened to be still looking at the plate when it happened.

A first-magnitude star suddenly bloomed between the planet and its moon.

Almost at the same moment, an enormous whirlpool of hydrogen clouds began to form on the side of the planet facing the star.

Maybury blinked, unable to believe her eyes. Meteorological phenomena thousands of miles across just didn’t develop in the space of a few minutes!

She looked across at Sorg and hesitated. She really should call Dr. Mackie at this point. If anything interesting was developing, she’d probably be shooed out of the booth. That’s the way things had been going at Farside since Dr. Ruiz had left. Her small jaw tightened stubbornly as professional pride took over. Sorg, lounging against a console, hadn’t noticed anything. She punched her queries into her lightpad and thumbed them into the computer.

Data began to dance across the lightpad; she had told the computer not to duplicate the display on any of the data boards. She watched for several minutes, then set the computer to continuously monitor the planet’s position against the solar orbit the observatory had plotted.

Sorg was sauntering over in her direction. She looked down into the photoplastic plate—hooded to keep out stray light—and gasped.

The new star was moving.

It was moving fast enough for the eye to see—about as fast as the second hand on an analog-style watch. From its initial position of about three planetary diameters from the Cygnus Object, it crossed in front of the planet.

It wasn’t a star. It was something bright in orbit around the planet. A pinpoint of brilliant blue-white light.

She did a quick mental calculation, timing its passage across the face of the planet. It covered the 8,000 miles in twelve seconds.

The thing was whipping around the shrouded planet at something more than two million miles per hour. And it was picking up speed. It winked out as the planet eclipsed it. The eclipse lasted some nine seconds.

It was accelerating at—her forehead wrinkled with disbelief—at a rate equal to tens of thousands of gravities! And why wasn’t it flying into a higher orbit? What tremendous force could be tying it down like that?

There was something else. The whirlpool of clouds was moving across the smudged face of the planet, following the moving star. She tried to imagine what a hurricane with winds of more than two million miles per hour would do to a landscape.

She reached for the communicator button. A hand slapped down over it before she could press it.

“What are you doing?” Sorg snapped.

“I’m calling Dr. Mackie,” she said. “Now get your hand off that button.”

Mackie took twenty minutes to arrive. By that time, the orbiting spark was whizzing round and round too fast for the eye to follow. It looked like a hoop of glowing wire around the planet—a ring of etched light.

The hydrogen whirlpool was no longer distinguishable. In its place was a blurred white band girdling the planet. The rest of the cloudy surface seemed to be seething violently.

And if you looked closely, you could see a rim of ghostly spider webs connecting the planet’s blurred belt with that strange shining halo. The effect was nothing at all like Saturn’s rings. It was a totally unfamiliar phenomenon.

“What’s this, what’s this?” Mackie fussed. His tone seemed to accuse her of being responsible for something untoward.

She tried to tell him about the circling spark that was responsible for that ring of light, but he dismissed her impatiently. He pursed his lips disapprovingly when she attempted to explain about an acceleration of hundreds of thousands of feet per second per second. He wouldn’t believe it until he’d resurrected the vids himself from the data banks.

But he didn’t kick her out of the booth, and she was grateful for that. There was a lot of work to do, and the two of them got busy. Neither of them noticed when Sorg slipped from the room.

Maybury worked straight through the end of her shift, and stayed on with the extra people Mackie had called in to help. He kept them all very busy with visual observations; spectra and bolometer readings—becoming very excited at the rise in surface temperature detectable over the next few hours, caused, most probably, by the scouring friction of those million-mile winds.

But it never occurred to him to recheck the planet’s solar orbit. Maybury finally was able to get his attention long enough to show him the numbers still unreeling on her lightpad.

“Good God!” he said, when he finally assimilated it. “I wish Ruiz were here!”

There was no doubt about it. The planet from Cygnus was moving again.

It was a course correction. It was against all the rules of celestial mechanics. Not even the powerful gravitational tug of Jupiter could account for the planet’s being torn from its solar orbit that way.

Mackie made everybody drop everything and apply themselves to this new phenomenon. So he was caught flat-footed ten hours later, when the wire hoop of light flickered and faded and became a spark again—a spark that slowed over the next twenty minutes and then abruptly extinguished itself.

The planet and its blistered moon had stopped changing direction. They were hurtling along a new path, but one that obeyed Newton’s laws of motion.

Maybury stood on tiptoe and peered past Mackie’s stooped shoulders to the viewplate. Mackie had plugged in the Sagan reflector, with Kerry’s assent, and the view of the planet’s disk was magnificent.

The face of the planet lay bare: a smooth rocky desert shorn of its hydrogen clouds except for a few wispy remnants.

It was dead now. That was the inescapable impression you got, looking at it. It had roused itself briefly and mysteriously, and now it was an inert ball of cooling rock.

But that last burst of effort had done its work.

Maybury tiptoed away and asked the computer for an entirely unauthorized projection of the planet’s new trajectory. The answer made her gasp; she’d have to show it to Dr. Mackie as soon as she could tear him away from the viewplate.

There was no doubt about it.

The planet from Cygnus was going to go into orbit around Jupiter.

Ruiz fed a newdollar into the slot and fidgeted impatiently until a holofax dropped into the tray. The news machine in the beachfront refreshment pavilion was the only one he’d been able to find in the whole government rest camp, except for the one in the lobby, and he didn’t feel like walking across a quarter mile of hot sand to get there. Workers who were lucky enough to rate a free vacation on the Nevada coast weren’t much interested in news of the outside world.

For Ruiz it was different. He chafed at the long absence from his work. It was exasperating not to know what was going on with the Cygnus Object—except for the sanitized snippets of information released to the general public. It was exasperating—and humiliating—not to be able to get through to his former colleagues on the Moon; there was always some “difficulty.” Oh, they were sugar-coating his enforced sabbatical, with make-work assignments and the lecture obligations that they’d discovered in the small print of his contract, and privileged holidays like this one. Until the government figured out what to do with him.

He was an embarrassment. The government didn’t like to admit mistakes. Ruiz was a leftover mistake.

The mistake had begun when they put him under house arrest almost as soon as he stepped off the Moon shuttle. The end of the world was politically sensitive information, it seemed. They just didn’t trust him not to blab.

Now that it appeared that the world wasn’t going to end after all, they didn’t trust him to cooperate with the cover-up, which was in full swing now. It wouldn’t do at all to let a powderkeg population of a billion know that their government had suppressed doomsday. Ruiz had too crusty a reputation. It was safer to have a poor frightened hack like Horace Mackie in charge of the crucial flow of information at Farside.

Ruiz squinted at the garish yellow ball of the Sun, shedding its fierce light on the herds of naked people facing seaward. It warmed his chill bones, baking out the old pains. He supposed he was lucky to be enjoying the luxury of Govpark instead of shivering in an isolation cell somewhere. Probably he could thank Harris for that; the man had brains enough to realize that Ruiz, despite his origins, couldn’t possibly have gotten where he was in GovCorp unless he had some discretion.

Ruiz sighed. Why couldn’t they understand that he had no desire at all to stir up problems? All he wanted was to get back to the Moon, where he could be useful.

A pair of young Govgirls strolled by, big and healthy and tanned, wearing only the briefest of fronties, white teeth flashing, repellesprayed hair still shaking out beads of salt water from their swim. They gave him a cursory glance, then walked on.

Ruiz didn’t belong here, with his seamed face and knobby joints, his hollow chest and baggy jockstrap. He stood there in the hot, insistent sun, squinting at the fax sheet, looking for all the world like some undernourished Privie who’d gotten in by mistake.

He was blocking the entrance to an eats booth, but he didn’t notice the annoyed glances he was getting from people who had to squeeze past him. He was studying the sheet in his hands with growing rage.

The holofax showed a scarred rocky globe with a headline in three-dimensional block letters hanging in front of it. The headline read:

He tilted the fax first to one side, then to the other, to see the part of the planetary surface the letters were obscuring. There were no surprises: just scorched rock like the rest of it. He snorted in disgust and read the brief story floating in white type in the illusory space beneath the sphere. There were no surprises there, either. It was substantially what he’d overheard a few minutes earlier when some bather had walked by with portable holovid blaring:

Ruiz crumpled the holofax angrily and dropped it on the boardwalk. So that was the pap they were going to feed the public! Updated computations!

It had taken some unimaginable force to tear that planetary mass from its solar orbit and aim it so that it would be captured by Jupiter. The universe was turning out to be a very queer place indeed, and here he was, stuck in this expensive sandbox for spoiled Guvie brats, while a stuffed gabacho like Mackie had all of Farside’s facilities to play with.

Hot tears of frustration in his eyes, Ruiz stared out over the water. Swarms of boisterous pink bathers splashed in the near surf, and farther out bright little sailboats bobbed against the translucent sky. It was hard to believe that this sparkling bay once had been known as Death Valley, before the ’09 earthquake had split the coast open and opened a channel to the sea.

He shook his head; best take advantage of it while he could. There’d been nothing like it for people like him while he was scrabbling for survival in the stinking tents of New Manhattan.

Ruiz hitched up his jockstrap and picked his way awkwardly through the sprawled sunbathers to the water’s edge. After a dip, he felt better. He picked up his gear and started the long trudge across the desert sands toward his assigned hospice. He’d give it one more try. Maybe this time they’d let him talk to Mackie. He pretended elaborately not to notice the arbee in the striped robe and mirrorglasses who followed him back.