The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 5

“Sorry I’m late,” Li said. “Struggle Group meeting.” He made a wry face. “We had to elect a new leader, and the self-criticism dragged on longer than usual.”

“Yuan yu,” Jameson said, giving Li a crooked grin of sympathy. “I thought Chu Lo was Struggle Group leader.”

“Didn’t you hear? Chu Lo got rotated Earth. They send up new biologist this morning. Lady name Tu Jue-chen.”

“Who’s the new leader?”

“Tu Jue-chen,” Li said blandly. “Only democratic way.”

Jameson diplomatically said nothing. If Peking Center wanted to replace their political watchdog this close to countdown, it was their business. He was just thankful that it was a biologist and not somebody involved in the operational safety of the spaceship.

The two of them set off down the corridor toward Stores, helmets tucked under their arms. The great ship was eerily silent, sound smothered in foam. A quarter of the crew was on Earth leave, or at Eurostation awaiting transportation. There was ample room in the 600-foot doughnut of the spin section to dilute the rest of the crew—now grown to almost eighty people.

The sandaled feet of an approaching crewman came into view as they advanced along the upward-curving floor, and gradually the rest of him emerged from the ceiling’s eclipse. It was Kiernan, the wiry little hydroponicist, muttering to himself. As he drew abreast, he said, “If you’re headed for Stores, that new bastard’s going to give you a hard time.”

“What’s the matter?” Jameson asked.

Kiernan jerked his head angrily toward the exit. “I wanted to check out a couple of parts bins to use for seedlings. They’re just the right size. Wang and I punch holes in them for drainage. This Klein makes a big deal out of it. Says they’re not authorized for that use—tells me to make out a requisition and he’ll have the proper equipment shipped over from Eurostation, and in the meantime I lose two days!”

“By the book,” Jameson said. “One of those.”

Kiernan disappeared down the corridor, still muttering. Jameson and Li turned into the next crosstube and found themselves in the supply bay.

There was some kind of argument going on at the desk. As they drew closer, Jameson recognized Chief Grogan. Grogan’s enormous competence had gotten him promoted from the original construction crew, and he would be coming along to Jupiter.

“Look,” Grogan was growling with forced patience, “I got five men waiting at the air lock to go on outside detail. I gotta have fresh charges for their scooters.”

On the other side of the counter, Klein’s narrow face was set woodenly. “I can’t issue you the new charges until you turn in the empties,” he said expressionlessly. “Those are the rules.”

“Rules hell!” Grogan said. “Those fragging scooters are tethered outside. I gotta go all the way back to the air lock, put a man in a spacesuit, wait till he vacs the lock, wait till he matches hub spin, goes out, gets the charges, matches spin again, waits for the air pumps, and hands me the tanks like a good little boy! Then I trot all the way down here and say, please, sir, can I have my charges now, sir! And in the meantime I waste an hour of the shift.” Grogan’s brick-colored face contorted with the effort of being polite. “Look, why can’t you just issue me the replacements and leave the paperwork for later. I’ll bring the empties down at the end of the shift. Bailey always used to—”

“Bailey isn’t here any more,” Klein said.

“But—”

“I’m responsible for everything that goes out of here.” Klein said. “You don’t get new charges until you account for the old ones. If you want to fill out a lost or damaged report…”

Grogan made a choking sound. He spat out a rude word and stormed out. Klein’s eyes flickered over Jameson and Li. “Yes, Commander,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Tongzhi Li, ching,” Jameson said to Li. “Can we have that shopping list?”

Li extracted a crumpled sheet of paper from a leg pocket and held it out to Klein. Klein didn’t take it.

“Just a minute,” Klein said. “I’ll get Tongzhi Chia in on this.”

“We’re kind of in a hurry,” Jameson said. “We’ve got to finish up outside before Communications closes down. Chia doesn’t mind, and it’s okay with Li and me—”

“It’s not okay with me, Commander,” Klein said. “Wait here.”

He came back with Chia Lan-ying. The Chinese stores exec was breathtakingly lovely, with a tiny flower face and great dark eyes. She moved with brisk efficiency. She was wearing a blue smock with the sleeves pushed up. Her little delicate fingers were grimy and ink-stained, and there was a smudge on her cheek. Jameson had always known her to be cheerful and cooperative, but today she seemed unhappy.

“Hau-a, Tongzhi Li,” she said severely, and then to Jameson: “Hello, Commander.”

“All right,” Klein said; “let’s start checking these things off. Do you have your book?”

“I can start getting those outside latch seals,” Jameson said. “I know where Bailey kept them.” He took a step past Klein and the girl.

“Just stay on your side of the counter, Commander,” Klein said in a flat tone. “Nobody except authorized personnel takes anything out of those bins.”

Jameson’s lips tightened, but he caught himself before saying anything. “All right,” he said. “But hurry it up, will you.”

Klein took his time. He fussed and nitpicked over everything. Jameson could see Chia Lan-ying developing more and more of a strained look; her response to Klein was a sort of tight courtesy. Jameson could understand it. It was no use trying to hurry Klein. If you got him off the track, it just had to be done over again. The pile of items on the counter grew as the harried clerks fetched them, one chit at a time. Finally Klein looked up.

“I guess that does it, Commander,” he said. “Will you verify the list?”

“I don’t have to. I’ve been keeping track as we went along. Just hand me that thing and Li and I will sign it.”

“We’ll have to check it all off. I’ll read off the items.”

Jameson restrained his impatience. They got through the list faster than he had expected. Klein actually smiled when they finished. Li, his face neutral, began to stuff things into a sack.

“Want to help me with this air tank, Lan-ying?” Jameson said. When Bailey had been stores exec, he’d often deferred to his Chinese co-worker, with her deft fingers.

“I’ll do that!” Klein said harshly.

The girl stepped back. Startled, Jameson couldn’t think of anything to say as he felt Klein fumbling at the valve connections behind his back.

“Don’t you know any better than to let a chi-com fool with your life-support equipment?” Klein whispered in his ear, loudly enough to embarrass Chia Lan-ying, who moved off and began to busy herself with a binder. “It’s against regs—and for a damn good reason. Any accidents where there’s the slightest chance the other side gets blamed—either side, Commander—and it could bollix up the whole mission. Think about it!”

Klein unlatched Jameson’s depleted tank, chalked it with an X, and added it to a pile of tanks in a canvas cart. He picked up a fresh tank from the pile of equipment on the counter and fastened it to Jameson’s harness.

“Careful when you screw in the T-valve on the switchover,” Jameson said mildly. “It’s a little tricky on this suit.”

“I’ve done this before,” Klein said irritably. “There you go, all set.”

“Did you check the safety on the pressure-relief valve?” Jameson asked.

“It’s all right, I said!” Klein snapped. He flipped all the latches shut, then moved away.

“Let’s go, Li,” Jameson said. They picked up their sacks and left.

Li waited until they were in the tubeway. “Not a very likable man, this Klein.”

Jameson’s accumulated irritation broke through and aimed itself at Li. A little bit of shamefaced loyalty to his own side was mixed in with it. “He doesn’t have to be likable,” he said shortly. “Just so long as he does his job.”

They walked to the nearest lift shaft in silence. They had to wait about five minutes. The wraparound door revolved to open, and Grogan and an assistant staggered out, hugging bulky scooter reaction tanks. Grogan grimaced at Jameson as he stepped past him. “Don’t empty your pissbottle while you’re out there, Commander,” he said. “That Klein joker’ll make you go back and count all the crystals.”

Jameson laughed and stepped inside. Li crowded in with him. The door slid shut with a hiss, and the circular platform began to rise. The lift shaft ran through one of the three equidistant spokes that connected the ship’s main ring to the hub and the thousand-foot spear that ran through it. It was three hundred feet to the hub—too far to walk and impossible to leap when the ship was under spin. Jameson felt his weight dropping fast as they ascended. The Coriolis force pushed at him, jamming him against the mesh wall of the cage. Then the cage stopped, the invisible fist released him, and he was so close to weightlessness that it made no difference.

Four of Grogan’s men were in the spinlock antechamber, playing a dispirited game of cards on a magnetic board that kept getting away from them. They were in skivvies and stickyslippers, their spacesuits bobbing from hooks on the wall behind them. They didn’t bother to look up as Jameson and Li unfastened the hatch to the spinlock and dove inside.

Jameson and Li helped each other with their helmets and gloves, then vacced the lock. The spinlock was an unpleasant place to be in for any length of time; though your weight was negligible this close to the center of the ship, the gradient between head and feet was quite noticeable. It made people feel odd, disoriented, a little nauseated. Through the little safety window Jameson could see the metal skin of the ship’s central shaft reeling past at two revolutions per minute. The wheel’s hub slid around that axle on frictionless bearings—the perfect ball bearings that had been cast under weightless conditions in one of the space factories swarming around Eurostation. Of course, total frictionlessness was impossible to achieve, but this came close enough; the minute amount of spin that was imparted to the thousand-foot axis of the ship was easily corrected once or twice a day by a modest computer-regulated flywheel.

Li released the brake. The anti-spin jets fired automatically, as soon as the computer verified that neither of the other two spinlocks had open outer doors. The unpleasant feeling disappeared as body fluids redistributed themselves. Jameson’s sinuses cleared. Through the little window he could see the motion of the inner hull slow down and stop. The spinlock fastened itself to the long shaft of the inner hull. Now the 600-foot wheel of the spin section was sliding around the spinlock’s outer ring of frictionless bearings in their Teflon track.

The two spacesuited figures pulled themselves aft along the webbing and cordage that restrained cargo. No-g wasn’t good for much of anything except stowage and the super-growth section of the hydroponics system. The boron fusion/fission engine was all the way aft, off limits behind thick bulkheads. Jameson could see the dull red glow of the warning lights in the murky distance—though this airless tunnel ought to be deterrent enough.

Jameson and Li emerged through a hatch roughly halfway down the tunnel. There was a dazzle of stars around them. Jameson pulled himself out on the hull and perched on a railing, enjoying the view. This was the only position where you could get some impression of the whole colossal work of engineering that was the ship. He was straddling a gigantic oar, with the bulbous knob of the command center at its forward end and the flaring skirt of the drive section at the rear. A small forest of antennae sprouted from the mushroom bulge of the bridge, and there was a cluster of spherical fuel tanks aft for the hydrogen-fusion part of the boron cycle. Otherwise the huge shaft was unbroken, except for the protective housings that held the Callisto lander and the automated probes.

But ahead of him, no more than fifty feet from where he sat, was the rotating bushing that contained the spinlocks and to which the three main spokes of the wheel were attached. He looked up and saw the great revolving circle he would be living in for the next year, as it swept steadily past the stars twice every minute. Here and there on the facing rim he saw little squares of light: illuminated ports. The ship would be ablaze with them when it began its outward journey.

“Come on, buddy,” Li’s voice said in his ear. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

Reluctantly Jameson dragged his eyes away from the stupendous moving archway above him. The whirling steel face in front of him was grinding away like a titan’s mill, its flailing arms as thick around as the first moon rocket had been. Jameson shuddered at the thought of the mass and momentum behind that motion. It made him feel like a fly clinging to a power-turbine housing. He turned away from it and crawled along a guiderail toward the plastic blister covering the lander.

Mothballing the lander was slow work. You couldn’t open the sack to look for the various small items you needed, because everything tended to float out at once; instead you had to feel around inside through an inverted sleeve, and with gloves on it was hard to trace the shapes of different objects. After an hour of it, Jameson and Li were getting impatient—and careless. Li was inside the blister when it happened. Jameson was outside, floating about two feet above the surface. He had just let go of his handhold so he could use both hands to get a tube of epoxy out of the sack.

Just at that moment there was a fluttering hiss inside his helmet as his number one air tank ran out and the switchover cycle to number two began.

And then he got a kick in the back.

He grabbed wildly for his handhold as he started to tumble, but he was too late. The jet of escaping air had nudged him a foot out of reach. It might as well have been a mile.

He was cartwheeling out of control. He hadn’t bothered with suit jets, for this job. Neither had Li. The valve of his number two tank was wide open and shooting him through space like a rocket. Before he could reach around behind him to try to do something about it, he had a new problem.

He was being squirted in a looping path toward the churning maw of the ship’s hub. An enormous metal arm swept past his vision. The entire mass of the wheel itself, a quarter of a million tons, was concentrated at the end of it.

There was no way he could stop himself. Helplessly he watched the next arm swoop down on him. With luck, it would barely miss him, and then, ten seconds later, the third spoke would bat him with the full momentum of the ship and slam him into the massive bushing that contained the spinlocks.

They’d have to scrape him off with butter knives.

Desperately he flicked out the sack he was holding. If he let go, was there enough mass inside it to push him in the opposite direction? Not a chance, with his inertia.

Instead he hung on. The sack curled itself around the descending spoke. There was a jolt that almost tore his arm off, and then he was sailing outward. The outer rim of the ship flashed by him. He saw a lighted port with a face behind it. The ship seemed to shrink. A minute later it was a child’s top, spinning in the void, and he was soaring up into eternal night. The air was gone from his helmet. He closed his eyes to save them, there was a fire in his chest as he sucked on vacuum, and then all his consciousness gathered itself into a single bright dot that shrank the way the ship had done. There was time to think that Li, still inside the lander pod, probably didn’t know yet what had happened, and if he did know there was nothing he could do about it, and then all the time was gone, along with the rest of that bright dot.

The light was too bright on his eyelids. He had the world’s worst headache. He was naked between clean sheets. There was weight on him, about two-thirds Earthweight, and he could smell ship’s air. He opened his eyes and sat up. He immediately regretted it. A heavy liquid seemed to be sloshing around inside his head.

“That’s a beautiful pair of bloodshot eyes,” a voice said.

It was Doc Brough. He was leaning over the narrow cot, a plump, sandy-haired man in shorts and a shirt with the tail hanging out. This was a cubicle in the ship’s infirmary. Over by the canvas wall, Li was standing next to Grogan. They both looked uncomfortable.

“You can thank those two,” Brough went on. “Comrade Li saw you sailing out to never-never land. Another minute and you’d have been invisible. They might have located you with radar in a day or two. Chief Grogan was just coming out of the outside lock with a couple of fresh scooter charges. He saw Li waving and pointing over by the lander pod. He didn’t even wait to put the charge in the scooter. He just jetted himself after you, riding the tank and steering by the seat of his pants. Damn lucky he didn’t cook his thighs and wherewithal. He’ll be walking gingerly a few days; I’ll tell you. Shared his air with you on the way back and got you right down here. Don’t worry, you aren’t a vegetable. You weren’t breathing space for more than a minute or two.”

Grogan lumbered over to the bed and took a wide-legged stance. “Anybody ever teach you to check your valves? he growled. “One arm of your T-valve was shut off tight. You vented your whole number two tank through the pressure-relief valve. And the safety came loose—wasn’t screwed in right.”

“Thanks, Chief,” Jameson said.

Grogan growled again and left with a curious gait. No one would comment on it unless they wanted a flattened nose. Li came over. “Schedule’s shot to hell,” he said. “I’ll go over the report with you when you feel up to it.”

“Thanks, Li,” Jameson said. “Excuse me. Hsieh hsieh, Tongzhi.”

“Don’t overdo it, buddy,” Li said with a quick grin, and left.

Jameson swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood up. “Where’re my shorts, Doc?” he asked.

Brough said, “Get the hell back on that bed. You’re not leaving here till I run a couple of tests.”

“Can’t wait, Doc,” Jameson said, padding over to the locker near the entrance flap. “I’ve got to see the captain.”

Captain Boyle was unhelpful. “File your complaint if you like,” he said stiffly. “But I won’t recommend Klein’s transfer.”

“Captain,” Jameson said, just as stiffly, “Klein almost killed me. And on top of that, he’s a damn bad stores exec.”

“He’ll learn.”

“Learn, hell! At whose expense? It’s going to be a long trip, Captain. You know we can’t afford baggage like Klein. What’s he doing here? What strings did he pull?”

“I won’t discuss it further, Commander,” Boyle said.

“All right, Captain, if that’s the way you want it. But I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

He turned to go. Boyle touched his arm. “Tod…” he said. He seemed uncomfortable about something.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’d help you if I could. But I’ll give you a piece of advice instead. Don’t file that complaint. It won’t do any good, and the people down below don’t like static.”

“Thanks for the advice, Captain,” Jameson said. “You’ll find the complaint on your desk in the morning.” His eyes held Boyle’s for a moment, and he walked out.

Sue was coming down the passageway, a sheaf of reports in her hand. She was wearing a duty tabard over her shirt and shorts, unbelted and flapping open at the sides. “How are you feeling?” she said. “I stopped down at Sickbay when I got off, but you’d already left.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “If my ears would stop ringing.”

“That Klein!” she said. For a moment her face flushed.

“Hey, don’t take it personally!”

“I can’t help it! I know that … that…” Her voice dropped, and she looked nervously around the corridor. “Captain Boyle was on the beam to Earth, raising ten different kinds of hell. I put the calls through. But he didn’t get anywhere with those stonewallahs at Mishcon! He was furious!”

He looked at her. Her chest under the tabard was rising and falling fast. “You bunking with the Giff tonight?” he said evenly.

She laughed. “No. He’s still sampling. I think it’s Beth Oliver at the moment.”

“Make room for a broken-down spacie? I’ve still got three days till Earth leave.”

“Any time, Tod,” she said. They squeezed hands, and she took her reports through to the captain’s quarters.

The shirt-sleeved young flight controller sat at his console, his finger poised above the firing button. He hesitated, then lifted the finger to a position in front of his face and studied it with undisguised admiration.

“This little pinkie’s worth a half billion newbucks, do you realize that?” he said with simulated awe. “That’s what it’s gonna cost the government a couple of seconds from now. Do you think it knows? Can fingers think?”

“Come on, Bedford, quit clowning,” the controller next to him said. “Push the damn button and get it over with. The course alteration’s all plugged in. I don’t wanna have to ask for a recomp.”

“Ah, brief moment of glory!” Bedford said theatrically, and stabbed at the red button.

Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen until the radio signal reached the vicinity of Jupiter, some forty-plus minutes from now: And they wouldn’t know if it had worked for another forty-plus minutes, when the telemetry data struggled all the way back.

There wasn’t much to do until then, so the dozen men on the team leaned back in their swivel chairs, sipped coffee, and traded desultory conversation.

The officials gathered in the glass booth at the rear of the room were more agitated. Shevchenko, the astronomer whose program was being superseded, was staring at the screen; looking grim. Beside him, the administrator for the Space Resources Agency, Harrison Richards, was biting his aristocratic lip as he watched half a billion dollars of his budget go down the drain for a project that hadn’t been in the year’s estimates. The deputy administrator, Fred Van Eyck, bespectacled and neat in crisp gray business pajamas, was nursemaiding a group of VIP’s from Washington, keeping them occupied and harmless with babytalk about the technical details of the mission. But there was sweat glistening on his high-domed forehead.

“Two years,” Shevchenko said bitterly. “Two years’ planning down the drain.” He was a small, untidy man with crumbs of food showing in the tangled oval around his mouth that he called a beard. He was wearing academic denims, faded and rumple-treated, with simulated patches badly dyed at the knees and elbows. Shevchenko’s parents had been part of the enormous wave of immigrants from a devastated Soviet Union in the 2010s, and, like so many second-generation Russians, he had an aggressive drive to succeed that sometimes irritated his more-secure colleagues.

Administrator Richards glanced nervously at the Washington bunch. Van Eyck was still keeping them busy. Shevchenko was definitely not playing the game, airing his gripes in their presence.

“We’ll tack as many of your experiments as we can onto the manned mission next month, Alex,” he said soothingly. “We ought to be able to salvage most of your program.”

“Salvage?” Shevchenko complained, spraying saliva with the sibilant. “And can you promise me that those cloudtop features in the south tropical zone will still be there six months from now? Eh, eh, tell me that!”

“There she goes!” one of the flight-dynamics engineers called from the front row of consoles.

With relief, Richards turned away from Shevchenko and looked up at the big central screen along with the rest of them. Van Eyck’s smooth, low-key spiel trailed off as the Washington people strained eagerly to see.

The vast orb of Jupiter was moving right and off screen, as the robot probe, half a billion miles away, swung on its axis. For a moment there was a stunning closeup view of Io in crescent phase, surrounded by the spooky yellow glow of sodium emission. Then the picture jumped and blurred as the probe’s thrusters fired a long burst, kicking it into a higher orbit.

“That does it,” Shevchenko said, looking close to tears. “No more fuel reserve now. There goes our cloudtop orbit.” There was garlic on his breath. Richards moved away from him.

“You can see the captured planet and its moon now,” Van Eyck was telling the VIP’s. “We think the moon will take up an independent orbit around Jupiter. The planet won’t be able to hold on to it now.”

He turned and spoke into a microphone. “How does our probe look, fellows?” he said.

The answer crackled through a loudspeaker in the booth as one of the flight controllers answered. “Right on target, Dr. Van Eyck.”

One of the VIP’s frowned importantly. It was MacPhail, the senator from Newfoundland, a big, portly man in a polyester kilt. Though his constituency was small, he was a power on the budget committee. “I couldn’t help overhearing what Dr. Richards said to Dr. Shevchenko. I know you people are anxious to get a look at this planet from outside the solar system, but isn’t it a fact that you’re altering the course of your probe with no… definite object? And in the meantime you’ve scratched a very expensive program that was planned with a view toward the efficient expenditure of tax dollars.”

Richards interposed himself hastily. “I appreciate your concern, Senator,” he said. “’But part of the original purpose of this unmanned mission was to insure the safety of the Jupiter crew.”

“I still think—”

“Come off it, Angus,” said one of the other VIP’s. It was Rumford of the Public Safety Commission, bearish and bleary-eyed after his Earth-Moon flight. “You know perfectly well that this is still a security matter. Don’t you remember the flap when we first discovered the thing and we came to your committee for funds to move troops and Reliability units into the major population centers? That thing may still have some surprises in it, and we’re not about to risk any public unrest at this point.”

MacPhail flushed. Van Eyck stepped smoothly into the situation.

“Let’s have some magnification, have a closer look,” he said.

He pressed a button, and the disk of the planet from Cygnus began to swell on the screen. The shadow of its moon had taken a small bite out of its edge.

“How did you do that?” someone asked. “I thought you needed an hour and a half for the radio waves to make a round trip.”

“Oh, the picture information is already here in the computer’s accumulator vat—it’s just like blowing up a high-resolution photo.”

Three-quarters of an hour before, the camera must have been in the middle of one of its back-and-forth pans to the Cygnus Object’s moon. Still zooming in, the camera was focusing on the space between the two planetary objects. Sunlight glinted off something in the void.

“Good Lord!” Richards said. “What are those?”

The camera was still zooming in, allowing a tantalizing glimpse of something unnaturally angular.

Then there was a dazzle of ruby light, and the screen went blank.

“Bedford!” Van Eyck roared through his microphone. “Get that picture back on!”

There was consternation among the ranked consoles down below. The flight controllers, some of them half out of their seats, were scrabbling over their buttons and dials. One of the systems-operation engineers had left his chair entirely and was leaning over the telemetry officer, yelling in his ear.

“It’s dead, sir,” Bedford’s voice came over the speaker. “The probe’s dead. The instruments say that everything heated up—fast! Then it died on us.”