The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 6

For a moment, as the ablative port shields shredded and whipped away into the wind, Jameson caught a fine view of Greater Houston spread out below him: a glittering sprawl of bright cuboid shapes stretching for a hundred miles along the Gulf Coast. Inland, at the center of that vast multicolored jumble, was the graceful mile-high stalk of the Federal Tower, its entire south face a shimmering parabolic cliff reflecting the sunlight of the hundred acres of solar collectors skirting its base toward a focus at the Houston Electrical Authority plant across the river. It was still in use after forty years, despite the gradual conversion to fusion power that had begun in the early decades of the century.

Offshore, rising from the rich blue waters of the Gulf, he could see the moored ranks of thousands of wind machines bobbing on their submerged floats: delicate-looking lattices hundreds of feet high, with propeller blades spinning like bright dewdrops all across the spider-web surfaces.

As far as the eye could see, across the surrounding Texas countryside, were the shining spokes of the solar farms, alternating with green strips of cropland growing chimeric soycorn and peanuts and wingbeans—food and energy for the megalopolis and its satellite cities. More than a hundred million people, the largest urban population in North America, lived in the Houston-San Antonio-Dallasworth triangle.

The horizon tilted as the great shuttlecraft banked toward the Dallasworth spaceport. Jameson settled back and watched the landscape flash by beneath him. The solar farms gave way to a drab patchwork of farmland dotted with small skyscrapers. After another ten minutes the green became increasingly pebbled with dull gray, as Dallasworth’s outskirts yearned toward merger with Houston. Then the shuttlecraft banked again and dropped like a stone as it entered its final glide path. There were audible gasps from the more inexperienced travelers. Jameson had a glimpse of looping freeways, a blurred impression of serried roofs, horizon to horizon, and then the huge manta-winged craft dipped and skidded to an abrupt stop.

The pilot was skillful; reentry vehicles have all the responsiveness of a brick at their 200-mph landing speed. Only a mild jolt threw Jameson and the other passengers forward against the corsets that encased them from armpit to hip. He could see his seatmate, a pert little brunette from the Moon, wince as the stretchband briefly flattened her breasts, and then the automatic clamps snapped free, a chime sounded, and the passengers began peeling themselves out of their cocoons.

“Please stay in your seats, ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot’s voice came over the com. “The conveyer will hook up as soon as our outer skin cools off a bit.”

No one paid attention. The passengers were struggling to their feet, jolly and befuddled by the drinks and joints they’d been served before reentry. More than a hundred of them were milling noisily in the narrow aisles: tourists returning from Mare Imbrium and Eurostation’s vacation inn, lunies, scientific and support personnel. They clutched their little souvenir packs with the ounce of Moon rock and the bottle of vacuum, and called back and forth to one another.

“How does it feel to have Earthweight on you again?” Jameson said to the woman. She very sensibly had remained in her seat while they were waiting.

“Good,” she said, flashing him a smile. “I haven’t been back for almost a year.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “I thought you Farside people got terrestrial furlough every six months.”

“I … I couldn’t get away,” she said. There was an awkward silence. She suddenly seemed preoccupied.

“Well…” Jameson said. “Planning to spend your leave in this area? There’s certainly a lot to do. You’re just in time for the start of the Houston theater season, and the San Antone Fiesta—”

“No,” she said. “I’ll be taking the tube to Nevada.” She stood up. “It was nice meeting you, Commander Jameson. Have a good leave, and good luck on your mission.”

She shook hands with him and disappeared into the crowd that was flowing toward the exit. The conveyor had arrived with a thud against the hull, and the big oval port swung inward; Jameson watched her go with faint regret. He had been on the verge of asking her to dinner.

He joined the surge to the exit, a tall, lean figure with his black hair cut spaceman-short. He looked cool and neat in lightweight gray slacks and an open-necked white shirt. He carried nothing but a small zipbag.

A beefy tourist, loaded down with cameras, last-minute purchases, and a bulging shoulder bag that had doubtless seemed light on the Moon, bumped into him. Jameson helped him retrieve a gift-wrapped bottle of champagne from Eurostation—one that had come from Earth in the first place. “Thanks,” the man said. There was hash on his breath. “What a trip, but there’s no place like home, right?” Jameson agreed with him politely and helped him negotiate the moving belt to the terminal. Around him cameras were clicking as they were carried past the controversial memorial statue of John F. Kennedy, an heroic nude more than fifty meters high, molded of gleaming polymers; the figure balanced a representation of the Moon in one hand and held a rocket aloft like a sword in the other.

His clearance through customs was fast. The inspector flipped to the holopic in Jameson’s ident-book and said, “Hey, you’re not the Commander Jameson that’s going to Jupiter?”

“I’m the one,” Jameson said.

The inspector snapped the book shut and shoved it briefly under the scanner linked to the federal computer. There was no warning light. The computer noted Jameson’s, position on the planet, along with the last known positions of a billion other Americans, and sent the appropriate signals to both the central locator files and Jameson’s own biographical file. It also automatically deducted his port-entry fee from his bank account.

“Nothing to declare, right, Commander?” the inspector asked cheerfully.

“Not a thing.”

The inspector slid the zipbag over to him, unopened, and handed him back his book. “Enjoy your stay, Commander,” he said. “And give our regards to the beasties on Jupiter.”

“I’ll do that.” Jameson laughed. He took his bag and headed for the slideway to the levi-car terminal.

He’d just missed a car. He was in time to see it rolling down the tube, retracting its landing wheels from the tunnel’s side flanges as it picked up speed and began to levitate.

The next car slid in a minute later, a long, sleek, windowless bullet, painted with graffiti. It was amazing how teenagers painted their slogans on the hulls during the few seconds a levi-car was at rest.

Curved sections of hull swung open and became ramps. Jameson boarded with long strides, found a seat, and sat down. He kept his zipbag in his lap. The hull sealed itself shut, and the levi-car launched itself smoothly down the tube.

The car rocked slightly as the side wheels retracted and the vehicle began to hover above the guideway, riding on a cushion of magnetic flux. Shielding coils under the floor protected the passengers from the intense fields generated by the superconducting levitation magnets. There was a momentary feeling of lag as the car’s bullet nose penetrated the elastic petals of the first tunnel seal, a second momentary resistance, and then the car was hurtling down the evacuated tubeway in full electromagnetic flight. Jameson raised his eyes to the display board at the front of the car. The reeling numbers told him that Greater Houston was 221 miles away, that they were building quickly toward their optimum 600-mph speed, and that E.T.A. was approximately 23 minutes.

His seat companion was a priest, a large jolly woman with close-cropped hair, wearing a gray cassock with a government badge and serial number pinned below one shoulder. “Your first visit to Houston?” she asked.

“Yes, Parent,” Jameson said, remembering his manners. His own family had been nominal members of the Church of the Reborn—his father, he suspected, for career purposes, though all registered religions were theoretically equal in the eyes of the government. “How could you tell?”

The priest laughed. “You had that eager look. It always shows. I hope Houston won’t disappoint you.”

“I’m sure it won’t. I’m a small-town boy myself. I’m looking forward to my choice of theaters; concerts, the holo pageants…”

“And some earthier amusements too, I don’t doubt,” the priest said, a twinkle in her eye. “You look like a healthy young man. I won’t preach at you—the Good Lord knows that clergypersons have a stuffy enough reputation as it is—but take my advice and stay away from Privatetown. You’ll have plenty of fun without slumming—and it could be dangerous.”

“Thanks for the advice, Parent,” Jameson said, grinning. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“You young people.” The priest sighed. “Well, remember to keep a tight grip on your bankchip.”

She went back to reading her breviary, an old-fashioned LED model with start-and-stop scanning, and Jameson amused himself by studying his fellow passengers. They were mostly civil-service bankers and brokers, wearing conservative candy-stripe or polka-dot suits, with a sprinkling of Partnership entrepreneurs, noses buried in the evening business faxes. Farther up, in an aisle seat, was a rich Privie in a gaudy ruffled suit with enormous puff sleeves, talking too loudly to his seatmate, a clerkish little man in olive drab who kept trying to shrink away from him. Jameson reminded himself that he wasn’t prejudiced. Two Indian businessmen were seated across the way, probably on their way to the Federal Tower to sell IndiaBurma technology or buy American rice or soycorn.

At the Greater Houston terminal, Jameson said good-bye to the priest and let himself be swept along by the crowd to the bustling upper level. He followed a blinking floor pattern to the cab stand. Ignoring the swarms of scruffy-looking hustlers who clamored at him, he chose a reliable-looking flywheel trike and rapped on the driver’s compartment at the rear. The driver looked him over from inside his Lexiglass pod, nodded, and pressed the latch release. Jameson stepped quickly inside the front bubble and lowered the canopy over himself—but not before he had had to throw a scattering of bucks at the urchins who were pursuing him.

“The MacDonald Towers,” he said.

The driver engaged the superflywheel, and the three-wheeler pulled out into traffic. Through a gap on the far side of one of Houston’s celebrated people plazas he caught a glimpse of the Federal Tower. Seen from ground level, it was a stupendous brown obelisk rising into the sky, its mirror side curving impossibly outward.

Then the streets became less fashionable. The driver speeded up and kept to the middle of the roadway as they passed dank alleys where sullen men in faded, once-gaudy clothing loitered and illegal lean-tos made of discarded sheets of plastic or cardboard sheltered whole families in a space large enough for only a couple of mattresses and a few cooking utensils. There were women here who would sell themselves, for a bowl of snow rice, and men who would slit your throat for a newbuck. The sidewalks were swarming with them—hordes of noisy, shabby people who jostled one another, bargained at makeshift stalls that sold cast-off junk—all managing to exist somehow on little more than the Federal subsidy. Flies buzzed around a ramshackle butcher’s stall festooned with the carcasses of what looked like—Jameson strained to see—skinned rats; he told himself they must be beef hamsters.

A potbellied child with broomstick arms and legs darted out in front of the cab. The driver cursed, braked, and managed to swerve around him.

“Bad place to get caught,” he told Jameson through the battered speaker. “Driver I know ran over a kid near here. Accident—the kid ran outa nowhere. But the crowd dragged him outa his cab and beat him to death, while the fed on the beat looked the other way. Left the passenger alone, though. Somebody even got him another cab.”

“That’s comforting,” Jameson said.

“Yeah. I dint wanna take the long way round. Wheel’s running down. Gotta recharge it after this trip.”

“You must be having a good day, then,” Jameson said. The kind of vacuum-sealed fiber composite flywheels used in small taxicabs generally stored enough energy for two or three hundred miles of city driving.

“Not bad,” the driver said noncommittally.

Jameson knew he was in for it. When a fare got taken to a luxury complex like the MacDonald Towers, he got taken by the cabbie, too. But Jameson had decided to splurge on his last vacation before leaving Earth for the next year and a half.

The Towers were built on a tooth of land projecting into Galveston Bay. The old Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center had once stood here, before it was dismantled at the turn of the century. Now it was a parklike preserve that occupied a half-mile strip along the shore. Farther inland was a smudge in the sky that indicated residential and industrial areas, but over the water the sky was clear and blue.

He could see the harlequin splendor of the Towers now—candied minarets that looked like something out of a fairytale. The late-afternoon sunlight sparkled on intricate balconies, hanging shrubs, and the soaring fantasy-arches that branched from each of the four bases to recurve and join in the center of the glittering complex.

The three-wheeler pulled into a wide circular drive, between two pillboxes joined by an overhead portcullis. The driver flashed something, and a bored Marine guard nodded him through. Jameson caught sight of a few listless beggars loitering hopefully outside the gate; and then they were bumping along past green lawns and fountains and massed floral displays. The fare came to a hundred dollars even. Jameson thumbed an added twenty-percent tip into his credit-transfer chip and inserted it briefly in the slot. The driver had to manually transmit the transaction to the dispatching computer by radio, but after a moment there was a beep and the passenger canopy unlatched.

“You’re welcome,” Jameson said, and climbed out of the pod. Instantly he was assailed by a dozen ragged, dirty urchins competing for his attention and his zipbag. How they managed to sneak onto the grounds was a mystery. Before the hefty Marine doorman was able to shoo them away—using the butt of his submachine gun rather too freely, Jameson thought—his left shoe had been shined, a deft little hand had explored the inside of the wrong pocket for his bankchip, and an enterprising eight-year-old had offered his virgin sister.

“This way, sir,” the doorman said, and Jameson followed him into the lobby.

The lobby was a four-acre parkland of winding mosaic paths, impossibly brilliant flower beds, gaudy pavilions where people sat and watched the passing scene. There was a lake in the center with tiny barges, each holding a low mushroom table and four chairs. Waitresses in swimsuits pushed floating trays of drinks to the patrons. People in holiday clothes strolled along the geometric walks, past peppermint kiosks. Around the vast perimeter was an arched arcade with cafés and theaters and shops.

Jameson was too tired to make plans. All he wanted was a hot shower, a change of clothing chosen from his room vid, a few drinks, and an early dinner at one of the restaurants up top. Then a fresh start in the morning—maybe shark fishing in the bay, or some skiing at the hotel’s indoor fluoroslope.

He threaded his way through the jostling, goodnatured lobby crowds toward the spiral elevator platform. One of the bubble cars had just alighted. It opened like a flower, and a dozen people stepped out. One of them was a tall, skinny redhead in a green jumpsuit. Their eyes met in mutual surprise.

“Tod!” she said.

“Maggie! Maggie MacInnes! What are you doing here?”

The question seemed to startle her. Then she recovered, and freckles crowded one another around a wide grin. “I live here,” she said.