The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 7

It was Jameson’s turn to be startled. He looked around the vast cylindrical chasm of the lobbyscape, his posture unconsciously conveying the outrage of the ruinous daily rates, and gulped: “You live here?”

Maggie laughed. “I mean in Greater Houston. I just come to the MacDonald for the skiing.”

“I was beginning to wonder if you were an Indian millionaire. Time for a drink?”

She looked at the watch painted on her wrist, a one-day film of multilayer time-release paint that matched her jumpsuit, good until you took a shower. “Well, maybe just a quick one,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to Dallasworth for dinner.”

“With Mike Berry?” he asked cautiously.

“Jeeks, no!” she said, making a face. “Mike’s spending his leave with his ex and their kid. I’m singling it.”

“Me too,” Jameson said. He and Sue had no firm understanding about what would happen when he returned. She had spent her own leave visiting her parents in Denver—a grim, gray place for a holiday.

They shared a martini slush, served in little silver cryo-glasses, at one of the canopied tables bordering the lake, and agreed to meet the next day.

“I’m not going to let you leave Houston without seeing some of the sights,” Maggie said firmly. “After that, the MacDonald can have you.”

“You won’t change your mind about dinner?” he said.

She glanced at the splash of paint on her wrist. Another slim wedge of green had just faded to a lighter shade. “Can’t,” she said. “I’m late now.”

She licked the last of her martini from the bottom of the cup and stood up. “See you tomorrow,” she said. Jameson watched her slim, straight figure until it disappeared into the holiday crowds.

She was waiting for Ruiz in his room when he returned from his afternoon walk along the beach. He came in all the way, tracking sand, and closed the door behind him. He’d been burned black by the sun, but otherwise his “vacation” hadn’t done him much good. He looked gaunt and drawn and tired, and he knew it. He drew his robe more closely around his bony shanks and asked, “How did you get in?”

“I told them at the desk that I was your daughter,” Mizz Maybury said. “They said I could wait for you here.”

She was sitting erect on his bed, a small, vulnerable figure in a short travel poncho and sandals, her hands folded in her lap. Square, competent hands, Ruiz noticed. He caught himself looking at her legs, still round and muscular despite all her months on the Moon.

“Daughter!” he snorted. “Granddaughter, more likely!”

He shuffled over to the wall vendette in his paper slippers and punched himself an iced fruitbeer. “Something cold to drink?”

Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. “Oh, Dr. Ruiz, you don’t know what it’s been like since you left!”

He waited until she was over it, then handed her a glass. “I can imagine,” he said dryly. “You know you shouldn’t be here.”

He noticed a small round patch on her head, about the size of a fivebuck, where her close-cropped dark hair seemed to be a little shorter. Fools, he thought. Fools and incompetents.

“Can’t you do something?” she said angrily. “Tell them—make them listen—come back and run things again—”

“They’re not interested in my opinions,” he said. “My opinions are an inconvenience to them.”

“I was there when one of your calls came through. Dr. Mackie wanted to talk to you, but they wouldn’t let him. He knows what the Cygnus Object has to be, but he’s afraid to come out and say so. Dr. Ruiz, he needs your help! I feel sorry for him!”

“I don’t have access to any of the new data about the Cygnus Object,” Ruiz said. “All I know is what I read in the faxes.”

“I’ve seen those,” she said. “They don’t say anything about the five smaller bodies. They can’t pretend those are natural phenomena!”

“Smaller bodies?” Ruiz brought his head up sharply. “Mizz Maybury, maybe you’d better start from the beginning.” He went over to the drawer and got his battered old pocket computer. He sat down on the bed beside her, cocking his head to listen.

She had just filled him in on the essentials when there was a heavy pounding and a harsh voice shouting “RB!” and somebody kicked the door open.

Two large, meaty young men burst into the room. Their hands were empty, but there was the bulky shape of weapons belts under their shirttails.

Ruiz half rose from the bed.

“Hold it, Gramps!” one of the men said. He crossed the room with a bound and gave Ruiz a shove in the chest.

Maybury made a little choking sound.

“What’s this about?” Ruiz asked in a steady voice.

The man looked both of them over, not bothering to answer. He was towheaded and pale, with narrow blue eyes. Maybury flushed at his scrutiny. Ruiz felt vulnerable and silly in his short robe with his knobby knees showing through.

The second man, a thick-necked fellow with a flattened nose, was pulling out the antenna of a communicator and talking into it. “We got ’em both. No sweat. The girl was in bed with him.”

“I wasn’t—I—” Maybury began. The towhead grabbed the computer from Ruiz and tossed it to his partner.

“Evidence,” he said. The other man put the computer in a shiny black shoulder bag.

“Okay, Gramps,” the towheaded one said. “Put on some clothes. You’re taking a trip.”

“Aren’t you supposed to show me some identification?” Ruiz said, sounding almost amused. “And read me the little homily about good citizens cooperating voluntarily with the government’s efforts to establish their reliability?”

The RB man sighed. “You wanna make trouble? Come on, move it!”

Ruiz got dressed under their watchful eyes. Maybury sat on the bed, eyes downcast, her face pale. By the time Ruiz was ready, she had gotten her trembling under control. The arbee with the flat nose grasped her roughly above the elbow and hauled her to her feet.

“Hands off her!” Ruiz snapped, his eyes smoldering dangerously. His intercession only got Maybury a painful, bone-grating squeeze.

“Take it easy, Gramps,” the other man said. “Awright, let’s go.”

Two hours later they were sitting in a windowless office north of Washington, D.C. Somebody in authority had thought them worth the expense of a suborbital flight in a military craft—and worth all the broken windows and deafened vacationers in Nevada before they got above the atmosphere.

“What are we going to do with you, Dr. Ruiz?” General Harris inquired from across an acre of polished desk. “And now you’ve gotten this young lady in trouble.”

His little beak of a nose was pinched and red in the sloping cliff that was his face. He drummed his fingers on the desk top.

“Trouble?” Ruiz said in a controlled voice. His eyes burned, red-rimmed, in a tired face. “Maybury was paying a kind visit to an old friend and former associate.”

Maybury said nothing. She sat in the big chair, hands in her lap, looking around the blank walls of the office.

“Giving—or receiving—restricted information is a Federal crime,” the general said. He pressed a button, and Maybury’s recorded voice came through a hidden speaker, telling Ruiz about the orbiting spark and the astonishing course change that had put the planet from Cygnus in orbit around Jupiter. Harris let it run for a minute, then switched it off.

“My Reliability Index hasn’t been lowered, as far as I know,” Ruiz said. “And Maybury has never received official notification that I’ve been barred from the receipt of observatory data.” He leaned back and waited.

“In security matters, a post facto determination can be made,” the general said. “As a matter of public policy—”

“As a matter of public policy, you’ve decided to use me, haven’t you,” Ruiz said. “Otherwise I’d be in a cell right now. Let’s stop the nonsense, General. What do you want?”

The general hemmed. Then he hawed. Then he looked at Maybury. He reached for a button.

“Maybury stays,” Ruiz growled. “She’s been bullied and harassed and braindipped. And now she’s going to hear what you have to say.”

“You’re a stubborn and cantankerous old man, Dr. Ruiz.”

“Never mind the flattery.”

“We want you to go along on the Jupiter expedition.”

Ruiz caught his breath. Then he said carefully, “Want to get me out of the way, do you? So that I can’t stir up any embarrassment for you while we’re discovering what that thing orbiting Jupiter is?”

The general’s lips tightened. “You’re determined to make things as difficult as possible, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

They locked eyes for a moment.

“We want an observer on the spot,” Harris said finally. “Somebody with an independent turn of mind. We’ll be drowning in observational data. We’ll need value judgments.”

Ruiz smiled sourly. “And I’ll be conveniently away from Earth while things are turning up.”

“We don’t want to lock you up, Dr. Ruiz. You’re a very important man.”

“Thanks for being blunt, General,” Ruiz said dryly. “I thought you’d never get around to that.”

“We can’t risk any public unrest,” the general said blandly. “You of all people ought to have learned that by now. If that thing out there turns out to be any danger to Earth—as you suggested when you first discovered it—there are all sorts of Rad elements ready to exploit the situation. The Chinese Coalition is just as worried about it as we are, I can assure you.”

“Why don’t you just arrest it?” Ruiz asked. “If it starts giving off X-rays again, that is.”

“I’m beginning to lose my patience, Dr. Ruiz.”

Ruiz scratched his ear. He stared at the ceiling. After a while he said, “That’s quite a choice. Get locked up or go back to work.”

“You’ll have full access to data,” Harris said eagerly. “And when you get back, and policy is firmed up on this thing, you’ll have your pick of options. Maybe a special project—”

“What happens to Maybury?”

The general pursed his lips. “We won’t prefer charges. Naturally, we’ll have to take steps to insure reasonable security. But when this is over…”

“Lock her up and throw away the key, is that it?” Ruiz said.

“I can assure you that the young lady will be given every consideration.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Ruiz said. “I’ll need an assistant. Somebody bright. Not one of your trained-seal brains. Send her along too. Maybury, how does that appeal to you?”

She leaned forward in her chair, eyes shining. “Dr. Ruiz, I’d do anything to go along with you! Anything but go back to Farside. Or the kind of place they were keeping you!”

“It’s all settled, then,” Ruiz declared. “No charges, and a nice title for her on the expedition. Something that will look good on her career record.”

“Dr. Ruiz!” the general sputtered. “I’m trying to be reasonable, but there are limits!”

“I’m sure there are,” Ruiz said. “But we haven’t reached them yet, have we.”

“Did you like it?” Maggie asked.

“It was … interesting,” Jameson replied delicately. He settled back in the narrow seat behind her and latched the bubble. The tricab pulled out of the lobby and into the street, the driver skillfully avoiding the beggars and Privie hawkers who clustered around each emerging vehicle before it picked up speed, pawing at the fastenings of the pods. Jameson twisted around for a last look at the Houston-Dallasworth Arts Center. The opera house, an immense iridescent egg balanced on end, had been built at the turn of the century, when architectural styles were beginning to take advantage of the new structural plastics.

“I thought you would,” Maggie said complacently. “You don’t know what I had to go through to get tickets.”

“I’m impressed,” Jameson said. “I thought it was sold out.”

It was the cultural event of the season—a sensational revival of Porgy and Bess with an all-white cast and a live symphony orchestra. The critics had acclaimed the brilliance of the conception: Catfish Row could have been Privietown, and Porgy and Jasbo and Sportin’ Life might have been some of the colorful characters you could find there.

“Isn’t it terrible the way Privies—I mean Private Sector persons—have to live,” Maggie said earnestly.

Jameson, his pre-theater supper still sitting comfortably in his stomach, said, “Maggie, any PriSec citizen is free to apply for Federal employment, get the housing that goes with it, make something of himself if he wants to. Most of them just don’t have the ambition.”

“You sound just like everybody else,” she flared. “Sure, Privies are lazy and dirty and ignorant! Give them enough subsidy tickets to keep their bellies full of rice and soycorn, give them a free high on Saturday night, give them a cheap holovid to keep them quiet, bottle them up and forget them! Well, I can’t be as smug about it as you! There are two hundred million Privies today—twenty percent of the population. You can’t just write them off!”

“Nobody’s writing them off. The Private Sector’ll be brought into the system gradually. These things can’t be done overnight.”

“You sound just like a Washington stonewallah!”

“Maggie, let’s not quarrel. We’re supposed to be out for a good time. You’re beginning to sound like a Rad.”

That stopped her. She reached back and squeezed his hand. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She laughed uneasily. “Just don’t tell Caffrey.”

The cabbie’s voice made an insect buzz in the battered speaker. “Here we are, mizz.”

The trike pulled into a huge Lexiglass-enclosed courtyard with manicured lawns and dwarf trees. Jameson paid off the driver and held the lid of the passenger pod open for Maggie while she climbed out. She was wearing a layered pettiskirt with leg tubes, but she managed it with a supple grace that surprised him. She turned to him with a big smile.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

Jameson looked around. Marine guards patrolled the walks, and transparent escalators rose to an elevated loggia lined with convenience shops. At either end of the court, visible through the arched roof, were twin residential towers, graceful trapezoids soaring a thousand feet into the night sky, ablaze with squandered energy. Jameson looked sharply at Maggie. It seemed rather expensive for someone with a computer tech rating. Maggie read his expression and said disarmingly, “I splurge on my rent. The view’s worth it. Otherwise, I’m disgustingly frugal.”

They passed a lobby security check, with a hard-eyed Marine sergeant studying their silhouettes on the screen of an ultrasonic mass detector, and rode a tinted transparent box up a central shaft to a floor that was very near the top. Maggie showed the holo pattern on her passbook cover to the door, and it let her in.

Jameson forgot to breathe when he saw the view. The city was a jeweled carpet spread out below. A pattern of streets stretched on forever like a spider web of glowing wires. The tall shapes of other residential towers rose out of the electric glitter like pillars of glowing coals. And there, across the silvered ribbon of a river, he could see the mile-high mirror of the Federal Tower dancing with reflected points of light.

He turned back to Maggie’s living room. It was sparsely furnished, but the pieces he could see looked good. There was a couch upholstered in an expensive coarse fabric, and an antique coffee table made of glass and driftwood. There was a transparent rocking chair facing the couch, and a Lexiglass cabinet holding Maggie’s collection of twentieth-century plastic bottles completely covered one wall.

“Fix yourself a drink and put some music in the slot,” she said, heading for the door at the far end. “I’m going to peel off these tubes and put on something more comfortable.”

Jameson wandered over to the omnisound hanging on the wall. Maggie’s collection of music cards was stacked untidily on a little shelf beneath it. He flipped through the plastic oblongs, reading the titles showing through the meaningless herringbone patterns of the holo imprints that held the music. It was the usual pop junk put out by the big music combines—creative-group stuff, with the words sung by whatever computer-constructed pseudovoices were the fads of the moment.

But there was a small stack of cards that didn’t seem to go with the rest. They looked newer, unplayed. Bach’s Art of the Fugue. A couple of Mozart symphonies. And—he blinked—the out-of-print collection of Farnaby virginal pieces he’d been trying to track down for years. How had Maggie managed to stumble on such a rarity?

He slipped the card into the slot of the omnisound, and the strange, otherworldly tones of “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame” began to float into the room. The Moog technician had given it a pure, lutelike twang, sustained beyond what would have been possible for a real instrument, but otherwise hadn’t tampered with it.

Jameson scooped some frozen martini from the nitrogen-chilled vessel on the sideboard and dropped it into a clear stemmed glass, where it caused a satisfying instant explosion of frost. He carried his drink over to the view window, and was losing himself in the glorious sparkle of the vista when Maggie entered the room, wearing a slinky green pantsgown made of some frictionless fluorocarbon material that slid over the surface of her body like oil.

“You must have been reading my mind,” she said. “You’re playing one of my favorites.”