The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 8

The image faded from the screen. “Is that all you have?” Ruiz asked.

“Yes, sir,” the NIB tech said, lifting his head from his knobs and dials. “We had less than a minute before the camera vehicle burned out. Only two frames at that rate of transmission. No time to adjust the focus—we were stuck with what was already in the memory accumulator. And as it was, we pushed computer enhancement to the point where that close-up image is ten percent conjecture.”

“Play it again,” Ruiz said.

He was sitting comfortably in an upholstered chair in the small semicircular projection room the NIB had cleared out for him. Maybury, grave and attentive, was seated next to him, an adequate little hand-held computer resting on her lap. General Harris was sitting a few seats away with a couple of his courteous thugs.

The tech replayed the sequence in real time. First there was that puzzling cluster of bent angular shapes, distorted by the computer’s efforts to achieve optimum resolution. Details were blurred, and there was a discontinuity in some of the straight lines that suggested image compromise. Thirty seconds of that, with the original zoom stopped. Then everything on the screen twitched as the second frame cut in. The things were moving, turning somehow. All the shapes were different. There was a slice of the Cygnus Object’s moon for comparison. That hadn’t changed at all. The third frame was nothing but a glare of red. That was when the camera vehicle had melted.

“Well?” General Harris demanded.

Ruiz pulled at his chin. “It appears that the planet from Cygnus brought some debris along with it. A moon. And now those things. They can only be artifacts.”

“Artifacts? Thirty miles across? Why not asteroids?”

Ruiz shrugged. “Don’t let the irregular shapes fool you. Don’t forget we’re seeing them in different planes. I’ll have to write a computer program to rotate them in three dimensions—with five different shapes, we ought to have enough input—but offhand I’ll guess that they’re Y-shaped or T-shaped, with a fourth axis at right angles to the other three. We never see fewer than three arms—the one at upper left was almost a perfect T—or more than four, like the one that resembled the Greek letter psi, where the long center tine might be the oblique arm seen in perspective.”

“We’d already come to that conclusion,” the general said with grudging respect. “We had a topology team on it.”

“So?” Ruiz lifted an eyebrow.

“We need an astronomer’s opinion.”

“One shape like that might be a natural phenomenon. The lower limit of planetary mass would give you a body with a radius of about a hundred and twenty-five miles. That’s the point at which gravitational forces tend to deform a body into a more or less spherical shape. I’m assuming a rocky body, of course. Masses smaller than that—like our friends out there—can maintain an irregular shape. But five of them—all out of the same bowl of Greek alphabet soup! Not a chance that it’s a coincidence!”

“But thirty miles across!”

“Why not? Eurostation’s a half mile in diameter. And we’ve only been in space a century.”

“Life?” the general whispered. He seemed shaken. Ruiz hadn’t credited him with that much imagination.

“Life … tens of thousands of years ago, maybe.

That blaze of X-rays would have annihilated anything moving through space with the planet. When we get out there for a closer look, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that those … artifacts … have melted a bit around the edges. Museum pieces, left by some other form of life.”

“What do you find in museums, Doctor?”

“Art. Cultural clues. Knowledge…”

General Harris’s face had turned to stone. “And weaponry. Armor and old weapons.”

“Obsolete weapons.”

“Obsolete—to them!”

“General, you’re letting your lack of imagination run away with you. This isn’t another one of your security problems, like crowd control for doomsday.”

“Isn’t it?” Harris looked bleak, preoccupied. “No natural force could have slowed that planet from light-speed. You said so yourself. No natural force could have put it into orbit around Jupiter. And what the hell melted our camera vehicle? That’s one museum I don’t intend to let the Chinese visit.”

Ruiz was trembling with the effort of controlling himself. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

The general stood up. His two silent aides got up with him, like twin shadows. “You have a week to get ready, Dr. Ruiz,” he said. “You and Maybury get your gear packed and ready to be ferried to Eurostation for transfer. It’ll take at least that long to sell the Chinese on the nuclear-bomb crews.”

Ruiz was half out of his chair. “Nuclear-bomb crews!” he choked. He made an involuntary move toward Harris, and one of the general’s large young men was suddenly in front of him, looking respectful.

The general was halfway to the door, his other aide trotting after him. He paused and turned a distracted face toward Ruiz. “Calm down, Dr. Ruiz,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “We won’t destroy it unless we have to.”

“A week,” Maggie said, stretching out in the tub. “A whole week’s gone by, do you realize that? We have to report back in twenty-one days.”

Jameson turned from the mirror, razor in hand. “You could move into my quarters—have you thought of that? I’ve got one of the double cabins.”

“Doc Lemieux wouldn’t like that.” She laughed. “She’d probably give us ten demerits on the psych profile. ‘Exclusive pair bonding is to be discouraged in the confined environment of a spaceship.’ Isn’t that what the manual says?”

“Captain Boyle’s a good guy. He won’t make any trouble for us.”

Maggie stood up in the tub and began toweling her hair vigorously. There was a coltish poignance for Jameson in her spindly legs and xylophone ribs and teacup breasts dusted with freckles. She favored him with a long examination through a fringe of orange lashes, then broke into a wide elastic smile.

“It’s an indecent proposal and I accept,” she said. “Unauthorized pair bonding and all.” She tied the towel into a turban and held out her skinny arms. Jameson put down the humming razor and kissed her. Still dripping from her bath, she pressed against him, all soft flesh and bony corrugations.

“We’ll miss the giant holo ballet,” he said.

“No we won’t.” She pried herself loose. “Now get out of here and let me dress.”

Jameson went back to the living room, sealing his shirt with a thumbnail. His gear, grown to a zipbag and two duffles, was leaning against the wall where he’d dumped it. He’d had it sent over from the MacDonald Towers the night before. Maggie had argued that it was silly to go on paying for a room there when he hadn’t been back for a week.

He finished dressing, then wandered over to Maggie’s curio cabinet. Idly, he picked up one of the plastic bottles and turned it over in his hands. It was a grimy white with a network of fine surface cracks, and he could make out the faded word clorox. He was putting it back when Maggie came into the room, dressed for their outing in a lizard-green dress with a little fringe of ribboned skirt that left her long legs bare.

“That’s one of my most valuable pieces,” she said. “It goes back over a hundred years. The ones I really like, though, are the ones with all the funny little pump tops that came in in the 1980s after the fluorocarbon scare. Some of them still work.”

“What are you going to do with your collection while you’re away on the mission?”

She tossed her mop of red hair. “It’s going to stay right here. I’ve made arrangements to put the apartment under seal.”

“That sounds expensive. Why don’t you put the collection in storage and give the apartment up? We’ll be gone a long time.”

“You don’t understand, Tod.” She tossed her head again. “I want to know that everything’s waiting for me when I get back. Exactly the same as I left it.”

“I think I understand,” he said slowly. “I keep a lock-coop myself near the base in Salt Lake. Store a few things there, sleep over sometimes when I want to get away from everything. Big enough for a bunk and an all-san. But it doesn’t eat up my pay when I’m away.”

“No you don’t!” she said impatiently. “You’re like everybody else! Most people these days don’t own anything but themselves! We’re all property of GovCorp!”

“Maggie, you’re not going to start all that again?”

“You wouldn’t be so complacent if you’d been raised in New England!”

Jameson groaned inwardly. Another argument! “Maggie, that’s all over and done with a long time ago,” he said in an attempt to soothe her.

“Is it?” she said. “You should visit the town I grew up in and see all the old people with napalm burns and missing arms and legs.”

“Maggie, it was over before you were born.”

“The war might have been over. But not the pacification. I was six years old when that ended. I remember that all right!”

“That was a rebellion,” he said, unwilling to stir her up. “The government had to put it down.”

“It was a war.” She gave him a look that dared him to challenge her.

Jameson sighed. They were on dangerous ground. Old passions, old political slogans that Maggie had learned secondhand. But they could still get her into trouble. And him too, for not reporting her. New England rebs had gained a pretty good foothold in the Congress since the agony of reunification, but they didn’t get promoted too far in Federal jobs unless they demonstrated their reliability.

“It’s over and done with,” Jameson repeated uncomfortably. “Maggie, when it comes to that, I had a great-grandfather who was killed in the Kansas City explosion.”

“You still don’t understand.” She turned sorrowful blue eyes on him. “You’re just one of those people that GovCorp uses to fill in its blanks with.”

“Look,” he said, feeling his temper rise. “If you’re going to keep blaming me for ancient history, maybe we’d better call this whole thing off. I can always move back to the MacDonald Towers.”

“You just don’t scan it, do you,” she asked. “I feel sorry for you, Tod.”

“All right!” he said angrily. “If that’s the way you want it!” He moved to his stack of belongings against the wall and shouldered the duffle bags.

“Tod,” she began, starting toward him. The vid phone chimed. Jameson stepped aside, out of pickup. Maggie said, “Don’t go yet,” and pressed the Who button. No picture appeared on the screen. The set continued to chime.

“It’s somebody with a who override,” she said worriedly. “It must be a high-priority call.” She pressed the Accept button.

The screen lit up with a picture of a jowly man holding up a Space Resources Agency dispatcher badge. “MacInnes,” he said without preamble, “you’ve been ordered to report to the Jupiter ship at once. All leaves are canceled. A cab will be at your residence in thirty minutes to take you to the Dallasworth shuttleport. Is Commander Jameson with you?”

“Well…” She looked uncertainly toward Jameson.

He took a step into pickup range. “I’m here,” he said.

“Fine, Commander,” the dispatcher said. “Do you have any luggage at the MacDonald?”

“No.”

“Good. You can take the cab with MacInnes.”

“What’s this about?” Jameson said. “I still have three weeks to go on my leave.”

“I can’t tell you that, Commander,” the dispatcher said. “There’ll be a briefing aboard ship.”

“Can you at least tell me if—”

“That’s all, Commander,” the dispatcher said, and clicked off.

Maggie had disappeared into the bedroom. He found her throwing things into a small zipbag. The green dress was crumpled carelessly in a corner. She was wearing a loose one-piece travel suit with elastic cuffs at wrist and knee.

“Need any help?” he said.

“No. I’ve been ready for a year. I just have to call building security before we leave and tell them to put the apartment under seal.”

“Can I leave my stuff here?”

“I suppose you’d better.” She gave him a canny look. “We’re not coming back, are we.”

“Not till we’ve been to Jupiter and back,” he said. “It looks like the mission’s on. And there’s been some kind of change in it.”