The Jupiter Theft Part 13

"Three and a half hours for the trip. I don't know when they left."

"Three and a half hours?"

"They're accelerating at a constant one g."

Jameson turned back to the window in time to see the glowing patch of light suddenly-flare up. A low murmur went up from the crowd along he rail.

"That was their turnover point," Ruiz said, "They'll be here in an hour and three quarters now."

Jameson looked across at the big screen with its magnified image. The points of light were lengthening.

They turned into lines that crosshatched the dark seemingly at random, making a net across the sky.

Maybury managed to catch a fleeting close-up of one of the creatures. It was reversing itself on its stick, twirling it around in a sinuous six-handed grasp. Around it, its thousands of companions presumably were doing the same. The crosshatched lines of light shrank to points again. The glowing patch out the window faded.

Somebody tapped Jameson on the shoulder. He turned around and saw Caffrey.

"My boys and I are going to station ourselves at the main spinlock and the other locks, Commander,"

Caffrey stated. "Just a precaution. The main entry points to the s.h.i.+p shouldn't be left unguarded."

"Good idea," Jameson responded. "Have you consulted with Tu Jue-chen?"

"Yeah, we settled the procedure. I'm taking three members of her Struggle Brigade with me."

Jameson looked past Caffrey's shoulder and saw the three husky young Chinese crewmen standing there. They all wore homemade Struggle badges pinned to their singlets: cardboard disks painted with the current slogans. One of them had gone so far as to transform himself into a walking poster, with the Chinese characters forching hsing-- "vigilance"-in red paint on his forehead. All three of them carried steel bars.

"Ray,?" Jameson said uneasily. "We don't know that those creatures are hostile. We can't afford to get off on the wrong foot with them."

"Do you think I'm crazy?" Caffrey said. "I'll keep these fellows in hand."

"It's good to see that s.h.i.+p's security is keeping the s.h.i.+p secure instead of protecting us from the exchange of scientific information," Ruiz said dryly.

Caffrey turned reproachful eyes on Ruiz. "Doctor," he said, sounding genuinely hurt.

Jameson watched the four of them shoulder their way through the crowd. They were met at the exit by Caffrey's three beetle-browed a.s.sistants, who also carried steel bars.

"G.o.d help us all" Ruiz said. "Slogans and steel bars. What a way for two intelligent races to meet for the first time."

"I don't think Boyle will let any Cygnans inside, anyway," Jameson said. "Germs. We'll send a delegation outside to meet them. Let Caffrey guard the locks. It'll keep him out of mischief."

Ruiz looked thoughtful "What if-"

"Excuse me, Doctor," Jameson said. He looked up at the balcony. Boyle was making urgent motions toward him. Jameson found a guy line and zipped up to his post. Kay Thorwald, looking worried, was sitting at a communications console while Captain Hsieh hovered over her.

"I can't get anyone in Major Hollis's territory to answer, Captain," she said.

"Have Jarowski try to patch you through to his suit radio," Boyle said through clenched teeth.

"What's wrong, Captain?" Jameson said.

"Look," Boyle said.

Jameson went over to the safety rail and looked down. With the drive on, even at one percent of g, there was the illusion of looking out of a very tall tower down toward the ballerina skirt of the ring. It was still spinning; they hadn't bothered to stop it for the braking maneuver.

Jameson found Hollis's pod as it swept by on its merry-go-round circuit. It was a plastic coc.o.o.n riding the inside of the wheel. Then he saw what Boyle was pointing at.

Hollis's bomb squad, silvery ants in their s.p.a.cesuits, were pouring out of the pod and a.s.sembling in a small group on the inner rim of the wheel. They were all sticking close to the safety railings. They were standing at right angles to Jameson's point of view, and he knew that they, unlike he and the people on the bridge, had two thirds of their Earth weight.

The wheel swung them out of sight. When they came back into view thirty seconds later, they were marching in military formation toward the nearest spoke.

"What are they doing?" Jameson said.

"They're going to fire their nukes," Boyle said.

"Captain Boyle," Hsieh said in a strangled voice. "I must insist that you put a stop to this unilateral action.

The bomb crews are to work in concert. We have not yet reached a joint decision."

"I'll do my best," Boyle said.

"Captain," Kay said. "I've got him."

"Hollis, can you hear me?" Boyle called into Kay's mike.

"Hollis's voice came, out of the little speaker on the console. "I can hear you, Captain. Make it quick."

"I order you and your men to return to quarters immediately."

"This is a military action, Captain. You have no jurisdiction."

"Hollis, are you crazy? You don't have the authority to commit the entire human race to a war with another civilization."

"I have my contingency orders from Earth, Captain. I'm interpreting them as I see fit."

"Hollis listen to me-"

Hollis's tight, rasping voice issued from the speaker. To Jameson it sounded somehow sleepy. "I'm locked in on all five of the alien s.h.i.+ps," he said "The computer techs transferred the information from the observatory computer this morning. But first I'm going to set off a couple of gigaton bombs in the middle of that cl.u.s.ter coming toward us. It's only a few hundred miles across; I can drench them with enough hard radiation to cook them all. Have to eyeball it and set off the bombs by radio signal."

Jameson s.n.a.t.c.hed the microphone from Boyle. "Listen, Major, you don't understand the situation. Those scooters are traveling at over a hundred kilometers a second at this point, and decelerating. Youcan't eyeball it. If you're off by a couple of seconds, your missiles will pa.s.s right through them or else go off too soon. All you can do is make them mad."

"That's enough talk," Hollis said, and switched off.

Boyle grabbed the mike back and shouted, "Major Hollis!" but the speaker was dead.

"He's going to get his men into trouble, Captain," Jameson said. "They aren't proficient enough yet to-"

"Look!" Kay said in a strained voice.

The last ant in the column had fallen behind and was hurrying to catch up. He must have gotten careless, or been disoriented by the star-encrusted void whirling past him, because he lost his footing and stumbled backward. Top-heavy in his gear, he toppled over the low safety rail.

The wheel hurled him out into the dark. The wriggling silver figure shrank until it was gone. There had been a sudden rush to save him, and now Hollis's men milled about aimlessly.

"Captain, can you stop the wheel?" Jameson asked.

Boyle looked at him steadily. "No," he said.

Hollis must have been giving orders. The confused movement of the men stopped all at once, and they all began marching again toward the base of the spoke.

They climbed the outside handles painfully, all of them being very careful now. Two thirds of the way toward the hub, they all stopped. Hollis was giving orders again. Suit jets misting, they floated at an angle toward the missile pods on the shaft. Hollis had had them do it a hundred times before when the s.h.i.+p was coasting, saving time by lifting off the spoke at the point where centripetal force dropped off enough "He just killed his men," Jameson said, between clenched teeth.

The difference in velocity was infinitesimal-less than ten centimeters per second per second. But, it added up. It took Hollis and his men twenty seconds to realize that an invisible rubber band was dragging them back to the plane of the wheel. Another twenty seconds and they were there-but their starting point wasn't.. The spoke swept by, tantalizingly out of reach, while they dropped past the waist of the s.h.i.+p at forty, then fifty and sixty centimeters per second.

Jameson's knuckles were white on the rail. "The d.a.m.ned bungling Earthlubber!" he said. "Didn't he realize he couldn't do that trick when the s.h.i.+p was braking?"

Only a minute had gone by. Even then, some of them might have saved themselves, but they wasted precious seconds trying to catch up to the radiating spokes of the wheel. Only one of them had the sense to aim at an efficient right angle straight toward the giant shaft that was slipping by. He caught a handhold just forward of the flaring skirt and immediately began to crawl forward, away from stray drive radiation.

The rest of them, in a panic to escape the h.e.l.lish beam of the exhaust, scattered sideways. The s.h.i.+p plunged past them, faster with each second. They were being left behind-or, more properly, were outracing the s.h.i.+p, keeping their initial velocity while the s.h.i.+p continued to decelerate.

And then there was just a swarm of silver insects hovering against the black depths, diminis.h.i.+ng until they were lost among the stars. The edge of the swarm had been seared by the dreadful violent flame of the drive. They were the lucky ones.

The survivor was too terrified to let go of his handhold. Grogan and one of his men had to suit up and go outside to pry him loose. They coaxed him forward toward the auxiliary air lock behind the observatory.

After a while he understood that ten centimeters per second per second wasn't dangerous if you kept contact with the s.h.i.+p, and scrambled forward on his own.

When the bulky figure stumbled into the bridge with Grogan, there was a rush to help him out of his helmet. A long blond braid tumbled out.

It was the girl. The only one of them who'd had the sense to save herself. People turned from the observation window to stare at her with open curiosity. In all the months of the journey, only a handful of people had seen her. Hollis had kept her bottled up with his men. Jameson caught Klein eyeing her with furtive interest.

She was a big one all right, as Grogan had said. The suit peeled off to reveal a chunky thick-waisted body; heavy in the shoulders, in a bulging skintight liner that had smitty st.i.tched over one flattened breast.

She had a baby-fat face with a little pug nose and a mouth blurred by makeup that had been hastily scrubbed at. Smitty had a lovely, enormous black eye. Jameson wondered which of the twenty-three men in the nuclear-bomb crew had given it to her.

"You all right?" Grogan asked solicitously.

The answer was an uninflected stream of foul language that made up in repet.i.tion what it lacked in inventiveness.

Grogan nodded. "You're all right." He turned back to the observation window to watch with the others.

The cloud of swarming lights had grown to blot out the stars. All of a sudden, they all winked out.

Chapter 14.

The three orange-ringed eyes of the creature from Cygnus stared into Jameson's face from less than a foot away. Two of them were where you'd expect eyes to be. The third, surprisingly, was under the jaw.

They were extended on stubby polyps that twitched like a puppy's nose, as if the thing were trying to sniff at him rather than see him.

Jameson switched on his flashlight for a better look. The creature blinked-if that sudden reflexive puckering around the eyes could be called a blink-and then, too fast for any movement to be seen, the Cygnan was simply gone.

Almost immediately it was replaced by another. This one clung to the outside of the observation bubble for a moment, giving Jameson a brief, palpitating scrutiny, and then it too darted off, clambering across the transparent plastic in quick little fits and starts. The Cygnans moved in a sequence of disconcerting skips, like a stop-action film. You'd be looking at them and then, abruptly, they'd be in a new position.

They'd been crawling all over the outside of the s.h.i.+p for nine or ten minutes now, like ants over a picnic ham. More were arriving every minute on their queer broomsticks. They were sleek, elongated creatures, a little smaller than men with six slender limbs. Incredibly, they weren't wearing s.p.a.cesuits, just transparent sheaths stretched over their narrow heads and their clubbed tails. For the rest of it, their mottled hides were as s.h.i.+ny and naked as a lacquered snake.

"I feel like a goldfish in a bowl," Ruiz said. "Why can't we get theirattention? "

People were lined up along the rail, waving at Cygnans, gesturing to them, trying vainly for some response. The communications teams were knocking themselves out with hand signals and easel pads.

But the Cygnans didn't seem at all interested in communicating. They'd stare for a moment, then dart away.

"Maybe we're not intelligent enough for them," Jameson said. "Maybe they just came over to look at the animals."

"Or maybethey're not intelligent enough," Ruiz said. "Maybe they're just the Cygnans' equivalent of trained hounds, sent over to sniff us out. Look at those narrow heads. You couldn't fit much of a brain into them."

Jameson squinted at the nearest alien. It squinted back at him with its three stalked eyes. He s.h.i.+vered, glad it was on the other side of the Lexigla.s.s. Ruiz was right. There was something primitive about that tapering, arrowhead-shaped skull. The jaws split it down the middle in a permanent reptilian smile. There were no teeth. The inside of the mouth, when it opened, was an unpleasant-looking rasp. The Cygnan put its mouth around its food, whatever it was, and filed it down. There was a tubular, needle-spined tongue way back in the gullet to go with it.

Dmitri pushed past Jameson to take a close-up picture. He shot off a second's worth of high-speed frames on full automatic before the Cygnan twitched its body around and ran off. He was in biologist's paradise.

"You're wrong," he burbled happily. "The brain doesn't have to be in the head. The head may just be an extended structure for the mouth and the sense organs. Take a closer look. There's nothing like a proper, rigid braincase. Just some kind of tough cartilaginous material."

Jameson peered up again at the undersides of scurrying Cygnans. Dmitri was right. Those long narrow heads were flexible. They tended to bend in the direction the Cygnan was looking, like an elephant's trunk.

"Where's the brain, then?" Jameson said.

"In the most sensible place, I imagine-at the top of the nerve cord. That would put it between where its shoulders would be, if it had shoulders instead of that almost-round cross section. The nerve cord probably runs through the center of the body-not dorsally, like us vertebrates, or ventrally, like terrestrial insects. Because..." Dmitri's face flushed in triumph. "Because Cygnans aren't bilaterally symmetrical. They're built on a radial plan, like hydras or starfish. They're descended from something like coelenterates, not flatworms."

Ruiz looked at him sharply, then out the observation bubble again. Jameson said, "Radial? But their limbs are paired!"

"Are they? Look again."

Jameson tried to focus again on the scampering aliens. It was hard, because they were never still. But then he saw what Dmitri was driving at. There was something odd about the placement of the Cygnans'

limbs.

There were two arms and four legs, or four arms and two legs, depending on how you looked at it. The middle pair functioned as either arms or legs, as the Cygnans' whim dictated, so that they were continually s.h.i.+fting from centaurlike beings to four-armed bipeds. The three splayed fingers-or toes, if you preferred-were monkey-clever. All the joints bent in a rubbery curve, showing that evolution had provided a flexible alternative to the ball-and-socket joint.

But that wasn't where the impression of strangeness came from.

The limb arrangement was asymmetrical. When you looked closely, you saw that the limbs were staggered-one placed noticeably forward of its mate on the opposite side. The middle pair in particular were lopsided. The attaching muscles on the middle limbs seemed to be placed higher, too-Jameson would have said they were rooted near the spine, except that there was no visible spine, just rippling bands of muscle ringing the creature's body.

But once the eye got used to the asymmetry, there was no sense of wrongness. It was just... different.

"You see, the limbs have been displaced by evolution," Dmitri said smugly. "Once there were two sets of three equidistant limbs or tentacles, like a double-ended hydra. But when it became a land creature, it had to choose an up and a down. They probably evolved the same way we did-took to the trees and came down again a few million years later. Only more deft and agile than us monkeys-with a choice of four hands for making tools or four legs for running away from their enemies."