The Jupiter Theft Part 31

"Help me tie it up," Jameson said.

He trussed the Cygnan's legs together with the nylon line, in two groups of three limbs each. He'd found that one of the middle legs stretched naturally to join the front limbs, while the other middle leg wanted to fold rearward. The Cygnan offered no resistance. It was alive and moving, but uncoordinated. The fan-shaped irises of its eyes had contracted to slits, despite the dimness, and the three eyestalks were limp.

"Now we know why the pink beasties developed the ability to mimic odors," Dmitri said. "Their ancestors used to hypnotize their prey."

"What was their prey, Dmitri?" Ruiz said. "The ancestors of the Cygnans?"

"No, I don't think they could have evolved on the same planet."

"How... how could they do a thing like that withsmells? " Maggie asked, motioning toward the hogtied Cygnan, whose whole body was pulsating, lengthening and contracting like an accordion.

Dmitri shrugged. "How does thePesis wasp mesmerize a tarantula, get the tarantula to stand still while the wasp digs its grave, cooperate while the wasp walks under its fangs, paralyzes it, and lays an egg on its abdomen? I don't know. Maybe these pink teddy bears release super-pheromones, thousands of times more powerful than the natural variety, the way synthetic a.n.a.logs of morphine like etorphine are thousands of times more powerful than morphine itself. Maybe the synthetic pheromones initiate powerful endocrine reactions that cause exaggerated versions of normal Cygnan syndromes-pleasure, fear, torpor, docility, autointoxication,anything! "

"In a creature that evolved on a different planet?" Jameson said.

Dmitri shrugged again. "The humanoids seem to be virtuoso scent-producers. And they've been around Cygnans a long time. No wonder they were kept behind gla.s.s."

Jameson wound nylon cord around the Cygnan's snout to keep it from sawing away at its bonds when it recovered from its trance. The two humanoids watched him with huge intelligent eyes.

"They ought to find it in a day or two," he said. "By that time we'll have made it, or we'll have been too late."

"Do you really think leaving that individual alive is going to make a difference in what the Cygnans think about human beings?" Ruiz asked wearily.

"I don't know," Jameson said. "Probably not."

He picked up his duffle and got to his feet. The humanoids seemed reluctant to follow suit. They kept trying to drift back to the helpless Cygnan.

"Tod," Maggie said. "Do you think...?"

"I don't know," Jameson said. "And I don't want to know."

"They didn't take any food with them."

Jameson gestured violently for the humanoids to get away from the Cygnan. Their spicy aroma was irresistible. They smelled like a bakery. He was suffused by a feeling of tenderness and warmth toward the little creatures.

"Stop that!" he barked.

"Tod," Maggie said hesitantly. "I have the weirdest feeling in my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as if they were full..."

Jameson advanced on the humanoids, making threatening gestures. They cowered and backed away, jabbering unhappily. The bakery smell diminished. After a longing, saucer-eyed look at the trussed Cygnan, they scampered off, leading the way to an exit.

"Cute little fellers," Ruiz said.

They crawled across the sky, looking down at the queer landscape below with its little manicured parks and gardens; and straight-edged lakes with their bright Wind-sock sailboats, and the crowded city streets squeezed between latticed towers.

"How high up are we?" Maggie said.

"About five miles," Jameson told her. "But the top layer that we're looking at now is probably only a quarter mile down."

"I'd hate to fall just the same," she said. "Even at this low gravity."

The sky had been poorly maintained over the centuries. What looked like unbroken luminescence from below was a tangled spaghetti of stained and broken transparent plumbing, supported by a girder like framework. A glowing liquid gurgled through the pipes, pulsing with brilliant white light. Suspended beneath the girders were sheets of a frosty, translucent material that diffused light. Some of the panels were missing or torn, and it was through these gaps that Jameson was able to get his bird's-eye view of the landscape as he crawled along the supports. He wasn't worried about being seen from below; distance made them specks, and the specks were masked by the glare.

"Bioluminescence," Dmitri said. "Some kind of microscopic fluorescent plants being pumped through these pipes. The Cygnans have had a long time to select for brightness-maybe even do a little genetic engineering. I wouldn't be surprised if it doubles as their air plant."

Jameson managed to restrain him from breaking a pipe to collect a sample. The last thing they needed was a fiery rain calling attention to them. The already-broken sections of pipe were dark; probably a computer turned off little pumping stations by the hundreds when pipes lost pressure.

Crawling was easy in the low gravity. Their weight, low to begin with, had diminished considerably during their long climb to the roof of the mini-world. But none of them could match the ease with which the humanoids traveled. They prowled ahead on all fours, maintaining the pliant arch-shape that kept their noses close to the girders, sniffing out Klein's trail.

From up here, Jameson was able to get a feeling for the overall layout of the environmental pod-one of the three pods swinging round the shaft of the s.h.i.+p. For a moment he felt a pang of regret that he would never get to see the other pods. Were they identical to this one? Or had history and jerrybuilt growth over six million years turned them into different countries?

In the center of the harlequin expanse was a triangular canyon that plunged to the floor of the world, its sides alive with golden movement. Spanning it, halfway down, was the colossal pin on which the world turned. At the bottom was a rusty floor with a small riddled patch of gray, which he knew to be the honeycomb enclosures of the zoo.

They had come a long way.

And somewhere ahead, in this labyrinth of pipes and struts squeezed between the layers of sky, was the round shadow he'd seen overhead-the convergence of the gigantic wishbone that gripped the turning pin, and an entrance to the miles of hollow shaft that led to the central axis of the s.h.i.+p. Somewhere in that airtight interface would be forgotten ways to get into the shaft. At least, Klein seemed to have found one.

There it was! The low overhead had begun to climb at a shallow angle, and through the forest of eye-dazzling plumbing he could see a curving black wall that had to be the outer boundary of the interchange. Behind the wall would be the reception area where the spiral tubes had dumped him and his captors when he'd first been brought to the s.h.i.+p. He'd never seen it, having lost consciousness before reaching bottom. The Cygnan circulatory system must be immune to merry-go-rounds. But he knew it would be crawling with Cygnan traffic. Surely within that enormous vertical void they would find bypaths and crooked ways.

The humanoids had given up trying to get any closer to the wall. They were ranging back and forth along the perimeter, like good hunting dogs.

Ruiz drew abreast of him, clutching his spear. His face was a sickly gray. The effort was taking its toll.

There was crusted blood on the bandage around his head.

"It'll get easier," Jameson said. "By the time we get up to the top, we won't weigh anything."

"Don't worry about me," Ruiz snapped peevishly. "I'll keep up."

Jameson looked him over. "How's the head, Hernando?"

Ruiz grimaced. "Terrible. Like a galloping hangover. The uppers will keep me going for another forty-eight hours."

"You're going to come down hard. You're burning yourself up."

"It won't matter after that. There'll be all the time in the universe to rest."

Dmitri called: "They've found something."

The four of them wriggled forward on their bellies.

The humanoids were hovering over something huddled on a catwalk leading to the black wall.

"More of Klein's work," Ruiz said.

It was the body of a Cygnan, almost split apart by gunfire. A ma.s.s of wetly glistening organs spilled out of the hole torn in its body, egg-shaped nodes clinging to a spongy ma.s.s of coral-branched tissue. The creature once had mated; the pulped remains of a parasitic male showed within the body cavity. She'd been a maintenance worker; there was a toolbox lying near her a kind of basket with bulbous grips around the edges instead of a handle.

"Still warm," Dmitri said. "We're not far behind them."

"Help me drag the body out of sight," Jameson said. They wedged it deep within a tangle of pipes.

The humanoids already were sniffing out Klein's traces near the body. They found a trail and followed it, walking on their knuckles and toes. It led to an un.o.btrusive opening at the base of the wall. The humanoids made certain there were no Cygnans nearby; then they all made a dash for it.

Inside was what looked like a small repair station. They found lengths of plastic pipe, braces, and odd-looking fasteners stacked haphazardly around the chamber with characteristic Cygnan carelessness.

There were also more Cygnan bodies strewn around the place-three of them, their orange blood splattering the walls.

Maggie looked pale. The freckles stood out on her white face. "They'll be discovered next s.h.i.+ft-whenever a Cygnan s.h.i.+ft begins," she said. "There'll be a hunt, if one hasn't started already."

"Easy," Ruiz said. "There may still be time. It may not dawn on them for a while that Klein's headed for the hub. He's just a very dangerous animal loose in the city. And they may not put it all together for a while. How many violent deaths take place in a twenty-four-hour period in a place the size of Dallasworth? The police look at it on a case-by-case basis at first, until somebody decides a maniac is loose."

"It's morning back at the zoo," Dmitri said thoughtfully.

"And the zookeepers are missing," Ruiz said firmly. "That's all. There are a lot of exhibits to search-if anybody's interested in searching right at the start. And the Cygnan sightseers will see an exhibit of these strange creatures called humans, and none of them will know how many are supposed to be in the cage."

Jameson said, "You're very comforting, Hernando."

"What other choice do I have?" Ruiz said impatiently. "Let's go."

It took them another two days to reach the hub. They were able to climb an average of half a mile per hour in the rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng gravity, but they had to stop to hide frequently, whenever the humanoids'

sensitive noses sniffed out the presence of Cygnans. They stopped to sleep twice; Ruiz slept fitfully, hopped up by the stimulants Janet had given him. Jameson scrupulously called a halt for ten minutes every hour to let them rest, and every four hours he made them eat some of their rations and drink some water.

They were able to refill their jugs at any number of places where condensation caused by the chill outer walls of the shaft had run into hollows, making respectable pools. Once there was a rainstorm that lasted a half-hour; the interior s.p.a.ces of the arm were vast enough to cause weather.

Jameson never saw the humanoids eat or drink. During the humans' rest periods they frequently disappeared, coming back when it was time to play bloodhound again. Jameson never inquired into the reason for the humanoids' little side expeditions. He prayed fervently that humanoid and Cygnan biochemistry were incompatible, and that the humanoids' incredible sense of smell was leading them to stores of synthetics they could snack on. If there was anything edible within miles, Dmitri a.s.sured him, they would be able to home in on it.

The s.p.a.ces they traversed were between the outer skin of the folding arm and the yawning central well that contained the corkscrew tubeways. From time to time, with the humanoids to warn him of danger, he cautiously checked their progress by poking a head out of an inner compartment and peering into the dim abyss beyond, where the flas.h.i.+ng shapes of Cygnans whizzed through the transparent spirals. They were too far away and moving too quickly to notice him; what he was afraid of was being seen by a Cygnan on one of the nearby adjacent ledges that overhung the chasm. But the humanoids' sense of smell was infallible.

The Cygnans used the s.p.a.ces around the core of the arm-but mostly for storage. It could hardly be otherwise, when down became up and up became down every few years. They wouldn't have wanted to go to the trouble of refurbis.h.i.+ng every single cubby and cell. But every mile or two Jameson and his party came across cl.u.s.ters of gimballed containers that were as big as houses. What were they? Low-gravity luxury housing? Factories or biological laboratories? Slums? It was impossible to tell. But some of them had windows, and Jameson gave them a wide berth.

They avoided open s.p.a.ces like the plague, climbing the pipeline beanstalk as it wound its way through the niches and flues and chambers that riddled the outer layers of the shaft, and leaving it for alternate routes whenever it emerged into some roomy expanse.

Twice more they came upon dead Cygnans. One had been turned into orange hamburger by Klein's automatic weapon. The other had been burned-perhaps by Chia's laser-and hacked apart needlessly by an ax. Klein had left a trail of minuscule spy instruments, but the humanoids were adept at finding these by the scent of the human oils that had been left on them. Jameson destroyed them as fast as they were found and tried not to worry about them.

"They'll be terrified if they see us coming after them," Ruiz grunted. "Kitchen knives and wrenches and a couple of cute pink mascots."

"They might not have seen us," Jameson said. "They won't be monitoring their bugs continuously-just spot-checking them."

They were bobbing around like balloons by this time, in gravity that was too weak to notice, launching themselves upward in giant swoops. For the vertical ascents, the humanoids changed their mode of travel, boosting themselves along the ducts and cables, their faces never far from a surface.

Eventually they found themselves in a small, crazily shaped room whose ceiling was a doughy substance that dimpled when Jameson experimentally poked a finger into it. The dimple began, slowly, to fill itself as he watched. Around them was the terrifying hiss of escaping air. The whole chamber was part of a huge gasket-a gasket with a faulty seal, as it happened-and Jameson knew that the leviathan bulk of the stars.h.i.+p's, main body hung above, with its three-sided forests and leaning turrets and the inconceivable energies of the interstellar drive sleeping within its spine.

There was a puckered area in the center of the ceiling. Without hesitation, one of the humanoids leaped straight upward. Its head and shoulders sank into the navel-like depression. It wriggled briefly, and its legs disappeared from view. The second humanoid gibbered encouragingly, exuding an odor of perspiring feet.

"I'll go first," Jameson announced. "Then you, Hernando-careful not to stab me with that spear.

Maggie, you're next. Dmitri, you bring up the rear."

He sprang for the dimpled spot, and it swallowed him up. He fought his way upward through the doughy sphincter, all his senses m.u.f.fled. After he'd forced his way through it for what seemed an inordinate distance, he had a moment of panic. What if he was simply burrowing into a thousand feet of insulation, to smother deep within its yielding ma.s.s? But common sense told him that the humanoids must have picked up traces of human scent. This was a definite pa.s.sage, perhaps an emergency route. He could breathe in the s.p.a.ces his head and shoulders opened up, though the air was stale. After what seemed hours, the spongy stuff disgorged him into an echoing void that smelled of metal and lubricants.

He was clinging to a metal slope that tilted to a dim gorge beneath. Across an intervening s.p.a.ce a tentlike wall of metal leaned ma.s.sively inward, its angle matched to the cliff he clung to.

To his right the view stopped at what he at first took to be mountain ridges, until he realized that he was looking at the edge of a great toothed wheel half a mile across. There was a gargantuan jumble of machinery-ratchets and pawls and pinions on a scale that made him feel like a flea in a tower clock. To his left the enormous metal cavern stretched on for miles, and he knew that he had finally reached the axis of the s.h.i.+p.

The ancient metal of the cliff was scarred and pitted, its face pocked with handholds and even places to stand. He eased off to one side and helped Ruiz through, then Maggie and Dmitri. The other humanoid wriggled through last.

The feathery beings motioned him to silence and pointed up toward the peak of the metal mountain.

Their gestures told him to be cautious.

He climbed the rusty slope and reached the top, another fifty feet up. He peeked over the edge. Down at the bottom of that toboggan-slide incline was another gorge, rising to another inward-leaning cliff.

Figures were moving around down there.

Human figures, tiny with distance. They milled around a projecting housing that had to be an air lock. It had a round door, pulled out like a drawer front on three shafts. Some of the figures, bulkier than the others, were either wearing s.p.a.cesuits or being helped into them.

There was no way he could slide down the metal toboggan slope without being seen a long way off.

Was there a way around the end of the ridge, where those gigantic gears meshed?

He eased himself cautiously down a foot and sighted along the crest.

And froze.

A mob of dark shapes was pouring out of the shadowed s.p.a.ces behind the t.i.tans' gears and swarming purposefully along the ridge toward him. Jameson fumbled for his rope and hammer. He had just time enough to glance down the slope, and see that the humanoids had disappeared, when the dark shapes halted a couple of yards away. They started to deploy themselves down the two sides of the ridge to encircle him.

The one straddling the ridge, keeping his feet planted to keep from drifting off in the almost nonexistent gravity, was Gifford. He was hefting an ax. The others, wielding axes and crowbars, were members of the Chinese missile crew, six men and a chunky, muscular-looking girl.

Across the intervening s.p.a.ce, Gifford grinned at him like a crew-cut ape. With his snub nose and flat boyish features he looked just as open and friendly and uncomplicated as he always had. He s.h.i.+fted his grip on the ax.

"Too bad, Commander," he said. "You overlooked a couple of the bugs."

Chapter 28.

Jameson threw the hammer. He threw it a couple of yards to the side of Gifford, reining in the cord that was tied to it as he did so. The six-pound maul caught Gifford in the ribs, knocking him sideways off the ridge. He began his long, slow tumble to the floor of the gorge, helpless to arrest his fall.

Jameson continued hauling in on the cord, imparting further momentum to the hammer. Next it caught one of the Chinese missile men in the side of the head, sending him rolling in slow motion down the steep slope, his crowbar clattering and bouncing along with him.

Jameson kept the hammer twirling like a lariat. It whizzed full circle around him and knocked the girl's legs out from under her. She toppled backward and floated toward the floor of the metal canyon. Her head hit the cliffside about a hundred feet down. She'd gathered enough inertia by then for a broken skull, despite the low gravity.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jameson saw Ruiz scrambling up the slope with his spear, Dmitri and Maggie behind him. One of the Chinese stepped inside the whirling arc of the hammer. As he raised an ax, the rope tw.a.n.ged into him from the other side and the hammer, its pendulum swing shortened, wrapped him round in a coc.o.o.n of rope. Jameson tugged sharply, and the man went sprawling down the slope, taking rope and hammer with him.