The Jupiter Theft

by Donald Moffitt

  Unconsciously her hand strayed to the dollar-sized shaved spot on her skull, where she'd been braindipped. The hair was starting to grow back, and it itched. They had told her that removing the tiny sample of cortical tissue for chemical monitoring during questioning—they took less than a cubic millimeter—couldn't possibly harm her. She'd hardly felt the prick of the dialytrode needle as it penetrated her scalp. But all the same, she hadn't felt the same since her arrest. It was more than a little scary to be locked up in a tiny room for a week while those dreadful men shouted at you and asked you questions and made all sorts of terrible accusations just to see how you'd react. They'd even told her that Dr. Ruiz had confessed that she had helped him sell information about the Cygnus Object to the Chinese! She knew that couldn't be true. And then, when they couldn't shake her, all the questions about who she'd talked to since the sighting. All of them had been checked out, including her ailing grandmother on Earth. Finally, when they were grudgingly satisfied, all the warnings—threats, really—about not discussing her work with anybody—not even her coworkers at Farside. She hadn't been allowed her six-month Earth furlough; and even a pass to Mare Imbrium was hardly worth it any more, with the government hassle.

  For once, Sorg had managed to talk to the Farside computer without being asked to repeat himself. The photoplastic plate in front of her came to life with the Cygnus Object's hazy disk. The speck of light off to the side was its moon.

  Maybury applied herself to her job. While she was at it, she hooked in the bolometer and took the planet's temperature.

  It was hot, despite its long sojourn in the chilly depths of interstellar space. No walking barefoot on its still-unseen surface unless you wanted to burn your feet! That terrifying blast of X-rays as it plowed its way through the interstellar hydrogen must have warmed it up considerably—and warmed it all the way through. The surface temperature hadn't dropped by any noticeable fraction of a degree since the last bolometer reading.

  She finished her measurements. Another moment and she would have told Sorg to switch off the image. But she just happened to be still looking at the plate when it happened.

  A first-magnitude star suddenly bloomed between the planet and its moon.

  Almost at the same moment, an enormous whirlpool of hydrogen clouds began to form on the side of the planet facing the star.

  Maybury blinked, unable to believe her eyes. Meteorological phenomena thousands of miles across just didn't develop in the space of a few minutes!

  She looked across at Sorg and hesitated. She really should call Dr. Mackie at this point. If anything interesting was developing, she'd probably be shooed out of the booth. That's the way things had been going at Farside since Dr. Ruiz had left. Her small jaw tightened stubbornly as professional pride took over. Sorg, lounging against a console, hadn't noticed anything. She punched her queries into her lightpad and thumbed them into the computer.

  Data began to dance across the lightpad; she had told the computer not to duplicate the display on any of the data boards. She watched for several minutes, then set the computer to continuously monitor the planet's position against the solar orbit the observatory had plotted.

  Sorg was sauntering over in her direction. She looked down into the photoplastic plate—hooded to keep out stray light—and gasped.

  The new star was moving.

  It was moving fast enough for the eye to see—about as fast as the second hand on an analog-style watch. From its initial position of about three planetary diameters from the Cygnus Object, it crossed in front of the planet.

  It wasn't a star. It was something bright in orbit around the planet. A pinpoint of brilliant blue-white light.

  She did a quick mental calculation, timing its passage across the face of the planet. It covered the 8,000 miles in twelve seconds.

  The thing was whipping around the shrouded planet at something more than two million miles per hour. And it was picking up speed. It winked out as the planet eclipsed it. The eclipse lasted some nine seconds.

  It was accelerating at—her forehead wrinkled with disbelief—at a rate equal to tens of thousands of gravities! And why wasn't it flying into a higher orbit? What tremendous force could be tying it down like that?

  There was something else. The whirlpool of clouds was moving across the smudged face of the planet, following the moving star. She tried to imagine what a hurricane with winds of more than two million miles per hour would do to a landscape.

  She reached for the communicator button. A hand slapped down over it before she could press it.

  “What are you doing?” Sorg snapped.

  “I'm calling Dr. Mackie,” she said. “Now get your hand off that button.”

  Mackie took twenty minutes to arrive. By that time, the orbiting spark was whizzing round and round too fast for the eye to follow. It looked like a hoop of glowing wire around the planet—a ring of etched light.

  The hydrogen whirlpool was no longer distinguishable. In its place was a blurred white band girdling the planet. The rest of the cloudy surface seemed to be seething violently.

  And if you looked closely, you could see a rim of ghostly spider webs connecting the planet's blurred belt with that strange shining halo. The effect was nothing at all like Saturn's rings. It was a totally unfamiliar phenomenon.

  “What's this, what's this?” Mackie fussed. His tone seemed to accuse her of being responsible for something untoward.

  She tried to tell him about the circling spark that was responsible for that ring of light, but he dismissed her impatiently. He pursed his lips disapprovingly when she attempted to explain about an acceleration of hundreds of thousands of feet per second per second. He wouldn't believe it until he'd resurrected the vids himself from the data banks.

  But he didn't kick her out of the booth, and she was grateful for that. There was a lot of work to do, and the two of them got busy. Neither of them noticed when Sorg slipped from the room.

  Maybury worked straight through the end of her shift, and stayed on with the extra people Mackie had called in to help. He kept them all very busy with visual observations; spectra and bolometer readings—becoming very excited at the rise in surface temperature detectable over the next few hours, caused, most probably, by the scouring friction of those million-mile winds.

  But it never occurred to him to recheck the planet's solar orbit. Maybury finally was able to get his attention long enough to show him the numbers still unreeling on her lightpad.

  “Good God!” he said, when he finally assimilated it. “I wish Ruiz were here!”

  There was no doubt about it. The planet from Cygnus was moving again.

  It was a course correction. It was against all the rules of celestial mechanics. Not even the powerful gravitational tug of Jupiter could account for the planet's being torn from its solar orbit that way.

  Mackie made everybody drop everything and apply themselves to this new phenomenon. So he was caught flat-footed ten hours later, when the wire hoop of light flickered and faded and became a spark again—a spark that slowed over the next twenty minutes and then abruptly extinguished itself.

  The planet and its blistered moon had stopped changing direction. They were hurtling along a new path, but one that obeyed Newton's laws of motion.

  Maybury stood on tiptoe and peered past Mackie's stooped shoulders to the viewplate. Mackie had plugged in the Sagan reflector, with Kerry's assent, and the view of the planet's disk was magnificent.

  The face of the planet lay bare: a smooth rocky desert shorn of its hydrogen clouds except for a few wispy remnants.

  It was dead now. That was the inescapable impression you got, looking at it. It had roused itself briefly and mysteriously, and now it was an inert ball of cooling rock.

  But that last burst of effort had done its work.

  Maybury tiptoed away and asked the computer for an entirely unauthorized projection of the planet's new trajectory. The answer made her gasp; she'd have to show it to Dr. Mackie as soon
as she could tear him away from the viewplate.

  There was no doubt about it.

  The planet from Cygnus was going to go into orbit around Jupiter.

  Ruiz fed a newdollar into the slot and fidgeted impatiently until a holofax dropped into the tray. The news machine in the beachfront refreshment pavilion was the only one he'd been able to find in the whole government rest camp, except for the one in the lobby, and he didn't feel like walking across a quarter mile of hot sand to get there. Workers who were lucky enough to rate a free vacation on the Nevada coast weren't much interested in news of the outside world.

  For Ruiz it was different. He chafed at the long absence from his work. It was exasperating not to know what was going on with the Cygnus Object—except for the sanitized snippets of information released to the general public. It was exasperating—and humiliating—not to be able to get through to his former colleagues on the Moon; there was always some “difficulty.” Oh, they were sugar-coating his enforced sabbatical, with make-work assignments and the lecture obligations that they'd discovered in the small print of his contract, and privileged holidays like this one. Until the government figured out what to do with him.

  He was an embarrassment. The government didn't like to admit mistakes. Ruiz was a leftover mistake.

  The mistake had begun when they put him under house arrest almost as soon as he stepped off the Moon shuttle. The end of the world was politically sensitive information, it seemed. They just didn't trust him not to blab.

  Now that it appeared that the world wasn't going to end after all, they didn't trust him to cooperate with the cover-up, which was in full swing now. It wouldn't do at all to let a powderkeg population of a billion know that their government had suppressed doomsday. Ruiz had too crusty a reputation. It was safer to have a poor frightened hack like Horace Mackie in charge of the crucial flow of information at Farside.

  Ruiz squinted at the garish yellow ball of the Sun, shedding its fierce light on the herds of naked people facing seaward. It warmed his chill bones, baking out the old pains. He supposed he was lucky to be enjoying the luxury of Govpark instead of shivering in an isolation cell somewhere. Probably he could thank Harris for that; the man had brains enough to realize that Ruiz, despite his origins, couldn't possibly have gotten where he was in GovCorp unless he had some discretion.

  Ruiz sighed. Why couldn't they understand that he had no desire at all to stir up problems? All he wanted was to get back to the Moon, where he could be useful.

  A pair of young Govgirls strolled by, big and healthy and tanned, wearing only the briefest of fronties, white teeth flashing, repellesprayed hair still shaking out beads of salt water from their swim. They gave him a cursory glance, then walked on.

  Ruiz didn't belong here, with his seamed face and knobby joints, his hollow chest and baggy jockstrap. He stood there in the hot, insistent sun, squinting at the fax sheet, looking for all the world like some undernourished Privie who'd gotten in by mistake.

  He was blocking the entrance to an eats booth, but he didn't notice the annoyed glances he was getting from people who had to squeeze past him. He was studying the sheet in his hands with growing rage.

  The holofax showed a scarred rocky globe with a headline in three-dimensional block letters hanging in front of it. The headline read:

  New Moon for Jupiter?

  He tilted the fax first to one side, then to the other, to see the part of the planetary surface the letters were obscuring. There were no surprises: just scorched rock like the rest of it. He snorted in disgust and read the brief story floating in white type in the illusory space beneath the sphere. There were no surprises there, either. It was substantially what he'd overheard a few minutes earlier when some bather had walked by with portable holovid blaring:

  ...according to Farside director Dr. Horace Mackie, scientists have now updated and corrected their original computations, and it appears that the wandering planet will take up an orbit around Jupiter instead of orbiting the sun, as had originally been theorized...

  Ruiz crumpled the holofax angrily and dropped it on the boardwalk. So that was the pap they were going to feed the public! Updated computations!

  It had taken some unimaginable force to tear that planetary mass from its solar orbit and aim it so that it would be captured by Jupiter. The universe was turning out to be a very queer place indeed, and here he was, stuck in this expensive sandbox for spoiled Guvie brats, while a stuffed gabacho like Mackie had all of Farside's facilities to play with.

  Hot tears of frustration in his eyes, Ruiz stared out over the water.-Swarms of boisterous pink bathers splashed in the near surf, and farther out bright little sailboats bobbed against the translucent sky. It was hard to believe that this sparkling bay once had been known as Death Valley, before the ‘09 earthquake had split the coast open and opened a channel to the sea.

  He shook his head; best take advantage of it while he could. There'd been nothing like it for people like him while he was scrabbling for survival in the stinking tents of New Manhattan.

  Ruiz hitched up his jockstrap and picked his way awkwardly through the sprawled sunbathers to the water's edge. After a dip, he felt better. He picked up his gear and started the long trudge across the desert sands toward his assigned hospice. He'd give it one more try. Maybe this time they'd let him talk to Mackie. He pretended elaborately not to notice the arbee in the striped robe and mirrorglasses who followed him back.

  Chapter 5

  “Sorry I'm late,” Li said. “Struggle Group meeting.” He made a wry face. “We had to elect a new leader, and the self-criticism dragged on longer than usual.”

  “Yuan yu,” Jameson said, giving Li a crooked grin of sympathy. “I thought Chu Lo was Struggle. Group leader.”

  “Didn't you hear? Chu Lo got rotated Earth. They send up new biologist this morning. Lady name Tu Jue-chen.”

  “Who's the new leader?”

  “Tu Jue-chen,” Li said blandly. “Only democratic way.”

  Jameson diplomatically said nothing. If Peking Center wanted to replace their political watchdog this close to countdown, it was their business. He was just thankful that it was a biologist and not somebody involved in the operational safety of the spaceship.

  The two of them set off down the corridor toward Stores, helmets tucked under their arms. The great ship was eerily silent, sound smothered in foam. A quarter of the crew was on Earth leave, or at Eurostation awaiting transportation. There was ample room in the 600-foot doughnut of the spin section to dilute the rest of the crew—now grown to almost eighty people.

  The sandaled feet of an approaching crewman came into view as they advanced along the upward-curving floor, and gradually the rest of him emerged from the ceiling's eclipse. It was Kiernan, the wiry little hydroponicist, muttering to himself. As he drew abreast, he said, “If you're headed for Stores, that new bastard's going to give you a hard time.”

  “What's the matter?” Jameson asked.

  Kiernan jerked his head angrily toward the exit. “I wanted to check out a couple of parts bins to use for seedlings. They're just the right size. Wang and I punch holes in them for drainage. This Klein makes a big deal out of it. Says they're not authorized for that use—tells me to make out a requisition and he'll have the proper equipment shipped over from Eurostation, and in the meantime I lose two days!”

  “By the book,” Jameson said. “One of those.”

  Kiernan disappeared down the corridor, still muttering. Jameson and Li turned into the next crosstube and found themselves in the supply bay.

  There was some kind of argument going on at the desk. As they drew closer, Jameson recognized Chief Grogan. Grogan's enormous competence had gotten him promoted from the original construction crew, and he would be coming along to Jupiter.

  “Look,” Grogan was growling with forced patience, “I got five men waiting at the air lock to go on outside detail. I gotta have fresh charges for their scooters.”

  On the other side
of the counter, Klein's narrow face was set woodenly. “I can't issue you the new charges until you turn in the empties,” he said expressionlessly. “Those are the rules.”

  “Rules hell!” Grogan said. “Those fragging scooters are tethered outside. I gotta go all the way back to the air lock, put a man in a spacesuit, wait till he vacs the lock, wait till he matches hub spin, goes out, gets the charges, matches spin again, waits for the air pumps, and hands me the tanks like a good little boy! Then I trot all the way down here and say, please, sir, can I have my charges now, sir! And in the meantime I waste an hour of the shift.” Grogan's brick-colored face contorted with the effort of being polite. “Look, why can't you just issue me the replacements and leave the paperwork for later. I'll bring the empties down at the end of the shift. Bailey always used to—”

  “Bailey isn't here any more,” Klein said.

  “But—”

  “I'm responsible for everything that goes out of here? Klein said. “You don't get new charges until you account for the old ones. If you want to fill out a lost or damaged report...”

  Grogan made a choking sound. He spat out a rude word and stormed out. Klein's eyes flickered over Jameson and Li. “Yes, Commander,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Tongzhi Li, ching,” Jameson said to Li. “Can we have that shopping list?”

  Li extracted a crumpled sheet of paper from a leg pocket and held it out to Klein. Klein didn't take it.

  “Just a minute,” Klein said. “I'll get Tongzhi Chia in on this.”

  “We're kind of in a hurry,” Jameson said. “We've got to finish up outside before Communications closes down. Chia doesn't mind, and it's okay with Li and me—”

  “It's not okay with me, Commander,” Klein said. “Wait here.”

  He came back with Chia Lan-ying. The Chinese stores exec was breathtakingly lovely, with a tiny flower face and great dark eyes. She moved with brisk efficiency. She was wearing a blue smock with the sleeves pushed up. Her little delicate fingers were grimy and ink-stained, and there was a smudge on her cheek. Jameson had always known her to be cheerful and cooperative, but today she seemed unhappy.