There was a sound like a maniac trying to play Bartok on the harmonica, and Jameson realized it had been made by one of the Cygnans. The other Cygnan answered with an incredibly rapid fragment of twelve-tone solfège.
Jameson came to full attention. There had been chords in all that quick passage-work, transitory but unmistakable, as if the Cygnans possessed multiple larynxes.
Whatever those brief cadenzas had meant, the Cygnans picked him up again and toted him to a cluster of what looked like manholes in the spongy floor. One of them lifted a lid, apparently at random, and, legs tucked in, dropped through. Another one of those damned tubes! Jameson was tossed in next, and the other Cygnan dove through after him, head first.
They were hurtling at dizzying speed down a corkscrew spiral. Outside the transparent walls of the tube was an enormous dim void, hung round with the ghostly outlines of fantastic shapes. If they had entered one of the spars, they were plunging down a shaft fifteen miles deep, with a boxed world at the bottom.
He could feel gravity starting to take hold after a mile or two; It didn't amount to much yet, but it would be a third of an Earth g at the bottom, if Ruiz's figures on the rotation had been correct. Enough to smash him to a bloody paste if he'd gone tobogganing down the spiral by himself without the Cygnans twelve busily pedaling legs to brake him.
His eyes began getting used to the dimness and he could see other transparent spirals in the hugeness around him, wrapped round slim silvery shafts. Other many-legged shapes were scooting up or down them. He peered down through the coils of his own tubeway and suddenly went rigid with fear.
A column of Cygnans was scurrying up the spiral, at the same fantastic speed. They and his own warders surely must see one another! But they weren't slowing down. Without doubt, they were going to collide with bone-crunching force. He had a split second to see the first shadowy shape, two coils below, flash around the shaft. He braced himself.
Nothing! Jameson looked upward. The ascending Cygnans were streaking through the tubes above. How the hell had they gotten past without a collision?
He looked across at the other tubes. The same trick was going on all around him. Ascending and descending Cygnans on a collison course in the same spiral tubeway passing one another without meeting!
Then he understood. He almost laughed, in spite of the gravity of his situation. The solution was ridiculously simple. A double spiral, like the elevators at the MacDonald. You could even find the same thing in that French château in the Loire valley with the famous double-spiral staircase. Chambord. He'd seen it in a holo travelogue. People going up never met the people coming down—a handy trick in the sixteenth century for getting out of the place.
They took more than an hour to reach bottom, an hour of being whipped round and round the central shaft at breakneck speed, while the remote walls of the murky chasm whirled dizzyingly around him and the indistinct structures that filled it blended into a tornado blur. Jameson passed out somewhere along the way. When he regained consciousness, he was out of the sack, but still in his suit, lying on a bare floor whose surface bristled with minute rubbery villi. He was alone.
He tried to stand up and immediately lost his balance and fell down again. The blood rushed through his head and the room wheeled and tilted.
He waited until the dizziness passed, then cautiously sat up. He was in a small room with an odd shape. It was a parallelogram rather than a rectangle. It was a shape that would have made sense to Cygnans if they'd built rows of chambers along one of the three sides of an environmental pod and kept the dividing walls parallel to the bulkhead at the end.
He struggled shakily to his feet, his hands groping for support along the wall. The wall was a mass of the same rubbery projections. He cast no shadow. Light seemed to exist in the room without an apparent source. It was a dim reddish light that turned his spacesuit the color of blood.
How long had he been unconscious? Reluctantly he lifted his eyes to the luminous squares of the helmet telltales. It was worse than he'd thought. Barely ten minutes worth of air was left.
“Are you afraid?” Maggie said.
“Terrified,” Maybury said. Her dark eyes were big. “What's going to happen now?”
Around them the big hemispherical chamber was alive with subdued conversation and purposeless moving to and fro. The air was already beginning to taste stale. Some seventy people were crowded into the bridge and observatory areas. Everything below hydroponics was hard vacuum.
Another twenty people were trapped in the tail of the ship: the Chinese and American engine techs and the erstwhile Chinese guards. The bridge was still in communication with them. Mike Berry had reported that everything forward of them was vacuum, and presumably swarming with Cygnans. They had one spacesuit down there, but no place to go with it.
Grogan's man, Fiaccone, had managed to bring back a half-dozen spacesuits from spinlock storage before Captain Boyle had vetoed any further forays. He'd reported dead bodies floating around everywhere.
“I don't know,” Maggie said, brushing back a strand of wilted hair. It was warm and steamy in the bridge. “It's stalemate, I guess. We're under house arrest. We can't get out, and those creatures don't seem to want to get in. God, look at them! They move like weasels! They're never still!”
Maybury followed her gaze to the glassy curve of the outside wall. It was covered with sleek six-legged shapes that stared and darted away, to be replaced by others. By this time most of the crew had moved uneasily away from the observation wall, leaving a clear space of about ten feet.
“They're afraid to come inside,” Maybury said. “After what happened in hydroponics”
On his last trip for spacesuits Fiaccone had been pursued by Cygnans coming through the breached spinlock. He'd barely made it through the improvised air lock into the farm. One of the Cygnans had gotten through after him before Kiernan managed to slam the lid shut. Other Cygnans were coming through, leaving the outside hatch open, but Kiernan barricaded it before too much air whooshed through. He turned to find Fiaccone hanging on to slippery thing that was twisting and squirming in his embrace. Kiernan stabbed it with a spading fork. It writhed on the three tines, oozing an orange ichor, and expired. Its friends were rattling the inside lid of the lock. Against Dmitri's anguished protests, Kiernan and Fiaccone opened the lid and, aided by the outward explosion of air, tossed the body outside and slammed the lid shut again, leaving a Cygnan finger inside.
There had been no further attempts by the Cygnans to get through the lock. Dmitri had had to be content with the severed finger. He and Louise Phelps were dissecting it now in the observatory.
“There's something going on up on the balcony,” Maggie said.
Boyle was conferring with Hsieh. After a moment he came to the rail and rapped for attention. The bridge became silent. Everybody looked up, waiting.
The Cygnans are through into the farm,” Boyle said without preamble. “The instruments show vacuum there.”
There was a confusion of voices. Kiernan, just behind Maggie in the jostling crowd, said, “The wingbeans! The algae! Everything! If only the captain had let me work down there for another half-hour I, could've saved more...”
Boyle rapped for attention again. “You might as well know the worst,” he said. “The air plant's gone. We're living on reserves now.”
Maggie looked up at the ventilators. The little ribbons on the grilles had stopped fluttering. Somewhere in the crowd a woman became hysterical.
“Somebody get the people out of the observatory,” Boyle went on. “We'll have to make a last stand here. Seal off all the exits. Gifford, break out some emergency patches and stickum and get them ready.”
“Captain!” a voice boomed from the floor. One of Grogan's men. “We've got seven suits. Let me and some of the boys get out there now. We can do it without losing too much air. We'll go through the door fast, and Gifford can slap a patch on after us. We can hold ’em off as long as our air lasts.”
Boyle conferred in whis
pers with Hsieh. He turned back to the rail, and said: “It's no good. You wouldn't have a chance. You saw what happened to Jameson and Chief Grogan and Comrade Yeh. We'll use the suits in here.”
“Captain,” the man said, standing his ground. “Seven suits aren't going to go very far with seventy people.”
“Seven people will have a chance to stay alive a little longer,” Boyle said firmly. “We're going to draw straws. Only crewpersons are eligible.”
Beth Oliver stood up, straight and beautiful. “Captain,” she said in a clear voice. “Once upon a time, ‘crewpersons’ meant people of both sexes. Well, I think I'm speaking for the rest of the ‘crewpersons’ when I say we won't have anything to do with that sexist nonsense. The men will have an equal chance with us.”
A female murmur of agreement came from the crowd. Sue Jarowski yelled, “Damn right!”
Boyle held up his hands for quiet. “All right,” he said. “I'm proud of you all. The men will be in the drawing. But of course any man who wins a suit will be free to decline it and throw his chance into the pot again.”
There was a groan from the women. Throughout the crowd, men were looking stubborn, nodding agreement with the captain. Klein stepped forward, waxy-faced. “Captain,” he began in a strained voice.
A horrifying whistling sound came from the observation wall. Everybody fell silent and stared at the bubble. A woman screamed.
The Cygnans had cleared a twelve-foot circle at the center of the port. Their packed bodies darkened the rest of the Lexiglass. At the fringes of the circle a dozen of the creatures were busy with glowing cutting tools. Plastic was melting and bubbling along the entire twelve-foot circumference.
There was a sudden rush toward the exits. But before anybody had gone more than a few steps, the heavy circle of plastic tumbled with nightmare slowness to the deck and a ring of long-snouted Cygnan faces was around the edges of the opening, peering in at the humans.
Maggie sucked in a last desperate lungful of air before it was gone, and waited to die.
Chapter 16
There was a grating sound at the door. Jameson scrambled to his feet. He backed off to give clearance, ready for anything.
The door opened in an unexpected fashion. It was a five-foot recessed circle with a knob set low at one side. He had imagined it might swing in or out, or—in view of the recess—slide open. Instead it rolled like a cartwheel on a hidden track, the knob revolving with it until it caught against the frame, leaving an opening the shape of a circle with a bite out of it.
An alien stepped in, standing upright and holding a shotgun-sized tubular object in its middle pair of limbs. It was dressed in a crinkly transparent envelope, evidently to protect it against Earthly microorganisms. The tubular thing was obviously an energy weapon of some sort. It had a trumpet bell at the business end with a stamenlike structure projecting from the focus. Instead of a stock or pistol grip, the weapon was equipped with a bulb adapted to the Cygnan grip.
Jameson raised his hands and took a step backward to reassure the creature. Perhaps the Cygnan didn't understand the human gesture. It squeezed the bulb, and Jameson was blind.
He was worse than blind. He was deaf, dumb, and paralyzed. He couldn't tell where his limbs were or what his body was doing Kaleidoscopic flashes exploded through his visual pathways. There was a red—red?—roaring in his ears. His nerves jangled with an excruciating discomfort that made him want to scream, to be free of his body, as if he were experiencing some hideously magnified episode of drug withdrawal.
Worst of all, he couldn't think! There was a trapped knot of consciousness that knew he couldn't think, and that was what made it a nightmare. His thoughts circled round and round uselessly, unable to track.
The sensation lasted only a moment. Or an eternity. Then, mercifully, he was himself again. He found himself sprawled on the floor, clammy with sweat in his spacesuit. He was still a little disoriented. He had lost control of his bladder during that brief hell, but the suit's plumbing had saved him from disgrace.
His cell was full of Cygnans—half a dozen of them, all dressed in the same clear protective suits. Some of them were standing erect on their hind legs, tails hanging straight down. Some were on four legs, their torsos upright so that they were shaped like little low-slung centaurs. They were jabbering at one another in a cacophony of quarter-tone scales and queer atonal chords, sounding like an orchestra of bagpipes warming up. Their actions all seemed pointless to Jameson, but then, he thought, perhaps a laboratory rat thought that the conversation of the lab workers was pointless.
The Cygnan holding the neural weapon was still there. Jameson kept very still. A Cygnan scuttled up to him, fixed him with three quivering eyes, then scuttled back. There was more bagpipe conversation.
Encouraged, he sat up, moving very slowly and keeping his hands down.
Did the Cygnans react nervously? It was hard to tell. They always seemed nervous. There was a lot of atonal chittering and much shuffling and twitching, but his nervous system remained unscrambled. He lifted his eyes to the helmet dials. How could he make them understand?
“Air,” he mouthed. “Dammit, don't you understand? I've only got a couple of minutes worth of air left.”
Raising his gloved hands to his helmet, he made raking-in gestures with spread fingers. He let them see his open mouth sucking in air.
No discernible reaction came from his audience. Even on Earth, body language was different between Arabs and Japanese, Scandinavians and Mediterraneans. Maybe his pantomimes couldn't work with creatures that had six limbs, radial symmetry, brains in their torsos, and, for all he knew, no lungs.
He tried again. This time he pointed to his air tanks and traced his hoses to their gaskets in his helmet.
They seemed bored with him. A couple of them skidded around on four legs and left the cell. The ones who were left lost interest in him entirely. Two of them had started holding hands. Another was scratching itself with a hind leg. Another had taken an object that looked like a bright yellow plastic asterisk out of a pouch and was showing it to a companion.
Jameson struggled recklessly to his feet. The trumpet bell of the weapon flicked in his direction. He ignored it. “Your air!” he roared. “Can I breathe your air?”
It was doubtful that they even understood his anguished cry as speech. Their own communication, Jameson had guessed depended on the pitch of speech components rather than anything resembling consonants and vowels—and those fragments of reedy tone were too quick and transitory for even his gifted ear to follow.
His lungs heaved, and he realized with despair that he was now rebreathing the stale air in his helmet. He staggered forward, arms outspread. The Cygnans scampered out of his way. The energy weapon tracked him but didn't fire.
The Cygnans were gone, no longer in his path. Instead, they were behind him. He felt a myriad of little three-fingered hands running all over his spacesuit, hugging his legs, pinioning his arms. He was being held immobile. He struggled, but his lungs were burning and his senses were growing dim.
Then he realized that they were removing his suit.
A transparent membrane, insubstantial as a soap bubble, was stretched across the twelve-foot circle the Cygnans had opened in the hull. That's why she still could breathe.
Maggie gawked at it. A lot of gawking was going on around her. Why didn't the air pressure inside the ship bend that membrane outward? Why didn't it burst?
“Look!” Maybury said, grabbing her arm.
Not only was the membrane not bulging outward, it was bulging inward! Stunned, the seventy people in the control room watched it stretch, ballooning itself until it filled the center of the chamber.
Nobody went near it. Nobody dared touch it. It looked too fragile. It looked as if it might burst at any moment.
A movement over by the row of empty spacesuits draped over a console apron caught Maggie's eye. It was Klein. He was lifting up the sleeve of one of the suits.
“Leave that
alone!” Boyle's voice thundered.
“I was just—” Klein began.
“Gwan-cha, gwan-cha!” a Chinese voice screamed.
Five or six Cygnans had dropped lightly to the floor. They stood, quivering, inside the ship, looking alertly through the bubble at the humans. They all looked upward at the same instant and started backing away from the center of their bubble. One of them was against the transparent skin itself, poking it outward.
The temptation was too much for one of the Struggle Brigade bullies. He snatched up a steel bar and swung it two-handed at the Cygnan's head.
“Don't!” Boyle yelled, but he was too late. The bar connected with a sickening impact. The Cygnan had tried to skip out of the way, but hadn't had enough warning, even with its speedy reflexes.
A gasp went up from the assembled crew, but the bubble held. The bar rested in a sagging indentation on the bubble. Slowly the indentation filled itself and the bar slid to the floor.
The injured Cygnan, incredibly, was still on its feet. It writhed in evident agony, its body twisting bonelessly like some fat worm that had been stepped on. Its head was orange pulp. One stubby eyestalk waved above the mess, blinking horribly. A couple of its friends passed it up to waiting sets of hands. The other Cygnans in the inverted bubble began darting their heads like angry geese at the nearest humans. You could see the cheese-grater mouths gaping and the tubular rasp of a tongue flicking in and out inside the inflated sheaths they wore over their heads. But they all stayed well away from the boundary of the bubble.
Now there was movement above, and the Cygnans were lowering a strange device on a stand into the ship. The Cygnans inside the bubble steadied the thing and set it in place. It looked like a squat brassy pyramid with three flaring horns sprouting from its apex. One of the Cygnans did something to it, and the apex started rotating. The horns rotated with it, waving up, and down like crazy semaphores.
The Cygnans jumped on one another's shoulders and scrambled out of the bubble fast. The anchoring alien stretched and flowed, becoming a foot taller, and caught the dangling hand of a living chain. Then they whisked it out of the hole.
The Jupiter Theft Page 17