He got an answer that it was equal to the length of one of the Cygnans’ active periods. It was the only unit of time he had succeeded in establishing so far. The kitten hadn't eaten for eight or nine days; that was the closest he could figure.
“Where did you find the animal?” he asked.
He wondered who in the crew had managed to smuggle a kitten aboard ship and keep it hidden for all those months. No—not a kitten. A mother cat. Pregnant. Wait a minute! What was the gestation period of a cat? Only a couple of months! That was impossible. The trip to Jupiter had taken five months, and the kitten couldn't be more than a few weeks old.
An awful suspicion began to dawn on Jameson.
Triad gestured toward the triangular containers. “We found the animal on your planet,” the creature said.
Tetrachord and Triad were indulgent. They let Jameson hang around while they unpacked the containers, though they hissed at him if he got too close.
Soil samples in little transparent bags. A dead beetle. Some dessicated samples of vegetation that was indisputably terrestrial. To Jameson the stuff looked tropical. South America or Southeast Asia? And—sinister import!—a preserved human hand and forearm with the shredded remnants of a cotton sleeve sticking to it. The kitten's owner?
They took out two more dead kittens and part of a third. The gray one had been the only one to survive the trip. Eight days, if he could believe the Cygnans.
Eight days from Earth! Was that possible?
Jameson didn't even have to do the arithmetic. This was a favorite spaceman's pipe dream, one that came up during every bull session.
Halfway from Earth to Jupiter at a constant acceleration of one gravity. The second half of the trip at constant one gravity deceleration. Eight or nine days was about right. If he needed confirmation, the kitten was proof enough. He looked at it sitting next to the empty bowl, contentedly giving itself a wash. Perhaps there had been water in the capsule it had traveled in—condensation or even a water supply. But it couldn't have survived without food for much longer than that.
Brute force. Unlimited power. That's what it would take. Never mind about vectors or the finer points of space navigation. But if those puny-looking Cygnan broomsticks could manage constant acceleration at one g, then certainly they could mail a package from Earth in eight days.
“Are there Cygnans on Earth now?” Jameson asked.
Tetrachord and Triad were preoccupied. Jameson had to ask several times before he got a reply.
“No. That is a wrong question. A Cygnan on Earth is a not-Cygnan, so that what you say has not-meaning.” While Jameson wrestled with that, Tetrachord went on: “We have caused to be sent to Earth a (number?) of tweetle-tweetle-chirp-trill.”
“What is a tweetle-tweetle-chirp-trill?”
Impatiently, Tetrachord glided over to the queer console at the far wall, still clutching a soil-sample bag in one middle claw. The fingers of three hands blurred over the pearly knobs and flicked over the rows of wires on their fretted necks. A picture formed on the three clustered circular screens—all the same picture, but with subtle differences. The Cygnans didn't use holo images. Their three eyes evidently focused separately on each of the three images and their brain translated them into a picture they could use.
Jameson concentrated on whatever picture seemed clearest at the moment. What he saw was a hangarlike interior occupied by a narrow flat-sided needle in the shape of an elongated pyramid. Twenty or thirty Cygnans were bustling around it, giving it scale. The object was about ten meters long, he guessed. Three flaring nozzles stuck out of the corners of the blunt end. The pointed end was broken away, and Cygnans were removing odd-shaped containers from the interior. All the Cygnans wore transparent protective suits.
A probe. An automated probe.
How the hell had the Cygnans slipped their probes through Earth's radar defenses without precipitating a world war?
“How long have you been studying Earth?”
The answer was indefinite, as answers involving duration or measurement always were. Jameson gathered that it hadn't been for very long, though. Not until after the human ship had entered the Jovian system.
That was odd. They must have picked up radio signals from Earth and Mars long before they themselves went into orbit around Jupiter. And picked up the com laser flashes to the ship. It seemed to Jameson that when you had traveled more than ten thousand light-years, having a look at an indigenous intelligent life form would have a high degree of priority. But evidently the Cygnans had just now gotten around to being curious about people.
“Why are you studying us now?”
“You are too puny to interfere with our purpose. But the mother-within-herself is prudent.”
More Cygnan gobbledegook. He'd run into the “mother-within-herself” reference before and had pinned down its literal meaning, if not its import. He wished he could pass on these clues to Janet Lemieux or someone else more qualified than he. But the thrust of Tetrachord's answer became clear when the Cygnan plucked some wires on the console and another scene took shape on the three circular screens. They showed a film or a tape or a sound-picture of the Jupiter ship after it had been evacuated. Cygnan technicians had removed the protective blisters over the nuclear-missile racks. They were taking lots of pictures, or whatever happened when light from those glittering little boxes they carried bathed the missiles, but they weren't touching the launching racks. They acted somewhat skittish, and were staying well clear of them.
The Cygnans were miffed about the nuclear bombs, and Jameson couldn't blame them.
“We wish you no harm,” Jameson said. “But humans also are prudent.”
“Humans cannot harm us,” Tetrachord said flatly.
His heart pounding, Jameson said, “What do you want with the Earth?”
“Want?” The two Cygnans tossed the word back and forth, like shrikes calling to each other in counterpoint. “The Earth is a wrong thing. It is not a thing that we want. We have no need to take it.”
That took Jameson's breath away. Tetrachord hadn't used “take” in the sense of possessing something. He had used the idiom for carrying something away.
Could he keep the Cygnans talking? They became bored easily. For the moment, they were intently watching the kitten. Its bath finished, it was clawing its way up his trouser leg. It settled in his lap, purring. There was an excited chirping from the Cygnans. Desperately Jameson ran his fingers over the keyboards of the Moog.
“Why have you come here then?” he asked. “What do you want in this star system?”
The Cygnans seemed at a loss to reply to him. They went into a hand-holding huddle, fluting at each other for a long time. Finally Tetrachord went over to the console again. An outside view sprang to life on the triple viewscreens: the tremendous disk of the planet Jupiter, repeated three times.
Jupiter had changed. Jameson stared in wonder at its seething bulk. The bands and the Red Spot were completely gone. The process the aliens had started had advanced considerably since the last time he had seen the planet. The atmosphere had churned itself into a boiling porridge, a uniform dirty yellow in color. It heaved violently, popping world-sized bubbles that burst through the surface and were sucked into the billowing chasm that divided the planet in half.
“This is what we want,” Tetrachord cheeped at him. “We will take it with us.”
Chapter 19
Jameson sat there, too stunned to move. The kitten purred in his lap, its sharp little claws digging into him rhythmically. Over on the triple screens, Jupiter continued to boil away.
If you're going to steal a planet, he thought insanely, why settle for anything except the biggest? Smash and run, with the brightest bauble the solar system has to offer!
Jupiter!
A mere bagatelle, massing three times the rest of all the planets and moons in the solar system combined! A giant among worlds—eleven times the diameter of Earth and more than three hundred times its weight. A melon next
to a grape! He supposed it was fortunate for the human race that the Cygnans thought big.
He patted the kitten absently. Under the soft fur it was all bones. The Cygnans were still watching him with their triangulated eyes. He flipped switches and pulled stops on the Moog. He was finally getting somewhere; every nuance had to be right.
“Why?” Jameson typed. “Why do you need the large planet?”
The two Cygnans hesitated. Their stumpy eye polyps twitched. They were facing a problem about vocabulary.
“Jameson eats the green food made from growing things,” Triad skirled. “The small animal from Earth eats the white liquid. Then Jameson has the power to move. Then the animal has the power to move. Does Jameson understand?”
“Jameson understands,” he tapped out on the keys.
“An engine must eat. Then this place may move.”
Fuel. They were talking about fuel. A couple of quick exchanges and he had the Cygnan word for it.
Tetrachord spoke up. “The fuel which our engines eat is the mother-of-matter.”
He got it right away. Hydrogen!
They were using Jupiter for fuel. To the Cygnans, that was all Jupiter was good for. They'd simply dropped in on a handy solar system to tank up.
Gas giants were common throughout the universe. They were a necessary consequence of planetary formation. Most of those that had been detected, like the superjovian companions of 61 Cygni and CIN 2347, were considerably more massive than Jupiter itself. Using them for refueling stops must be a convenient way to star-hop.
Mother-of-matter—that was as good a description as any for the most basic of the elements. Rather poetic, in fact.
Jupiter was composed almost entirely of hydrogen. The giant planets, with their tremendous gravitational strength, were able to hang on to the light gases that had given them birth. Oh, the atmosphere was placed with helium and with such impurities as water, methane, and ammonia. And somewhere at the center of that vast slush ball, like a cherry pit, was a small rocky core about the size of the planet Earth.
But mostly it was hydrogen—an atmosphere hundreds of miles deep, squeezed gradually by its own unsupportable weight until it began to behave like a liquid. There was no clear boundary. It became an ocean without a surface, some twelve thousand miles deep, an ocean in which the planet Earth could have sunk without a trace. It was also an ocean without a bottom. At that depth, under a pressure of three million Earth atmospheres, the thickening syrup of molecular hydrogen underwent another transformation. Its molecules dissociated into atoms. It turned into a metallic form never seen on Earth: a dense fluid that could conduct electricity.
It would make a bottomless reservoir of hydrogen fuel. Siphon off the upper atmosphere and the lower layers, released from pressure, would boil up into a gas again. Drain the oceans that weighed on that strange ball of metallic hydrogen and the viscid stuff would turn into the molecular form, in turn boiling off as a gas at its surface.
Jupiter would make a great fuel tank. How close to the speed of light could you get before you used it up?
Jameson looked over at the triple image of Jupiter on the circular screens. How much of Jupiter was gone already? It was impossible to guess. The Cygnans could have stolen a mass equal to several Earths without making an appreciable dent in it. And as the surface pressure let up, what was left of Jupiter would expand. To Jameson's naked eye there was no difference in Jupiter's size.
Jameson's fingers rippled over the keys. The Moog cleared its electronic throats and said, “How? How is it possible for you to do this thing?”
“The planet you call Jupiter will fall,” Tetrachord repeated for the fourth time. “And we will fall after it.”
“Yes, but what will it fall toward?” Jameson asked, getting desperate. It wasn't easy discussing orbital mechanics in babytalk.
“It will fall to that-which-pulls,” the Cygnan tweetled, “when that-which-pulls grows heavy enough.”
Jameson clenched his big fists in frustration. They were going around in circles. Any more of this and the Cygnans would give up on him, as they always did when the going got tough. He might never have another chance to reopen the subject.
He composed his thoughts and ran his hands over the keys again.
“Where is that-which-pulls?”
Tetrachord gestured vaguely toward the bulk of Jupiter on the screens. “You see it,” he said.
What did that mean? Was Jupiter supposed to fall toward itself? “Give me a closer look,” Jameson said. Tetrachord twisted a serpentine neck toward the triple screens and warbled at them. The console evidently could be voice-activated as well as manually controlled by the little tuned wires.
The view of Jupiter enlarged. The screens zoomed in on a segment of the hoop of glowing wire that circled the giant planet above the cloudtops. A rim of clouds stretched from Jupiter to the hoop like a hat brim.
The zoom stopped. Jameson was looking at a sash of light stretching in triplicate across the screens.
The close-up of a piece of halo told him nothing. “I see that the light draws hydrogen ('mother-of-matter') from Jupiter. But where does the hydrogen go? How is it stored?”
That earned him a lot of disconcerted whistling. “To store hydrogen has not-meaning. It is to be eaten by that-which-pulls.”
Back to square one. Exasperated, Jameson said, “I don't see anything there except light.”
They seemed puzzled that Jameson couldn't see what they were showing him. They held a bagpipy conference about it. Then Tetrachord made some adjustments at the keyboardlike row of fretted miniature guitar necks.
As Jameson watched, the glowing bracelet that circled Jupiter began to flicker. It became a series of fireballs chasing one another's tails. The fireballs finally slowed so that he could see them. What he saw was a herringbone frieze of overlapping shapes. Through the ghost images he could make out the basic form of the thing.
It was a strobe effect. Jameson was looking at a frozen frame of the object that circled Jupiter at a blurring speed that by now must be an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
The Cygnans needed no such visual coddling, he suddenly realized. The neurons in their visual pathways must be able to fire selectively, at millions of times per second, as naturally as a human being might squint for better focus. They carried their own built-in strobe flash.
“That-which-pulls,” Triad hummed.
It was one of their probes—an elongated pyramid like a flat-sided spike. It was doing nothing but circle. Jupiter, again and again, picking up speed with each circuit.
“Does Jameson know that as a thing goes faster, it grows heavier?” Tetrachord asked.
By God, the creature was quoting the theory of relativity at him! What Cygnan Einstein, thousands of years in the past, had arrived at the great keystone equation governing the increase of mass with velocity? Jameson dug into his memory for what he had learned at his Academy classes long ago.
“Jameson knows that if a thing would go as fast as light is fast, its weight would be...”
Damn! What was the Cygnan word for “infinite"? He'd never learned it. Perhaps there wasn't one. And did they understand “weight” to mean “mass"? And how did you express the concept of a square root in Cygnanese? The square root of one minus the square of velocity divided by the square of the speed of light—how did you go about saying a thing like that in pidgin? Maybe the Cygnans didn't use square roots, either. Perhaps they arrived at their results in an entirely different fashion—like Russian multiplication.
He stared at the little triangular probe on the screens. Could a thing that small really move the biggest planet in the solar system? His instincts said no. Einstein said yes.
What was its mass by now? Enough to make the outer fringes of the Jovian atmosphere fall into it. Jameson could see the threadlike stem of a whirling tornado sucked into the needle craft—a tornado that was whipped round the circumference of Jupiter at thousands of miles per second, unwinding the gia
nt planet like a ball of twine.
The probe couldn't be more than a few dozen meters in length. But its speed made it legion; it zipped around the planet like a horde of hydrogen-sucking vampires, bleeding Jupiter's substance from the great continuous wound at the equator.
Faster and faster, squandering that bottomless reservoir of hydrogen to push itself fractionally close to the unattainable speed of light, this one tiny gnat could unpeel Jupiter layer by layer. Then, pregnant with stolen mass, it would reach a point on the curve where it outweighed Jupiter itself—or what was left of Jupiter.
Long before that point, Jupiter would begin to respond to its gravitational tug. The two bodies would be revolving around a common center of gravity, rising through Jupiter, then outside it. Some of the energy could be diverted to form a vector.
The giant planet would then follow the little robot ship like an elephant on a tether. The gigantic alien ships, in turn, would be drawn along in Jupiter's wake, using its bulk as a convenient shield against the inferno of X-rays and gamma radiation sparking off the planet's forward face.
Jameson scratched the stubble on his chin. The mysterious Earth-sized planet that the Cygnans had deposited in orbit around Jupiter was—he guessed—the discarded core of another gas giant. The sheer extravagance of it took his breath away. The Cygnans had to be the wastrels of the universe.
Maybe it was the only way to travel between the stars at relativistic speeds. Take along a gas giant for a fuel tank. Or, more accurately, have it take you along. A fuel supply—and protection against the hellish storm of radiation that happened when you collided with interstellar hydrogen at a speed approaching that of light.
The scale of it was staggering. But after all, he told himself reasonably, the principle wasn't too different from that of an early chemical rocket burning tons of fuel to put a few pounds into orbit. As the fuel was burned up it imparted its energy to what was left of the payload—a point that had been lost on some of the early critics of space travel, who insisted that not even the most powerful known fuels contained enough energy to boost themselves to escape velocity.
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