The Jupiter Theft

by Donald Moffitt

  They reached the end of the hall, where he saw another locked cage. Beyond, Jameson could see a stark, garishly lit enclosure with wide bare terraces sloping down to a shallow pool filled with brownish water. Figures moved among the branched metal uprights set around the water's edge. They were obviously human.

  Jameson strained toward the bars, trying to see. Tetrachord held him back by the tether while Triad unlocked the cage door with one of her cylindrical keys.

  Figures were bounding up the terraces toward him, whooping and yelling. Jameson recognized Mike Berry, gaunt, long-haired, and bearded, wearing only a pair of tattered denim shorts. And one of the Chinese crewmen, a young probe tech.

  The three Cygnans jerked their neural weapons upward, fanning them back and forth. The humans skidded to a stop, staying a respectful distance from the bars. New arrivals bumped into them from behind and stayed where they were. The noise died down. They stood silently watching.

  Tetrachord unfastened the tether, leaving a foot-long loop of cord dangling from Jameson's nostrils. Augie backed away, keeping the weapon trained on him. The Cygnans gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the cage, the kitten cradled in his arms.

  Mike Berry stepped forward, his face grim. “Welcome to the zoo.”

  Chapter 22

  “This won't hurt,” Janet Lemieux said. “Sit still.”

  With a deft yank she pulled the severed cord out of Jameson's nose. There was about a foot of it, crusted with dried blood.

  Jameson swallowed experimentally. The back of his throat still felt sore, but it was an immense relief to have the cord out.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said. He put his arm back around Maggie and pulled her close to him on the step. She was painfully thin, even for her. He could feel her ribs through the threadbare cotton shirt she wore. All of the eighty-odd crewmen and crewpersons gathered around him on the terraced slope had lost weight. Jameson had lost weight too, but he was painfully conscious of the fact that he was in better condition than the rest of them.

  They were scattered in a loose semicircle, waiting expectantly, sitting on the edges of the terraces or leaning against the iron trees, a bunch of ragged scarecrows in scraps of clothing. The Chinese remained a little apart, sticking together.

  Jameson's eyes fell on Ruiz, looking like a bearded death's head, a collection of raw bones in faded shorts. Like the rest of the men, he'd given his shirt to the women. Maybury was standing unobtrusively near him, her pretty little face marred by dark circles beneath the eyes. Further back, Omar Tuttle was looking Jameson's way, unsmiling, a starved bear with his arm around a gaunt and straggly-haired Liz Becque. Liz was pregnant. Jameson caught Sue Jarowski's eye. She gave him a wan smile. Mike Berry stepped up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

  The surroundings were bleak under the glaring yellow light: grounds of a depressing gray substance like hardened oatmeal, the stagnant brown pool, a dusty sky that hadn't been washed for centuries. Across the pool some dispirited greenery was struggling for existence; Kiernan and Wang seemed to have coaxed some wingbean vines to grow in a shallow depression filled with coarse earth.

  Captain Boyle pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He was still wearing his cap, but otherwise he'd stripped to shorts. His bare torso was as red as a boiled lobster, but a lot of the meat was gone, and his once-florid face was blotchy. He looked a decade older.

  He looked Jameson up and down. “Where've you been, Tod?” he said mildly.

  “I've been talking to Cygnans,” Jameson said.

  There was a stirring at the fringes of the Chinese group. Tu Jue-chen stepped forward, her waxen face angry. “Impossible,” she snapped. “No one can talk to them. They tried to communicate with Comrade Yeh. They kept him in a cell for days before putting him here with the rest of us. Isn't that so, Comrade?”

  Yeh shuffled uncomfortably. “It's true. They tried to make me copy their whistles. I thought I had a word or two at first, but they meant something different every time.”

  Jameson nodded at the big man. He was surprised that Yeh had survived. When he'd seen him borne off by a horde of Cygnans, he was sure they'd killed him, as they had Grogan.

  “That's because you were whistling in different keys, Comrade,” he said. “It depends on absolute pitch.”

  Boyle's square head came up alertly. “You found a way to talk to them?”

  “That's right, Captain,” Jameson said.

  “You are a traitor, admit it!” Tu Jue-chen said in a fury. “Otherwise they would not have pampered you so! Now they've sent you here to spy on us!”

  Boyle's face hardened as he spoke to the Struggle Group leader. “You can't have it both ways, Comrade Tu,” he said. “If he doesn't know how to talk to Cygnans, then he can't be a spy for them.” He turned back to Jameson. “You better tell us about it,” he said.

  Patiently Jameson explained about how Cygnan phonemes were formed, and how he'd programmed the Moog synthesizer to imitate them.

  “Can you still communicate with them?” Boyle asked urgently.

  “Without the Moog, it's hard, Captain. But I can get a few primitive ideas across ... if they bother to pay attention. And I can understand most of what they say directly to me—again, if they bother to try. When they talk to one another, I miss a lot.”

  “Commander, we're in bad shape here. We could use some of the stuff from the ship. Clothing, soap. Razors. Birth-control pills. And we could stand an improvement in our rations. Kiernan and Wang are trying to get an ecology going. The Cygnans gave us some plants from hydroponics, some hamsters and fish and so forth. But it'll be some time till we can feed ourselves entirely—if ever. In the meantime we depend on the synthetic slop they dish out to us, and Dr. Lemieux and Dr. Phelps say it isn't adequate. Wrong balance of amino acids, vitamin deficiencies, and so on.”

  “I'll see what I can do, Captain. At least I know where they've stockpiled our stuff. But I don't know if I can get them to listen to me.”

  “You've got to, boy! Those damned walking eels are trying to take care of us, I suppose. But it doesn't seem to occur to them that we're trying to communicate. When I think of how—” He broke off. “We're just curiosities to them. Zoo animals.”

  Jameson's gaze strayed to the branching transparent pipes overhead. There were a few shadowy six-legged shapes moving through them. “I know what you mean, Captain,” he said.

  “Dammit, they know we're intelligent beings!”

  “We know porpoises are intelligent beings, Captain. Known it for fifty years. That doesn't stop us from putting them in aquariums.”

  “Or killing them when they get in the way of our fishing remotes,” Janet Lemieux put in.

  Boyle had command of himself again. Jameson was pleased to see the Old Man's spine straighten. “Did you see any spacesuits, Tod?” the captain said.

  Jameson was startled. “Captain, you're not thinking about an escape?”

  “It's my responsibility to think about it, Commander. Captain Hsieh and I have talked it over. We're keeping our options open.”

  “Captain, what if we get out of our cage, even out of this zoo enclosure? It'd be like those porpoises getting out of their tanks. In an inland aquarium at that! Where do we go?”

  “Our ship has to be parked somewhere nearby. Some of the crew members regained consciousness soon enough to see the Cygnans pushing it along behind us.”

  “Captain, I saw the ship.”

  “You saw—” Boyle swallowed, then went on more quietly. “You saw the ship? What kind of shape is it in?”

  “I don't know what the interior's like, Captain. I didn't see any evidence that they'd ripped out any essential equipment. Just carted away some of the loose stuff. I'd guess that the power plant and the controls are intact ... and maybe even enough frozen seed stock in hydroponics to get an air plant going again. The outside of the ship's okay, though. The missile racks are still in place, if that's any indication—they hadn't even gone near them. And the pod for the Ca
llisto lander is intact. I suppose it could be-used to nudge—”

  “I beg your pardon, Commander,” a voice said. Jameson turned to see People's Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang emerging from the knot of Chinese. The bomb-crew officer was a lean, ascetic man who had managed to keep his beard plucked and his head closely cropped despite his incarceration. He'd donated his shirt, but retained a cotton singlet with a huge puckered ridge that indicated that he'd somehow contrived to darn the frayed edges of a hole together.

  “Yes, Comrade,” Jameson said politely.

  “Did I hear you say that the nuclear missiles are intact?”

  “They seem to be, but I hope ... There's nothing we could do with them except annoy the Cygnans ... Oh, I see what you're getting at! You think we might be able to use the propulsive units to maneuver the ship if we have to.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Boyle broke in briskly. “Well, we can talk about all that later. The first step is to inject some morale into the crew, get them properly fed and cleaned up, whip things into shape around here. We're human beings, not animals. I don't know if we can ever be entirely self-supporting, even with our hamsters and fish and vegetables, but we're damn well going to control our own destiny to the extent we're able.”

  Then everybody was crowding around Jameson, asking breathless questions about his sojourn with the Cygnans, clapping him on the shoulder, welcoming him, while Maggie snuggled up to him. Even the Chinese broke through their reserve and, forgetting ideology, pestered him with questions.

  The kitten, Mao, was popular with both factions. He was passed from hand to hand, fussed over, coaxed to eat tidbits that had been saved from human rations. Jameson got a lump in his throat when he saw how pathetically starved everyone was for this little furry link with Earth and the human race. He couldn't help thinking of the Jovians, swimming forlornly in their tank of liquid hydrogen in the next exhibition hall.

  The normally standoffish Klein surprised Jameson by making an awkward effort to be sociable. Jameson, a little ashamed of his dislike of the man, did his best to answer Klein's persistent questions about the sights he'd seen through the walls of the travel tube leading down the ship's arm, the layout of the zoo and the surrounding Cygnan country, and the like.

  Klein still looked fit, compared to most of the crew; he'd made an effort to take care of-himself. His sleek seal's head was combed and plastered down, his sloping shoulders and thick upper arms showed knots of hard muscle, his shorts were mended and somehow pressed.

  “You mean you were in the place where those snakes live, Commander?” Klein was saying. “When they went to get those nervous system guns of theirs—”

  He was interrupted by Mike Berry, who wanted to hear Jameson's theory about the three-armed design of the Cygnan vessels.

  “Technology follows morphology,” Mike said sententiously. “But if their designs got frozen all those thousands of years ago, they must have a frozen society, too. Maybe they're not all that intelligent. Just got the jump on us, that's all. Take this drive of theirs that squirts them around at close to the speed of light, for example. Maybe it's not all, that far beyond us. Take an ordinary photon. Like the ones that are letting you see how sexy Maggie is. Now, you pump it full of energy—a billion times as much. Know what happens? That proletarian photon of yours takes on airs. It starts to behave like a hadron. It thinks it's a massive particle like a proton. Now you generate a beam of high-energy photons—”

  “Now wait a minute, Mike,” his assistant Quentin, interrupted, his peach-fuzz face alight with combat. “First tell the man about vector mesons with zero strangeness. Yeah, I'm talking about the rho. You measure those two pions...”

  Jameson left them babbling at each other and elbowed his way through the crowds with Maggie in tow. He was stopped by Dmitri.

  “How did it feel to have a team of alien biologists study you, Tod?” Dmitri said. “God, I wish it had been me! What an opportunity! The specimen studying them back! I can't get a close look at them through those tubes, and when they feed us they makes keep back. Look, you've got to sit down with me and tell me everything you saw.”

  “They weren't biologists, Dmitri,” Jameson said. “Just zookeepers. They brought in the staff veterinarians to make sure they kept me healthy ... probably used my own tissue cultures to treat the rest of you and get a line on synthesizing human food. That's their job. But I don't think the Cygnans have any great abstract interest in human beings.”

  Dmitri's face fell. “But they've got to be interested in us!” he said.

  Jameson took the younger man by the arm. “Let me tell you about the Jovians,” he said.

  He was able to pry himself away from Dmitri a half-hour later and look for Ruiz. The crowd had scattered by then, breaking up into smaller groups. Kiernan had some recruits working in his garden. Some of the Chinese were having a meeting, with guards posted to keep eavesdroppers away. A couple of women were washing clothes in the pool, scrubbing them against the concretelike brim. Jameson tried not to notice a few furtive couples who had retreated to more-or-less-isolated spots on the perimeter of the terraced arena; the Cygnans hadn't provided much in the way of screening materials.

  He found Ruiz squatting on his heels at the base of one of the iron trees. He was contriving some sort of little square frame by lashing together four plastic strips that might have been braces ripped off a hamster cage. Beside him, Maybury was threading dried beans on cotton unraveled from her shirt.

  “Ah, Commander Jameson, Mizz Macinnes. Sit down, both of you. We're just making an abacus. We've got a pen, too, and some precious scraps of paper we're hoarding. Begged shamelessly for the contents of people's pockets. Por Dios, what I wouldn't give for a lightpad!”

  Jameson squatted down beside him. “I wish you had one too, Doctor. I've got some orbits for you to compute.”

  Ruiz put down the frame. “You managed to find out a few things, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find out where the Cygnans came from?”

  “I got some information that might help you figure it out. I also think I found out how they keep from getting fried by their own X-rays while they're traveling. I'd like you to verify my theory.”

  “All right. Let's get to it.”

  “I've got something more important to tell you first.”

  “More important than that?”

  “Do you have any idea how much time has elapsed since the Cygnans picked us up?”

  “A very good idea. Some of our people managed to keep their watches.”

  “Do you know where Earth is in its orbit in relation to Jupiter right now?”

  Ruiz gave him a penetrating look. “I don't keep planetary tables in my head. But yes, I can give you a rough notion.”

  “Tod, what's this all about?” Maggie said.

  Jameson spoke without taking his eyes off Ruiz. “I want Dr. Ruiz to figure out how long we've got before the Cygnans leave this system and take us with them.”

  Ruiz raised his eyebrows. “They're leaving, then?” he said.

  “That's what they told me. If you'll let me have one of those scraps of paper, I can draw you a diagram of the relative positions of all the inner planets as they'll be when the Cygnans cross Earth's orbit.”

  Ruiz was excited. “Including Mercury?”

  “Yes.”

  Ruiz handed him a pen and a page torn from a book. It was from a pocket Bible—the first page of Genesis. “Go ahead, Commander. Try to be as accurate as possible.”

  Jameson contrived a crude compass by tying a piece of Maybury's thread to the pen. He drew the orbits as he remembered them from the Cygnan's animated diagram, translating the triangular format to circles. When he finished, Ruiz and Maybury went into a huddle. They bisected and quadrisected angles with thread and a straight edge made from the cover of the Bible. They scratched figures in the cementlike surface of the terrace. Ruiz finally raised his head.

  “I can pin it down fairly close, Comm
ander,” he said. “I'll assume an error of no more than four degrees in your planetary positions. But Mercury's our second hand. That's only about one day's travel for Mercury. I'm also assuming that the Cygnans will stay true to form and accelerate at a constant one gravity. That's less than a day till they intersect Earth's orbit.”

  “So how long till they leave?” Jameson asked.

  “About nine days. Give or take a couple of days.”

  Maggie drew her breath in sharply. Jameson didn't look at her. He turned to Maybury. The girl's face was pale and drained under a dark cap of hacked-off hair. Her eyes were huge. He could see her narrow shoulders trembling.

  “Is that right?” he demanded.

  She bit her lip. “That's right. If your diagram's anywhere near right, the Cygnans expect to begin to move Jupiter out of orbit in about nine days.”

  “Tod!” Maggie said urgently. “We'd better tell Captain Boyle right away! That leaves practically no time at all for his escape plans!”

  “We're not going to tell the captain.”

  “What?” Maggie sat suddenly erect.

  “We're not telling the captain. Or anybody. Maggie, I want you to keep quiet about this.”

  “But, Tod—”

  “Nine days isn't time enough to do anything. A lot of people would just get hurt. Even if we got loose in the ship for a while, we couldn't go anywhere. We'd just get the Cygnans stirred up, get in their way.”

  “I don't believe what I'm hearing!” she said. There was an edge of contempt in her voice. “Maybe it is hopeless. But Captain Boyle says it's our duty to try to escape.”

  “Under ordinary circumstances, sure. But our duty now is to the entire human race. And we're all they've got.”

  Maggie shook her mop of red hair. “Tod, what are you talking about?”