The Jupiter Theft Part 10

Jameson tried to suppress a grin. "Let's hope she doesn't get sick."

"Commander, if she gets sick, they get sick too."

The lock cycled again. Hollis waited long enough to make sure that his group was complete, then herded them in twos and threes toward the lift shaft, where a noncom stoically shepherded them to an a.s.sembly point at the rim. It took Jameson a moment to pick out the girl. She was as big and tough-looking as the men, dressed in the same shapeless fatigues, but her cheeks were shiny-smooth and she had a thick braid of blond hair hanging down her back. Then they were gone, Grogan and the bosun's mates with them, leaving nothing but a smell of sweat and stale vomit behind.

The new astronomer came aboard later that day. His name was Ruiz, and he looked a little old for s.p.a.ce, but he handled himself well in no-g. They hadn't subjected him to the indignity of a rescue ball; he looked too brittle for that, and he was a VIP. He was ferried over from Eurostation in a small pa.s.senger gig with an a.s.sistant, a grave dark-eyed little girl named Maybury who somehow looked familiar.

She saw Jameson looking at her and said at once, "It was the Eurostation-Texas shuttle a couple of weeks ago, Commander. We were seatmates."

"Of course. You were wearing a poncho, and you were on your way to Nevada." He shook hands with the two of them. Ruiz had the knack, but the girl's feet lost contact, and Jameson had to discreetly plant her again.

Boyle and Captain Hsieh were off somewhere for a meeting with the fusion engineers, making preparations for engine start-up. After Yeh Fei and Tu Juechen had stiffly completed their share of the formalities, and Kay Thorwald had excused herself and disappeared, Jameson volunteered to get Ruiz and Maybury settled.

"Just stay close to a wall and don't move too abruptly and you'll be all right," he said. "There are cords strung along the corridors, and those socks they gave you will stick to the fuzzy strips along the floors. If youdo find yourself floating in the center of a compartment, out of reach, don't get panicky. Air currents will eventually send you drifting up against a surface."

"Or some friendly pa.s.serby will bounce himself off of us, eh?" Ruiz said.

Jameson smiled appreciatively. "Oh, you've spent some time in free fall, then? I know you both were stationed on the Moon, but..."

"I put in almost two years at the old L-5 orbital observatory when I was a young man," Ruiz said. "They spun the living quarters, but I spent my working days in the cage. Big warehouse of a place. Even a small fraction of a g, of course, would have made the big mirror sag out of all usefulness. It was made by stretching a film of molten Merlon across a hundred-meter hoop in the first place, and it was less than a millimeter thick at the center."

"How about you, Mizz Maybury?" Jameson said. "Have you spent much time in free fall?"

"No," she responded. "That is, except in the Moon shuttle. But of course you spend most of your time belted in your seat, and they have the flight attendants taking care of you and everything."

"You're doing very well," Jameson said charitably. "At any rate, you'll only have to put up with it for a few more days. We'll-be putting on spin as soon as we're sure the new modules are fastened securely.

After that, we'll have two thirds of a g all the way-except for a few hours during engine start-up, as a safety precaution."

At that point they all had to crowd themselves against the corridor wall as one of Grogan's angels came sailing toward them, halfway-between floor and ceiling, a bundle of plastic struts cradled in his hairy forearms.

"Sorry, Commander," he said as he shot past; Jameson had to duck the end of a strut. They turned to watch the man. His line of flight was a chord that intersected the shallow upward curve of the corridor, and at the last possible moment, when his chin seemed about to sc.r.a.pe the floor, he gave an expert push of one foot, like the flick of a goldfish's tail, and launched himself on a new chord toward the invisible ceiling beyond.

"I'll never be able to do that," Maybury said ruefully.

"He shouldn't be doing it either," Jameson said. "It's against the safety rules."

"How long will we be accelerating?" Ruiz said as they continued walking.

"A bit over two weeks," Jameson said. "By that time we'll have reached about a hundred and sixty kilometers per second. Then we coast, for four months, turn the ship's long axis around, and decelerate for another couple of weeks. We'll reach Jupiter in five months, thanks to the new boron engine."

"And you're going to spin the ship during acceleration and deceleration? Won't that complicate our sense of up and down?"

"Not enough to notice," Jameson said. "We'll only be accelerating at about a hundredth of a g-nine point eight centimeters per second per second. But we'll be spinning at two-thirds of a g at right angles to the direction of thrust. That's a distortion factor of less than one to sixty-six. The floor will seem to tilt slightly, of course, but it'll be almost imperceptible." He slapped the corridor wall. "About enough of a tilt to start a marble rolling toward the aft bulkhead here, if you gave it a helpful push."

"I got a good view of the ship through the porthole on the way over," Maybury said hesitantly. "I didn't think it would be so big. It was beautiful-like a giant toy top, with that long broomstick sticking through the center of the circle."

"That's a good way to think of it, except that the 'broomstick' doesn't spin. It's more of an axle than a shaft. What we've really got is a s.p.a.ce station revolving round a rocket. It's the only sensible design for very long trips. I wouldn't like to be spinning round a short radius, as they do in those glorified barrels they send to Mars, or try to apply course corrections to two weights tied to each other by a long cord."

"Commander," Ruiz said abruptly, "I'd like to see Dr. Pierce first and get it over with."

"All right," Jameson said. "I thought you might want to put it off till you'd had a chance to catch your breath."

"How's he taking it?"

"I suppose," Jameson said carefully, "he's wondering why he's being superseded as chief astronomer just a few days before the start of the expedition."

"I suppose you all are," Ruiz said dryly. "And why the powers that be have grafted a nuclear strike force onto what started out as a purely scientific mission."

"They explained it to us at the briefing yesterday," Jameson said in a neutral tone. "The nukes are just a precaution. Like giving an archeologist a pistol to protect himself against snakes. But those thirty-mile-long artifacts from Cygnus have been scrubbed by radiation for thousands-maybe millions-of years, so there aren't going to be any snakes. Or so they say."

"Except in this case the archeologist's pistol has a mind of its own, eh? I don't suppose your Captain Boyle likes having an officer on board who isn't under his orders. To say nothing of the Chinese bomb crew."

Jameson said nothing.

Ruiz sighed. "How doyou feel about the bomb crews, Commander?"

"As long as they don't interfere in the running of the ship or our a.s.signed missions, it's none of my concern."

"Prudently spoken, Commander. ButI'm going to interfere in your a.s.signments, aren't I?"

"That's different."

"Can you modify your Callisto lander for the Cygnus planet, Commander?" Ruiz asked.

"No. The gravitational field's too powerful-about one Earth gravity, I'm told. We could get down, but we'd never get up again. We'll have to study it from close orbit. But we can try a landing on its moon."

"You can crash an automated probe or two on the planet's surface, though, can't you?"

"We can do better than that. We can soft-land some of the little rovers. We've got a few to spare. A planet from outside the solar system's a h.e.l.l of a lot more interesting than Ganymede or Europa."

"I'm glad you feel that way, Commander."

Jameson permitted himself to show a little emotion.

"h.e.l.l, man, this is mychance! I never thought it would come in my lifetime!"

Ruiz looked pleased. "I suppose not. There'll be Centauri probes with the new boron engine, but we'll be waiting the better part of a thousand years to get any answers fromthem . Our Cygnus visitor's been masked by radiation from Cygnus X-1 for more than eighty years that we know of. It has to be from a hundred light-years' distance at the very least."

"You were the astronomer who discovered it, weren't you, Dr. Ruiz?"

"Maybury here was the first person to notice it," Ruiz said. Maybury either lip and blushed. "But I was the nearest stuffed savant. That makes me the agreed-upon expert on the Cygnus object, and that's why the authorities sent me along to complicate your lives. I'm sure your Dr. Pierce would have done a thoroughly competent job. Well, I'll try not to interfere with him too much. He and his staff can carry out their Jupiter studies as planned. I have the greatest sympathy for him. It's going to be a d.a.m.ned awkward situation."

"Here we are," Jameson said, stopping at a door marked astronomy. "The observation instruments are in the no-spin axle of the ship, of course. There's an observatory near the bridge, but the readouts are down here, where the astronomy people can feel some weight on their feet." He pushed the door open.

The meeting with Pierce went better than expected. The younger man was deferential. Fresh out of the Venusian Studies task force himself, he was awed by Ruiz's eminence as former Farside director and ingenuously respectful of Ruiz's pioneering studies on black holes and gravitational entropy. He pledged the full cooperation of himself and his staff, and managed to enlist Ruiz's help on a problem involving the Jovian atmosphere sampling scoops. All the while he kept stealing sidelong glances at Maybury, looking guilty when he was caught.

Jameson could appreciate 'Pierce's feelings. Maybury was a pretty little thing. He wondered if Ruiz was sleeping with her, then decided it was none of his business. He showed them to their quarters, two hastily cleaned out cabins adjoining an office with a computer terminal connected to the ship's brain and some oddball peripheral equipment Ruiz had requested. If they were sharing a bunk, the old man could stumble through the connecting room.

"Dinner's at eight, captain's mess," Jameson said. "Will we be seeing you?"

"I think not, Commander," Ruiz said. "We'll skip tonight. I'm a bit tired after the trip. I see that there's an adequate kitchenette and a good selection of self-heating instameals. Mizz Maybury and I have some observational data to go through, and then we'll have an early supper. I'm meeting with my Chinese counterpart, Dr. Chu, first thing in the morning, and I suppose I'd better be prepared."

"Good night then, sir," Jameson said, preparing to push himself off against the door frame.

"Good night, Commander," Ruiz said. As Jameson launched himself down the corridor, he could see Maybury already punching something into a computer peripheral.

Chapter 10.

The Jupiter ship drifted among the stars, a gigantic hoop and stick perforated with light from its blazing ports. A blast from its att.i.tude jets had nudged it a safe distance from Eurostation's traffic and set it tumbling languidly.

On Earth, almost half the human race took a last look at the majestic image, gathered around holovids in their homes or watching the public viewplates that had been set up in communes and village schools, playing fields and places of work. Then the camera pinnace, hovering a prudent fifty miles away, zoomed in to the limit of its magnification, and the hoop became an enormous puffy doughnut, b.u.mpy with outside structures, and the stick swelled to an immense cylindrical shaft, festooned with spherical tanks and sporting irregular bulges. Little spurts of flame flared from odd places along the shaft. Gradually the tumbling stopped. The ship held rock-steady, poised for flight.

Somewhere inside the long shaft, Chinese technicians bustled around a ma.s.sive globate housing that bristled like a hedgehog with converging laser a.s.semblies. Towering stacks of capacitors marched endlessly down the arched chamber. Pipes and cables disappeared through a thick bulkhead. On the other side of the bulkhead, a team of American technicians tended the dull bulging shapes of cryogenic storage vats and monitored a bewildering array of computer displays.

A walnut-size pellet of boron dropped into a vat. It was hollow on the inside, and beautifully machined, with twelve precise pinholes slanting through its jacket. It was immediately stuffed with a tiny s...o...b..ll made of frozen deuterium and tritium.

A computer on the American side of the bulkhead positioned the pellet to within an angstrom and fired it through a long pipe into the chamber of the Chinese device. All the lasers fired at once in a burst that lasted only a few picoseconds. They were computer-controlled by a single oscillator on the American side. This was the point that had caused so much trouble. It had taken two years of diplomatic negotiations at the highest level before a way was worked out for the sensors and timers to be slaved to the U.S. computers through a scrambler program. The Chinese had never seen a pellet, nor was there any way they could extract the vital details of size, density, or timing from their own computer replays-though they had dismantled their own equipment many times in an attempt to gain clues from the pellet delivery pipe and the physical arrangement of the electronics interfaces.

Twelve thread-thin beams of coherent light blasted through the pellet's pinholes and converged at the center of the s...o...b..ll. A tiny volume of s.p.a.ce turned into h.e.l.l. A few cubic microns of hydrogen isotopes became ten times hotter than the interior of the Sun. The fusion reaction became self-sustaining.

The pressure of the blast crushed superheated plasma to the awesome density of degenerate matter, and held the pellet together for the few picoseconds needed to initiate the next stage of the reaction.

For hydrogen fusion, a mere 200 million degrees Fahrenheit had been sufficient. For boron fission, a temperature in the billions of degrees was needed. Fusion was only the trigger. The raging nuclear fury in that tortured speck of matter stripped hot protons from surrounding hydrogen atoms and drove them with incredible energy into the now-collapsing nuclei of boron-11 atoms. The extra proton was too much for the boron nucleus to hold. Each atom split into three helium nuclei. The energy released was tremendous-far more than the controlled fusion energy that mankind had unlocked a half century before. A stream of electrically charged helium nuclei sought their mad escape rearward through the ship's nozzles.

The ship trembled and moved.

Another pellet dropped. Another chamber turned into h.e.l.l. Then, three seconds later, another. And another.

The ship, shuddering, picked up speed. It was accelerating rapidly now, at one percent of a g. On Earth, an estimated seven billion people watched the ship dwindle on their screens.

They watched it until it was small and indistinct, a ghostly target pierced by a glittering arrow. A silver phi sketched against the void. A needle encircled by a wedding ring, pointing itself toward a star.

When Jameson staggered into his quarters after his first twelve-hour watch, Maggie had a mug of steaming coffee and a hot beanie waiting for him. He wolfed the crisp, paste-filled cone down gratefully.

"Thanks," he said. "I didn't have a chance to eat. It was wild on the bridge. The skipper's still up there.

Have you had anything?"

She gestured at a half-eaten beanie, its fragile rice-flour wrapping spilling out a congealing green sludge.

"I was too excited. Are we really on our way?"

He nodded. "Everything got straightened out a couple of hours ago, when you felt us put the spin back on. The engine's working beautifully. We won't have any more trajectory corrections till tomorrow. By that time the computer should have acc.u.mulated enough data to tell us how much longer those d.a.m.n bomb blisters are going to make us keep the boost on."

"Want another beanie?"

"No, that'll hold me till mealtime."

"Let's not go down to the mess for dinner. I'll fix us something here."

He ruffled her red hair. "That's fine with me. Let's put on some music and have a drink."

She pecked him on the cheek and got up to put a music card in the slot. It was "Giles Farnaby's Dreame" again. Jameson was getting a little tired of it, but he didn't have the heart to tell her. They had been careful with each other since making up their quarrel on the shuttle trip, and Maggie had moved in with him. Sue had taken it well. She'd been a little hurt, but she recovered quickly, and her behavior toward Maggie had been warm and friendly.

Maggie returned with some chilled gin and one of the adulterated joints that were all anyone could get from Stores. She lit the joint and pa.s.sed it to Jameson. She seemed unusually quiet.

"Something's bothering you," he said. "What is it?"

"It's nothing."

"Come on, What's wrong?"

"Oh, it's just that Klein."

"What did he do?"

"Wanted to come by my quarters tonight. Got very insistent about it. Threw rank at me. I told him I was bunking here. He started quoting regulations about pair-bonding during a mission. Said I ought to be spreading myself around. That's how he put it. Nasty man! Anyway, I've only been here about week."

"And you're going to stay here," Jameson said. "I'll have a talk with Klein."

"He's already made trouble for Liz Becque and Omar. They're reporting for counseling sessions with Janet."

"I'll speak to the skipper," Jameson said. "n.o.body's complained about your work. Or mine. Klein can mind his own d.a.m.ned business."

She snuggled against his chest. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."

The "Dreame" came to an end on a translucent D-major chord, to be replaced by the jolly tones of "Tower Hill." Maggie pried the drink from Jameson's hand and pressed herself against him. There was a rapping at the door.

"d.a.m.n!" Jameson said, sitting up. Maggie picked up her drink again, and Jameson went to the door.

Mike Berry was standing there, looking tousled and exhausted. "Could I talk to you?" he said.

"Mike! I thought you'd locked up and sacked out."

Berry glanced over at Maggie and nodded apologetically at her. Maggie looked away and gathered her robe more closely around her. Berry turned back to Jameson.

"Yeah, I did. I left Quentin in charge, and Caffrey put a guard on the door, and Tu Jue-chen put one of her Struggle Brigade mugs on guard outsidetheir door, and... look, could you come back to the engine room with me? I haven't said anything to Boyle yet. I don't want to make a big thing of it."

"What's the matter?"

"Look, Po Fu-yung's techs and my techs have got totalk to one another, don't they? We've got a good working relationship. When something comes up, we get together in one of the nonrestricted areas off the cryo department. Now Caffrey's goon won't let Quentin out of the computer room to work with Po's man and the Struggle Brigade goon is throwing his weight around too. Could you come down and smooth things over before it develops into anything official?"