The Jupiter Theft Part 15

Grasping hands and feet were all over Jameson now. He swung out with his crowbar and felt it thud into the closely packed bodies. But dozens of three-fingered paws began tugging at it, antic.i.p.ating his every move.

He could see Grogan floating belly-up above the hull beside him, being borne away by Cygnans, like a grub carried by ants. Grogan's struggles did him no good. When he shook a Cygnan claw off, two or three more were there to take its place. With their six limbs and unenc.u.mbered bodies, they just kept changing hands in a blur of motion. There was nothing to fight against.

Clumsy in his s.p.a.cesuit, Jameson tried to strike out, to grab. The crowbar had been plucked away before he realized what was happening. Whenever he caught hold of a Cygnan, deft, slender fingers pried his grip loose. Dozens of hands s.n.a.t.c.hed at his sleeves, keeping him from hitting hard.

Ahead of him he saw an explosion of packed bodies. Grogan had somehow broken free for a moment.

Cygnans rose into the air and began to settle down again. He caught a glimpse of Grogan, writhing against a background of stars, a half dozen aliens clinging to him like terriers to a bear. Busy fingers were plucking at Grogan's hoses, at the latches of his suit. Finally came the horrible sight of Grogan's helmet being pa.s.sed from Cygnan to Cygnan like a basketball, while above Grogan's collar ring a ball of oozing sludge sprayed a fine pink mist into s.p.a.ce.

Jameson felt a moment of panic as alien fingers fumbled at his own latches. He managed to slap them away, and they didn't return. Then suddenly came a heave, like a concerted blanket-toss, and Jameson felt himself sailing into s.p.a.ce. Tumbling end over end, he saw himself heading into the mouth of a large transparent sack that was being held open by a circle of hovering Cygnans. There was nothing he could do to change his trajectory, as he discovered when he tried to use his suit jets. Industrious little fingers had managed to disconnect them.

He was ignominiously stuffed, kicking and squirming, into the sack. The neck was drawn shut. He struck out through the tough plastic material at the smooth, shiny bodies around him. All he succeeded in doing was to work up a sweat inside his s.p.a.cesuit. Can't fight my way out of a paper bag, he thought. He groped at his belt kit for something sharp. All his tools were missing.

A Cygnan with some kind of tank-and-hose arrangement floated over to him. Jameson studied the creature through the clear plastic. It was holding the tank in its middle limbs, the hose nozzle with one hand. The other hand-or what pa.s.sed for a hand-began fiddling with a valve. Holding its broomstick negligently with one foot, the Cygnan started to spray him. When it had finished the job, another Cygnan floated over with a bundle of long tubes fitted with a pistol grip. His captors let go of the sack again and left Jameson hanging free. The creature vacuumed the entire surface of the sack industriously. Jameson detected a glow of purple light. Sterilizing me, he thought.

A pair of Cygnans took him then, like a sack of laundry and zoomed off with him. The creature on the right clutched its broomstick with the three right-hand limbs, like an outrigger, and the one on the left hung on to its stick with its three left limbs. They held the stack stretched safely between them, leaning inward to join hands at its neck. Jameson noticed that they kept shifting their grip. They had three choices. And there were never more than two limbs wrapped around the stick. One of them always was resting. Did Cygnans tire easily? Jameson decided that no individual Cygnan limb was as strong as a human arm or leg. But it didn't have to be.

A mile or two from the ship, he finally stopped struggling. When his air was gone, he was dead. He wanted to postpone that as long as possible. So he settled into the sack and tried to make himself relax.

Ruiz had been right. Those flimsy-looking tubes the Cygnans rode stored enough power for constant acceleration. He had weight, dangling between his two captors; it felt like half a g, but it was hard to be sure.

He saw a lot of traffic going in both directions around him. The long brilliant beams of light flashing from the ends of the slender brooms made a jack-straw pattern against s.p.a.ce.

They were heading straight toward some invisible target a quarter million miles away. There was no nonsense about trajectories, about matching orbits. The aliens simply plowed through s.p.a.ce as if they had all the power in the universe at their disposal. And perhaps they did, if they could move whole planets.

Jameson looked back-"down," actually-at the Jupiter ship. It was tiny now, a double-pointed thumbtack pinned against the stars.

Then, abruptly, twin threads of light stretched across the black of s.p.a.ce. That wasn't the boron drive.

The aliens had attached some kind of propulsive units, to the ship at the head and tail of the shaft. He could see it begin to move sideways, its wheel still turning, as if it were rolling through s.p.a.ce.

The Cygnans had gone fishing. Now they were bringing home their catch.

Chapter 15.

The alien ship loomed ahead, big as a world. Itwas a world, thirty miles from tip to splayed tip. From this angle it was a slender triskelion, a three-bladed pinwheel with a triangular bucket dangling from the end of each arm.

Jameson squirmed around in his transparent game-bag for a better view. He'd been cramped inside for more than six hours now, and his suit's air was almost gone.

His captors were approaching the ship head on, so he couldn't see much of the long central spar that formed the axis, except for a yawning triangular maw at the hub. That had to be the business end of the drive.

An extraordinary thought occurred to him. He had read once, in a popular book on psychotechnology, that the works of man were influenced by buried images of self. His motile surrogates of himself tended to be cross-shaped-a man with arms outstretched-like early airplanes, or four-limbed like the drive shaft and two axles of a wheeled vehicle at right angles, or, in the ultimate subconscious distillation; male symbols like rockets or female symbols like boats.

But the Cygnans-if Dmitri's morphology was to be believed-were three limbs s.p.a.ced equally around a central axis. And so was their ship. There were even three stubby triangular petals-feet?-placed at the opposite end of the shaft. Jameson could make them out on another Cygnan ship hovering some dozens of miles away. They might be miles-thick radiation baffles for the life-support modules when the ship was in its folded mode. They'd be facing forward then, into a howling storm of impinging interstellar hydrogen. This all made eminent sense in engineering terms, but so did the design of their Jupiter ship.

Jameson wondered what psychoa.n.a.lytical innuendos the author would have found to describethat!

There was one more flash of insight before his mind got busy again with his predicament. Designs evolve past first solutions. Technological phylogeny, the book had called it. The cross-shaped airplane was an early effort of mankind, replaced by delta wings and various lifting bodies. Was this tremendous feat of engineering he saw looming before him afirst try for the Cygnans?

Then he became lost in wonder. Those fifteen-mile-long jibs that held the environmental pods were anch.o.r.ed at their roots by pins that had to be large enough and strong enough to keep a small world from flying off into s.p.a.ce. The grooves along the flat faces of the hull that the jibs were meant to rest in were as deep as the Grand Canyon. And-he sighted along one of the arms until he came to the distant three-sided bucket-that wishbone-shaped tholepin that formed the handle of the bucket was, by itself, of a size to stagger the imagination.

He tried to visualize it-a structure four and a half miles from end to end pivoting on a pair of bearings that alone were bigger than the largest turning structure man had ever made: Eurostation itself. The bolt head he could distantly see was a bright dome the size of a small mountain.

The rotation of the arms, from Jameson's vantage point, was almost imperceptible. Structures that size didn't have to turn very fast to provide g forces fifteen miles from the center.

By the same token, the Cygnans seemed to have dispensed with anything resembling a docking hub.

Perhaps they didn't need one at this creeping rate of rotation, depending on their own agility and the feebleness of centrifugal force so close to the spine of the ship.

Jameson shriveled in the sack. Were they going to plunge into the miles-wide pit of the drive tube that was growing before his eyes? He saw a triangular chasm whose interior walls were blackened and pitted with the violent energies that had flung the Cygnans across ten thousand light-years.

Then with a casual flick of their broomsticks, the Cygnans altered course fractionally. The rim of the pit flashed by. Jameson, with nothing to hang onto, found himself falling past a sheer metal wall that stretched on forever.

They barely missed the outstretched arm of one of the jibs. Resolutely, Jameson kept his eyes open, but he found his gloved hands trying to clutch at nothingness. He had a flashing glimpse of the spar's upper surface before he dropped below its horizon. This was a metal moonscape, pocked with craters and scarred with long furrows, the wounds of forgotten encounters with interstellar debris.

He looked upward as he fell below the knife edge of that strange skyline. The undersides of the spar hung above him like an ax blade fifteen miles long. These were the faces that fit into the canyon-size notch in one of the ship's flat sides. There were no pockmarks. They were smooth and shiny enough to reflect the stars.

They fell what he judged to be another four or five miles before the laboring broomsticks were able to slow them to a halt. Jameson's orientation changed. He was no longer falling down the side of an immense cliff. Now he was floating, weightless, above a vast metal plain, incised along its entire length by a triangular gorge. The landscape was tilting, moving past him. Long minutes later, the sharp edge of the landscape swam past and he was hovering above an identical plain with an identical incised groove stretching toward the vanishing point.

Jupiter dipped, then rose again above that strange, flat horizon. It was a great, reddish moon, filling the ship's sky. Itwas the sky, or most of it: a vast arch stretching from side to side, showing only a fraction of its curvature, with a band of night on its border. Here, this close, you could see the violent turmoil of the planet's atmosphere, a boiling sea of multicolored clouds rushing toward an invisible equator.

The two creatures loafed along on their sticks, the sack stretched between them, until they found an entrance. This proved to be a squarish hatch the size of a barn door, with a perfectly ordinary-looking T-bar handle precisely in the center. The handle was surrounded by a circle of what looked like doork.n.o.bs.

They hovered a few feet above it, dangling Jameson ignominiously between them. The sheer ma.s.s of the tremendous ship was enough to produce a minute but noticeable gravitational tug; Jameson guessed that he weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of an ounce.

Then the Cygnans touched down, clinging lizard-like to the k.n.o.bs with two or three spare feet.

Instantly, Jameson's weight was reversed. He soared upward in his sack as if he were a captive balloon, while the Cygnans kept him moored with infuriating nonchalance. Again, the spin was slow enough to keep his pseudo-weight down to a few ounces, but his stomach did a flip-flop. What if the Cygnans let go?

One of them did. The other, its toes wrapped around k.n.o.bs, stretched its sleek body toward the handle in the center. Jameson wondered how the creature proposed to open the door with the three of them clinging to it. Did it swing outward, inward, or slide open?

It did none of these. To Jameson's mild astonishment, when the Cygnan pulled on the handle, the handle got longer. Then he realized that the door was riding downward on a central shaft, of which the handle was the end. Bottom was five feet down. The creatures stepped off the door, pulling Jameson unceremoniously with them. The door flew up on its shaft, falling into place in the opening with its own weight. It settled into place in the beveled frame. It seemed a careless way to seal a ship's air in.

Clinging upside down to what was now the ceiling, the Cygnans scurried toward a circular door in a wall. This one opened like a bank vault. It didn't go anywhere. Inside was a honeycomb of three-foot metal disks that looked like a wall of storage drums.

One of the creatures chose a lid and it popped open. Before Jameson knew what was happening, it slithered inside. The other Cygnan stuffed the sack into the opening and followed. Jameson was being hustled down a narrow, looping tube. It was transparent, and he could see other tubes branching out on all, sides, each going to some unknown destination.

It was an efficient way to travel-for Cygnans. They reverted to their six-legged mode, hardly caring which direction was up. Jameson was getting some painful b.u.mps, even through the s.p.a.cesuit.

They emerged into an enormous s.p.a.ce-a forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. No, not quite.

About a mile away was a mile-high ridge, stretching on to infinity. This had to be, he realized, the underside of that tremendous canyon-size trench he had seen on the outside of the hull. The sky was a tent-two walls converging at an apex miles above. The sky was forested too, and each had its own central ridge.

He had time for a quick look at what he had taken for trees before they hoisted him aloft. It was a tangle of thick twisting boles, intertwined like a banyan tree, with thick blue-green foliage. If there were any vertical trunks, they were accidental. The growth seemed to spread out sideways, like some enormous creeping vine. He couldn't tell if they were individual growths or one interconnected ent.i.ty.

The Cygnans scurried up the nearest trunk like six-legged squirrels, taking Jameson with them. Soon they were about fifty feet up, and Jameson was getting dizzy. He knew that at his present weight a fall couldn't hurt him, but all his instincts were screaming at him. The Cygnans pa.s.sed the sack back and forth to each other, and from hand to foot, as they scampered along the tremendous branches, but always there seemed to be at least one clever little paw wrapped around the neck of the sack.

After about half a mile of being towed through the branches in this offhand fashion, Jameson found himself draped over a branch, dizzy and bruised. He lay there in his bag, not daring to move. His captors had evidently stopped to catch their breath-even Cygnans had to do that, it seemed-and to tear the plastic wrappings off their heads and beaverlike tails.

They let the torn plastic flutter down to the forest floor and tossed their globular air canisters down after it. Jameson was shocked in spite of himself. In the closed economy of a s.p.a.ceship, littering was a capital sin.

The Cygnans stretched and preened themselves. They groomed one another as monkeys would, scratching away transparent flakes of what he took to be dead skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for a tail was actually three tails, a petaled structure that folded in on itself.

For a moment, as one of the creatures turned away, he had a glimpse of the orifice the petals enclosed, a moist, tender surface that was the same bright orange as the lining of the Cygnans mouth and the mucosa of their eyes. He had an impression of hairlike projections pointed inward, in the manner of a fish trap, and then the three petals closed up again.

Jameson studied his captors curiously. This was the first time he had had a really good look in strong light. They were naked except for tubular harnesses festooned with soft oval pouches. Their hides were clothing enough, a mottled pattern of golds and rusts that reminded him of something between a diamondback rattlesnake and a reticulated giraffe. Under other circ.u.mstances he might have found the pattern beautiful.

He was unable to decide on their s.e.x. They seemed to have nothing resembling external s.e.xual organs.

Hidden between the two hindmost limbs where he was unable to get a clear view of it was something that might have been a secondary s.e.xual characteristic like a breast or a c.o.c.ks...o...b..a soft, palpitating ovoid the color of dried blood. It seemed squashy and vulnerable from its placement and the automatic manner in which the Cygnans seemed to shield it, and for some reason--though Jameson told himself he was being irrational-it disgusted him.

As the Cygnans continued to groom each other with their fingers and their vegetable-grater mouths, Jameson twisted in his sack to look at the life around him. He'd gradually become aware that the strange tangle of vegetation was alive with darting, twittering creatures. He could see an odd three-winged bird-or flying creature, at any rate-in brilliant, jewellike colors. Its three petallike wings, transparent membranes through which Jameson saw shadowed supporting spines, were arranged helicopter-fashion around its stubby neck, and at the bottom of its streamlined body were three delicate clawed feet. They were about the size of hummingbirds. One of them hovered in front of his face, looking at him, then fluttered off.

There was a squirrel-size creature that strikingly vindicated Dmitri's theory. Its six limbs were definitely not paired. Instead, they were arranged in two radiating arrays, fore and aft. It had three eyes, s.p.a.ced like the Cygnans', around a central orifice. It wasn't bothered by any sense of the upright, but scampered along the branches, its body giving a quarter turn or rotating entirely from time to time as it nibbled the fat bluish leaves. In spite of its bizarre configuration, Jameson found the creature delightful, with its busy movements and its bright goldfishlike colors.

It came too close. There was a flash of movement, and one of Jameson's captors had the little creature trapped in a three-fingered hand. It chirped and twittered, squirming to get free. But the Cygnan held it out to its companion, as if offering it for inspection. The other Cygnan made an odd, nonhuman gesture-a sort of corkscrewlike drawing in of its long head. A refusal?

Then, to Jameson's horror, the first Cygnan popped the little animal into its mouth, hind end first. The snout with its rasplike lining rotated around the tiny golden body. The creature shrieked, still alive. Inch by inch, the Cygnan sucked it in. By the time the head disappeared, the little eyes had become gla.s.sy and the circular mouth was open in a slack O. The Cygnan's spined tubular tongue came out, made a circular swipe, and was gone.

Jameson made an effort not to be sick. Being sick in a s.p.a.ce helmet was a disaster, and every s.p.a.cefarer learned how to fight down nausea. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitter bile in his throat. So much for the theory that advanced civilizations had to be morally superior!

Abruptly the Cygnans s.n.a.t.c.hed up the sack again and oozed along the twisting branches, pa.s.sing Jameson back and forth between them like a basketball. They were heading for the edge of the forest, that acute corner where the overgrown sky came down to meet the land.

As feeble as the pseudo-gravity was, Jameson could feel the downhill tug. Of course! The ground would only be relatively "flat" near the central ridges. Visualize a triangle drawn inside a circle; "up" is always the center of the circle. It got steeper and steeper as they approached the artificial horizon. Jameson, despite the blurry motion, noticed the tendency of the vegetable growths to point toward that center. As they advanced the gnarled trunks were leaning farther and farther backward, Earth blended into sky with no visible break in the forest. Everything was intergrown in thick profusion.

The Cygnans made a wild leap, trailing the light puff of the sack, and caught at the wall of branches opposite. All at once, instead of plunging downhill they were climbing toward another of the mile-high central ridges. The jungle they had just left behind became their sky.

Why hadn't the Cygnans built on sensible circular plan, like human beings? Again, Jameson could merely guess that it simply didn't matter to them. This flat-sided plan was more convenient to them in other ways.

It simplified the engineering of the folding spar arrangement. Straight lines made for easier construction.

And as for the gravity gradient, perhaps the Cygnans lived in three dimensions, like monkeys or birds.

Or-the thought came to him-perhaps they lived along surfaces, like so many small, clinging terrestrial creatures.

With startling suddenness, the forest ended. Jameson was looking through the branches at a flat metal prairie studded with surrealistic structures. They were placed at random along the plain: silolike cylinders of shiny metal, skysc.r.a.per-size prismoids set with gemlike facets, flaring hyperboloids with barber-pole skirts, enormous lattices of translucent colored materials. They were connected by looping transparent tubes, like some crazy gigantic chemistry apparatus, and there were dark specks moving fittingly through the tubes.

Everything leaned.

As the geometric shapes retreated from the vast tent of the central ridge, they leaned farther and farther toward center, until, at the knife-edge crease where ground met sloping ceiling, structures hundreds of feet high were tilting drunkenly. The mad architecture continued along the metal sky until it disappeared into the mists.

For there was a vast tubular cloud running down the spine of the empty s.p.a.ce above. As the mists swirled and parted, Jameson could catch glimpses of a gleaming pipe stretching the length of the no-gravity center of this artificial world. Condensation? Escaping gases? Jameson shuddered. One thing was clear. That pipe-wide as the Mississippi River-had something to do with the mighty drive that had carried the Cygnans across the universe. Humans kept such relatively feeble things as nuclear power plants out of sight, if possible! What manner of creatures were the Cygnans to live and work, unconcerned, in such proximity totheir engine?

As the Cygnans jostled him along, he could see what supported the pipe: a row of slender metal pillars raised from the apex of the central ridge-from all three of the ridges. They didn't look half ma.s.sive enough to hold up the pipe. But then, he realized, it was in zero-g up there, and the pillars need do nothing but brace it lightly in place.

Jameson found himself being stuffed through a rubbery membrane into a circular port. The membrane closed behind him-he couldn't tell how-and he was with his two keepers in a crazy rotating drum.

They scuttled round its walls while a lens-shaped aperture widened into the shape made by two intersecting circles. Before it was quite a full circle they picked up Jameson's sack and heaved him through. He struck another of the rubbery membranes. He expected to bounce back in time to be snipped in half by the closing edges, but in some mysterious fashion he oozed through and settled to the floor like a toy balloon.

He found himself in an immense warehouse of a place with acres of spongy floor. The ceiling hung distant and shadowy above. The walls leaned inward. Dim shapes bulked against the walls and in random piles all over the floor. These sacks and bales and queer pyramid-shaped boxes were stenciled with odd cursive symbols that, instead of following one another in straight lines like human script, wandered in random peaks and valleys up and down.

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 solfege.

Jameson came to full attention. There had beenchords in all that quick pa.s.sage-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 cl.u.s.ter 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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 scurryingup 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sing 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 chateau 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.cesuit 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 s.p.a.cesuit down there, but no place to go with it.