The Jupiter Theft Part 22

This time Jameson whistled his response in his imitation Cygnan.

"Where?"

They turned abruptly toward him, as if surprised that their pet was talking again.

"This animal is from the planet you call Jupiter," Tetrachord offered with careful enunciation.

Jameson stared at the undulating disk of flesh. So therewas life in Jupiter's planetwide ocean after all.

The speculations had been correct. Under that crushing atmosphere, in a sea that was twelve thousand miles deep before it turned to something else, there was plenty of room for life to develop. A sea of hydrogen laced with organic molecules, with a volume at least 300,000 times the volume of all Earth's oceans! For an instant Jameson's imagination ran riot. He saw vast herds of dirigiblelike grazers browsing at the rich nitrile pastures that welled up to become the Great Red Spot and the lesser spots, while these leviathans of the hydrogen deeps stalked them with hundred-foot bone spears.

Then he felt a dawning horror. The Cygnans must have scooped up their Jovian specimensbefore their Einsteinian siphon had churned Jupiter's atmosphere into a h.o.m.ogenized maelstrom. They'dknown there was intelligent life there. Yet they'd gone on to make all life on Jupiter extinct.

The thought was all the more horrifying because there was no malice involved. Just selfishness.

Thoughtlessness. Lack of empathy. In that respect they were no different from humans, in the mad century that had forever wiped out the humpbacks and the great blue whales.

They prodded him to move again. He took a last backward look at the Jovians before the ma.s.sive creatures flapped off into the depths of their tank. He felt a pang of overwhelming sympathy for them.

They were, after all, his brothers under the Sun.

They seemed to be in some sort of Hall of Bipeds now. Rows of cages along a curving corridor apparently formed the narrow ends of habitats that widened out in a fan beyond. The creatures that Jameson glimpsed as they led him down the corridor were obviously animals, not intelligent beings. He saw a little green bearded creature like a misshapen troll gravely pacing its cage with its knuckles dragging on the ground, and a hulking spiny-skinned thing with a little bullet head growing directly out of a barrel chest. Then there was a pair of delightful feathery humanoids, elfin pink creatures who stared at him with great sad eyes as he pa.s.sed.

The three Cygnans gave a wide berth to the feathery humanoids' cage. Augie skittered nervously past it, skipping ahead momentarily and twisting a long neck to look back. There was a wire-mesh arrangement in front of the bars to keep anyone from getting too close, with its own locked gate. Jameson couldn't see the reason for the extreme security precautions. The humanoids looked harmless enough. They were delicate, attenuated creatures who certainly would be no match for a Cygnan.

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 b.u.mped 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 un.o.btrusively 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 w.a.n.g seemed to have coaxed some wingbean vines to grow in a shallow depression filled with coa.r.s.e 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 w.a.n.g 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 d.a.m.ned 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, theyknow 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 s.p.a.cesuits, 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."

"Yousaw- " 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 Callisto 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sed 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 snakeslive , 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 s.e.xy 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 ma.s.sive particle like a proton. Now you generate a beam of high-energy photons-"

"Now wait a minute, Mike," his a.s.sistant 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. "G.o.d, 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 sc.r.a.ps of paper we're h.o.a.rding. 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 thanthat? "