The Jupiter Theft Part 30

"Those heavy boots that were so out of place in s.p.a.ce," Jameson said. "n.o.body ever thought to question them."

"How could you?" Maggie said. "I mean, something like that is too far out."

The cramped interior of the zookeepers' apartment had been torn apart. Objects had been swept off the spoon-shaped shelves and trampled underfoot. The graduated set of miniature resting perches had been wantonly smashed. Jameson recognized their special poignance now. Nursery furniture.

The Moog was still where he'd left it, but it had been hammered into junk. "The son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Jameson flared. "He didn't want anyone talking to the Cygnans after he was gone!"

He searched the litter. The cupboard that had held the little a.r.s.enal of neural weapons was empty.

Klein's party was armed to the teeth now.

"If wedo catch up with Klein, what do you expect to do?" Ruiz asked tartly.

"We'll worry about that when we catch him," Jameson said and kept on looking.

He found what he wanted among the litter on the floor. Klein had overlooked it, or hadn't realized what it was.

One of the two-p.r.o.nged electric prods the Cygnans had herded him with.

"It doesn't have any reach," Maggie said. "It's no better than a knife or a club. You can't get near someone with a gun."

"It's better than nothing," Jameson said, sticking the implement in the waistband of his shorts.

He poked his head out the other door to make sure there were no Cygnans in the warehouse section, then led his troops outside. The two little humanoids scampered along beside them, their silky fur bouncing.

He knew the worst even before he reached the stacks of looted human artifacts. Why had he ever led Klein here?

The junkpile had been thoroughly picked over for anything useful. s.p.a.cesuits, of course-enough to outfit Klein's whole party. The ones that hadn't been taken were slashed, faceplates smashed, hoses pulled out.

Maggie held up a slashed suit, tears running down her face. "Why? Why didn't they leave the rest of us a chance? Just achance! "

"They don't want us to have a chance," Ruiz said, his face grim. "The people they left behind are a complication in their plans. I'll tell you what I think. I think the first missile they intend to fire will be targeted for this pod."

"No!" Jameson cried. "Not even Klein or Chia would do a thing like that! Disable the spine of the ship, they said! They wouldn't slaughter their own people!"

"Types like that alwaysstart with their own people," Ruiz said.

Dmitri was rummaging in the piles of goods. He came up with a fire ax that had been overlooked and stuck it in his belt. Maggie collected a bottle of alcohol and some cotton and, after she had explained their use, then said: "Don't look shocked. I come from a family of rebs." Ruiz found a kitchen knife and tied it to the end of a fibergla.s.s pole that had been part of a stretcher. Jameson armed himself with an eighteen-inch crescent wrench and then, in the same tool locker, found a six-pound maul and an a.s.sortment of chisels. After some thought he tied a nylon cord around the handle of the maul and stuffed a coil of twenty or thirty feet of line inside his shirt.

"Something's moving!" Maggie cried. "Over there!"

Jameson whipped around and saw a tiny glittering thing emerge from a pile of castoff clothing and begin to climb the slanting wall. Before he could do anything there was a blur of pink motion as one of the diminutive humanoids streaked for the thing. It trapped it in a dainty four-fingered hand and presented it to Jameson.

Jameson looked it over and immediately smashed it beneath his heel.

"What... was it?" Dmitri said.

"Piece of electronics," Jameson said. "One of Klein's motile probes. Pinhead lens, rice-grain mike, little magnetized ball-bearing wheels, trailing a spider-thread antenna. It must have been activated by our movements or body heat. Klein's watching his rear."

"So now he knows we're after him," Ruiz mused.

"Probably. I don't know what the range of a thing like that is."

"How do we find them?"

"Good question. He's got those miniature probes to scout out a safe route for him. Wish we had the same. Or at least a bloodhound. Now, which direction did he go in?"

He looked around the expanse of floor, frowning.

"What's got into them?" Maggie said.

The two humanoids were behaving oddly. They were prowling the area on all fours-not on hands and knees, as people would have done, but bent double in an impossible arch, walking on the tips of their toes and the backs of their little hands, with their fingers curled up. The position seemed entirely natural for them. They moved with a supple, spidery grace, their faces casting back and forth a half inch from the floor.

Dmitri watched them intently as they worked in widening circles, then turned to Jameson.

"I think you've got your bloodhounds," he said.

Chapter 27.

They climbed more than a mile before they saw their first live Cygnan. Klein had been correct in his a.s.sumption: Even in an artificial environment that was more crowded than Hong Kong or Dallasworth there were service and utilities routes that were untraveled and almost unvisited.

"This is like sneaking through the sewers of Paris in an old novel by Victor Hugo," Ruiz observed, "while thousands of Parisians are walking around a few feet overhead." Then he had to explain who Victor Hugo was.

The route they followed was a tangled confusion of pipes, enormous three-sided ducts and twisting cables as thick around as oak trees. They pa.s.sed through narrow chimneys of metal that they had to squeeze through inch by inch, and yawning s.p.a.ces that seemed to have been wasted in the design of the ship. Jameson was reminded of just how old the ship must be; some of the chambers they traversed had been used for various purposes and abandoned by past generations of Cygnans. The dust of centuries lay on the crumbling artifacts that loomed in the flickering dimness provided by skeins of leaking optical fibers.

"Cygnans are sloppy housekeepers," Jameson said at one point, looking at an electrical cable that had been gnawed clean through by some small animal. "They never repaired this."

"The function it served might have disappeared a thousand years ago," Ruiz said. "Do we maintain the Roman aqueducts, or the transatlantic cables?"

There was life all around them in the unused s.p.a.ces-little furry things that fled chittering as they approached. Mosslike fungus grew near damp spots where pipes had burst or condensation beaded the walls. Once they saw a small flying thing-a podlike shape suspended from a crown of furiously beating transparent wings.

The ducts and conduits branched off like some immense fossil vine to disappear through bulkheads or snake their way through side tunnels and adjacent chambers. Once Jameson put his eye to a rent that showed light and saw a horde of Cygnans slithering across a floor to crowd around a dozen raised perches where other Cygnans dispensed tiny pea-green cubes from wide-mouthed baskets slung around them. Another time the feathery humanoids stopped Dmitri just in time to prevent him from stepping through an opening where Cygnans disembarked from a travel tube to a platform that debouched to a multibranched artery.

It was the humanoids that kept them out of trouble. They darted ahead and then back like coursing gazehounds, sniffing out danger and herding Jameson and the others into side tunnels, or by example making them hide behind ducts and bulkheads till stray Cygnans pa.s.sed. And all the time, the two elvish beings followed the trail of Klein and his group, selecting trails from among alternate routes with utter certainty.

"Butyric acid," Dmitri said suddenly.

"What?" Jameson called.

"Butyric acid. It's a const.i.tuent of human sweat. Every time you take a step, something like two hundred and fifty billion molecules of butyric acid pa.s.s through the sole of your shoe. A good bloodhound or German shepherd can detect a millionth of that amount and follow a trail a week old. These two fluffb.a.l.l.s of ours seem to live by scent."

"Very interesting. But we haven't time to-"

"There's something else."

"What are you talking about?"

Ruiz and Maggie had stopped to listen. The two humanoids were twenty feet farther on, dancing impatiently up and down.

"How do they make us hide when there are Cygnans nearby?" Dmitri asked.

Jameson wrinkled his brow. "Why... they make a lot of gestures, and they act excited, and then they hide behind something..."

"Think again. We don't wait around and stop to think. We act very quickly. Theytell us Cygnans are around."

Maggie said, "Well, we seem tosense what they mean. I can almostfeel us getting close to Cygnans...

Oh!"

Dmitri grinned with triumph. "Exactly. It's the most evocative of the senses. Human beings use it every day without being aware of it. It makes us like people or dislike them, triggers s.e.xual behavior, evaluates our surroundings on a subconscious level, makes us nostalgic without knowing why-"

"Slow down," Jameson said.

"He's too much of an ox to notice," Maggie said. She turned to Jameson and said: "Smell!They tell us by smell! When they want to warn us that there are Cygnans around, they lose that nice spicy aroma and they suddenly smell sort ofmusty , the way Cygnans do."

Dmitri nodded vigorously. "Theymanufacture smells as well as detect them. They probably can imitate any smell they encounter. Make up new ones, too." He laughed delightedly. "Odors to order!"

"Maybe," Jameson said. "Come on, we're wasting time."

"I'llshow you," Dmitri said.

He hurried to catch up to the humanoids, the others following. The two creatures were at a division in the metallic gorge where two narrow flumes diverged, making motions to go right. Dmitri ignored them and turned left.

"What-" Jameson began.

"Watch," Dmitri said. "Or I should say, smell."

The little creatures squeaked with distress. After a couple more attempts to turn Dmitri around, they planted themselves at the right, waving their pink tails in agitation.

It hit Jameson with full force. A smell like old socks. A locker room with a million sweaty feet. The lemurlike creatures were fanning it toward the three humans with their bushy tails.

"I'm convinced," Jameson said. To the evident relief of the humanoids, the humans began following them up the metal flume, climbing the thick vinelike cables. In the low gravity, it was easy.

Ruiz, his jury-rigged spear slung across his back, inquired between puffing breaths: "Why would any critter develop an ability like that?"

"Any number of biological reasons," Dmitri said happily "Carnivorous plants make themselves smell like rotten meat to attract flies. Moths generate pheromones to attract mates. Deer deposit scents to warn other deer of danger. Rabbits mark their territories with scent glands to keep other rabbits out. Skunks protect themselves with odors. All different ways of using scents to communicate or modify the behavior of other creatures." He stopped. "I just had a thought."

"What?"

"Why do we like them?"

"Because they'recute! " Maggie called from above.

"What if that nice spicy smell you like so much isn't their natural aroma? What if it's tailor-made to influence our att.i.tude toward them?"

Ruiz said, "How could they know what appeals to us? Different life form, different planet, entirely out of their biological spectrum."

"Feedback," Dmitri said. "They respond to all the billions of scent molecules we're putting out from our skin, our mouths, our gonads, our intestinal tracts. Their olfactory organs a.n.a.lyze them as naturally as our own eyes put together a lot of data and give us the shape of the world around us. Then their scent glands mix up a brew that gets the response they want."

Jameson grunted. "Scents couldn't affect us that powerfully."

"Couldn't they? The smell of a baby can bring on a maternal response in a nonlactating female. The presence of menstruating females in a group living situation can bring on a woman's period. A man can make you want to fight him by the smell of his fear, or back down by the smell of his rage. Do you know that a cat has a scent gland on its forehead that-"

"All right!" Jameson said. "I give up!"

"It doesn't have to be sinister, you know," Dmitri said, mollified. "They needed our help, and they instinctively tried to make themselves pleasing."

Up above, the two pink forms were swinging themselves up the braided cables and optical fibers like a pair of cotton-candy monkeys. The vertical crevice twisted and widened into a dim grotto filled with the shrouded shapes of corroded machines that resembled rusty twelve-foot-high beehives. The dust, thick on the floor, showed the tracks of many humans. There was a litter of empty cans to show where they'd stopped to camp, and from somewhere behind the hives came the unmistakable smell of human waste.

"Watch it!" Ruiz cried as he pulled himself up into the chamber, and Jameson whirled to see one of Klein's little glittering bugs scurry across the floor. He pounced and scooped it up, and with one smooth unbroken motion flung it back down the metal chasm they'd climbed from.

The two humanoids had disappeared. Jameson looked around, trying to locate them among the tall domelike shapes. He stepped round one of the hives and came face to three-eyed, long-snouted face with a Cygnan who seemed to be as startled as he was.

Jameson made a dive for it. At the back of his mind was the thought that if he could grab hold of a leg and manage to keep himself from getting drilled through by that rasping tongue until the others rushed up and helped him pin the alien down, he could tie it up with some of the rope he carried, just as he'd tied Augie.

"Kill it!" Maggie shouted behind him.

That gave him a jolt, but the advice was academic. The Cygnan reared up like an ocean wave and oozed backward along itself until it was running away,upside down on its queerly articulated legs. It was already a dozen feet away and rotating on its axis to put itself right-side up, without missing a beat, before Jameson could react. Ruiz threw his spear, which clattered harmlessly off one of the metal hives.

Jameson pounded after it futilely. He watched helplessly as it skidded around a dome and streaked for a crack in the grotto wall.

"Let's get out of here!" Ruiz said, gasping.

The Cygnan rounded another dome, its flexible head raised like the trunk of a charging elephant.

Jameson changed course, knowing he could never head it off.

He circled around, a mouse lost amid an acre of overturned bowls. He had lost track of the Cygnan.

Ruiz, his spear retrieved, was circling in the opposite direction. Dmitri and Maggie were doing their best to flank him. But the Cygnan didn't emerge anywhere.

"Here!" he heard Ruiz gasp.

He ran in fifteen-foot leaps toward Ruiz's voice, Dmitri bringing up-the rear. When he saw Ruiz, spear braced, fixed on something behind a dome, he approached from the opposite side. Maggie was coming up behind Ruiz, a kitchen knife in her hand.

"Look," Ruiz said.

The Cygnan was stretched out on its back, writhing voluptuously like a puppy on a deliciously scratchy rug. The two humanoids squatted peaceably on their furry haunches beside it, looking like great big jolly pink nursery spiders.

There was an overpowering musty odor hanging like a miasma over the scene, too powerful to be coming from the one Cygnan. It was overlaid by a pungent, sour smell that tugged at Jameson's memory until he realized that it reminded him of the scent in the zookeepers' quarters the time Tetrachord had behaved so sluggishly.

"They've got the critter mesmerized," Dmitri observed.