The Jupiter Theft Part 6

"Let's go, Li," Jameson said. They picked up their sacks and left.

Li waited until they were in the tubeway. "Not a very likable man, this Klein."

Jameson's acc.u.mulated irritation broke through and aimed itself at Li. A little bit of shamefaced loyalty to his own side was mixed in with it. "He doesn't have to be likable," he said shortly. "Just so long as he does his job."

They walked to the nearest lift shaft in silence. They had to wait about five minutes. The wraparound door revolved to open, and Grogan and an a.s.sistant staggered out, hugging bulky scooter reaction tanks.

Grogan grimaced at Jameson as he stepped past him. "Don't empty your p.i.s.sbottle while you're out there, Commander," he said. "That Klein joker'll make you go back and count all the crystals."

Jameson laughed and stepped inside. Li crowded in with him. The door slid shut with a hiss, and the circular platform began to rise. The lift shaft ran through one of the three equidistant spokes that connected the ship's main ring to the hub and the thousand-foot spear that ran through it. It was three hundred feet to the hub-too far to walk and impossible to leap when the ship was under spin. Jameson felt his weight dropping fast as they ascended. The Coriolis force pushed at him, jamming him against the mesh wall of the cage. Then the cage stopped, the invisible fist released him, and he was so close to weightlessness that it made no difference.

Four of Grogan's men were in the spinlock antechamber, playing a dispirited game of cards on a magnetic board that kept getting away from them. They were in skivvies and stickyslippers, their s.p.a.cesuits bobbing from hooks on the wall behind them. They didn't bother to look up as Jameson and Li unfastened the hatch to the spinlock and dove inside.

Jameson and Li helped each other with their helmets and gloves, then vacced the lock. The spinlock was an unpleasant place to be in for any length of time; though your weight was negligible this close to the center of the ship, the gradient between head and feet was quite noticeable. It made people feel odd, disoriented, a little nauseated. Through the little safety window Jameson could see the metal skin of the ship's central shaft reeling past at two revolutions per minute. The wheel's hub slid around that axle on frictionless bearings-the perfect ball bearings that had been cast under weightless conditions in one of the s.p.a.ce factories swarming around Eurostation. Of course, total frictionlessness was impossible to achieve, but this came close enough; the minute amount of spin that was imparted to the thousand-foot axis of the ship was easily corrected once or twice a day by a modest computer-regulated flywheel.

Li released the brake. The anti-spin jets fired automatically, as soon as the computer verified that neither of the other two spinlocks had open outer doors. The unpleasant feeling disappeared as body fluids redistributed themselves. Jameson's sinuses cleared. Through the little window he could see the motion of the inner hull slow down and stop. The spinlock fastened itself to the long shaft of the inner hull. Now the 600-foot wheel of the spin section was sliding around the spinlock's outer ring of frictionless bearings in their Teflon track.

The two s.p.a.cesuited figures pulled themselves aft along the webbing and cordage that restrained cargo.

No-g wasn't good for much of anything except stowage and the super-growth section of the hydroponics system. The boron fusion/fission engine was all the way aft, off limits behind thick bulkheads. Jameson could see the dull red glow of the warning lights in the murky distance-though this airless tunnel ought to be deterrent enough.

Jameson and Li emerged through a hatch roughly halfway down the tunnel. There was a dazzle of stars around them. Jameson pulled himself out on the hull and perched on a railing, enjoying the view. This was the only position where you could get some impression of the whole colossal work of engineering that was the ship. He was straddling a gigantic oar, with the bulbous k.n.o.b of the command center at its forward end and the flaring skirt of the drive section at the rear. A small forest of antennae sprouted from the mushroom bulge of the bridge, and there was a cl.u.s.ter of spherical fuel tanks aft for the hydrogen-fusion part of the boron cycle. Otherwise the huge shaft was unbroken, except for the protective housings that held the Callisto lander and the automated probes.

But ahead of him, no more than fifty feet from where he sat, was the rotating bushing that contained the spinlocks and to which the three main spokes of the wheel were attached. He looked up and saw the great revolving circle he would be living in for the next year, as it swept steadily past the stars twice every minute. Here and there on the facing rim he saw little squares of light: illuminated ports. The ship would be ablaze with them when it began its outward journey.

"Come on, buddy," Li's voice said in his ear. "We've got a lot to do."

Reluctantly Jameson dragged his eyes away from the stupendous moving archway above him. The whirling steel face in front of him was grinding away like a t.i.tan's mill, its flailing arms as thick around as the first moon rocket had been. Jameson shuddered at the thought of the ma.s.s and momentum behind that motion. It made him feel like a fly clinging to a power-turbine housing. He turned away from it and crawled along a guiderail toward the plastic blister covering the lander.

Mothballing the lander was slow work. You couldn't open the sack to look for the various small items you needed, because everything tended to float out at once; instead you had to feel around inside through an inverted sleeve, and with gloves on it was hard to trace the shapes of different objects. After an hour of it, Jameson and Li were getting impatient-and careless. Li was inside the blister when it happened.

Jameson was outside, floating about two feet above the surface. He had just let go of his handhold so he could use both hands to get a tube of epoxy out of the sack.

Just at that moment there was a fluttering hiss inside his helmet as his number one air tank ran out and the switchover cycle to number two began.

And then he got a kick in the back.

He grabbed wildly for his handhold as he started to tumble, but he was too late. The jet of escaping air had nudged him a foot out of reach. It might as well have been a mile.

He was cartwheeling out of control. He hadn't bothered with suit jets, for this job. Neither had Li. The valve of his number two tank was wide open and shooting him through s.p.a.ce like a rocket. Before he could reach around behind him to try to do something about it, he had a new problem.

He was being squirted in a looping path toward the churning maw of the ship's hub. An enormous metal arm swept past his vision. The entire ma.s.s of the wheel itself, a quarter of a million tons, was concentrated at the end of it.

There was no way he could stop himself. Helplessly he watched the next arm swoop down on him. With luck, it would barely miss him, and then, ten seconds later, the third spoke would bat him with the full momentum of the ship and slam him into the ma.s.sive bushing that contained the spinlocks.

They'd have to sc.r.a.pe him off with b.u.t.ter knives.

Desperately he flicked out the sack he was holding. If he let go, was there enough ma.s.s inside it to push him in the opposite direction? Not a chance, with his inertia.

Instead he hung on. The sack curled itself around the descending spoke. There was a jolt that almost tore his arm off, and then he was sailing outward. The outer rim of the ship flashed by him. He saw a lighted port with a face behind it. The ship seemed to shrink. A minute later it was a child's top, spinning in the void, and he was soaring up into eternal night. The air was gone from his helmet. He closed his eyes to save them, there was a fire in his chest as he sucked on vacuum, and then all his consciousness gathered itself into a single bright dot that shrank the way the ship had done. There was time to think that Li, still inside the lander pod, probably didn't know yet what had happened, and if he did know there was nothing he could do about it, and then all the time was gone, along with the rest of that bright dot.

The light was too bright on his eyelids. He had the world's worst headache. He was naked between clean sheets. There was weight on him, about two-thirds Earthweight, and he could smell ship's air. He opened his eyes and sat up. He immediately regretted it. A heavy liquid seemed to be sloshing around inside his head.

"That's a beautiful pair of bloodshot eyes," a voice said.

It was Doc Brough. He was leaning over the narrow cot, a plump, sandy-haired man in shorts and a shirt with the tail hanging out. This was a cubicle in the ship's infirmary. Over by the canvas wall, Li was standing next to Grogan. They both looked uncomfortable.

"You can thank those two," Brough went on. "Comrade Li saw you sailing out to never-never land.

Another minute and you'd have been invisible. They might have located you with radar in a day or two.

Chief Grogan was just coming out of the outside lock with a couple of fresh scooter charges. He saw Li waving and pointing over by the lander pod. He didn't even wait to put the charge in the scooter. He just jetted himself after you, riding the tank and steering by the seat of his pants. d.a.m.n lucky he didn't cook his thighs and wherewithal. He'll be walking gingerly a few days; I'll tell you. Shared his air with you on the way back and got you right down here. Don't worry, you aren't a vegetable. You weren't breathing s.p.a.ce for more than a minute or two."

Grogan lumbered over to the bed and took a wide-legged stance. "Anybody ever teach you to check your valves? he growled. "One arm of your T-valve was shut off tight. You vented your whole number two tank through the pressure-relief valve. And the safety came loose-wasn't screwed in right."

"Thanks, Chief," Jameson said.

Grogan growled again and left with a curious gait. No one would comment on it unless they wanted a flattened nose. Li came over. "Schedule's shot to h.e.l.l," he said. "I'll go over the report with you when you feel up to it."

"Thanks, Li," Jameson said. "Excuse me.Hsieh hsieh, Tongzhi ."

"Don't overdo it, buddy," Li said with a quick grin, and left.

Jameson swung his legs over the side of the cot and stood up. "Where're my shorts, Doc?" he asked.

Brough said, "Get the h.e.l.l back on that bed. You're not leaving here till I run a couple of tests."

"Can't wait, Doc," Jameson said, padding over to the locker near the entrance flap. "I've got to see the captain."

Captain Boyle was unhelpful. "File your complaint if you like," he said stiffly. "But I won't recommend Klein's transfer."

"Captain," Jameson said, just as stiffly, "Klein almost killed me. And on top of that, he's a d.a.m.n bad stores exec."

"He'll learn."

"Learn, h.e.l.l! At whose expense? It's going to be a long trip, Captain. You know we can't afford baggage like Klein. What's he doing here? What strings did he pull?"

"I won't discuss it further, Commander," Boyle said.

"All right, Captain, if that's the way you want it. But I don't understand what's going on here."

He turned to go. Boyle touched his arm. "Tod..." he said. He seemed uncomfortable about something.

"Yes, sir?"

"I'd help you if I could. But I'll give you a piece of advice instead. Don't file that complaint. It won't do any good, and the people down below don't like static."

"Thanks for the advice, Captain," Jameson said. "You'll find the complaint on your desk in the morning."

His eyes held Boyle's for a moment, and he walked out.

Sue was coming down the pa.s.sageway, a sheaf of reports in her hand. She was wearing a duty tabard over her shirt and shorts, unbelted and flapping open at the sides. "How are you feeling?" she said. "I stopped down at Sickbay when I got off, but you'd already left."

"I'm fine," he said. "If my ears would stop ringing."

"That Klein!" she said. For a moment her face flushed.

"Hey, don't take it personally!"

"I can't help it! I know that... that..." Her voice dropped, and she looked nervously around the corridor. "Captain Boyle was on the beam to Earth, raising ten different kinds of h.e.l.l. I put the calls through. But he didn't get anywhere with those stonewallahs at Mishcon! He was furious!"

He looked at her. Her chest under the tabard was rising and falling fast. "You bunking with the Giff tonight?" he said evenly.

She laughed. "No. He's still sampling. I think it's Beth Oliver at the moment."

"Make room for a broken-down s.p.a.cie? I've still got three days till Earth leave."

"Any time, Tod," she said. They squeezed hands, and she took her reports through to the captain's quarters.

The shirt-sleeved young flight controller sat at his console, his finger poised above the firing b.u.t.ton. He hesitated, then lifted the finger to a position in front of his face and studied it with undisguised admiration.

"This little pinkie's worth a half billion newbucks, do you realize that?" he said with simulated awe.

"That's what it's gonna cost the government a couple of seconds from now. Do you, think it knows? Can fingers think?"

"Come on, Bedford, quit clowning," the controller next to him said. "Push the d.a.m.n b.u.t.ton and get it over with. The course alteration's all plugged in. I don't wanna have to ask for a recomp."

"Ah, brief moment of glory!" Bedford said theatrically, and stabbed at the red b.u.t.ton.

Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen until the radio signal reached the vicinity of Jupiter, some forty-plus minutes from now: And they wouldn't know if it had worked for another forty-plus minutes, when the telemetry data struggled all the way back.

There wasn't much to do until then, so the dozen men on the team leaned back in their swivel chairs, sipped coffee, and traded desultory conversation.

The officials gathered in the gla.s.s booth at the rear of the room were more agitated. Shevchenko, the astronomer whose program was being superseded, was staring at the screen; looking grim. Beside him, the administrator for the s.p.a.ce Resources Agency, Harrison Richards, was biting his aristocratic lip as he watched half a billion dollars of his budget go down the drain for a project that hadn't been in the year's estimates. The deputy administrator, Fred Van Eyck, bespectacled and neat in crisp gray business pajamas, was nursemaiding a group of VIP's from Washington, keeping them occupied and harmless with babytalk about the technical details of the mission. But there was sweat glistening on his high-domed forehead.

"Two years," Shevchenko said bitterly. "Two years' planning down the drain." He was a small, untidy man with crumbs of food showing in the tangled oval around his mouth that he called a beard. He was wearing academic denims, faded and rumple-treated, with simulated patches badly dyed at the knees and elbows. Shevchenko's parents had been part of the enormous wave of immigrants from a devastated Soviet Union in the 2010s, and, like so many second-generation Russians, he had an aggressive drive to succeed that sometimes irritated his more-secure colleagues.

Administrator Richards glanced nervously at the Washington bunch. Van Eyck was still keeping them busy. Shevchenko was definitely not playing the game, airing his gripes in their presence.

"We'll tack as many of your experiments as we can onto the manned mission next month, Alex," he said soothingly. "We ought to be able to salvage most of your program."

"Salvage?" Shevchenko complained, spraying saliva with the sibilant. "And can you promise me that those cloudtop features in the south tropical zone will still be there six months from now? Eh, eh, tell me that!"

"There she goes!" one of the flight-dynamics engineers called from the front row of consoles.

With relief, Richards turned away from Shevchenko and looked up at the big central screen along with the rest of them. Van Eyck's smooth, low-key spiel trailed off as the Washington people strained eagerly to see.

The vast orb of Jupiter was moving right and off screen, as the robot probe, half a billion miles away, swung on its axis. For a moment there was a stunning closeup view of Io in crescent phase, surrounded by the spooky yellow glow of sodium emission. Then the picture jumped and blurred as the probe's thrusters fired a long burst, kicking it into a higher orbit.

"That does it," Shevchenko said, looking close to tears. "No more fuel reserve now. There-goes our cloudtop orbit." There was garlic on his breath. Richards moved away from him.

"You can see the captured planet and its moon now," Van Eyck was telling the VIP's. "We think the moon will take up an independent orbit around Jupiter. The planet won't be able to hold on to it now."

He turned and spoke into a microphone. "How does our probe look, fellows?" he said.

The answer crackled through a loudspeaker in the booth as one of the flight controllers answered. "Right on target, Dr. Van Eyck."

One of the VIP's frowned importantly. It was MacPhail the senator from Newfoundland, a big, portly man in a polyester kilt. Though his const.i.tuency was small, he was a power on the budget committee. "I couldn't help overhearing what Dr. Richards said to Dr. Shevchenko. I know you people are anxious to get a look at this planet from outside the solar system, but isn't it a fact that you're altering the course of your probe with no...definite object? And in the meantime you've scratched a very expensive program thatwas planned with a view toward the efficient expenditure of tax dollars."

Richards interposed himself hastily. "I appreciate your concern, Senator," he said. "'But part of the original purpose of this unmanned mission was to insure the safety of the Jupiter crew."

"I still think-"

"Come off it, Angus," said one of the other VIP's. It was Rumford of the Public Safety Commission, bearish and bleary-eyed after his Earth-Moon flight. "You know perfectly well that this is still a security matter. Don't you remember the flap when we first discovered the thing and we came to your committee for funds to move troops and Reliability units into the major population centers? That thing may still have some surprises in it, and we'renot about to risk any public unrest at this point."

MacPhail flushed. Van Eyck stepped smoothly into the situation.

"Let's have some magnification, have a closer look," he said.

He pressed a b.u.t.ton, and the disk of the planet from Cygnus began to swell on the screen. The shadow of its moon had taken a small bite out of its edge.

"How did you do that?" someone asked. "I thought you needed an hour and a half for the radio waves to make a round trip."

"Oh, the picture information is already here in the computer's acc.u.mulator vat-it's just like blowing up a high-resolution photo."

Three-quarters of an hour before, the camera must have been in the middle of one of its back-and-forth pans to the Cygnus Object's moon. Still zooming in, the camera was focusing on the s.p.a.ce between the two planetary objects. Sunlight glinted off something in the void.

"Good Lord!" Richards said. "What are those?"

The camera was still zooming in, allowing a tantalizing glimpse of something unnaturally angular.

Then there was a dazzle of ruby light, and the screen went blank.

"Bedford!" Van Eyck roared through his microphone. "Get that picture back on!"

There was consternation among the ranked consoles down below. The flight controllers, some of them half out of their seats, were scrabbling over their b.u.t.tons and dials. One of the systems-operation engineers had left his chair entirely and was leaning over the telemetry officer, yelling in his ear.

"It's dead, sir," Bedford's voice came over the speaker. "The probe's dead. The instruments say that everything heated up-fast! Then it died on us."

Chapter 6.

For a moment, as the ablative port shields shredded and whipped away into the wind, Jameson caught a fine view of Greater Houston spread out below him: a glittering sprawl of bright cuboid shapes stretching for a hundred miles along the Gulf Coast. Inland, at the center of that vast multicolored jumble, was the graceful mile-high stalk of the Federal Tower, its entire south face a shimmering parabolic cliff reflecting the sunlight of the hundred acres of solar collectors skirting its base toward a focus at the Houston Electrical Authority plant across the river. It was still in use after forty years, despite the gradual conversion to fusion power that had begun in the early decades of the century.