The Jupiter Theft Read online

  The damned thing was less than a light-year away!

  He snatched the lightpad from a startled Mizz Maybury and made his own rough calculation. His answer approximated the computer's average figure: a distance of about half a light-year. The Cygnus source was close—closer than any stellar object had a right to be. And it wa blue-shifting. And there was no proper motion. All the motion was head-on.

  Something soft nudged his arm: Mizz Maybury's breast. She was leaning across him, thrusting a piece of paper in front of him, trying to get his attention.

  “Dr. Ruiz!” she said urgently. “I thought you might want—that is—I asked the computer to pull out the most recent planetary data. The positions of the outer planets—I mean, there's a discrepancy of several seconds in the longitude and declination of both Neptune and Pluto. It might turn out to be simple observational error, but—-”

  He waved her aside. “In a moment, Mizz Maybury.” He was staring intently at the screen that showed the values for the base angles. The computer was constantly updating them as it refined and reaveraged its data. They held steady up to the eighth decimal point, then jumped back and forth a good deal, but the trend of the figures was definitely higher.

  The thing had to be moving fast to show any noticeable change in that short a time. Ruiz was almost afraid to ask how fast. But he wiped the lightpad and scribbled an order for the computer to pin a tentative value on the blue shift and try to correlate it with the changing parallax. There was a pause of several seconds while the computer searched its peripheral memories for an appropriate program; then figures began to flow across the lightpad, while a duplicate column of numbers marched across one of the display screens.

  He heard a gasp behind him. Maybury was looking over his shoulder.

  “That's right,” he said. “It appears to be moving toward us at something more than ninety-eight percent of the speed of light.”

  Over at the data screen the junior resident cleared his throat. He was perspiring, and the green ident disk on his chest was coming unstuck. “That means it'll be in the vicinity of the solar system in about six months,” he said.

  “At its present speed, yes,” Ruiz said.

  He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Finally he said, “I don't suppose we'll really have enough data till we've observed it for a few more days, but why don't you have the computer generate a projection of the path of the Cygnus source through the solar system.”

  Maybury and the young man got busy over at one of the consoles. Ruiz could hear them whispering together, having some kind of dispute, but he wasn't paying attention. He was thinking about the trip to Earth he'd probably be making some time in the next twelve hours, dreading it. He glanced up and saw the junior resident, an angry flush on his face and chest, step away from the console and stare sulkily out the observation window. Maybury was hunched over, shoulders tense, her fingers flying over the lightboard, her bare toes twiddling in unconscious rhythm. At last she straightened up and turned in her chair.

  A flat disk grew in the square darkness of the holo well. It looked something like a target, with the sun and the orbits of the inner planet crowded together to make a bull's-eye. In the computer's stylized representation, Pluto's orbit was a tilted hoop intersecting the orbit of Neptune, which had briefly replaced it as the outermost planet beginning in 1987.

  A yellow dotted line with an arrowhead represented the probable course of the Cygnus source. It wiggled back and forth a bit as the computer changed its mind, but it always intersected the plane of the ecliptic somewhere near the edge of the bull's-eye.

  Ruiz canted the image for better perspective and zoomed in so that Jupiter's orbit was outermost. Now he could see the positions of the inner planets—colored beads strung on those glowing tracks, and necessarily out of scale. Six months hence, Mars would just have overtaken Jupiter, and Earth would be rounding the Sun to catch up.

  That X-ray holocaust from Cygnus was going to penetrate the plane of the solar system somewhere between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. It would pass within 4 A.U.s of Earth.

  Ruiz rose out of his chair very carefully, like an old man, and walked over to the observation window. He took another long look at Cygnus, knowing it was futile. If the 500-inch telescope couldn't see anything, he certainly wasn't going to see anything with the naked eye. The duty tech made no attempt to follow him with her piece of paper. Even the junior resident had sense enough not to say anything.

  Dr. Mackie arrived a few minutes later, still wearing his pressure suit, his helmet tucked under his arm and his turkey neck sticking out of the collar ring. He saw the look on Ruiz's face. “What's wrong?” he said.

  Ruiz was a tough old bird. He had grown up in the squalor of a refugee camp on Long Island in the years after most of Manhattan had been rendered uninhabitable by the bomb, made of stolen reactor wastes, set off by the New England Separatists in 1998. He had clawed his way to the top on his own merits, despite the twin handicaps of poverty and a provisional ident. There wasn't much that could unnerve him.

  But now his face was gray as he turned to Mackie.

  “I'm putting you in charge, Horace,” he said. “I'm going down to Earth to tell them that the human race has just been sentenced to death.”

  Chapter 2

  Tod Jameson flung up a gauntleted hand to protect his faceplate and yelled: “Wei hsien!”

  He grabbed a startled Li Chen-yung by an air hose and spun him around. There was just enough time to plant both boots against Li's quilted blue spacesuit and give him a mighty shove; then the flat, perforated pad of the landing leg went sailing past his head like a gigantic flyswatter. Its stately slow motion was deceptive. There was enough mass behind the pad to grind him into the hull like a bug. His spine crawling, Jameson saw it crunch its way through several honeycomb layers of the Callisto lander's skin and embed itself there, trailing springs and broken struts.

  He was drifting outward in a direction opposite to the shove he'd given Li. Earth filled the sky, a colossal backdrop of sparkling blue-and-white whorls. Against it was silhouetted the unfinished framework of the Jupiter ship, just a couple of miles off, a spidery wheel with a spear through the hub.

  Li's voice crackled in his helmet. “Thanks, buddy,” he said.

  “Hwan-ying,” Jameson replied. He wondered if his Chinese sounded as stilted as Li's English.

  He located Li, a starfish shape floating in emptiness, pinwheeling crazily. As he watched, Li brought the spin under control and fired a short, economical burst from his suit jets that sent him back toward the squat bulk of the landing vehicle.

  Jameson aimed himself carefully and fired his own thruster. He braked expertly within reach of a strut and hooked one foot under it. Li was already there, inspecting the mangled locking mechanism of the landing foot that had almost killed them both.

  “Missing bolt,” Li said, pointing a sausagelike finger. “Big spring in leg tear loose.”

  “K'an-yi-k'an,” Jameson said.

  They both looked up at the place where the lander had kicked a hole in its own side. The skeleton leg was sticking out ignominiously, its foot buried in the lander's aluminum hide. The image was so anthropomorphic that they both laughed.

  “What if that happen while we orbit Callisto?” Li said, his broad peasant features suddenly serious inside his fishbowl.

  “Bu-hau,” Jameson began. “Bu-dau shem...” He floundered, trying to think of the word for “abort,” and gave up. “We'd have to scrub the mission,” he finished lamely in English.

  His suit radio buzzed, and Jameson tongued the switch that put him on closed circuit. “We're sending a repair crew right away,” Sue Jarowski's husky voice said. “Are you and your Chinese friend all right?”

  “We're fine,” Jameson said. “No injuries. But it looks as if the lander's been holed. We're doing a damage inventory now.”

  Li had turned away discreetly so that Jameson wouldn't see his lips move while he reported on his own scramb
led circuit. It was a meaningless courtesy. Both of them knew perfectly well that Li's people, in the sequestered pod they had attached to the rim of the international space station a few miles away, were busily processing all American message traffic, just as the Americans routinely unscrambled all Chinese transmissions.

  The ritual spying had become a way of life during the year-long preparations for the joint Chinese-American Jupiter mission—like the elaborate charade of speaking the other side's language during mission exercises.

  The big prize in the game was the new boron fusion/fission engine that was going to power the Jupiter ship, courtesy of the United States. The Chinese didn't have one yet, though they were said to be working on it furiously.

  Jameson was familiar with the basic principle: You inject a proton into boron 11, with its six neutrons and five protons, and you get an unstable nucleus that explodes into three helium nuclei, with two protons and two neutrons apiece. But it took temperatures in the billions of degrees to start boron fission.

  So to get the hot protons needed to trigger the boron reaction, you had to have a fusion reaction first. That was being supplied, courtesy of the Chinese, via a more conventional deuterium-tritium fusion, triggered by carbon dioxide lasers.

  The security problems at the interface of the two systems were nightmarish.

  The daily American security sweeps constantly uncovered one ingenious Chinese spy device after another hidden in and around the still-empty engine modules. They were deactivated without comment. Both sides pretended they weren't there.

  It was a hell of a basis for traveling to another planet, but it was the only way it was going to get done. America and the China Coalition were the only two political entities that had the resources and the motivation. The European Space Agency was too fragmented by intramural squabbles. Greater Japan stuck pretty close to Earth orbit and applications satellites of a practical nature. And Russia—what was left of it after the Chinese police action of 2003-2008—was no longer a spacefaring nation.

  Jameson looked at Li and grinned. It was a good thing that both sides had a healthy share of get-the-job-done types like Li and himself. Best to leave the rest of it to the politicians and the security men.

  Li grinned back. “You look more Chinese than I do, old buddy,” he said. “Are you sure we're not getting to you?”

  Jameson knew what he meant. In zero-g conditions, some of the body fluid tends to migrate upward to the face. Jameson's normally lean face was temporarily puffy, cheeks risen and his gray eyes slitted. He was also an inch taller, thanks to a stretched spine.

  “Wo ma?” Jameson said innocently. “Wo pu-shih Chung-gwa-jen.”

  Li laughed, a little constrained by all of the listening ears. The two of them pulled themselves from handhold to handhold across the curving surface of the Callisto lander, toward the embedded footpad. There was a lot of debris floating around: pieces of the locking mechanism, fragments of hardened foam insulation. Something the size and shape of a pot lid drifted past lazily. Li made a grab at it, but Jameson netted it first.

  He turned it over in his gloved hands, anchoring himself with the toe of a boot. It was a bolt head—the one missing from the locking mechanism.

  He saw why it had broken loose: Someone had sawed the head off the bolt and substituted this hollowed-out fake. Inside was something that he guessed was part of an X-ray camera. It seemed to be a lensless system depending on folded optics and a paper-thin electronics sandwich of an image plane that transmitted the pictures on its face through a pea-size FM device. The capsule of radioactives seemed to be missing, fortunately.

  He looked reprovingly at Li. Li looked back blandly through his visor, without even the grace to blush. He probably hadn't known the thing was there. After all, it had almost killed him too.

  Why? Jameson wrinkled his forehead and had the answer immediately. The Callisto lander would normally be tucked up in an external module next to an engine pod. The Chinese hoped to get a few pictures that would give an insignificant clue or two to the size and configuration of some component of the boron drive, so they could add the information to all their other pieces. They were capable of going to ridiculous lengths. The other day someone had caught a Chinese engineer with millimeter markings painted on his thumbnail, sneaking a measurement of one of the unconnected fuel pellet delivery pipes.

  He stowed the bogus bolt head in a leg pocket of his spacesuit. He'd turn it over to one of the security boys later. No official complaint would ever be lodged. The polite fictions that made the joint mission possible had to be maintained at all costs.

  Li had looked away nonchalantly while Jameson pocketed the spy device. He'd be talking to his own security representatives later. Now he said, as if nothing had happened, “Here they come now.”

  Jameson craned his neck and saw reflected earth-light glinting off an open tetrahedral framework festooned with clinging objects. It was about a half mile away. Whoever was jockeying the repair rig was good; he'd coasted all the way without correction. Suddenly there were a couple of brief flares of hydrazine jets, and the thing was hanging motionless in reference to the Callisto lander.

  Two bulky dolls floated from the cage: the co-foremen. Jameson could make out the American-flag shoulder patch on one and the red-star patch on the other. They conferred briefly, helmets together, and then two repair lobsters detached themselves from the frame, accompanied by a swarm of spacesuited attendants.

  Sue Jarowski's voice sounded in his helmet again. “Mission Control says you and Li can call it a day, Tod. They're scratching the training exercise until Thursday.”

  Jameson conjured up an image of Sue's face while she talked: dark hair, strong almost-pretty features with wide cheekbones, snub nose, generous mouth. She was crisp and alert, and a damn fine communications officer.

  “I think I'll stick around here, Sue, until they finish the repair. I can borrow a bottle of air from the repair crew.”

  Sue hesitated, then said: “Ray Caffrey wants to see you.”

  “I'll bet he does. Tell him I'll check in with him later.”

  Caffrey was the security rep. On the official mission roster he was listed as “Safety Engineer.”

  “I understand. I'll tell Ray.”

  Jameson turned back toward the repair rig. The two lobsters, bright orange against blackness, were maneuvering themselves into position, getting a helpful nudge or two from the men swarming around them. A repair lobster was nothing more than a simple cylinder with a plastic bubble for the head of its operator at one end. It got its name from the two big clawlike waldos at the forward end and the twin rows of smaller specialized limbs down its ventral surface.

  One of the lobsters anchored itself on the Callisto lander's hull and grasped the embedded landing foot. It tugged gently, trying to do as little further damage as possible. The leg came free. There was a little frosty explosion of particles of trapped air. A couple of spacesuited men took charge of the damaged leg and ferried it back to the repair frame. One was Chinese, one American. Jameson grinned without humor. Even the garbage detail had to be binational.

  There was a frying sound in his helmet, and Li's voice said: “I be going back to Eurostation now. See you Thursday.”

  Li's stocky figure was already mounting his scooter. He gave it a couple of squirts, aiming it toward the big wheel in the distance.

  “You're not going to watch the repair?” Jameson said in careful Standard Mandarin.

  “No. What for?”

  Li hunched over the steering bar, and the scooter dwindled against the stars. Jameson watched it until it was too small to see. Li obviously had been recalled to explain why he hadn't managed to retrieve the spy camera first. Perhaps if those security clowns had had the sense to confide in Li, he would have.

  Jameson sighed. It was a sticky business. As co-commanders of the Callisto lander, he and Li would depend on each other utterly when they set down on the frozen surface of the Jovian moon. They had to trust each oth
er without reservation. But Li had his loyalties, just as Jameson did. Jameson shrugged mentally. You had to work within the system.

  He gave a start as a pair of mittened paws grasped his upper arms and a helmet clinked against his. He found himself staring into the raw red features of the U.S. repair-crew foreman, a likable, plain-spoken man named Grogan. Grogan was being smart enough not to use his suit radio.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” Grogan said, “but what's going on? We saw the landing leg spring loose through the telescope, but that's all.”

  Jameson pressed his helmet against the other man's. “Tell you all about it later. For now, just make sure that everything you replace in the locking mechanism is all right. Particularly the bolts.”

  Grogan's corned-beef face split in a grin. “Got you, sir. I'll check out the replacement parts myself,”

  He gave a push and launched himself toward the sleeve of the landing gear. The Chinese foreman was fishing around in the tangled mess and passing broken pieces to a crewman member with a sack. Grogan stationed himself there, the lines of his body looking belligerent even through the bloat of the spacesuit. Jameson relaxed.

  The other lobster brought over a replacement leg, an articulated metal lattice five meters long, with the flat mesh pad of the landing foot at one end. Swimming behind it was a four-man crew with laser cutting torches.

  Jameson waited until they were finished, then hitched a ride back on the repair frame. Clinging to a crossbar, he watched Eurostation grow in his vision. The great wheel was surrounded by a random collection of orbital constructions and the parked shuttles of half a dozen nations hanging like gnats above its hub. That glittering spider web suspended a couple of kilometers beyond the rim was their radiotelescope, leased to all corners, and the pool of quicksilver trapped in a cage was one of the solar collectors. The spinning cross with the tin cans at the ends of the arms was one of the earlier stations, still in use as an isolation lab.

  But it was Eurostation itself, rotating ponderously against the stars, that dominated that floating junkyard. It had been growing for fifty years. The inner rim, only six hundred feet in diameter, had been the original station back in the early decades of the century. Now it was a low-g hospital, among other things. It was connected by six vast spokes to the outer rim, more than a half mile across. Future expansion would have to be done laterally, turning the wheel gradually into a cylinder, unless they wanted to slow the rotation. An exception was the blister the Chinese had attached to the rim—a spartan environment where they could practice their state religion uncontaminated by Eurostation's amenities.