Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

He threaded his way through the jostling, goodnatured lobby crowds toward the spiral elevator platform. One of the bubble cars had just alighted. It opened like a flower, and a dozen people stepped out. One of them was a tall, skinny redhead in a green jumpsuit. Their eyes met in mutual surprise.

“Tod!” she said.

“Maggie! Maggie MacInnes! What are you doing here?”

The question seemed to startle her. Then she recovered, and freckles crowded one another around a wide grin. “I live here,” she said.

It was Jameson’s turn to be startled. He looked around the vast cylindrical chasm of the lobbyscape, his posture unconsciously conveying the outrage of the ruinous daily rates, and gulped: “You live here? ”

Maggie laughed. “I mean in Greater Houston. I just come to the MacDonald for the skiing.”

“I was beginning to wonder if you were an Indian millionaire. Time for a drink?”

She looked at the watch painted on her wrist, a one-day film of multilayer time-release paint that matched her jumpsuit, good until you took a shower. “Well, maybe just a quick one,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to Dallasworth for dinner.”

“With Mike Berry?” he asked cautiously.

“Jeeks, no!” she said, making a face. “Mike’s spending his leave with his ex and their kid. I’m singling it.”

“Me too,” Jameson said. He and Sue had no firm understanding about what would happen when he returned. She had spent her own leave visiting her parents in Denver—a grim, gray place for a holiday.

They shared a martini slush, served in little silver cryo-glasses, at one of the canopied tables bordering the lake, and agreed to meet the next day.

“I’m not going to let you leave Houston without seeing some of the sights,” Maggie said firmly. “After that, the MacDonald can have you.”

“You won’t change your mind about dinner?” he said.

She glanced at the splash of paint on her wrist. Another slim wedge of green had just faded to a lighter shade. “Can’t,” she said. “I’m late now.”

She licked the last of her martini from the bottom of the cup and stood up. “See you tomorrow,” she said. Jameson watched her slim, straight figure until it disappeared into the holiday crowds.

She was waiting for Ruiz in his room when he returned from his afternoon walk along the beach. He came in all the way, tracking sand, and closed the door behind him. He’d been burned black by the sun, but otherwise his “vacation” hadn’t done him much good. He looked gaunt and drawn and tired, and he knew it. He drew his robe more closely around his bony shanks and asked, “How did you get in?”

“I told them at the desk that I was your daughter,” Mizz Maybury said. “They said I could wait for you here.”

She was sitting erect on his bed, a small, vulnerable figure in a short travel poncho and sandals, her hands folded in her lap. Square, competent hands, Ruiz noticed. He caught himself looking at her legs, still round and muscular despite all her months on the Moon.

“Daughter!” he snorted. “Granddaughter, more likely!”

He shuffled over to the wall vendette in his paper slippers and punched himself an iced fruitbeer. “Something cold to drink?”

Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. “Oh, Dr. Ruiz, you don’t know what it’s been like since you left!”

He waited until she was over it, then handed her a glass. “I can imagine,” he said dryly. “You know you shouldn’t be here.”

He noticed a small round patch on her head, about the size of a fivebuck, where her close-cropped dark hair seemed to be a little shorter. Fools, he thought. Fools and incompetents.

“Can’t you do something? ” she said angrily. “Tell them—make them listen—come back and run things again—”

“They’re not interested in my opinions,” he said. “My opinions are an inconvenience to them.”

“I was there when one of your calls came through. Dr. Mackie wanted to talk to you, but they wouldn’t let him. He knows what the Cygnus Object has to be, but he’s afraid to come out and say so. Dr. Ruiz, he needs your help! I feel sorry for him!”

“I don’t have access to any of the new data about the Cygnus Object,” Ruiz said. “All I know is what I read in the faxes.”

“I’ve seen those,” she said. “They don’t say anything about the five smaller bodies. They can’t pretend those are natural phenomena!”

“Smaller bodies?” Ruiz brought his head up sharply. “Mizz Maybury, maybe you’d better start from the beginning.” He went over to the drawer and got his battered old pocket computer. He sat down on the bed beside her, cocking his head to listen.

She had just filled him in on the essentials when there was a heavy pounding and a harsh voice shouting “RB!” and somebody kicked the door open.

Two large, meaty young men burst into the room. Their hands were empty, but there was the bulky shape of weapons belts under their shirttails.

Ruiz half rose from the bed.

“Hold it, Gramps!” one of the men said. He crossed the room with a bound and gave Ruiz a shove in the chest.

Maybury made a little choking sound.

“What’s this about?” Ruiz asked in a steady voice.

The man looked both of them over, not bothering to answer. He was towheaded and pale, with narrow blue eyes. Maybury flushed at his scrutiny. Ruiz felt vulnerable and silly in his short robe with his knobby knees showing through.

The second man, a thick-necked fellow with a flattened nose, was pulling out the antenna of a communicator and talking into it. “We got ’em both. No sweat. The girl was in bed with him.”

“I wasn’t—I—” Maybury began. The towhead grabbed the computer from Ruiz and tossed it to his partner.

“Evidence,” he said. The other man put the computer in a shiny black shoulder bag.

“Okay, Gramps,” the towheaded one said. “Put on some clothes. You’re taking a trip.”

“Aren’t you supposed to show me some identification?” Ruiz said, sounding almost amused. “And read me the little homily about good citizens cooperating voluntarily with the government’s efforts to establish their reliability?”

The RB man sighed. “You wanna make trouble? Come on, move it!”

Ruiz got dressed under their watchful eyes. Maybury sat on the bed, eyes downcast, her face pale. By the time Ruiz was ready, she had gotten her trembling under control. The arbee with the flat nose grasped her roughly above the elbow and hauled her to her feet.

“Hands off her!” Ruiz snapped, his eyes smoldering dangerously. His intercession only got Maybury a painful, bone-grating squeeze.

“Take it easy, Gramps,” the other man said. “Awright, let’s go.”

Two hours later they were sitting in a windowless office north of Washington, D.C. Somebody in authority had thought them worth the expense of a suborbital flight in a military craft—and worth all the broken windows and deafened vacationers in Nevada before they got above the atmosphere.

“What are we going to do with you, Dr. Ruiz?” General Harris inquired from across an acre of polished desk. “And now you’ve gotten this young lady in trouble.”

His little beak of a nose was pinched and red in the sloping cliff that was his face. He drummed his fingers on the desk top.

“Trouble?” Ruiz said in a controlled voice. His eyes burned, red-rimmed, in a tired face. “Maybury was paying a kind visit to an old friend and former associate.”

Maybury said nothing. She sat in the big chair, hands in her lap, looking around the blank walls of the office.

“Giving—or receiving—restricted information is a Federal crime,” the general said. He pressed a button, and Maybury’s recorded voice came through a hidden speaker, telling Ruiz about the orbiting spark and the astonishing course change that had put the planet from Cygnus in orbit around Jupiter. Harris let it run for a minute, then switched it off.