Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

Hastily, Jameson changed the subject. “Wouldn’t the extra limbs just atrophy? Would evolution really displace them so drastically?”

“Sure,” Dmitri said. “Happens all the time. It doesn’t even have to wait for evolution. Take the asymmetrical sole. Flounders and other flatfish on Earth start life with the usual bilateral symmetry, with an eye on either side, like free-swimming fish. When they get older and decide to lie on one side, the eye on that side moves around to the other side of the head.”

Dmitri paused to snap a picture of a Cygnan applying some instrument to the bubble. Perhaps it was taking a picture of him.

“The clincher is those three eyes,” he said after a moment. “What’s one doing under the jaw? Simple! No jaw! It’s just learned to open like one. It started as three eyestalks around a central orifice.”

“So the creature’s’ just a glorified tube?” Ruiz ventured.

“Well … so are we. But yes.” He frowned. “I wonder what’s so important about the other end, that the Cygnans have to wrap them up like their heads.”

“What I’d like to know,” Jameson said, “is how they matched orbits with us. And just by eyeballing it, too!”

“And how do they manage without spacesuits?” Ruiz asked.

“Maybe a very tough outer cuticle, like nematodes,” Dmitri said.

“What are nematodes?”

“Most numerous animal on Earth. Little parasitic roundworms. Every species of higher plant or animal has at least one species of nematode living off it. Human beings have about fifty. Most you never notice. They can live in vacuum. Some even live in boiling water, in hot springs.”

“Where do you get all these nasty facts?” Ruiz said.

“My specialty was parasitology,” Dmitri said with a self-satisfied smirk. “Good training for an exobiologist. You’d be surprised at some of the adaptations—”

“Later,” Ruiz said hastily. He turned to Jameson. “Tod my boy, what are we going to do about our visitors? Can we let a delegation of them inside for a talk?”

“Some of us may go outside,” Jameson said. “The skipper’s talking it over with Captain Hsieh now.”

At that moment a mild sensation washed through his body, as if he were on a descending elevator. He’d suddenly lost his one percent of weight. Ruiz noticed it too. He looked up questioningly. Only Dmitri seemed oblivious. He was opening his mouth for another little lecture, his slippers hooked into the fuzzy surface of the deck.

“Drive’s off,” Jameson said. “That’s odd. We still have another couple of hours of braking to do.”

“ Mister Jameson! ” Boyle was bawling his name from the control balcony.

“Excuse me” Jameson said. He circled the nearest guideline loosely with thumb and forefinger and kicked off into the air. He reached the balcony in a great swoop and swung himself over.

Boyle and Hsieh were hunched over a communicator screen, looking worried. Mike Berry’s face looked out at them, grimy and lined. In the background a Chinese technician, illegally present in the American section, was going over a computer display with Quentin.

Boyle looked up at Jameson. “Listen to this,” he said.

“…reaction just damped out,” Berry was saying. “We can’t seem to get it started again. There seems to be a strong magnetic field interfering with the shape of the field squeezing the plasma. And it’s playing hell with the computers. Timing’s all out of whack.

Kay Thorwald, looking grim, was pointing through the bulge of the observation port down along the length of the hull.

“Look!” she cried.

Jameson sighted down the shaft. At the far end a dozen Cygnans were clustered together, engaged in purposeful activity. He could make out some kind of lattice attached to the ship, encircling the hull.

“That’s how they did it, Captain,” he said.

Kay’s hand flew to her throat. “They’ll kill us! Don’t they know that? If we don’t kill our momentum, we won’t go into orbit around Callisto. We’ll crash into Jupiter!”

“Captain!” Jameson said. “We’ve got to damage that structure they’ve attached to the ship. I’m betting that it won’t take much to do it. Smash it up with pry bars wherever the thing looks most fragile. Toss the loose parts into space. By the time they could replace it, Berry would be able to get the drive working. If we could buy a couple of hours that way, we’d have time to get into a stable orbit.”

Grogan gestured at the scurrying hordes of six-limbed creatures outside. “We’d have to get past them.”

Jameson drew a breath. “From the spinlock to that point on the hull is about half the length of a football field,” he said. “If I have a dozen good people running interference for me, I think I can make it.”

“I can’t risk it, Tod,” Boyle said.

“Captain, it’s the only way.”

Boyle and Hsieh exchanged a glance. “All right,” Boyle said at last. “Let’s round up some volunteers.”

Jameson kissed Maggie good-bye and gathered the volunteers around him. “Let’s go.”

There was a strangled cry from Kay. “Look, look! What are they doing to the air lock?”

Jameson glanced out the bubble. Down at the hub of the ship, aliens were clustered all over the surface of the concentric cylinders that contained the spinlocks, thick as bees on honeysuckle. They were centering their attention on one of the outside doors.

A Cygnan with an implement that looked, at this distance, like an Easter egg at the end of a shovel handle was tracing the crack where the door was sealed. In its wake, other Cygnans were inserting toothpicks. When the eye adjusted for distance, the toothpicks became perfectly ordinary-looking crowbars. The Cygnans were already leaning on them, two or three feet hooked somehow into the surface of the hull, the remaining two or three hands bearing down on the bar.

“They’re prying the damn door open!” Boyle howled.

“Let’s get going!” Jameson yelled, starting toward the exit. “Caffrey’ll need help.”

“Stay where you are, Commander,” Boyle ordered.

“But—”

“There’s no time.”

The hatch flew off. It seemed to catch the Cygnans by surprise. They rose off the ship like a swarm of flies being disturbed. One of them appeared to have been injured by the hatch. After a moment they settled. There was a frosty explosion of air glittering against space, a white cloud growing larger. Alarms were going off all over the board.

Human bodies were floating out there. Jameson counted three.

“Caffrey must have had the inside door open, trying to get outside to stop them in time,” Jameson said. “The whole middle of the shaft between bulkheads’ll be open to vacuum.”

Kay glanced at her-instruments. “It is.”

The Cygnan with the Easter-egg tool slithered into the opening. Its assistants oozed after it.

Grogan was beside Jameson, clutching the edge of Kay’s console with raw knuckles. “Caffrey would’ve had the spin matched to the shaft, then. The wheel’s still safe. It’d be too hairy for them to try to get through the interface while it’s grinding around. They’ll come through this way first.”

He was wrong. There was another explosion of frost, a big one this time. A couple of hapless Cygnans came tumbling out of the lock, squirming round on their broomsticks to get back to the ship.

“Somebody was riding the cage, trying to get up here.” Jameson said. “The bulkhead at the end of the spoke must have been open.”

“Who was in that section of the wheel?” Boyle asked, his voice tight.

“That was spoke number three,” Kay said, reading the board. “Sickbay.”

“How many patients did Doc Brough and Dr. Nyi have?”