Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

A column of Cygnans was scurrying up the spiral, at the same fantastic speed. They and his own warders surely must see one another! But they weren’t slowing down. Without doubt, they were going to collide with bone-crunching force. He had a split second to see the first shadowy shape, two coils below, flash around the shaft. He braced himself.

Nothing! Jameson looked upward. The ascending Cygnans were streaking through the tubes above. How the hell had they gotten past without a collision?

He looked across at the other tubes. The same trick was going on all around him. Ascending and descending Cygnans on a collison course in the same spiral tubeway passing one another without meeting!

Then he understood. He almost laughed, in spite of the gravity of his situation. The solution was ridiculously simple. A double spiral, like the elevators at the MacDonald. You could even find the same thing in that French château in the Loire valley with the famous double-spiral staircase. Chambord. He’d seen it in a holo travelogue. People going up never met the people coming down—a handy trick in the sixteenth century for getting out of the place.

They took more than an hour to reach bottom, an hour of being whipped round and round the central shaft at breakneck speed, while the remote walls of the murky chasm whirled dizzyingly around him and the indistinct structures that filled it blended into a tornado blur. Jameson passed out somewhere along the way. When he regained consciousness, he was out of the sack, but still in his suit, lying on a bare floor whose surface bristled with minute rubbery villi. He was alone.

He tried to stand up and immediately lost his balance and fell down again. The blood rushed through his head and the room wheeled and tilted.

He waited until the dizziness passed, then cautiously sat up. He was in a small room with an odd shape. It was a parallelogram rather than a rectangle. It was a shape that would have made sense to Cygnans if they’d built rows of chambers along one of the three sides of an environmental pod and kept the dividing walls parallel to the bulkhead at the end.

He struggled shakily to his feet, his hands groping for support along the wall. The wall was a mass of the same rubbery projections. He cast no shadow. Light seemed to exist in the room without an apparent source. It was a dim reddish light that turned his spacesuit the color of blood.

How long had he been unconscious? Reluctantly he lifted his eyes to the luminous squares of the helmet telltales. It was worse than he’d thought. Barely ten minutes worth of air was left.

“Are you afraid?” Maggie said.

“Terrified,” Maybury said. Her dark eyes were big. “What’s going to happen now?”

Around them the big hemispherical chamber was alive with subdued conversation and purposeless moving to and fro. The air was already beginning to taste stale. Some seventy people were crowded into the bridge and observatory areas. Everything below hydroponics was hard vacuum.

Another twenty people were trapped in the tail of the ship: the Chinese and American engine techs and the erstwhile Chinese guards. The bridge was still in communication with them. Mike Berry had reported that everything forward of them was vacuum, and presumably swarming with Cygnans. They had one spacesuit down there, but no place to go with it.

Grogan’s man, Fiaccone, had managed to bring back a half-dozen spacesuits from spinlock storage before Captain Boyle had vetoed any further forays. He’d reported dead bodies floating around everywhere.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, brushing back a strand of wilted hair. It was warm and steamy in the bridge. “It’s stalemate, I guess. We’re under house arrest. We can’t get out, and those creatures don’t seem to want to get in. God, look at them! They move like weasels! They’re never still!”

Maybury followed her gaze to the glassy curve of the outside wall. It was covered with sleek six-legged shapes that stared and darted away, to be replaced by others. By this time most of the crew had moved uneasily away from the observation wall, leaving a clear space of about ten feet.

“They’re afraid to come inside,” Maybury said. “After what happened in hydroponics.”

On his last trip for spacesuits Fiaccone had been pursued by Cygnans coming through the breached spinlock. He’d barely made it through the improvised air lock into the farm. One of the Cygnans had gotten through after him before Kiernan managed to slam the lid shut. Other Cygnans were coming through, leaving the outside hatch open, but Kiernan barricaded it before too much air whooshed through. He turned to find Fiaccone hanging on to slippery thing that was twisting and squirming in his embrace. Kiernan stabbed it with a spading fork. It writhed on the three tines, oozing an orange ichor, and expired. Its friends were rattling the inside lid of the lock. Against Dmitri’s anguished protests, Kiernan and Fiaccone opened the lid and, aided by the outward explosion of air, tossed the body outside and slammed the lid shut again, leaving a Cygnan finger inside.

There had been no further attempts by the Cygnans to get through the lock. Dmitri had had to be content with the severed finger. He and Louise Phelps were dissecting it now in the observatory.

“There’s something going on up on the balcony,” Maggie said.

Boyle was conferring with Hsieh. After a moment he came to the rail and rapped for attention. The bridge became silent. Everybody looked up, waiting.

“The Cygnans are through into the farm,” Boyle said without preamble. “The instruments show vacuum there.”

There was a confusion of voices. Kiernan, just behind Maggie in the jostling crowd, said, “The wingbeans! The algae! Everything! If only the captain had let me work down there for another half-hour I, could’ve saved more…”

Boyle rapped for attention again. “You might as well know the worst,” he said. “The air plant’s gone. We’re living on reserves now.”

Maggie looked up at the ventilators. The little ribbons on the grilles had stopped fluttering. Somewhere in the crowd a woman became hysterical.

“Somebody get the people out of the observatory,” Boyle went on. “We’ll have to make a last stand here. Seal off all the exits. Gifford, break out some emergency patches and stickum and get them ready.”

“Captain!” a voice boomed from the floor. One of Grogan’s men. “We’ve got seven suits. Let me and some of the boys get out there now. We can do it without losing too much air. We’ll go through the door fast, and Gifford can slap a patch on after us. We can hold ’em off as long as our air lasts.”

Boyle conferred in whispers with Hsieh. He turned back to the rail, and said: “It’s no good. You wouldn’t have a chance. You saw what happened to Jameson and Chief Grogan and Comrade Yeh. We’ll use the suits in here.”

“Captain,” the man said, standing his ground. “Seven suits aren’t going to go very far with seventy people.”

“Seven people will have a chance to stay alive a little longer,” Boyle said firmly. “We’re going to draw straws. Only crewpersons are eligible.”

Beth Oliver stood up, straight and beautiful. “Captain,” she said in a clear voice. “Once upon a time, ‘crewpersons’ meant people of both sexes. Well, I think I’m speaking for the rest of the ‘crewpersons’ when I say we won’t have anything to do with that sexist nonsense. The men will have an equal chance with us.”

A female murmur of agreement came from the crowd. Sue Jarowski yelled, “Damn right!”

Boyle held up his hands for quiet. “All right,” he said. “I’m proud of you all. The men will be in the drawing. But of course any man who wins a suit will be free to decline it and throw his chance into the pot again.”