Donald Moffitt: The Jupiter Theft

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 scrambled 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.