Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

There was a groan from the women. Throughout the crowd, men were looking stubborn, nodding agreement with the captain. Klein stepped forward, waxy-faced. “Captain,” he began in a strained voice.

A horrifying whistling sound came from the observation wall. Everybody fell silent and stared at the bubble. A woman screamed.

The Cygnans had cleared a twelve-foot circle at the center of the port. Their packed bodies darkened the rest of the Lexiglass. At the fringes of the circle a dozen of the creatures were busy with glowing cutting tools. Plastic was melting and bubbling along the entire twelve-foot circumference.

There was a sudden rush toward the exits. But before anybody had gone more than a few steps, the heavy circle of plastic tumbled with nightmare slowness to the deck and a ring of long-snouted Cygnan faces was around the edges of the opening, peering in at the humans.

Maggie sucked in a last desperate lungful of air before it was gone, and waited to die.

There was a grating sound at the door. Jameson scrambled to his feet. He backed off to give clearance, ready for anything.

The door opened in an unexpected fashion. It was a five-foot recessed circle with a knob set low at one side. He had imagined it might swing in or out, or—in view of the recess—slide open. Instead it rolled like a cartwheel on a hidden track, the knob revolving with it until it caught against the frame, leaving an opening the shape of a circle with a bite out of it.

An alien stepped in, standing upright and holding a shotgun-sized tubular object in its middle pair of limbs. It was dressed in a crinkly transparent envelope, evidently to protect it against Earthly microorganisms. The tubular thing was obviously an energy weapon of some sort. It had a trumpet bell at the business end with a stamenlike structure projecting from the focus. Instead of a stock or pistol grip, the weapon was equipped with a bulb adapted to the Cygnan grip.

Jameson raised his hands and took a step backward to reassure the creature. Perhaps the Cygnan didn’t understand the human gesture. It squeezed the bulb, and Jameson was blind.

He was worse than blind. He was deaf, dumb, and paralyzed. He couldn’t tell where his limbs were or what his body was doing. Kaleidoscopic flashes exploded through his visual pathways. There was a red—red?—roaring in his ears. His nerves jangled with an excruciating discomfort that made him want to scream, to be free of his body, as if he were experiencing some hideously magnified episode of drug withdrawal.

Worst of all, he couldn’t think! There was a trapped knot of consciousness that knew he couldn’t think, and that was what made it a nightmare. His thoughts circled round and round uselessly, unable to track.

The sensation lasted only a moment. Or an eternity. Then, mercifully, he was himself again. He found himself sprawled on the floor, clammy with sweat in his spacesuit. He was still a little disoriented. He had lost control of his bladder during that brief hell, but the suit’s plumbing had saved him from disgrace.

His cell was full of Cygnans—half a dozen of them, all dressed in the same clear protective suits. Some of them were standing erect on their hind legs, tails hanging straight down. Some were on four legs, their torsos upright so that they were shaped like little low-slung centaurs. They were jabbering at one another in a cacophony of quarter-tone scales and queer atonal chords, sounding like an orchestra of bagpipes warming up. Their actions all seemed pointless to Jameson, but then, he thought, perhaps a laboratory rat thought that the conversation of the lab workers was pointless.

The Cygnan holding the neural weapon was still there. Jameson kept very still. A Cygnan scuttled up to him, fixed him with three quivering eyes, then scuttled back. There was more bagpipe conversation.

Encouraged, he sat up, moving very slowly and keeping his hands down.

Did the Cygnans react nervously? It was hard to tell. They always seemed nervous. There was a lot of atonal chittering and much shuffling and twitching, but his nervous system remained unscrambled. He lifted his eyes to the helmet dials. How could he make them understand?

“Air,” he mouthed. “Dammit, don’t you understand? I’ve only got a couple of minutes worth of air left.”

Raising his gloved hands to his helmet, he made raking-in gestures with spread fingers. He let them see his open mouth sucking in air.

No discernible reaction came from his audience. Even on Earth, body language was different between Arabs and Japanese, Scandinavians and Mediterraneans. Maybe his pantomimes couldn’t work with creatures that had six limbs, radial symmetry, brains in their torsos, and, for all he knew, no lungs.

He tried again. This time he pointed to his air tanks and traced his hoses to their gaskets in his helmet.

They seemed bored with him. A couple of them skidded around on four legs and left the cell. The ones who were left lost interest in him entirely. Two of them had started holding hands. Another was scratching itself with a hind leg. Another had taken an object that looked like a bright yellow plastic asterisk out of a pouch and was showing it to a companion.

Jameson struggled recklessly to his feet. The trumpet bell of the weapon flicked in his direction. He ignored it. “Your air!” he roared. “Can I breathe your air?”

It was doubtful that they even understood his anguished cry as speech. Their own communication, Jameson had guessed, depended on the pitch of speech components rather than anything resembling consonants and vowels—and those fragments of reedy tone were too quick and transitory for even his gifted ear to follow.

His lungs heaved, and he realized with despair that he was now rebreathing the stale air in his helmet. He staggered forward, arms outspread. The Cygnans scampered out of his way. The energy weapon tracked him but didn’t fire.

The Cygnans were gone, no longer in his path. Instead, they were behind him. He felt a myriad of little three-fingered hands running all over his spacesuit, hugging his legs, pinioning his arms. He was being held immobile. He struggled, but his lungs were burning and his senses were growing dim.

Then he realized that they were removing his suit.

A transparent membrane, insubstantial as a soap bubble, was stretched across the twelve-foot circle the Cygnans had opened in the hull. That’s why she still could breathe.

Maggie gawked at it. A lot of gawking was going on around her. Why didn’t the air pressure inside the ship bend that membrane outward? Why didn’t it burst?

“Look!” Maybury said, grabbing her arm.

Not only was the membrane not bulging outward, it was bulging inward! Stunned, the seventy people in the control room watched it stretch, ballooning itself until it filled the center of the chamber.

Nobody went near it. Nobody dared touch it. It looked too fragile. It looked as if it might burst at any moment.

A movement over by the row of empty spacesuits draped over a console apron caught Maggie’s eye. It was Klein. He was lifting up the sleeve of one of the suits.

“Leave that alone!” Boyle’s voice thundered.

“I was just—” Klein began.

“ Gwan-cha, gwan-cha! ” a Chinese voice screamed.

Five or six Cygnans had dropped lightly to the floor. They stood, quivering, inside the ship, looking alertly through the bubble at the humans. They all looked upward at the same instant and started backing away from the center of their bubble. One of them was against the transparent skin itself, poking it outward.

The temptation was too much for one of the Struggle Brigade bullies. He snatched up a steel bar and swung it two-handed at the Cygnan’s head.