Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

“ Don’t! ” Boyle yelled, but he was too late. The bar connected with a sickening impact. The Cygnan had tried to skip out of the way, but hadn’t had enough warning, even with its speedy reflexes.

A gasp went up from the assembled crew, but the bubble held. The bar rested in a sagging indentation on the bubble. Slowly the indentation filled itself and the bar slid to the floor.

The injured Cygnan, incredibly, was still on its feet. It writhed in evident agony, its body twisting bonelessly like some fat worm that had been stepped on. Its head was orange pulp. One stubby eyestalk waved above the mess, blinking horribly. A couple of its friends passed it up to waiting sets of hands. The other Cygnans in the inverted bubble began darting their heads like angry geese at the nearest humans. You could see the cheese-grater mouths gaping and the tubular rasp of a tongue flicking in and out inside the inflated sheaths they wore over their heads. But they all stayed well away from the boundary of the bubble.

Now there was movement above, and the Cygnans were lowering a strange device on a stand into the ship. The Cygnans inside the bubble steadied the thing and set it in place. It looked like a squat brassy pyramid with three flaring horns sprouting from its apex. One of the Cygnans did something to it, and the apex started rotating. The horns rotated with it, waving up, and down like crazy semaphores.

The Cygnans jumped on one another’s shoulders and scrambled out of the bubble fast. The anchoring alien stretched and flowed, becoming a foot taller, and caught the dangling hand of a living chain. Then they whisked it out of the hole.

“Smash that thing!” Boyle yelled from the balcony. “See if you can get at it through the bubble!”

Half a dozen willing hands poked at the revolving device with bars through the resilient material, but they couldn’t reach it. The blister dimpled just so far, then resisted.

“I feel so strange,” Maybury said.

Maggie, for no reason, began to feel edgy. It was like hearing a fingernail scrape along a blackboard, except that there wasn’t any sound. Her teeth were on edge.

All across the bridge people were starting to behave strangely. Somebody staggered and fell. A woman with a contorted face was squeezing her head with both hands. Then a man, his mouth open, began clenching his fists in front of his chest and trembling violently.

Somebody stumbled against her, as if off balance. It was Dmitri, his boyish face shiny with sweat. “They couldn’t gas us,” he said between clenched teeth. “They don’t know enough about terrestrial biochemistry yet. But any kind of a nervous system can be interfered with by modulated electromagnetic fields. They must have used their gadget before on all kinds of life.”

Maggie’s vision was disappearing, as if her face were swelling up in the worse allergy attack she’d ever had. There was a ringing in her ears, drowning out Dmitri’s words. There was a dreadful spine-crawling sensation and the illusion of rapid flickering through her entire body. Then she was suspended in a senseless horror, while her mind scrabbled round and round, trying to get out.

She was not aware of it when a horde of aliens oozed somehow through the transparent membrane without breaking it and stuffed her and the other helpless humans into airtight sacks. When her senses returned, she was floating in a giant soap bubble beside a metal cliff that seemed to stretch on forever. She was part of a chain of bubbles rising through the dark of space while a flock of shiny demons swam alongside, prodding them with broomsticks.

Jameson’s ears popped. The air was thin, but rich in oxygen. It had an oily, industrial smell to it. But after what he’d been expecting, it was marvelous. He took deep, grateful breaths.

They had him pinned to the floor while they stripped off his pressure suit and skivvies. It was no good struggling. Too many of those three-fingered hands were holding him down, shifting their grips with blinding speed while they pulled off sleeves, undid fasteners, shucked him out of the rest of it. By the time he realized that an arm or leg was free, they’d peeled it down and imprisoned it again. In a few brief seconds he was naked and shivering with cold.

His belongings went into a sealed sack. He guessed that he was in biological quarantine. All of the Cygnans handling him were encased in transparent envelopes. He saw nothing resembling air filters; perhaps the entire envelope was permeable to gas molecules but not subviruses.

He tried to talk, but they ignored him, talking instead among themselves with all sorts of chirps and whistles and concertina humming. Once or twice, when his ear was fast enough to catch a fragment, he tried humming it back to them in perfect pitch, but the effort seemed to make no impression.

All at once they began probing him all over with rubbery fingers and little metal instruments that were cold on his bare skin. A three-fingered hand walked along his spine, tracing it. Another counted his ribs. Another probed elbows and kneecaps while they flexed his arms and legs. They forced his mouth open with a bellowslike instrument and shone a light into it. He gagged as a swab poked down his throat, but then it was over and they withdrew the bellows. The swab went into a little oval container.

Next came a tray of little pipettes with suction bulbs at one end. He struggled as they inserted these into every body orifice they could find, from nostrils to urethra. His struggles didn’t do him a bit of good. They got their samples and whisked them away, leaving him sneezing, itching, and smarting.

There was a tricky moment when one of the Cygnans tried to force a slim metal tube into his navel, evidently under the impression that it opened. Jameson howled in protest. He had visions of being skewered. But after a moment the Cygnan gave up and contented itself with a swab.

They took their tissue sample in direct, brutal fashion. One of the Cygnans pinched the flesh of Jameson’s thigh and sliced off a piece of meat as thick as a piece of bacon. Blood welled up and ran down his leg. The Cygnans seemed excited by this. There was a chorus of harmonica music, and they siphoned off several cc’s of blood with a pipette. While he lay pinioned and bleeding, a Cygnan sprayed the wound with something that burned like fire. Almost instantly the spray hardened into a rubbery, transparent skin that sealed the wound and stopped the bleeding. Jameson was thankful the Cygnan’s blade hadn’t severed the femoral artery.

After several more tests, including running something like a metal detector over the surface of his body, the Cygnans gathered up their paraphernalia and left. The circular door rolled in its groove and thudded shut.

They left him in his cell without food or water for what seemed to be about twenty-four hours. He spent most of that time huddled in a ball, trying to keep warm. The Cygnans seemed to like low temperatures.

When the door rolled open again, three plastic-wrapped Cygnans entered the cell. The guard with the neural scrambler was with them. Jameson tried to pantomime his need for food and water, but they roundly ignored him. Before he knew what was happening, one of the Cygnans stabbed him in the belly.

He yelped and leaped backward. There was a raw circle about an inch in diameter just below his navel, studded with bright jewels of blood from a dozen pinpricks. He caught a glimpse of the instrument the Cygnan had used, something like half a golf ball with short needles projecting from the flat side. He’d been given injections of some kind.

The Cygnans left. An hour later he was feverish and getting sicker. He spent the next day feeling miserable. For a couple of hours he was delirious. But he had a blanket now, a square of some soft synthetic textured like overlapping orange scales that he was able to wrap around himself for warmth. Eventually his warder brought him a bowl of flat, tepid water, which he lapped up eagerly, getting down on his hands and knees, not daring to lift it to his lips for fear of spilling some of the precious liquid. There were no sanitary facilities. He used the far corner of the cell, feeling humiliated. Nothing was ever done about cleaning it up.