Donald Moffitt: The Jupiter Theft

Sue Jarowski’s voice sounded in his helmet again. “Mission Control says you and Li can call it a day, Tod. They’re scratching the training exercise until Thursday.”

Jameson conjured up an image of Sue’s face while she talked: dark hair, strong almost-pretty features with wide cheekbones, snub nose, generous mouth. She was crisp and alert, and a damn fine communications officer.

“I think I’ll stick around here, Sue, until they finish the repair. I can borrow a bottle of air from the repair crew.”

Sue hesitated, then said: “Ray Caffrey wants to see you.”

“I’ll bet he does. Tell him I’ll check in with him later.”

Caffrey was the security rep. On the official mission roster he was listed as “Safety Engineer.”

“I understand. I’ll tell Ray.”

Jameson turned back toward the repair rig. The two lobsters, bright orange against blackness, were maneuvering themselves into position, getting a helpful nudge or two from the men swarming around them. A repair lobster was nothing more than a simple cylinder with a plastic bubble for the head of its operator at one end. It got its name from the two big clawlike waldos at the forward end and the twin rows of smaller specialized limbs down its ventral surface.

One of the lobsters anchored itself on the Callisto lander’s hull and grasped the embedded landing foot. It tugged gently, trying to do as little further damage as possible. The leg came free. There was a little frosty explosion of particles of trapped air. A couple of spacesuited men took charge of the damaged leg and ferried it back to the repair frame. One was Chinese, one American. Jameson grinned without humor. Even the garbage detail had to be binational.

There was a frying sound in his helmet, and Li’s voice said: “I be going back to Eurostation now. See you Thursday.”

Li’s stocky figure was already mounting his scooter. He gave it a couple of squirts, aiming it toward the big wheel in the distance.

“You’re not going to watch the repair?” Jameson said in careful Standard Mandarin.

“No. What for?”

Li hunched over the steering bar, and the scooter dwindled against the stars. Jameson watched it until it was too small to see. Li obviously had been recalled to explain why he hadn’t managed to retrieve the spy camera first. Perhaps if those security clowns had had the sense to confide in Li, he would have.

Jameson sighed. It was a sticky business. As co-commanders of the Callisto lander, he and Li would depend on each other utterly when they set down on the frozen surface of the Jovian moon. They had to trust each other without reservation. But Li had his loyalties, just as Jameson did. Jameson shrugged mentally. You had to work within the system.

He gave a start as a pair of mittened paws grasped his upper arms and a helmet clinked against his. He found himself staring into the raw red features of the U.S. repair-crew foreman, a likable, plain-spoken man named Grogan. Grogan was being smart enough not to use his suit radio.

“Beg pardon, sir,” Grogan said, “but what’s going on? We saw the landing leg spring loose through the telescope, but that’s all.”

Jameson pressed his helmet against the other man’s. “Tell you all about it later. For now, just make sure that everything you replace in the locking mechanism is all right. Particularly the bolts.”

Grogan’s corned-beef face split in a grin. “Got you, sir. I’ll check out the replacement parts myself.”

He gave a push and launched himself toward the sleeve of the landing gear. The Chinese foreman was fishing around in the tangled mess and passing broken pieces to a crewman member with a sack. Grogan stationed himself there, the lines of his body looking belligerent even through the bloat of the spacesuit. Jameson relaxed.

The other lobster brought over a replacement leg, an articulated metal lattice five meters long, with the flat mesh pad of the landing foot at one end. Swimming behind it was a four-man crew with laser cutting torches.

Jameson waited until they were finished, then hitched a ride back on the repair frame. Clinging to a crossbar, he watched Eurostation grow in his vision. The great wheel was surrounded by a random collection of orbital constructions and the parked shuttles of half a dozen nations hanging like gnats above its hub. That glittering spider web suspended a couple of kilometers beyond the rim was their radiotelescope, leased to all corners, and the pool of quicksilver trapped in a cage was one of the solar collectors. The spinning cross with the tin cans at the ends of the arms was one of the earlier stations, still in use as an isolation lab.

But it was Eurostation itself, rotating ponderously against the stars, that dominated that floating junkyard. It had been growing for fifty years. The inner rim, only six hundred feet in diameter, had been the original station back in the early decades of the century. Now it was a low-g hospital, among other things. It was connected by six vast spokes to the outer rim, more than a half mile across. Future expansion would have to be done laterally, turning the wheel gradually into a cylinder, unless they wanted to slow the rotation. An exception was the blister the Chinese had attached to the rim—a spartan environment where they could practice their state religion uncontaminated by Eurostation’s amenities.

The hub of the station reared in front of him like a metal cliff. Jameson detached himself from the repair rig and kicked himself toward it. The rig continued on toward the floating corral where the construction equipment was parked.

Jameson’s boots hit the wall of metal and stuck. He found a convenient handhold and looked around for a single-lock. They weren’t going to open one of the yawning docking adapters for one man.

The surface he was clinging to—a flat disk a hundred meters in diameter, painted with bright targets—didn’t share the station’s rotation. Otherwise he’d have found himself sliding inexorably toward the edge and out into space. Actually it was the base of a shallow, truncated cone that floated free within the station’s hub—a little space station in its own right. The station personnel—depending on their origin—called it the Kupplung or the Embrayage or the Clutch.

He crawled toward one of the open manholes, electrostatically sticky, and levered himself inside. He closed the cover behind him and pressed the big red button next to the inner door. Air hissed into the lock. After an interval, the inner door spun open, and a bored attendant with a German-Swiss accent helped him off with his suit. Jameson headed immediately for the men’s showers and peeled off his wilted liner in a cubicle smelling of sweat, steel, and rubber. After six hours in a spacesuit, it was a relief to zip himself into a showerbag set for needle spray. He emerged, refreshed, in a clean singlet and shorts, and joined the crowd of off-shift construction workers waiting in the outer corridor.

If they had been standing instead of drifting in random orientations along the walls, Jameson would have stood half a head above most of them. He was tall for a spaceman, but he made up for it by being greyhound-lean. Actually, he was well within the mass limits. Jameson had the frank eyes and square-jawed good looks that delighted the Space Resources Agency’s pressecs and accredited newsies. He looked the part, hanging casually from a holdbar with one big-knuckled, competent-looking hand and keeping a firm grip on an SRA blue nylon zipbag with the other.

A chime sounded. The drifting men began to settle toward the curving wall as imperceptibly it became a floor. The clutch was matching its spin to that of the station. There was a gentle lurch, and clutch and station mated with a resounding clang that shuddered through the chamber. The row of doors underfoot slid open and the waiting men dropped through. Jameson hurried through with the crowd. He repressed a shiver as he floated past the rubber-gasketed doorframe. The shearing action from a mismatched spin could slice a man neatly in half—but of course it couldn’t happen; the doors wouldn’t open unless the safety locks were firmly engaged.