Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

This time Jameson whistled his response in his imitation Cygnan.

“Where?”

They turned abruptly toward him, as if surprised that their pet was talking again.

“This animal is from the planet you call Jupiter,” Tetrachord offered with careful enunciation.

Jameson stared at the undulating disk of flesh. So there was life in Jupiter’s planetwide ocean after all. The speculations had been correct. Under that crushing atmosphere, in a sea that was twelve thousand miles deep before it turned to something else, there was plenty of room for life to develop. A sea of hydrogen laced with organic molecules, with a volume at least 300,000 times the volume of all Earth’s oceans! For an instant Jameson’s imagination ran riot. He saw vast herds of dirigiblelike grazers browsing at the rich nitrile pastures that welled up to become the Great Red Spot and the lesser spots, while these leviathans of the hydrogen deeps stalked them with hundred-foot bone spears.

Then he felt a dawning horror. The Cygnans must have scooped up their Jovian specimens before their Einsteinian siphon had churned Jupiter’s atmosphere into a homogenized maelstrom. They’d known there was intelligent life there. Yet they’d gone on to make all life on Jupiter extinct.

The thought was all the more horrifying because there was no malice involved. Just selfishness. Thoughtlessness. Lack of empathy. In that respect they were no different from humans, in the mad century that had forever wiped out the humpbacks and the great blue whales.

They prodded him to move again. He took a last backward look at the Jovians before the massive creatures flapped off into the depths of their tank. He felt a pang of overwhelming sympathy for them. They were, after all, his brothers under the Sun.

They seemed to be in some sort of Hall of Bipeds now. Rows of cages along a curving corridor apparently formed the narrow ends of habitats that widened out in a fan beyond. The creatures that Jameson glimpsed as they led him down the corridor were obviously animals, not intelligent beings. He saw a little green bearded creature like a misshapen troll gravely pacing its cage with its knuckles dragging on the ground, and a hulking spiny-skinned thing with a little bullet head growing directly out of a barrel chest. Then there was a pair of delightful feathery humanoids, elfin pink creatures who stared at him with great sad eyes as he passed.

The three Cygnans gave a wide berth to the feathery humanoids’ cage. Augie skittered nervously past it, skipping ahead momentarily and twisting a long neck to look back. There was a wire-mesh arrangement in front of the bars to keep anyone from getting too close, with its own locked gate. Jameson couldn’t see the reason for the extreme security precautions. The humanoids looked harmless enough. They were delicate, attenuated creatures who certainly would be no match for a Cygnan.

They reached the end of the hall, where he saw another locked cage. Beyond, Jameson could see a stark, garishly lit enclosure with wide bare terraces sloping down to a shallow pool filled with brownish water. Figures moved among the branched metal uprights set around the water’s edge. They were obviously human.

Jameson strained toward the bars, trying to see. Tetrachord held him back by the tether while Triad unlocked the cage door with one of her cylindrical keys.

Figures were bounding up the terraces toward him, whooping and yelling. Jameson recognized Mike Berry, gaunt, long-haired, and bearded, wearing only a pair of tattered denim shorts. And one of the Chinese crewmen, a young probe tech.

The three Cygnans jerked their neural weapons upward, fanning them back and forth. The humans skidded to a stop, staying a respectful distance from the bars. New arrivals bumped into them from behind and stayed where they were. The noise died down. They stood silently watching.

Tetrachord unfastened the tether, leaving a foot-long loop of cord dangling from Jameson’s nostrils. Augie backed away, keeping the weapon trained on him. The Cygnans gave him a shove, and he stumbled into the cage, the kitten cradled in his arms.

Mike Berry stepped forward, his face grim. “Welcome to the zoo.”

“This won’t hurt,” Janet Lemieux said. “Sit still.”

With a deft yank she pulled the severed cord out of Jameson’s nose. There was about a foot of it, crusted with dried blood.

Jameson swallowed experimentally. The back of his throat still felt sore, but it was an immense relief to have the cord out.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said. He put his arm back around Maggie and pulled her close to him on the step. She was painfully thin, even for her. He could feel her ribs through the threadbare cotton shirt she wore. All of the eighty-odd crewmen and crewpersons gathered around him on the terraced slope had lost weight. Jameson had lost weight too, but he was painfully conscious of the fact that he was in better condition than the rest of them.

They were scattered in a loose semicircle, waiting expectantly, sitting on the edges of the terraces or leaning against the iron trees, a bunch of ragged scarecrows in scraps of clothing. The Chinese remained a little apart, sticking together.

Jameson’s eyes fell on Ruiz, looking like a bearded death’s head, a collection of raw bones in faded shorts. Like the rest of the men, he’d given his shirt to the women. Maybury was standing unobtrusively near him, her pretty little face marred by dark circles beneath the eyes. Further back, Omar Tuttle was looking Jameson’s way, unsmiling, a starved bear with his arm around a gaunt and straggly-haired Liz Becque. Liz was pregnant. Jameson caught Sue Jarowski’s eye. She gave him a wan smile. Mike Berry stepped up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.

The surroundings were bleak under the glaring yellow light: grounds of a depressing gray substance like hardened oatmeal, the stagnant brown pool, a dusty sky that hadn’t been washed for centuries. Across the pool some dispirited greenery was struggling for existence; Kiernan and Wang seemed to have coaxed some wingbean vines to grow in a shallow depression filled with coarse earth.

Captain Boyle pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He was still wearing his cap, but otherwise he’d stripped to shorts. His bare torso was as red as a boiled lobster, but a lot of the meat was gone, and his once-florid face was blotchy. He looked a decade older.

He looked Jameson up and down. “Where’ve you been, Tod?” he said mildly.

“I’ve been talking to Cygnans,” Jameson said.

There was a stirring at the fringes of the Chinese group. Tu Jue-chen stepped forward, her waxen face angry. “Impossible,” she snapped. “No one can talk to them. They tried to communicate with Comrade Yeh. They kept him in a cell for days before putting him here with the rest of us. Isn’t that so, Comrade?”

Yeh shuffled uncomfortably. “It’s true. They tried to make me copy their whistles. I thought I had a word or two at first, but they meant something different every time.”

Jameson nodded at the big man. He was surprised that Yeh had survived. When he’d seen him borne off by a horde of Cygnans, he was sure they’d killed him, as they had Grogan.

“That’s because you were whistling in different keys, Comrade,” he said. “It depends on absolute pitch.”

Boyle’s square head came up alertly. “You found a way to talk to them?”

“That’s right, Captain,” Jameson said.

“You are a traitor, admit it!” Tu Jue-chen said in a fury. “Otherwise they would not have pampered you so! Now they’ve sent you here to spy on us!”

Boyle’s face hardened as he spoke to the Struggle Group leader. “You can’t have it both ways, Comrade Tu,” he said. “If he doesn’t know how to talk to Cygnans, then he can’t be a spy for them.” He turned back to Jameson. “You better tell us about it,” he said.