Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

“Watch it!” Ruiz cried as he pulled himself up into the chamber, and Jameson whirled to see one of Klein’s little glittering bugs scurry across the floor. He pounced and scooped it up, and with one smooth unbroken motion flung it back down the metal chasm they’d climbed from.

The two humanoids had disappeared. Jameson looked around, trying to locate them among the tall domelike shapes. He stepped round one of the hives and came face to three-eyed, long-snouted face with a Cygnan who seemed to be as startled as he was.

Jameson made a dive for it. At the back of his mind was the thought that if he could grab hold of a leg and manage to keep himself from getting drilled through by that rasping tongue until the others rushed up and helped him pin the alien down, he could tie it up with some of the rope he carried, just as he’d tied Augie.

“Kill it!” Maggie shouted behind him.

That gave him a jolt, but the advice was academic. The Cygnan reared up like an ocean wave and oozed backward along itself until it was running away, upside down on its queerly articulated legs. It was already a dozen feet away and rotating on its axis to put itself right-side up, without missing a beat, before Jameson could react. Ruiz threw his spear, which clattered harmlessly off one of the metal hives.

Jameson pounded after it futilely. He watched helplessly as it skidded around a dome and streaked for a crack in the grotto wall.

“Let’s get out of here!” Ruiz said, gasping.

The Cygnan rounded another dome, its flexible head raised like the trunk of a charging elephant. Jameson changed course, knowing he could never head it off.

He circled around, a mouse lost amid an acre of overturned bowls. He had lost track of the Cygnan. Ruiz, his spear retrieved, was circling in the opposite direction. Dmitri and Maggie were doing their best to flank him. But the Cygnan didn’t emerge anywhere.

“Here!” he heard Ruiz gasp.

He ran in fifteen-foot leaps toward Ruiz’s voice, Dmitri bringing up the rear. When he saw Ruiz, spear braced, fixed on something behind a dome, he approached from the opposite side. Maggie was coming up behind Ruiz, a kitchen knife in her hand.

“Look,” Ruiz said.

The Cygnan was stretched out on its back, writhing voluptuously like a puppy on a deliciously scratchy rug. The two humanoids squatted peaceably on their furry haunches beside it, looking like great big jolly pink nursery spiders.

There was an overpowering musty odor hanging like a miasma over the scene, too powerful to be coming from the one Cygnan. It was overlaid by a pungent, sour smell that tugged at Jameson’s memory until he realized that it reminded him of the scent in the zookeepers’ quarters the time Tetrachord had behaved so sluggishly.

“They’ve got the critter mesmerized,” Dmitri observed.

“Help me tie it up,” Jameson said.

He trussed the Cygnan’s legs together with the nylon line, in two groups of three limbs each. He’d found that one of the middle legs stretched naturally to join the front limbs, while the other middle leg wanted to fold rearward. The Cygnan offered no resistance. It was alive and moving, but uncoordinated. The fan-shaped irises of its eyes had contracted to slits, despite the dimness, and the three eyestalks were limp.

“Now we know why the pink beasties developed the ability to mimic odors,” Dmitri said. “Their ancestors used to hypnotize their prey.”

“What was their prey, Dmitri?” Ruiz said. “The ancestors of the Cygnans?”

“No, I don’t think they could have evolved on the same planet.”

“How … how could they do a thing like that with smells? ” Maggie asked, motioning toward the hogtied Cygnan, whose whole body was pulsating, lengthening and contracting like an accordion.

Dmitri shrugged. “How does the Pesis wasp mesmerize a tarantula, get the tarantula to stand still while the wasp digs its grave, cooperate while the wasp walks under its fangs, paralyzes it, and lays an egg on its abdomen? I don’t know. Maybe these pink teddy bears release super-pheromones, thousands of times more powerful than the natural variety, the way synthetic analogs of morphine like etorphine are thousands of times more powerful than morphine itself. Maybe the synthetic pheromones initiate powerful endocrine reactions that cause exaggerated versions of normal Cygnan syndromes—pleasure, fear, torpor, docility, autointoxication, anything! ”

“In a creature that evolved on a different planet?” Jameson said.

Dmitri shrugged again. “The humanoids seem to be virtuoso scent-producers. And they’ve been around Cygnans a long time. No wonder they were kept behind glass.”

Jameson wound nylon cord around the Cygnan’s snout to keep it from sawing away at its bonds when it recovered from its trance. The two humanoids watched him with huge intelligent eyes.

“They ought to find it in a day or two,” he said. “By that time we’ll have made it, or we’ll have been too late.”

“Do you really think leaving that individual alive is going to make a difference in what the Cygnans think about human beings?” Ruiz asked wearily.

“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “Probably not.”

He picked up his duffle and got to his feet. The humanoids seemed reluctant to follow suit. They kept trying to drift back to the helpless Cygnan.

“Tod,” Maggie said. “Do you think…?”

“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “And I don’t want to know.”

“They didn’t take any food with them.”

Jameson gestured violently for the humanoids to get away from the Cygnan. Their spicy aroma was irresistible. They smelled like a bakery. He was suffused by a feeling of tenderness and warmth toward the little creatures.

“Stop that!” he barked.

“Tod,” Maggie said hesitantly. “I have the weirdest feeling in my breasts, as if they were full…”

Jameson advanced on the humanoids, making threatening gestures. They cowered and backed away, jabbering unhappily. The bakery smell diminished. After a longing, saucer-eyed look at the trussed Cygnan, they scampered off, leading the way to an exit.

“Cute little fellers,” Ruiz said.

They crawled across the sky, looking down at the queer landscape below with its little manicured parks and gardens; and straight-edged lakes with their bright Wind-sock sailboats, and the crowded city streets squeezed between latticed towers.

“How high up are we?” Maggie said.

“About five miles,” Jameson told her. “But the top layer that we’re looking at now is probably only a quarter mile down.”

“I’d hate to fall just the same,” she said. “Even at this low gravity.”

The sky had been poorly maintained over the centuries. What looked like unbroken luminescence from below was a tangled spaghetti of stained and broken transparent plumbing, supported by a girder-like framework. A glowing liquid gurgled through the pipes, pulsing with brilliant white light. Suspended beneath the girders were sheets of a frosty, translucent material that diffused light. Some of the panels were missing or torn, and it was through these gaps that Jameson was able to get his bird’s-eye view of the landscape as he crawled along the supports. He wasn’t worried about being seen from below; distance made them specks, and the specks were masked by the glare.

“Bioluminescence,” Dmitri said. “Some kind of microscopic fluorescent plants being pumped through these pipes. The Cygnans have had a long time to select for brightness—maybe even do a little genetic engineering. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doubles as their air plant.”

Jameson managed to restrain him from breaking a pipe to collect a sample. The last thing they needed was a fiery rain calling attention to them. The already-broken sections of pipe were dark; probably a computer turned off little pumping stations by the hundreds when pipes lost pressure.