Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

“ Bye dzwe na-yang! ” Yeh suddenly bellowed. “Don’t touch that!”

The feathery humanoid snatched its hand away from the control board, its teddy-bear face looking somehow hurt. It rewarded Yeh with a bad smell, something like rotten eggs, and pranced off to join its friend over at one of the scattered monitor screens on the floor.

“Mischievous little devils, aren’t they,” said Kay.

Jameson watched the rosy-furred creatures fiddle with the console. They had somehow managed to conjure up a star chart. Now one of them was making peeping field-mouse noises, rolling the display, while the other one danced around in front of the view window, pointing at constellations.

“These two aren’t the simple hunters they seemed to be, any more than we still are,” Jameson said. “They come from a technologically advanced civilization. They were trying to show Mike something about how the Cygnan broomstick worked until he threw them out of the engine room. I think that before we get back home they’ll be helping us man this ship.”

The pink bipeds had been an invaluable help with the Cygnan prisoner, keeping it tranquilized and getting it settled in a cage—a cage, Jameson reflected, that was probably less comfortable than the one he’d been confined in aboard the Cygnan vessel. The Cygnan was in Kiernan’s care now. It would have a lot of hamsters for company if Kiernan could get a few of the frozen ova in his files to start dividing. The humanoids had painstakingly sniffed every food and biological sample that Kiernan had shown them to try to improvise a diet that would keep the Cygnan alive until they got back to Earth. One of the things it could eat, surprisingly, was turkey, so it was going to get everybody’s portion of frozen Christmas dinner—if everybody lived that long. The humanoids themselves had rejected all terrestrial animal protein, and were putting together a combination of spun vegetable protein that evidently added up to the right balance of amino acids. With the superb analytical laboratories in their noses, they were in no danger of starving.

The Cygnan prisoner, the humanoids had given Jameson to understand, was not just some run-of-the-mill technician, but was an important person they had taken some pains to select. They seemed desperately to want to keep it alive.

The humanoid looking at the stars suddenly bounced into the air and tumbled weightlessly toward Jameson like a giant ball of pink milkweed. Its fluffy tail whipped around the guardrail to anchor it, and it plucked at Jameson’s sleeve, making urgent piping sounds. When it finally had Jameson’s attention, it struck itself on its little chest and flung a slender arm toward the constellation Cygnus.

“What in the world,” Kay said.

“He’s telling us where his home is,” Jameson said.

“Of course. It would have to be somewhere in the volume of space between here and Cygnus, along the Cygnans’ line of flight. But which star? It might not even be visible to the naked eye.”

“It’s not Deneb or Albireo. They’re too far away from the line of sight toward Cyg X-l, and we know the Cygnans came in more or less under its X-ray umbrella. Wait a minute! I think it’s trying to tell me that it’s 61 Cygni! But if that’s so, then—”

Jameson didn’t get a chance to finish. Yeh had risen from his seat so abruptly that he had to grasp an armrest to keep from floating off.

“ K’an, k’an! ” he said excitedly. “Look! It happens!”

In a moment the three of them were crowding the observation rail, looking out into the dark. An awesome event was taking place out there.

Against the burning stars, Jupiter moved!

Jameson could only gape. The scale of what he was witnessing was almost beyond human grasp.

Slowly, ponderously, the colossal bulk of the planet stirred.

It sloshed.

Across its seething face, a great sluggish tidal wave of thickened hydrogen brimmed over hundreds of miles of atmosphere and lapped in an advancing wall that would have tumbled Earth like a cork.

It stretched.

It no longer was the oblate sphere that man had known since he started looking at it through telescopes. The thing spinning around its waist had given it a flying-saucer shape, a hatbrim of raging hydrogen fighting to pour itself into the circling maw of a gnat.

The gnat had strained and swallowed an elephant. By now, zipping around the captive giant at very nearly the speed of light, the robot probe had converted enough of the stolen hydrogen into Einsteinian mass to tug at the remainder of that tremendous corpse.

Just how much of Jupiter was left? To Jameson, it looked no smaller than before. Perhaps it had lost a few thousand miles of diameter, perhaps not. As its outer layers were stripped away, the rest of that compressed hydrogen, relieved of pressure, would tend to boil and swell. And even with half its bulk gone, Jupiter would still be the most massive object in the solar system other than the Sun itself.

“It won’t be there!” Kay said suddenly. “I just realized that from now on when we look up in the sky at night to find Jupiter, it won’t be there!”

Jameson looked around and was amazed to see tears running down her cheeks. “Sorry,” Kay said. “I’m just tired.”

“It’ll be our turn someday, Kay,” he said. “When we’ve used up everything else, we’ll start using up the planets.”

With trembling hands he swung one, of the stubby ship’s telescopes around in its gimbals and turned on the magnetic lens. The computer-controlled fields flexed transparent plastic, shaped a pool of mercury into a reflecting curve. A picture stirred itself into being on the photoplastic plate behind the eyepiece, held steady by the electronic image compensator.

A Cygnan ship stretched toward him like a claw. It had stopped rotating. The three long spars, with their buckets of life at the ends, spread motionless from the tip of the notched beam of the drive section. As Jameson watched, the buckets swiveled in their wishbone cradles and snapped into place, reversed. He tried to imagine what was happening inside those worldlets. Had the lakes with their queer bright sailboats been drained? Were the animals hushed in their cages, waiting for gravity to resume?

The spars folded inward, swinging through their fifteen-mile arcs. Jameson could see how their triangular cross sections and the three-sided buckets fit into the grooved sides of the starship, just as Pierce had said they would.

He lifted his face from the eyepiece. Jupiter was picking up momentum, like a stone rolling downhill. It moved past the stars, dragging its moons with it.

And us too, if we don’t fire our engines soon, he thought.

He called the observatory and got Maybury. She’d finished her work in the engine room a couple of hours go.

“Are you recording?” he asked.

“Yes, Commander.”

“How fast are they accelerating?”

“One gravity, same as before.”

“Their trajectory. Is it going to be what we figured?”

In the screen, Maybury bit her lip. “It’s too early to tell, Commander.”

“Keep tracking them.” He switched off.

Kay had returned to her console, taking instrument readings with Yeh and feeding questions to the ship’s computer. She looked up as Jameson returned to his seat.

“We’re going to have a lot of borrowed momentum when we break loose from Jupiter,” she said. “We may reach Earth in less than four months.”

Jameson nodded. “The astronomers are going to have a merry time figuring out what all that gravitational displacement will do to the balance of the solar system.”

Kay hesitated. “Tod, will … will the Earth be safe?”

Jameson drew a long breath. “We’ll know for sure in just a couple of days. That’s all the time it will take for them to cross Earth’s orbit.”