The Jupiter Plague

There was no traffic on the bridge that they could see and it appeared to float in midair, vanishing out of sight into the mist in both directions: they drifted under it with muted fans. Ahead lay the wilderness of mudbanks, waterways, swamps and waving cattails that made up the heart of Jamaica Bay. They floated over it, ignoring the marked channels as the hover craft crossed water, reed clumps and mud flats with equal facility. Then the bay was behind them and just ahead was the straight line of the filled land and the lights marking the end of the Kennedy Airport runway. With engines throttled back they drifted up the bank.

“The alarms begin right there at the lights, sir,” Haber’s voice whispered in General Burke’s earphone.

“Put down then, we’ll go the rest of the way on foot.” They dropped like silent shadows and the men climbed out and unloaded the equipment. “Sergeant, you’ve had the most experience with the cheaters; we’ll hold here while you put them in.”

Sergeant Bennett shouldered the heavy equipment pack and crawled forward in the mud, the detector rod held out before him. They could see nothing of his advance and Sam held his impatience under control and tried to keep his thoughts off Nita back there in the hospital dying by degrees. He wished that he had put in the cheaters, though he knew that they must have changed in the ten years since he had last handled one. Trying to picture what Bennett was doing would keep his mind off that hospital bed. The swinging prod cutting a regular arc over the ground, then the twitch of the needle on the glowing dial. Knocking out the infrared detectors wasn’t difficult, as long as you didn’t bang them with the insulation hood when you were dropping it over them at the end of the long rod. The ultraviolet alarms were the tricky ones, first making an accurate reading of the output without cutting the beam in order to adjust the cheater lamp. Then the smooth, continuous motion they had practiced so much, moving the tiny UV generator in front of the pickup so that there was no change in the level of received radiation. Once it was in position you could break the original beam to the photocell because the cheater light was shining into it from a few inches away. Nita, Nita. The minutes stretched out and the air cleared, stars broke through above them. At least there was no moon.

A silent figure loomed up before them and Sam’s hand automatically found the butt of his pistol. It was Sergeant Bennett.

“All in position, sir, a pushover, dead easy. If you’ll all walk behind me single file I’ll take you through the gap.”

They went carefully, one behind the other, treading as lightly as they could with the heavy packs and the ladder. The infrared detectors were ignorant of their passage since their body heat was shielded from the pickups by the insulating covers, and though they cut through the invisible beam of ultraviolet light there was no alarm since the cheater fed its own steady UV source guarding photocell.

“That’s the last of them,” Haber said. “There’s nothing now between us and the guards around the ship.”

“No cover either,” General Burke said, “and the rain has stopped. We’ll stay in the grass here and parallel the runway. Keep low and keep quiet.”

With its attendant rows of lights the wide runway stretched away from them, terminating suddenly in the dark bulk of the spaceship that sprawled across it, blocking it. A few lights on the ground near the ship marked the location of the guarded, barbed-wire fence that ringed it, but there were black gaps in between the lights. The general led them toward the nearest patch of darkness, midway between two of the lights, and they crawled the last hundred yards on their stomachs. They dropped into the mud, motionless, when a slowly plodding policeman appeared in the nearest illuminated circle. He cradled a recoilless.75 submachine gun in the crook of his arm. No one moved as the guard squelched by them, a dimly moving form against the night sky. Only when he had passed through the next circle of light did General Burke issue his whispered instructions.

“Bennett — knock out the detectors and as soon as you do we can cut through the wire. Sam and Haber move toward that light and get ready to take out any cops that come this way. Yasumura, lie still and shut up. Let’s go.”