The Jupiter Theft

Jameson wasn’t surprised. Maggie spoke with an unmistakable Yankee twang. People were more tolerant these days, but when Jameson had been growing up there still had been a lingering bitterness over all the ugliness of the New England Secession, and the loss of so many occupation troops during the pacification. Of course, it had been tough on the New Englanders and eastern Canadians too; particularly the use of nukes. It couldn’t have been easy for Maggie, getting this far in the space program. Since reunification, New Englanders and Canadian annexees were theoretically entitled to full citizenship with all its rights, but there was always that coded notation in their passbooks. There were far fewer restrictions on the children and grandchildren of the Russian refugees of the 2010’s.

Sue changed the subject diplomatically. “Look!” she said. “I’ve never seen Jupiter so bright!”

Jameson looked down into the stars. The splendid gem that was Jupiter had just come into view in the glassed, rail-encircled well set into the carpeted floor of the lounge. It drifted slowly past as the great wheel of the space station turned majestically on its axis. Of all the points of light visible, it was the most brilliant.

The four of them watched it in silence until it disappeared almost beneath their feet. A minute later, the window was full of Earth, blue and dazzling against the threadbare fabric of the night. Beneath the swirling clouds he could make out the brownish outlines of the continents, the elephant wrinkles of mountain chains, the patches of lucent green at the poles, where the Arctic wastes had been planted in snow rice. It all seemed familiar and comforting and close.

“What do you suppose we’ll find when we get there?” Maggie said in a voice that was almost a whisper.

Jameson knew what she was feeling. It got to you every once in a while, that moment of strangeness when you caught a glimpse of that distant spark and realized it was a place. That you were actually going to go there across that enormous dark gulf, with a hundred members of your species, in a fragile hollow ring of drawn metal and spun plastic foam.

Maggie was looking directly at him. He saw her shiver.

“On Io,” Berry said, “sulfur and sodium. On Callisto, lots of pebbles. What else?”

“Why not life?” Sue said. “No, wait minute, listen! After all, Callisto’s got an atmosphere of sorts, and it’s far enough from Jupiter so that it doesn’t get the same dose of radiation as the other three Galilean satellites. Dmitri says that, given ammonia frost and evaporate salts, and the existence of molecular hydrogen…”

In a few moments the four of them were having the usual animated argument about life on the Jovian moons—life on Jupiter itself. It was the major after-hours pastime of the entire Jupiter crew, Americans and Chinese alike. Soon it would be settled once and for all.

“…I see a giant lipid, floating in a pool of methane,” Berry was saying, stroking his scraggly beard and peering into his beer as if it were a crystal ball. He had an exaggerated gypsy accent. “A very complex molecule, like chicken fat. No, no, it’s not a lipid after all! It’s a lipoprotein, in a cloud of sulfur! It’s saying ‘Earth-man beware…’ ”

Jameson stopped listening. He was staring into the bowl of stars at his feet. Earth was gone. Jupiter swung into view again among the wheeling stars. It was clear and steady-bright, and it was half a billion miles away.

Maggie said it for him. She caught his eye across the table and said, “It’s a long way down, isn’t it.”

Chapter 3

“Can’t you scientist fellows do something to stop it?” demanded the Undersecretary for the Department of Urban Safety. He was a large, beefy man in a conservative lace suit over a crimson body stocking.

“No,” Ruiz said bluntly.

Ass, he was thinking. But he kept his expression neutral as he looked around the horseshoe table at the assorted bureaucrats sitting there. There wasn’t a flicker of comprehension on any of those well-fed faces, except perhaps for Fred Van Eyck, deputy administrator for the Space Resources Agency.

The conference room was deep underground, buried beneath the National Intelligence Bureau’s reinforced-concrete antheap somewhere north of Washington. They had hustled him here as soon as he arrived on Earth. They had told him it was because the huge parabolic antennae on the roof of NIB headquarters offered a convenient—and secure—channel of communication with the Moon. But they hadn’t allowed him near a communications terminal since his arrival.

Ruiz was tired, and his legs ached from the unaccustomed gravity. His body clock hadn’t had time to adjust to terrestrial rhythms. His head was muzzy, and there was a bad taste in his mouth, and he felt seedy in the vending-machine disposasuit he’d been wearing for the last two days. They had promised him an audience with the President, but so far he’d spent most of his time talking to a parade of obvious gumshoes from the NIB and the Reliability Board.