The Jupiter Theft

The helmets came apart. Gifford still was steadying himself with a grip on his friend’s arm. Then, with a swift, savage motion, he plunged the screwdriver into the belly of the man’s suit. Jameson couldn’t tell immediately if it had penetrated. Gifford reversed his grip and smashed the weighted handle of the screwdriver into the Chinese faceplate. He kept hammering until the visor went frosty. The blue suit had become floppy. Gifford held the screwdriver up, letting Jameson see it, then tossed it away.

Jameson nodded.

Gifford swam over to another white suit, which had to be Fiaccone, and the two of them went over to get Smitty. Jameson could tell that it was Smitty because he could see a glint of golden hair inside the helmet; it had come undone, filling the bowl. They all put their helmets together for a minute, conferring. Then they waved their hands outward toward Jameson in the universal gesture.

Other white suits were drifting toward Jameson on short bursts of thruster: the prisoners; nobody among the remaining ten Chinese was bothering to keep any of them under guard. One of the Americans—an undersized suit that had to contain Kiernan—had gotten hold of some kind of floating tool, and he was shaking it threateningly in the direction of the Chinese. It must have massed considerable because Kiernan was bobbing up and down at the end of the handle almost as much as the tool was.

The clustered Chinese had turned to watch something. Jameson looked in the same direction.

A pencil of light was drawn against the frosty void—the broomstick coming back. The American who had chased it was bringing it back. Jameson could see the white doll-like figure hunched over the shaft. The bubble with its curled-up Cygnan and fetal humanoids was still snubbed in place.

The figure, swung the shaft under, climbing for a moment on a pillar of fire, then did a complete backflip, rising on arms and legs like a jockey. The searing beam of light traced a large circle around the scattered swarm of people, then died out as most of the rider s forward velocity was canceled.

It had been an expert braking maneuver.

It also had been an object lesson.

The Chinese went into a quick conference by radio. Jameson could tell they were talking by the amount of nodding and gesturing that went on.

The broomstick rider drifted in Jameson’s direction, using suit jets to damp out the remaining momentum. As he came close, Jameson saw that it was Mike Berry, with a big grin on his face.

The Chinese finished their discussion. They made ostentatious palms-outward gestures and floated over to join the Americans. What was left of the Jupiter expedition was united again.

A last blue-clad figure, awkward in a spacesuit that was too small a fit, had been left behind. That would be Maggie in her borrowed suit. After a moment, she followed. She had nowhere else to go.

Chapter 30

“Where are the six-legs?” Li asked, sweating inside his helmet. He’d removed his faceplate and mittens so that he could work faster, even though the Callisto landing module wasn’t fully pressurized yet. “They must know for long time now that we here in ship.”

“I don’t know,” Jameson replied tightly. “I just hope that they don’t come after us for at least a couple of hours. By then we ought to be far enough away and moving fast enough so they’ll figure it isn’t worth the bother of chasing us.”

He continued working with his screwdriver on the guts of the dismantled control panel. He’d torn the plastic bag off his head as soon as he, safely could. The Cygnan spray-on spacesuit already was, starting to flake away in white scales that looked like dead skin—evidently a consequence of being exposed to atmosphere after being in vacuum. When his job in the lander was finished, somebody was going to have to come out with a spare spacesuit to ferry him back to the ship.

Maybury was wedged uncomfortably against him, crouching in front of the luminous squiggles of the lander’s computer console. The cockpit wasn’t really big enough for three people. She had been plotting escape orbits through a radio link to the Jupiter ship’s data banks, but now she was looking through a telescope out the bowl-shaped port.

“Commander, you’d better have a look,” she said.

He took the telescope from her. Jupiter overflowed the port, a billowing globe that now had a distinct rim around it. The sticklike Cygnan ships were black hieroglyphs against its face. They were arranged in a five-pointed figure rotating around a common center of gravity.

Looking at those forked shapes, it was hard to believe they contained worlds.

Jameson lifted the eyepiece to his face. He saw that Maybury had programmed the telescope’s pea brain to damp outmost of the light on Jupiter’s chaotic wavelengths. The tortured planet was a dim ghost among the stars. The five ships were no longer silhouettes. They took on proper three-dimensional shapes, chisel-edged constructions illumined by the amplified light of the distant Sun.