The Jupiter Theft

“It’ll be you,” Mike said in a positive tone. “You and our pink feathered friends. With the three of you working on that Cygnan engineer we’ve got in the hamster cages, we ought to get enough clues to have a star drive inside of twenty years. Anyway, if I’m going to be project supervisor I won’t take anybody but you.”

“I accept,” Jameson said, laughing.

Mike leaped to his feet, spilling more beer. “It’ll be the stars, boy!” he declaimed dramatically. “Just think of it—the stars in our lifetime!”

Heads turned in their direction. Mike lifted his glass and toasted the saloon in general.

The humanoid who had been imitating Yeh came tumbling over in a series of cartwheels. Mike scratched it behind the ears. Everybody was doing that now. It was hard to keep your hands off them.

“S-t-t-t-ars!” it chirruped in its songbird voice. “S-t-t-ars, s-t-t-ars, t-t-t-we!” The two of them already had picked up a few English and Chinese words, beginning with “no” and “stop” and “don’t touch,” and you could understand them if you listened hard.

“That’s right,” Mike said, patting the silky crest. “We’ll take you home first. Then we’ll visit Alpha Centauri.”

“Hold on there!” Jameson said. “Don’t go off halfcocked. Alpha Centauri’s only four light-years away, and 61 Cygni’s eleven. If we get a starship out of this, the bureaucrats who finance it are going to want instant gratification.”

People were starting to drift over, drinks in hand. Ears had perked up at the sound of what had become the most popular subject aboard the ship.

“That’s right,” Quentin agreed earnestly. “Baby steps first. That’s been the whole history of the space program, ever since Stafford and Cernan and Young circled the moon before they let Armstrong and Aldrin land.”

“Look,” Mike said. “It’s a five-year trip to Alpha Centauri. Two of that is boosting and decelerating up to light-speed, during which you knock off another light-year, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“And it’s a twelve-year trip to 61 Cygni. Same two years to boost and brake. In between you travel at, say, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.”

“What about it?”

Mike leaned back, looking smug. “So at that speed, the time dilation effect is a hundred to one, right? Subjective time for the crew is maybe two years and two weeks to Alpha Centauri compared to two years and six weeks to 61 Cygni.” He spread his hands. “So what’s the big deal?”

“You’re missing the point,” Jameson said, egging him on. “Back home in the budget department, they’re waiting ten years to show results from an Alpha Centauri round trip versus twenty-four years for a return from 61 Cygni.”

“You’re missing the point,” Mike said, grinning hugely. “61 Cygni’s a sure thing! Nobody can criticize the maiden voyage. We know there’s life there! And intelligent life at that!” He ruffled the humanoid’s silky fur affectionately. “And we’ve got two friends to introduce us.”

Quentin was still trying. “Yeah, but listen, Mike—”

Mike sat up, an astonished expression on his face. “Hey, it just came to me! All distances are the same! Give or take a couple of months, anyway. We can reach any star within a hundred light-years in about three years of travel. The hell with them back home! If you want to spend five years traveling, you can have any star within three hundred light-years. Hell, make that ten years—no, twelve years…”

He stopped and looked round at the circle of faces.

Kay Thorwald said it for him. “We own all the stars in a thousand light-years. That’s what we traded Jupiter for.”

The celebration had grown suddenly quiet. Into the silence, Jameson said: “What’s the price? Do we dismantle Saturn next?”

“Hell no!” Mike said briskly. “The Cygnans spent six million years traveling with a first-generation technology. We’ll have a second-generation technology. We’ll find a better way.”

Epilogue

“There’s our snowball,” Jameson said. “Let’s see if we can nudge it into the cup.”

Through the forward viewscreen the comet was an enormous sphere of frozen slush, fifty miles in diameter, according to the instruments. Out here in the cometary halo, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, it had no tail. According to Maybury’s calculations, it grew its tail only once every two million years or so, when its elliptical orbit took it close enough to the Sun to vaporize its sherbetlike surface.

“Right on target, Skipper,” Li said from his console in the circular control room. His English had improved a lot in ten years.

It had taken only ten years to build the first starship. Mike had been right. The principle behind the Cygnans’ energized-photon drive was simple. The human race would have had it in another century anyway; the technical and theoretical groundwork already had been laid.

Of course, the humans had made a lot of improvements.

Sue lifted her head from the communications console to admire the view outside. The ten years had fine-etched her face, making it even more striking. Jameson was glad their daughter looked like her, not him.