The Jupiter Theft

“I don’t like committee music,” Jameson said good-naturedly. “At least the Chinese leave out the aleatory computer input.”

“He has a hyper ear for tone, though, I’ll give him that,” Berry went on imperturbably. “Did you know that behind that standard face lurks the gift of absolute pitch?”

“Is that true?” Maggie said.

Berry answered for him. “Of course, absolute pitch has nothing to do with musical talent. It’s just a freak ability.”

“Mike, on the other hand, has talent but a tin ear,” Jameson said. “Haven’t you noticed that the Moog’s out of tune? The last person who used it must have been fooling around with an enharmonic change between F sharp and G flat. I’ve been wincing for the last half-hour. You better clear the instructions and get it back to equal temperament.”

Unabashed, Berry went on playing.

“Can you really tell?” Maggie said.

Jameson’s attention was distracted by the sight of Sue Jarowski drifting over, with the new man, Gifford, in tow like a magnetized particle. Sue was wearing an off-the-bosom chlamys with what seemed to be nothing more than a spray-on on the revealed side. “Sure,” he said absently. “Won a lot of bets with it when I was a cadet—earned my pocket money that way. Used to bet I could tell a fellow what note his boot was squeaking on, or whether somebody had just belched in B flat or B natural.”

“Maggie’s an antiquarian too,” Berry said. “Collects old things.”

“Old physicists, you mean?” Jameson said automatically.

Maggie laughed. “Nothing too really hyper,” she said. “Twentieth-century plastic bottles, mostly.”

“Expensive hobby,” Jameson said.

Sue and Gifford pushed their way through the circle surrounding the Moog. Dmitri was hovering miserably nearby. Sue gave them all a big, earthy smile. Jameson wondered if he could pry Sue away from the party before Gifford did.

Berry lit up a joint and let the Moog do the work while his hands were busy. The dancers didn’t seem to notice. With Berry no longer hammering away, the computer reached into its memory and filled in the gap with a standard contrapuntal theme that would go with the raga. It sounded fine.

“Have a gasp,” Berry said, passing the joint to Gifford. “This is all organic—no synthetic THC added.”

“Thanks,” Gifford said, taking a drag and passing it to Sue. “Too bad about Roy, but his hard luck’s my ticket to Jupiter.”

“Glad to have you aboard,” Jameson said.

“Oh, here’s our other new man,” Sue said. “Hi.”

Jameson looked around and saw Klein standing on the fringes of the group, a plastic-lidded mug in his hand, his eyes roving over the dancers across the way. He turned around and nodded—reluctantly, it seemed to Jameson.

“Hey, you were on Mars,” Gifford said. “Do you know Raul Peterson? Stocky guy. Seismologist assigned to Tharsis.”

“I was at Syrtis Major,” Klein explained. “Excuse me.”

He threaded his way through the crowd and walked in his heavy boots over to the circular bar that skirted the center of the lounge. The two barwomen were both busy, so Klein reached across to help himself. As Jameson watched, Klein thumbed his mug open and started to pour himself a cup of coffee. Just as Jameson was thinking that it was a little odd for Klein to be drinking coffee this early in the party, there was a scream and a little flurry of confusion up at the bar. Klein had managed to spill hot coffee over Beth Oliver, and himself, too. The coffee had streamed right past the rim of the mug and splashed them both. Klein hadn’t allowed for the sidewise curving effect, of the Coriolis force when he poured. It seemed an odd lapse for someone who was supposed to be used to space.

Klein, his sallow face turning livid, was apologizing to Beth, and the United German barmaid was hurrying over with a damp cloth to mop up Beth’s kaleidogown. Jameson craned his neck to see above the heads of the crowd, but then Sue, her voice raised against the din, was saying something to him, and he forgot about Klein.

By the time the intruder from Cygnus crossed the orbit of Neptune, its mass had shrunk to approximately that of the planet Earth. It could be picked up visually now by the 500-inch Sagan reflector on the Moon and the smaller mirror at L-5. With computer-enhancement of the images, its surface features—if you could call them that—could be seen quite plainly.

The Cygnus Object, as the freepie media called it now that its existence no longer could be kept a secret, turned out indeed to be an Earth-size plant, its surface masked by clouds of boiling hydrogen. It even had a moon—a seared, rocky body a couple of thousand miles in diameter—and it also had an inexplicable wobble, as if it were rotating about a common center of gravity with some massive object, one that the telescopes could not detect.

It was going to intersect the plane of the solar system at a shallow angle—about seventeen degrees from the ecliptic—and its speed was now low enough, at some fourteen miles per second, to assure that it would be captured by the Sun.