The Jupiter Theft

The planet and its blistered moon had stopped changing direction. They were hurtling along a new path, but one that obeyed Newton’s laws of motion.

Maybury stood on tiptoe and peered past Mackie’s stooped shoulders to the viewplate. Mackie had plugged in the Sagan reflector, with Kerry’s assent, and the view of the planet’s disk was magnificent.

The face of the planet lay bare: a smooth rocky desert shorn of its hydrogen clouds except for a few wispy remnants.

It was dead now. That was the inescapable impression you got, looking at it. It had roused itself briefly and mysteriously, and now it was an inert ball of cooling rock.

But that last burst of effort had done its work.

Maybury tiptoed away and asked the computer for an entirely unauthorized projection of the planet’s new trajectory. The answer made her gasp; she’d have to show it to Dr. Mackie as soon as she could tear him away from the viewplate.

There was no doubt about it.

The planet from Cygnus was going to go into orbit around Jupiter.

Ruiz fed a newdollar into the slot and fidgeted impatiently until a holofax dropped into the tray. The news machine in the beachfront refreshment pavilion was the only one he’d been able to find in the whole government rest camp, except for the one in the lobby, and he didn’t feel like walking across a quarter mile of hot sand to get there. Workers who were lucky enough to rate a free vacation on the Nevada coast weren’t much interested in news of the outside world.

For Ruiz it was different. He chafed at the long absence from his work. It was exasperating not to know what was going on with the Cygnus Object—except for the sanitized snippets of information released to the general public. It was exasperating—and humiliating—not to be able to get through to his former colleagues on the Moon; there was always some “difficulty.” Oh, they were sugar-coating his enforced sabbatical, with make-work assignments and the lecture obligations that they’d discovered in the small print of his contract, and privileged holidays like this one. Until the government figured out what to do with him.

He was an embarrassment. The government didn’t like to admit mistakes. Ruiz was a leftover mistake.

The mistake had begun when they put him under house arrest almost as soon as he stepped off the Moon shuttle. The end of the world was politically sensitive information, it seemed. They just didn’t trust him not to blab.

Now that it appeared that the world wasn’t going to end after all, they didn’t trust him to cooperate with the cover-up, which was in full swing now. It wouldn’t do at all to let a powderkeg population of a billion know that their government had suppressed doomsday. Ruiz had too crusty a reputation. It was safer to have a poor frightened hack like Horace Mackie in charge of the crucial flow of information at Farside.

Ruiz squinted at the garish yellow ball of the Sun, shedding its fierce light on the herds of naked people facing seaward. It warmed his chill bones, baking out the old pains. He supposed he was lucky to be enjoying the luxury of Govpark instead of shivering in an isolation cell somewhere. Probably he could thank Harris for that; the man had brains enough to realize that Ruiz, despite his origins, couldn’t possibly have gotten where he was in GovCorp unless he had some discretion.

Ruiz sighed. Why couldn’t they understand that he had no desire at all to stir up problems? All he wanted was to get back to the Moon, where he could be useful.

A pair of young Govgirls strolled by, big and healthy and tanned, wearing only the briefest of fronties, white teeth flashing, repellesprayed hair still shaking out beads of salt water from their swim. They gave him a cursory glance, then walked on.

Ruiz didn’t belong here, with his seamed face and knobby joints, his hollow chest and baggy jockstrap. He stood there in the hot, insistent sun, squinting at the fax sheet, looking for all the world like some undernourished Privie who’d gotten in by mistake.

He was blocking the entrance to an eats booth, but he didn’t notice the annoyed glances he was getting from people who had to squeeze past him. He was studying the sheet in his hands with growing rage.

The holofax showed a scarred rocky globe with a headline in three-dimensional block letters hanging in front of it. The headline read:

New Moon for Jupiter?

He tilted the fax first to one side, then to the other, to see the part of the planetary surface the letters were obscuring. There were no surprises: just scorched rock like the rest of it. He snorted in disgust and read the brief story floating in white type in the illusory space beneath the sphere. There were no surprises there, either. It was substantially what he’d overheard a few minutes earlier when some bather had walked by with portable holovid blaring: