The Jupiter Theft

Jameson’s accumulated irritation broke through and aimed itself at Li. A little bit of shamefaced loyalty to his own side was mixed in with it. “He doesn’t have to be likable,” he said shortly. “Just so long as he does his job.”

They walked to the nearest lift shaft in silence. They had to wait about five minutes. The wraparound door revolved to open, and Grogan and an assistant staggered out, hugging bulky scooter reaction tanks. Grogan grimaced at Jameson as he stepped past him. “Don’t empty your pissbottle while you’re out there, Commander,” he said. “That Klein joker’ll make you go back and count all the crystals.”

Jameson laughed and stepped inside. Li crowded in with him. The door slid shut with a hiss, and the circular platform began to rise. The lift shaft ran through one of the three equidistant spokes that connected the ship’s main ring to the hub and the thousand-foot spear that ran through it. It was three hundred feet to the hub—too far to walk and impossible to leap when the ship was under spin. Jameson felt his weight dropping fast as they ascended. The Coriolis force pushed at him, jamming him against the mesh wall of the cage. Then the cage stopped, the invisible fist released him, and he was so close to weightlessness that it made no difference.

Four of Grogan’s men were in the spinlock antechamber, playing a dispirited game of cards on a magnetic board that kept getting away from them. They were in skivvies and stickyslippers, their spacesuits bobbing from hooks on the wall behind them. They didn’t bother to look up as Jameson and Li unfastened the hatch to the spinlock and dove inside.

Jameson and Li helped each other with their helmets and gloves, then vacced the lock. The spinlock was an unpleasant place to be in for any length of time; though your weight was negligible this close to the center of the ship, the gradient between head and feet was quite noticeable. It made people feel odd, disoriented, a little nauseated. Through the little safety window Jameson could see the metal skin of the ship’s central shaft reeling past at two revolutions per minute. The wheel’s hub slid around that axle on frictionless bearings—the perfect ball bearings that had been cast under weightless conditions in one of the space factories swarming around Eurostation. Of course, total frictionlessness was impossible to achieve, but this came close enough; the minute amount of spin that was imparted to the thousand-foot axis of the ship was easily corrected once or twice a day by a modest computer-regulated flywheel.

Li released the brake. The anti-spin jets fired automatically, as soon as the computer verified that neither of the other two spinlocks had open outer doors. The unpleasant feeling disappeared as body fluids redistributed themselves. Jameson’s sinuses cleared. Through the little window he could see the motion of the inner hull slow down and stop. The spinlock fastened itself to the long shaft of the inner hull. Now the 600-foot wheel of the spin section was sliding around the spinlock’s outer ring of frictionless bearings in their Teflon track.

The two spacesuited figures pulled themselves aft along the webbing and cordage that restrained cargo. No-g wasn’t good for much of anything except stowage and the super-growth section of the hydroponics system. The boron fusion/fission engine was all the way aft, off limits behind thick bulkheads. Jameson could see the dull red glow of the warning lights in the murky distance—though this airless tunnel ought to be deterrent enough.

Jameson and Li emerged through a hatch roughly halfway down the tunnel. There was a dazzle of stars around them. Jameson pulled himself out on the hull and perched on a railing, enjoying the view. This was the only position where you could get some impression of the whole colossal work of engineering that was the ship. He was straddling a gigantic oar, with the bulbous knob of the command center at its forward end and the flaring skirt of the drive section at the rear. A small forest of antennae sprouted from the mushroom bulge of the bridge, and there was a cluster of spherical fuel tanks aft for the hydrogen-fusion part of the boron cycle. Otherwise the huge shaft was unbroken, except for the protective housings that held the Callisto lander and the automated probes.

But ahead of him, no more than fifty feet from where he sat, was the rotating bushing that contained the spinlocks and to which the three main spokes of the wheel were attached. He looked up and saw the great revolving circle he would be living in for the next year, as it swept steadily past the stars twice every minute. Here and there on the facing rim he saw little squares of light: illuminated ports. The ship would be ablaze with them when it began its outward journey.

“Come on, buddy,” Li’s voice said in his ear. “We’ve got a lot to do.”