The Jupiter Theft

“Two years,” Shevchenko said bitterly. “Two years’ planning down the drain.” He was a small, untidy man with crumbs of food showing in the tangled oval around his mouth that he called a beard. He was wearing academic denims, faded and rumple-treated, with simulated patches badly dyed at the knees and elbows. Shevchenko’s parents had been part of the enormous wave of immigrants from a devastated Soviet Union in the 2010s, and, like so many second-generation Russians, he had an aggressive drive to succeed that sometimes irritated his more-secure colleagues.

Administrator Richards glanced nervously at the Washington bunch. Van Eyck was still keeping them busy. Shevchenko was definitely not playing the game, airing his gripes in their presence.

“We’ll tack as many of your experiments as we can onto the manned mission next month, Alex,” he said soothingly. “We ought to be able to salvage most of your program.”

“Salvage?” Shevchenko complained, spraying saliva with the sibilant. “And can you promise me that those cloudtop features in the south tropical zone will still be there six months from now? Eh, eh, tell me that!”

“There she goes!” one of the flight-dynamics engineers called from the front row of consoles.

With relief, Richards turned away from Shevchenko and looked up at the big central screen along with the rest of them. Van Eyck’s smooth, low-key spiel trailed off as the Washington people strained eagerly to see.

The vast orb of Jupiter was moving right and off screen, as the robot probe, half a billion miles away, swung on its axis. For a moment there was a stunning closeup view of Io in crescent phase, surrounded by the spooky yellow glow of sodium emission. Then the picture jumped and blurred as the probe’s thrusters fired a long burst, kicking it into a higher orbit.

“That does it,” Shevchenko said, looking close to tears. “No more fuel reserve now. There-goes our cloudtop orbit.” There was garlic on his breath. Richards moved away from him.

“You can see the captured planet and its moon now,” Van Eyck was telling the VIP’s. “We think the moon will take up an independent orbit around Jupiter. The planet won’t be able to hold on to it now.”

He turned and spoke into a microphone. “How does our probe look, fellows?” he said.

The answer crackled through a loudspeaker in the booth as one of the flight controllers answered. “Right on target, Dr. Van Eyck.”

One of the VIP’s frowned importantly. It was MacPhail the senator from Newfoundland, a big, portly man in a polyester kilt. Though his constituency was small, he was a power on the budget committee. “I couldn’t help overhearing what Dr. Richards said to Dr. Shevchenko. I know you people are anxious to get a look at this planet from outside the solar system, but isn’t it a fact that you’re altering the course of your probe with no… definite object? And in the meantime you’ve scratched a very expensive program that was planned with a view toward the efficient expenditure of tax dollars.”

Richards interposed himself hastily. “I appreciate your concern, Senator,” he said. “’But part of the original purpose of this unmanned mission was to insure the safety of the Jupiter crew.”

“I still think—”

“Come off it, Angus,” said one of the other VIP’s. It was Rumford of the Public Safety Commission, bearish and bleary-eyed after his Earth-Moon flight. “You know perfectly well that this is still a security matter. Don’t you remember the flap when we first discovered the thing and we came to your committee for funds to move troops and Reliability units into the major population centers? That thing may still have some surprises in it, and we’re not about to risk any public unrest at this point.”

MacPhail flushed. Van Eyck stepped smoothly into the situation.

“Let’s have some magnification, have a closer look,” he said.

He pressed a button, and the disk of the planet from Cygnus began to swell on the screen. The shadow of its moon had taken a small bite out of its edge.

“How did you do that?” someone asked. “I thought you needed an hour and a half for the radio waves to make a round trip.”

“Oh, the picture information is already here in the computer’s accumulator vat—it’s just like blowing up a high-resolution photo.”

Three-quarters of an hour before, the camera must have been in the middle of one of its back-and-forth pans to the Cygnus Object’s moon. Still zooming in, the camera was focusing on the space between the two planetary objects. Sunlight glinted off something in the void.

“Good Lord!” Richards said. “What are those?”

The camera was still zooming in, allowing a tantalizing glimpse of something unnaturally angular.

Then there was a dazzle of ruby light, and the screen went blank.

“Bedford!” Van Eyck roared through his microphone. “Get that picture back on!”