The Jupiter Theft

“Not enough to notice,” Jameson said. “We’ll only be accelerating at about a hundredth of a g—nine point eight centimeters per second per second. But we’ll be spinning at two-thirds of a g at right angles to the direction of thrust. That’s a distortion factor of less than one to sixty-six. The floor will seem to tilt slightly, of course, but it’ll be almost imperceptible.” He slapped the corridor wall. “About enough of a tilt to start a marble rolling toward the aft bulkhead here, if you gave it a helpful push.”

“I got a good view of the ship through the porthole on the way over,” Maybury said hesitantly. “I didn’t think it would be so big. It was beautiful—like a giant toy top, with that long broomstick sticking through the center of the circle.”

“That’s a good way to think of it, except that the ‘broomstick’ doesn’t spin. It’s more of an axle than a shaft. What we’ve really got is a space station revolving round a rocket. It’s the only sensible design for very long trips. I wouldn’t like to be spinning round a short radius, as they do in those glorified barrels they send to Mars, or try to apply course corrections to two weights tied to each other by a long cord.”

“Commander,” Ruiz said abruptly, “I’d like to see Dr. Pierce first and get it over with.”

“All right,” Jameson said. “I thought you might want to put it off till you’d had a chance to catch your breath.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“I suppose,” Jameson said carefully, “he’s wondering why he’s being superseded as chief astronomer just a few days before the start of the expedition.”

“I suppose you all are,” Ruiz said dryly. “And why the powers that be have grafted a nuclear strike force onto what started out as a purely scientific mission.”

“They explained it to us at the briefing yesterday,” Jameson said in a neutral tone. “The nukes are just a precaution. Like giving an archeologist a pistol to protect himself against snakes. But those thirty-mile-long artifacts from Cygnus have been scrubbed by radiation for thousands—maybe millions—of years, so there aren’t going to be any snakes. Or so they say.”

“Except in this case the archeologist’s pistol has a mind of its own, eh? I don’t suppose your Captain Boyle likes having an officer on board who isn’t under his orders. To say nothing of the Chinese bomb crew.”

Jameson said nothing.

Ruiz sighed. “How do you feel about the bomb crews, Commander?”

“As long as they don’t interfere in the running of the ship or our assigned missions, it’s none of my concern.”

“Prudently spoken, Commander. But I’m going to interfere in your assignments, aren’t I?”

“That’s different.”

“Can you modify your Callisto lander for the Cygnus planet, Commander?” Ruiz asked.

“No. The gravitational field’s too powerful—about one Earth gravity, I’m told. We could get down, but we’d never get up again. We’ll have to study it from close orbit. But we can try a landing on its moon.”

“You can crash an automated probe or two on the planet’s surface, though, can’t you?”

“We can do better than that. We can soft-land some of the little rovers. We’ve got a few to spare. A planet from outside the solar system’s a hell of a lot more interesting than Ganymede or Europa.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Commander.”

Jameson permitted himself to show a little emotion.

“Hell, man, this is my chance! I never thought it would come in my lifetime!”

Ruiz looked pleased. “I suppose not. There’ll be Centauri probes with the new boron engine, but we’ll be waiting the better part of a thousand years to get any answers from them. Our Cygnus visitor’s been masked by radiation from Cygnus X-1 for more than eighty years that we know of. It has to be from a hundred light-years’ distance at the very least.”

“You were the astronomer who discovered it, weren’t you, Dr. Ruiz?”

“Maybury here was the first person to notice it,” Ruiz said. Maybury either lip and blushed. “But I was the nearest stuffed savant. That makes me the agreed-upon expert on the Cygnus object, and that’s why the authorities sent me along to complicate your lives. I’m sure your Dr. Pierce would have done a thoroughly competent job. Well, I’ll try not to interfere with him too much. He and his staff can carry out their Jupiter studies as planned. I have the greatest sympathy for him. It’s going to be a damned awkward situation.”

“Here we are,” Jameson said, stopping at a door marked astronomy. “The observation instruments are in the no-spin axle of the ship, of course. There’s an observatory near the bridge, but the readouts are down here, where the astronomy people can feel some weight on their feet.” He pushed the door open.