The Jupiter Theft

“Look, Po Fu-yung’s techs and my techs have got to talk to one another, don’t they? We’ve got a good working relationship. When something comes up, we get together in one of the nonrestricted areas off the cryo department. Now Caffrey’s goon won’t let Quentin out of the computer room to work with Po’s man and the Struggle Brigade goon is throwing his weight around too. Could you come down and smooth things over before it develops into anything official?”

Jameson sighed and got to his feet. “Let’s go.”

He slipped a pair of stickysocks over his bare feet and followed Mike into the corridor. Maggie looked sulky and turned her face to the wall as he closed the door behind him.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “But I thought we’d better stop it before it got out of hand. I didn’t think we’d have this kind of a problem so soon after launch.”

Jameson nodded. “And we’ve still got half a billion miles to go.”

Chapter 11

They were a quarter of a billion miles beyond the orbit of Mars when the message came.

Jameson was standing on the bridge, admiring the stunning view around him through the vast comforting bulge of clear plastic that kept space outside. Jupiter hung against the night, a yellow lantern that outshone the crystal stars. It was by far the brightest light in the sky, except for the chill shrunken golfball of the Sun behind them, but it still showed no disk to the naked eye.

That fact alone brought home the immensity of the distances they were traveling. In the past three months they had journeyed farther and faster than any manned spacecraft before them had ever gone, but Jupiter still seemed as far away as when they had started.

Jameson indulged himself with a final long look at the brilliant dot of light, then turned reluctantly toward the command chair on the balcony above, where he could hear a buzzer sounding. He was tempted to jump for it, but he had to set an example. Some half dozen personnel of both nations were scattered among the paired consoles and the mostly empty seats rimming the circular deck. Most crewpersons preferred to serve their watches in the spin section’s duplicate bridge, connected to this one by electronic ganglia, but some jobs required direct observation here in the ship’s spearhead, and of course there were always one or two free-fall freaks. So Jameson dutifully clipped his jump line to the proper nylon cord in the spider web that crisscrossed the hemispherical chamber.

He soared upward to the catwalk, his trajectory perfectly parallel to the line. It was a point of pride with him never to get a corrective yank from the safety when crew were watching. He caught the rail and swung himself easily over.

He flipped a toggle. The buzzing stopped and his screen lit up. At the horseshoe console opposite his, Yeh Fei nodded formally at him and flipped his own switch. He’d been waiting. The big, shambling Chinese second officer looked like a gorilla hacked out of a block of wood with a dull chisel, but he had a fine sense of the niceties.

Sue Jarowski and little narrow-faced Chang-ho stared out at him from a split screen. He could see a tangle of communications equipment around them. “Commander,” Sue said, “there’s a laser message coming in.”

Beside her Jameson could see Chang-ho’s thick purple lips move, saying the same thing in Chinese to Yeh Fei. This would be a joint message, in clear, for both commands, then.

“Okay,” he said. “Put it on our screens.”

“Commander,” Sue said. “I think you’d better get the astronomers. They won’t want to wait for a replay. Something’s happening on Jupiter.”

Jameson could feel the hair on the nape of his neck prickle. “All right, he said. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ruiz.”

Chang-ho’s small face glared ferociously at him from the other half of the screen. “You must to notify Dr. Chu, you must to notify Dr. Chu!” he said stridently.

“Yi-ding,” Jameson said soothingly. “Of course.”

Dr. Ruiz arrived in a bathrobe. It was not an ideal garment for free fall. Maybury trailed behind him, still buttoning a man’s shirt that was too large for her. Dr. Chu arrived moments later. He’d managed to get himself dressed in shorts, a blue tunic with his astronomer’s rating on the collar, and a cotton cap with a Mao badge pinned to it. He was a frail, fussy man with two large chipmunk teeth peeping through a mossy mustache. When he saw Maybury, he frowned.

“Sit down, everyone,” Jameson said. “We’ll crank it back to the beginning for you.”

Data in computer script was flowing across the big display screen that Jameson and Yeh Fei had plugged in. Ruiz craned toward it with hawklike intensity until it stopped. Then he noticed that his robe had ridden up on his fleshless shanks and absent-mindedly pushed down at it. He sat down next to Dr. Chu, and Maybury handed him a lightpad that had been slaved via FM to the astronomy computer.

“They’re, still transmitting,” Jameson said. “We’ll play it at twice real time till it catches up.” He pressed the button that would alert Sue Jarowski.