The Jupiter Theft

“Ya i!” Chu gasped. He was half out of his chair, his hands gripping the arms. Ruiz was motionless, staring at the screen with fierce concentration.

They watched in frozen silence for long minutes. Then they saw what was causing it.

“There’s our ‘meteorological phenomenon,’ ” Ruiz snorted. “Kerry’s ‘cloudtop disturbance.’ ”

It was sweeping around the curve of the planet, moving at what seemed a crawling pace, but actually traveling at what had to be more than a million miles per hour. At this rate it would circle Jupiter’s 89,000-mile diameter in something like fifteen minutes.

It was an unimaginably huge vortex of churning clouds. As it progressed along the equator it deformed the colored bands of clouds into an elongated eye-shape, with itself at the center. And now they could see that it was gathering a skein of those bloody streamers from the Red Spot around itself, dragging them halfway around the planet.

“Maybury!” Ruiz said sharply. “Is Pierce recording?”

She looked startled. “Yes, Dr. Ruiz,” she said. “I signaled him before we left.”

Jameson briefly considered calling Boyle, but decided not to wake the skipper up. All this had happened hours ago anyway. Boyle and Hsieh could see it in replay.

The tremendous whirling funnel was overtaking the Red Spot. It distorted the shape of the oval feature, making it bulge northward. Twisting ribbons of red stretched in a bloodshot spindle between the two loci.

A great gob of matter, the size of a continent, detached itself from the bulging Spot and was sucked into the whirlpool.

“God help us,” Ruiz breathed.

The sudden infusion of red nitriles briefly colored the gigantic maelstrom. Jameson tried to grasp the scale of the colossal events he was witnessing, and found he couldn’t. Those whipping shapes winding themselves like torn confetti around that spinning vortex were bigger than worlds, and they were covering vast distances in fractions of a second. It was a violence that would have shorn Earth in the blink of an eye and left it a polished ball, glowing with the heat of friction. Now, as Jameson watched, the blurred spirals of cloud were turning pink, showing that ulcerous pit more clearly against the face of the planet.

Something was growing out of it.

“They’re doing it to Jupiter, too,” Ruiz whispered.

Jameson had no time to reflect on what Ruiz meant. The spectacle he was seeing held all his attention. The raging vortex had marched from horizon to horizon, and he had an oblique view of it as it approached the edge of the planet.

He could make it out now against the engulfing darkness: a tenuous pillar of cloud extending thousands of miles into space in a coiling loop. The roots of that spectral rope were stained pink with colored hydrogen. It became more transparent, insubstantial, as it ascended its twisting path, narrowing all the while until it ended as a gossamer thread somewhere inside the orbit of Jupiter. V.

A thread whose tip was a glowing blue spark.

The bomb crews began their grim rehearsals the next day. Hollis drove his men hard—too hard in an environment where fatigue could be fatal. Boyle had spoken to him about it, and received an answer in advanced officialese that amounted to “mind your own business.”

It was amazing, Jameson thought, how well Major Hollis got along with his counterpart, People’s Deputy Commander Yao Hu-fang, when his relations with his fellow Americans were so distant and grudging. Hollis acted as if he were in enemy territory whenever he ventured out of his spun-foam cocoon on the inner rim of the wheel to see Boyle or confer with Liz Becque about his men’s rations. He was never seen after hours in the lounge. Evidently he drank alone with his executive, a watchful, tight-lipped man named Toscano.

Standing in the observation lounge on the inner side of the rim, Jameson was getting a good view of the latest rehearsal through the overhead bubble.

The long spear of the ship’s drive section, a hundred meters overhead, was aswarm with bulky spacesuited figures, scrambling around a cluster of dart-shaped missiles splayed out in their launching racks at an angle to the hull. The weapons, finned and needle-nosed, obviously had been designed for atmospheric launch, and their presence on this mission showed how hasty the preparations had been.

“So they’re playing with their toys, are they?” a voice said behind him.

Jameson turned. Ruiz was there, looking tired. He was dressed in shorts and sandals and a short-sleeved shirt that for once seemed to be pressed.

“They’re not exactly toys,” Jameson said. “There’s a rumor that they’ve got a gigaton bomb with them. It’s never been tested. Couldn’t be, on Earth. They think it would make a fifty-mile crater, maybe even break through the Earth’s crust.”

“Lunatics!” Ruiz said. “What kind of a crater do they expect to make in space? Or Jupiter, for that matter. No solid surface.”

“The bombs are for the Cygnans, aren’t they?” Jameson asked carefully.