The Jupiter Theft

“Yes, I’m getting to that,” Pierce said. “Let me see if I remember my geometry. At three miles to a side, an equilateral triangle would have an area of approximately four and a half square miles. Now, how many levels in one of those pods? Let’s be conservative and assume fifty-foot ceilings. Room for an ecology, with the equivalent of trees and so forth. That gives more than one hundred levels per mile of height…”

“One hundred and five,” Chu said pedantically. “And six tenths.”

“Yes … I mean, shih,” Pierce said, flustered. He floundered a moment and went on. “Now, I’m going to be conservative again and assume the same volumetrics as our own ship. That is to say, the Cygnans occupy only the lower three miles of their pods, and leave the top third for storage, machinery, space-intensive hydroponics, and so forth. That gives us three hundred—”

“Three hundred and sixteen point eight,” Dr. Chu said severely.

“—levels, each with an area of four and a half square miles. That works out to…” he floundered again.

“One thousand four hundred and twenty-five square miles per pod,” Maybury supplied. She looked straight at Chu. “And point six,” she added.

“Thank you, Shirl,” Pierce said gratefully. It was the first time Jameson had heard Maybury’s first name. He saw her glance over at Ruiz. Ruiz was standing straight, arms folded, scorning the no-gravity crouch the rest of them had adopted, looking straight ahead at the screen.

Maybury reached around to the rear pocket of her shorts and took out a pocket lightpad, which she gave to Pierce. A few of the plates got away from her, but she corraled them with little fuss. She’d improved tremendously at handling herself in zero-g in the last few months.

Pierce scribbled on the lightpad, letting it do his sums. It kept flashing question marks at his poor handwriting, and he had to erase and write over again several times.

“Now,” he said, “we’ve got three pods per ship; That’s four thousand two hundred and seventy-six point eight square miles of deck space. And we’ve got five ships. So the Cygnans inhabit an area of twenty-one thousand three hundred and eighty-four square miles.”

Ruiz turned round with a smile. “Fine,” he said encouragingly. “Now who knows anything about population densities?”

“I looked up some averages in the ship’s library, Dr. Ruiz,” Maybury said hesitantly.

“Go on,” he encouraged her.

She cleared her throat. “Well, it would be densely populated, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t waste space in a spaceship. No swamps or deserts. Places like England or the Netherlands have populations of over a thousand per square mile. In urban areas, like the Houston-Dallasworth megalopolis, it goes up to ten thousand. And in really crowded places, like Hong Kong, it can go up to two hundred thousand people per square mile.”

“Let’s stick with ten thousand,” Ruiz said dryly.

Pierce stared wonderingly at his lightpad. “That would mean that there are more than two hundred million Cygnans out there.”

They all turned instinctively to look at the silhouetted shape on the screen. With nothing to give it scale, it resembled nothing so much as a collection of jackstraws.

Ruiz nodded. “Or, to take the lower and upper ends of Maybury’s scale, anywhere from twenty-one million to four billion individuals.”

“But why?” Pierce breathed. “What did they come here for?”

“An army!” Tu Jue-chen said, her eyes glittering. “A—a—” She hesitated. “Ch’in lueh che!”

“An expeditionary force,” Jameson said helpfully. She nodded.

“Colonists,” Pierce said. “We know they’re doing something to Jupiter.”

“Refugees,” Chu said, peering over his glasses. “They left their world because it was dying.”

“Maybe they are not leave their world behind,” Li said. “Maybe they take it with them.”

“The Cygnus Object?” Ruiz said.

Li nodded.

“Mizz Maybury,” Ruiz said, “let’s have a look.”

She moved to the instrument panel. The image on the screen shook. There was a blurry twitch as the telescope’s aim swept past the alien fleet, past the kidnapped moon it was circling, to the black void a million miles to the left of Jupiter.

The blurs resolved themselves into the Cygnus planet, a sooty ball which was crowding Callisto on the elliptical orbit which intersected the path of its own former moon. Now it too was a moon of Jupiter—the biggest of them all. It was making a mess of the orbits of its stepsisters.

“Bring it up to maximum, will you?” Ruiz said.

The ball sprang toward them, filling the screen. Jameson looked down through wisps of hydrogen clouds at the face of hell.