The Jupiter Theft

A pair of Cygnans took him then, like a sack of laundry and zoomed off with him. The creature on the right clutched its broomstick with the three right-hand limbs, like an outrigger, and the one on the left hung on to its stick with its three left limbs. They held the stack stretched safely between them, leaning inward to join hands at its neck. Jameson noticed that they kept shifting their grip. They had three choices. And there were never more than two limbs wrapped around the stick. One of them always was resting. Did Cygnans tire easily? Jameson decided that no individual Cygnan limb was as strong as a human arm or leg. But it didn’t have to be.

A mile or two from the ship, he finally stopped struggling. When his air was gone, he was dead. He wanted to postpone that as long as possible. So he settled into the sack and tried to make himself relax. Ruiz had been right. Those flimsy-looking tubes the Cygnans rode stored enough power for constant acceleration. He had weight, dangling between his two captors; it felt like half a g, but it was hard to be sure.

He saw a lot of traffic going in both directions around him. The long brilliant beams of light flashing from the ends of the slender brooms made a jack-straw pattern against space.

They were heading straight toward some invisible target a quarter million miles away. There was no nonsense about trajectories, about matching orbits. The aliens simply plowed through space as if they had all the power in the universe at their disposal. And perhaps they did, if they could move whole planets.

Jameson looked back—“down,” actually—at the Jupiter ship. It was tiny now, a double-pointed thumbtack pinned against the stars.

Then, abruptly, twin threads of light stretched across the black of space. That wasn’t the boron drive. The aliens had attached some kind of propulsive units, to the ship at the head and tail of the shaft. He could see it begin to move sideways, its wheel still turning, as if it were rolling through space.

The Cygnans had gone fishing. Now they were bringing home their catch.

Chapter 15

The alien ship loomed ahead, big as a world. It was a world, thirty miles from tip to splayed tip. From this angle it was a slender triskelion, a three-bladed pinwheel with a triangular bucket dangling from the end of each arm.

Jameson squirmed around in his transparent game-bag for a better view. He’d been cramped inside for more than six hours now, and his suit’s air was almost gone.

His captors were approaching the ship head on, so he couldn’t see much of the long central spar that formed the axis, except for a yawning triangular maw at the hub. That had to be the business end of the drive.

An extraordinary thought occurred to him. He had read once, in a popular book on psychotechnology, that the works of man were influenced by buried images of self. His motile surrogates of himself tended to be cross-shaped—a man with arms outstretched—like early airplanes, or four-limbed like the drive shaft and two axles of a wheeled vehicle at right angles, or, in the ultimate subconscious distillation; male symbols like rockets or female symbols like boats.

But the Cygnans—if Dmitri’s morphology was to be believed—were three limbs spaced equally around a central axis. And so was their ship. There were even three stubby triangular petals—feet?—placed at the opposite end of the shaft. Jameson could make them out on another Cygnan ship hovering some dozens of miles away. They might be miles-thick radiation baffles for the life-support modules when the ship was in its folded mode. They’d be facing forward then, into a howling storm of impinging interstellar hydrogen. This all made eminent sense in engineering terms, but so did the design of their Jupiter ship. Jameson wondered what psychoanalytical innuendos the author would have found to describe that!

There was one more flash of insight before his mind got busy again with his predicament. Designs evolve past first solutions. Technological phylogeny, the book had called it. The cross-shaped airplane was an early effort of mankind, replaced by delta wings and various lifting bodies. Was this tremendous feat of engineering he saw looming before him a first try for the Cygnans?

Then he became lost in wonder. Those fifteen-mile-long jibs that held the environmental pods were anchored at their roots by pins that had to be large enough and strong enough to keep a small world from flying off into space. The grooves along the flat faces of the hull that the jibs were meant to rest in were as deep as the Grand Canyon. And—he sighted along one of the arms until he came to the distant three-sided bucket—that wishbone-shaped tholepin that formed the handle of the bucket was, by itself, of a size to stagger the imagination.