The Jupiter Theft

“K’an-yi-k’an,” Jameson said.

They both looked up at the place where the lander had kicked a hole in its own side. The skeleton leg was sticking out ignominiously, its foot buried in the lander’s aluminum hide. The image was so anthropomorphic that they both laughed.

“What if that happen while we orbit Callisto?” Li said, his broad peasant features suddenly serious inside his fishbowl.

“Bu-hau,” Jameson began. “Bu-dau shem…” He floundered, trying to think of the word for “abort,” and gave up. “We’d have to scrub the mission,” he finished lamely in English.

His suit radio buzzed, and Jameson tongued the switch that put him on closed circuit. “We’re sending a repair crew right away,” Sue Jarowski’s husky voice said. “Are you and your Chinese friend all right?”

“We’re fine,” Jameson said. “No injuries. But it looks as if the lander’s been holed. We’re doing a damage inventory now.”

Li had turned away discreetly so that Jameson wouldn’t see his lips move while he reported on his own scrambled circuit. It was a meaningless courtesy. Both of them knew perfectly well that Li’s people, in the sequestered pod they had attached to the rim of the international space station a few miles away, were busily processing all American message traffic, just as the Americans routinely unscrambled all Chinese transmissions.

The ritual spying had become a way of life during the year-long preparations for the joint Chinese-American Jupiter mission—like the elaborate charade of speaking the other side’s language during mission exercises.

The big prize in the game was the new boron fusion/fission engine that was going to power the Jupiter ship, courtesy of the United States. The Chinese didn’t have one yet, though they were said to be working on it furiously.

Jameson was familiar with the basic principle: You inject a proton into boron 11, with its six neutrons and five protons, and you get an unstable nucleus that explodes into three helium nuclei, with two protons and two neutrons apiece. But it took temperatures in the billions of degrees to start boron fission.

So to get the hot protons needed to trigger the boron reaction, you had to have a fusion reaction first. That was being supplied, courtesy of the Chinese, via a more conventional deuterium-tritium fusion, triggered by carbon dioxide lasers.

The security problems at the interface of the two systems were nightmarish.

The daily American security sweeps constantly uncovered one ingenious Chinese spy device after another hidden in and around the still-empty engine modules. They were deactivated without comment. Both sides pretended they weren’t there.

It was a hell of a basis for traveling to another planet, but it was the only way it was going to get done. America and the China Coalition were the only two political entities that had the resources and the motivation. The European Space Agency was too fragmented by intramural squabbles. Greater Japan stuck pretty close to Earth orbit and applications satellites of a practical nature. And Russia—what was left of it after the Chinese police action of 2003-2008—was no longer a spacefaring nation.

Jameson looked at Li and grinned. It was a good thing that both sides had a healthy share of get-the-job-done types like Li and himself. Best to leave the rest of it to the politicians and the security men.

Li grinned back. “You look more Chinese than I do, old buddy,” he said. “Are you sure we’re not getting to you?”

Jameson knew what he meant. In zero-g conditions, some of the body fluid tends to migrate upward to the face. Jameson’s normally lean face was temporarily puffy, cheeks risen and his gray eyes slitted. He was also an inch taller, thanks to a stretched spine.

“Wo ma?” Jameson said innocently. “Wo pu-shih Chung-gwa-jen.”

Li laughed, a little constrained by all of the listening ears. The two of them pulled themselves from handhold to handhold across the curving surface of the Callisto lander, toward the embedded footpad. There was a lot of debris floating around: pieces of the locking mechanism, fragments of hardened foam insulation. Something the size and shape of a pot lid drifted past lazily. Li made a grab at it, but Jameson netted it first.

He turned it over in his gloved hands, anchoring himself with the toe of a boot. It was a bolt head—the one missing from the locking mechanism.

He saw why it had broken loose: Someone had sawed the head off the bolt and substituted this hollowed-out fake. Inside was something that he guessed was part of an X-ray camera. It seemed to be a lensless system depending on folded optics and a paper-thin electronics sandwich of an image plane that transmitted the pictures on its face through a pea-size FM device. The capsule of radioactives seemed to be missing, fortunately.