The Jupiter Theft

As the Cygnans jostled him along, he could see what supported the pipe: a row of slender metal pillars raised from the apex of the central ridge—from all three of the ridges. They didn’t look half massive enough to hold up the pipe. But then, he realized, it was in zero-g up there, and the pillars need do nothing but brace it lightly in place.

Jameson found himself being stuffed through a rubbery membrane into a circular port. The membrane closed behind him—he couldn’t tell how—and he was with his two keepers in a crazy rotating drum. They scuttled round its walls while a lens-shaped aperture widened into the shape made by two intersecting circles. Before it was quite a full circle they picked up Jameson’s sack and heaved him through. He struck another of the rubbery membranes. He expected to bounce back in time to be snipped in half by the closing edges, but in some mysterious fashion he oozed through and settled to the floor like a toy balloon.

He found himself in an immense warehouse of a place with acres of spongy floor. The ceiling hung distant and shadowy above. The walls leaned inward. Dim shapes bulked against the walls and in random piles all over the floor. These sacks and bales and queer pyramid-shaped boxes were stenciled with odd cursive symbols that, instead of following one another in straight lines like human script, wandered in random peaks and valleys up and down.

There was a sound like a maniac trying to play Bartok on the harmonica, and Jameson realized it had been made by one of the Cygnans. The other Cygnan answered with an incredibly rapid fragment of twelve-tone solfège.

Jameson came to full attention. There had been chords in all that quick passage-work, transitory but unmistakable, as if the Cygnans possessed multiple larynxes.

Whatever those brief cadenzas had meant, the Cygnans picked him up again and toted him to a cluster of what looked like manholes in the spongy floor. One of them lifted a lid, apparently at random, and, legs tucked in, dropped through. Another one of those damned tubes! Jameson was tossed in next, and the other Cygnan dove through after him, head first.

They were hurtling at dizzying speed down a corkscrew spiral. Outside the transparent walls of the tube was an enormous dim void, hung round with the ghostly outlines of fantastic shapes. If they had entered one of the spars, they were plunging down a shaft fifteen miles deep, with a boxed world at the bottom.

He could feel gravity starting to take hold after a mile or two; It didn’t amount to much yet, but it would be a third of an Earth g at the bottom, if Ruiz’s figures on the rotation had been correct. Enough to smash him to a bloody paste if he’d gone tobogganing down the spiral by himself without the Cygnans twelve busily pedaling legs to brake him.

His eyes began getting used to the dimness and he could see other transparent spirals in the hugeness around him, wrapped round slim silvery shafts. Other many-legged shapes were scooting up or down them. He peered down through the coils of his own tubeway and suddenly went rigid with fear.

A column of Cygnans was scurrying up the spiral, at the same fantastic speed. They and his own warders surely must see one another! But they weren’t slowing down. Without doubt, they were going to collide with bone-crunching force. He had a split second to see the first shadowy shape, two coils below, flash around the shaft. He braced himself.

Nothing! Jameson looked upward. The ascending Cygnans were streaking through the tubes above. How the hell had they gotten past without a collision?

He looked across at the other tubes. The same trick was going on all around him. Ascending and descending Cygnans on a collison course in the same spiral tubeway passing one another without meeting!

Then he understood. He almost laughed, in spite of the gravity of his situation. The solution was ridiculously simple. A double spiral, like the elevators at the MacDonald. You could even find the same thing in that French château in the Loire valley with the famous double-spiral staircase. Chambord. He’d seen it in a holo travelogue. People going up never met the people coming down—a handy trick in the sixteenth century for getting out of the place.

They took more than an hour to reach bottom, an hour of being whipped round and round the central shaft at breakneck speed, while the remote walls of the murky chasm whirled dizzyingly around him and the indistinct structures that filled it blended into a tornado blur. Jameson passed out somewhere along the way. When he regained consciousness, he was out of the sack, but still in his suit, lying on a bare floor whose surface bristled with minute rubbery villi. He was alone.

He tried to stand up and immediately lost his balance and fell down again. The blood rushed through his head and the room wheeled and tilted.