The Jupiter Theft

Encouraged, he sat up, moving very slowly and keeping his hands down.

Did the Cygnans react nervously? It was hard to tell. They always seemed nervous. There was a lot of atonal chittering and much shuffling and twitching, but his nervous system remained unscrambled. He lifted his eyes to the helmet dials. How could he make them understand?

“Air,” he mouthed. “Dammit, don’t you understand? I’ve only got a couple of minutes worth of air left.”

Raising his gloved hands to his helmet, he made raking-in gestures with spread fingers. He let them see his open mouth sucking in air.

No discernible reaction came from his audience. Even on Earth, body language was different between Arabs and Japanese, Scandinavians and Mediterraneans. Maybe his pantomimes couldn’t work with creatures that had six limbs, radial symmetry, brains in their torsos, and, for all he knew, no lungs.

He tried again. This time he pointed to his air tanks and traced his hoses to their gaskets in his helmet.

They seemed bored with him. A couple of them skidded around on four legs and left the cell. The ones who were left lost interest in him entirely. Two of them had started holding hands. Another was scratching itself with a hind leg. Another had taken an object that looked like a bright yellow plastic asterisk out of a pouch and was showing it to a companion.

Jameson struggled recklessly to his feet. The trumpet bell of the weapon flicked in his direction. He ignored it. “Your air!” he roared. “Can I breathe your air?”

It was doubtful that they even understood his anguished cry as speech. Their own communication, Jameson had guessed depended on the pitch of speech components rather than anything resembling consonants and vowels—and those fragments of reedy tone were too quick and transitory for even his gifted ear to follow.

His lungs heaved, and he realized with despair that he was now rebreathing the stale air in his helmet. He staggered forward, arms outspread. The Cygnans scampered out of his way. The energy weapon tracked him but didn’t fire.

The Cygnans were gone, no longer in his path. Instead, they were behind him. He felt a myriad of little three-fingered hands running all over his spacesuit, hugging his legs, pinioning his arms. He was being held immobile. He struggled, but his lungs were burning and his senses were growing dim.

Then he realized that they were removing his suit.

A transparent membrane, insubstantial as a soap bubble, was stretched across the twelve-foot circle the Cygnans had opened in the hull. That’s why she still could breathe.

Maggie gawked at it. A lot of gawking was going on around her. Why didn’t the air pressure inside the ship bend that membrane outward? Why didn’t it burst?

“Look!” Maybury said, grabbing her arm.

Not only was the membrane not bulging outward, it was bulging inward! Stunned, the seventy people in the control room watched it stretch, ballooning itself until it filled the center of the chamber.

Nobody went near it. Nobody dared touch it. It looked too fragile. It looked as if it might burst at any moment.

A movement over by the row of empty spacesuits draped over a console apron caught Maggie’s eye. It was Klein. He was lifting up the sleeve of one of the suits.

“Leave that alone!” Boyle’s voice thundered.

“I was just—” Klein began.

“Gwan-cha, gwan-cha!” a Chinese voice screamed.

Five or six Cygnans had dropped lightly to the floor. They stood, quivering, inside the ship, looking alertly through the bubble at the humans. They all looked upward at the same instant and started backing away from the center of their bubble. One of them was against the transparent skin itself, poking it outward.

The temptation was too much for one of the Struggle Brigade bullies. He snatched up a steel bar and swung it two-handed at the Cygnan’s head.

“Don’t!” Boyle yelled, but he was too late. The bar connected with a sickening impact. The Cygnan had tried to skip out of the way, but hadn’t had enough warning, even with its speedy reflexes.

A gasp went up from the assembled crew, but the bubble held. The bar rested in a sagging indentation on the bubble. Slowly the indentation filled itself and the bar slid to the floor.

The injured Cygnan, incredibly, was still on its feet. It writhed in evident agony, its body twisting bonelessly like some fat worm that had been stepped on. Its head was orange pulp. One stubby eyestalk waved above the mess, blinking horribly. A couple of its friends passed it up to waiting sets of hands. The other Cygnans in the inverted bubble began darting their heads like angry geese at the nearest humans. You could see the cheese-grater mouths gaping and the tubular rasp of a tongue flicking in and out inside the inflated sheaths they wore over their heads. But they all stayed well away from the boundary of the bubble.