The Jupiter Theft

Now there was movement above, and the Cygnans were lowering a strange device on a stand into the ship. The Cygnans inside the bubble steadied the thing and set it in place. It looked like a squat brassy pyramid with three flaring horns sprouting from its apex. One of the Cygnans did something to it, and the apex started rotating. The horns rotated with it, waving up, and down like crazy semaphores.

The Cygnans jumped on one another’s shoulders and scrambled out of the bubble fast. The anchoring alien stretched and flowed, becoming a foot taller, and caught the dangling hand of a living chain. Then they whisked it out of the hole.

“Smash that thing!” Boyle yelled from the balcony. “See if you can get at it through the bubble!”

Half a dozen willing hands poked at the revolving device with bars through the resilient material, but they couldn’t reach it. The blister dimpled just so far, then resisted.

“I feel so strange,” Maybury said.

Maggie, for no reason, began to feel edgy. It was like hearing a fingernail scrape along a blackboard, except that there wasn’t any sound. Her teeth were on edge.

All across the bridge people were starting to behave strangely. Somebody staggered and fell. A woman with a contorted face was squeezing her head with both hands. Then a man, his mouth open, began clenching his fists in front of his chest and trembling violently.

Somebody stumbled against her, as if off balance. It was Dmitri, his boyish face shiny with sweat. “They couldn’t gas us,” he said between clenched teeth. “They don’t know enough about terrestrial biochemistry yet. But any kind of a nervous system can be interfered with by modulated electromagnetic fields. They must have used their gadget before on all kinds of life.”

Maggie’s vision was disappearing, as if her face were swelling up in the worse allergy attack she’d ever had. There was a ringing in her ears, drowning out Dmitri’s words. There was a dreadful spine-crawling sensation and the illusion of rapid flickering through her entire body. Then she was suspended in a senseless horror, while her mind scrabbled round and round, trying to get out.

She was not aware of it when a horde of aliens oozed somehow through the transparent membrane without breaking it and stuffed her and the other helpless humans into airtight sacks. When her senses returned, she was floating in a giant soap bubble beside a metal cliff that seemed to stretch on forever. She was part of a chain of bubbles rising through the dark of space while a flock of shiny demons swam alongside, prodding them with broomsticks.

Jameson’s ears popped. The air was thin, but rich in oxygen. It had an oily, industrial smell to it. But after what he’d been expecting, it was marvelous. He took deep, grateful breaths.

They had him pinned to the floor while they stripped off his pressure suit and skivvies. It was no good struggling. Too many of those three-fingered hands were holding him down, shifting their grips with blinding speed while they pulled off sleeves, undid fasteners, shucked him out of the rest of it. By the time he realized that an arm or leg was free, they’d peeled it down and imprisoned it again. In a few brief seconds he was naked and shivering with cold.

His belongings went into a sealed sack. He guessed that he was in biological quarantine. All of the Cygnans handling him were encased in transparent envelopes. He saw nothing resembling air filters; perhaps the entire envelope was permeable to gas molecules but not subviruses.

He tried to talk, but they ignored him, talking instead among themselves with all sorts of chirps and whistles and concertina humming. Once or twice, when his ear was fast enough to catch a fragment, he tried humming it back to them in perfect pitch, but the effort seemed to make no impression.

All at once they began probing him all over with rubbery fingers and little metal instruments that were cold on his bare skin. A three-fingered hand walked along his spine, tracing it. Another counted his ribs. Another probed elbows and kneecaps while they flexed his arms and legs. They forced his mouth open with a bellowslike instrument and shone a light into it. He gagged as a swab poked down his throat, but then it was over and they withdrew the bellows. The swab went into a little oval container.

Next came a tray of little pipettes with suction bulbs at one end. He struggled as they inserted these into every body orifice they could find, from nostrils to urethra. His struggles didn’t do him a bit of good. They got their samples and whisked them away, leaving him sneezing, itching, and smarting.

There was a tricky moment when one of the Cygnans tried to force a slim metal tube into his navel, evidently under the impression that it opened. Jameson howled in protest. He had visions of being skewered. But after a moment the Cygnan gave up and contented itself with a swab.