The Jupiter Theft

They took their tissue sample in direct, brutal fashion. One of the Cygnans pinched the flesh of Jameson’s thigh and sliced off a piece of meat as thick as a piece of bacon. Blood welled up and ran down his leg. The Cygnans seemed excited by this. There was a chorus of harmonica music, and they siphoned off several cc’s of blood with a pipette. While he lay pinioned and bleeding, a Cygnan sprayed the wound with something that burned like fire. Almost instantly the spray hardened into a rubbery, transparent skin that sealed the wound and stopped the bleeding. Jameson was thankful the Cygnan’s blade hadn’t severed the femoral artery.

After several more tests, including running something like a metal detector over the surface of his body, the Cygnans gathered up their paraphernalia and left. The circular door rolled in its groove and thudded shut.

They left him in his cell without food or water for what seemed to be about twenty-four hours. He spent most of that time huddled in a ball, trying to keep warm. The Cygnans seemed to like low temperatures.

When the door rolled open again, three plastic-wrapped Cygnans entered the cell. The guard with the neural scrambler was with them. Jameson tried to pantomime his need for food and water, but they roundly ignored him. Before he knew what was happening, one of the Cygnans stabbed him in the belly.

He yelped and leaped backward. There was a raw circle about an inch in diameter just below his navel, studded with bright jewels of blood from a dozen pinpricks. He caught a glimpse of the instrument the Cygnan had used, something like half a golf ball with short needles projecting from the flat side. He’d been given injections of some kind.

The Cygnans left. An hour later he was feverish and getting sicker. He spent the next day feeling miserable. For a couple of hours he was delirious. But he had a blanket now, a square of some soft synthetic textured like overlapping orange scales that he was able to wrap around himself for warmth. Eventually his warder brought him a bowl of flat, tepid water, which he lapped up eagerly, getting down on his hands and knees, not daring to lift it to his lips for fear of spilling some of the precious liquid. There were no sanitary facilities. He used the far corner of the cell, feeling humiliated. Nothing was ever done about cleaning it up.

When the fever had passed, Jameson felt ravenous. Still shaky, he pounded on the door for attention. No one came. He waited it out for another twelve hours. Then the door opened. A Cygnan skittishly set something on the floor in front of him and fled.

He pounced on it. It was a prepared meal from his own ship’s galley, a thawing block of stew still in its original foil warming pan. He ignored the implications of that while he wolfed down the food, ice crystals and all. It was the first food he’d eaten in forty-eight hours.

He pushed the pan aside, satiated, and looked up. Two Cygnans were standing there, watching him. They were the first ones he’d seen without the transparent protective suits since he’d been taken out of his sterilized sack and isolated here. So he was at last out of quarantine! They were safe from his germs now—or he from theirs.

The two aliens were holding hands, Cygnan fashion. The middle pair. One of them was carrying a foot long implement in one of its primary limbs that resembled a two-pronged toasting fork with blunt tines.

The other Cygnan uttered a clear, chimelike sound composed of two tones. Jameson recognized it as a tetrachord: a perfect fourth. The first Cygnan let go of the other’s hand and high-stepped over the rim of the door, holding the forklike object in front of it like a weapon.

Chapter 17

Jameson looked the pair of them over. They were just inside the door, sizing him up. The taller of the two, the one with the toasting fork, came to his shoulder. The alien was roughly the size of a Russian wolfhound standing on its hind legs. The other was a couple of inches shorter and more lightly built. A male and a female? It was impossible to tell. Their bodies were smooth and without gender. Like the other Cygnans he’d seen, they wore only their mottled hides, plus the ubiquitous tubular harnesses with the ovoid gadget bags. He could see no external sign of sex, except—

He overcame his repugnance and took a closer look at the dreadful thing attached to their bellies. It was the same palpitating horror that at first he’d taken for a secondary sex characteristic in his original captors during that dizzy hegira through the monkey-puzzle forest and across the industrial plain. He’d glimpsed a couple more of the things through the transparent suits of the Cygnans who’d done the lab workup on him. But this was the first time he’d had a clear view of one.

It was a parasite. No doubt about it.