The Jupiter Theft

Tetrachord and Triad were indulgent. They let Jameson hang around while they unpacked the containers, though they hissed at him if he got too close.

Soil samples in little transparent bags. A dead beetle. Some dessicated samples of vegetation that was indisputably terrestrial. To Jameson the stuff looked tropical. South America or Southeast Asia? And—sinister import!—a preserved human hand and forearm with the shredded remnants of a cotton sleeve sticking to it. The kitten’s owner?

They took out two more dead kittens and part of a third. The gray one had been the only one to survive the trip. Eight days, if he could believe the Cygnans.

Eight days from Earth! Was that possible?

Jameson didn’t even have to do the arithmetic. This was a favorite spaceman’s pipe dream, one that came up during every bull session.

Halfway from Earth to Jupiter at a constant acceleration of one gravity. The second half of the trip at constant one gravity deceleration. Eight or nine days was about right. If he needed confirmation, the kitten was proof enough. He looked at it sitting next to the empty bowl, contentedly giving itself a wash. Perhaps there had been water in the capsule it had traveled in—condensation or even a water supply. But it couldn’t have survived without food for much longer than that.

Brute force. Unlimited power. That’s what it would take. Never mind about vectors or the finer points of space navigation. But if those puny-looking Cygnan broomsticks could manage constant acceleration at one g, then certainly they could mail a package from Earth in eight days.

“Are there Cygnans on Earth now?” Jameson asked.

Tetrachord and Triad were preoccupied. Jameson had to ask several times before he got a reply.

“No. That is a wrong question. A Cygnan on Earth is a not-Cygnan, so that what you say has not-meaning.” While Jameson wrestled with that, Tetrachord went on: “We have caused to be sent to Earth a (number?) of tweetle-tweetle-chirp-trill.”

“What is a tweetle-tweetle-chirp-trill?”

Impatiently, Tetrachord glided over to the queer console at the far wall, still clutching a soil-sample bag in one middle claw. The fingers of three hands blurred over the pearly knobs and flicked over the rows of wires on their fretted necks. A picture formed on the three clustered circular screens—all the same picture, but with subtle differences. The Cygnans didn’t use holo images. Their three eyes evidently focused separately on each of the three images and their brain translated them into a picture they could use.

Jameson concentrated on whatever picture seemed clearest at the moment. What he saw was a hangarlike interior occupied by a narrow flat-sided needle in the shape of an elongated pyramid. Twenty or thirty Cygnans were bustling around it, giving it scale. The object was about ten meters long, he guessed. Three flaring nozzles stuck out of the corners of the blunt end. The pointed end was broken away, and Cygnans were removing odd-shaped containers from the interior. All the Cygnans wore transparent protective suits.

A probe. An automated probe.

How the hell had the Cygnans slipped their probes through Earth’s radar defenses without precipitating a world war?

“How long have you been studying Earth?”

The answer was indefinite, as answers involving duration or measurement always were. Jameson gathered that it hadn’t been for very long, though. Not until after the human ship had entered the Jovian system.

That was odd. They must have picked up radio signals from Earth and Mars long before they themselves went into orbit around Jupiter. And picked up the com laser flashes to the ship. It seemed to Jameson that when you had traveled more than ten thousand light-years, having a look at an indigenous intelligent life form would have a high degree of priority. But evidently the Cygnans had just now gotten around to being curious about people.

“Why are you studying us now?”

“You are too puny to interfere with our purpose. But the mother-within-herself is prudent.”

More Cygnan gobbledegook. He’d run into the “mother-within-herself” reference before and had pinned down its literal meaning, if not its import. He wished he could pass on these clues to Janet Lemieux or someone else more qualified than he. But the thrust of Tetrachord’s answer became clear when the Cygnan plucked some wires on the console and another scene took shape on the three circular screens. They showed a film or a tape or a sound-picture of the Jupiter ship after it had been evacuated. Cygnan technicians had removed the protective blisters over the nuclear-missile racks. They were taking lots of pictures, or whatever happened when light from those glittering little boxes they carried bathed the missiles, but they weren’t touching the launching racks. They acted somewhat skittish, and were staying well clear of them.

The Cygnans were miffed about the nuclear bombs, and Jameson couldn’t blame them.