The Jupiter Theft

“We wish you no harm,” Jameson said. “But humans also are prudent.”

“Humans cannot harm us,” Tetrachord said flatly.

His heart pounding, Jameson said, “What do you want with the Earth?”

“Want?” The two Cygnans tossed the word back and forth, like shrikes calling to each other in counterpoint. “The Earth is a wrong thing. It is not a thing that we want. We have no need to take it.”

That took Jameson’s breath away. Tetrachord hadn’t used “take” in the sense of possessing something. He had used the idiom for carrying something away.

Could he keep the Cygnans talking? They became bored easily. For the moment, they were intently watching the kitten. Its bath finished, it was clawing its way up his trouser leg. It settled in his lap, purring. There was an excited chirping from the Cygnans. Desperately Jameson ran his fingers over the keyboards of the Moog.

“Why have you come here then?” he asked. “What do you want in this star system?”

The Cygnans seemed at a loss to reply to him. They went into a hand-holding huddle, fluting at each other for a long time. Finally Tetrachord went over to the console again. An outside view sprang to life on the triple viewscreens: the tremendous disk of the planet Jupiter, repeated three times.

Jupiter had changed. Jameson stared in wonder at its seething bulk. The bands and the Red Spot were completely gone. The process the aliens had started had advanced considerably since the last time he had seen the planet. The atmosphere had churned itself into a boiling porridge, a uniform dirty yellow in color. It heaved violently, popping world-sized bubbles that burst through the surface and were sucked into the billowing chasm that divided the planet in half.

“This is what we want,” Tetrachord cheeped at him. “We will take it with us.”

Chapter 19

Jameson sat there, too stunned to move. The kitten purred in his lap, its sharp little claws digging into him rhythmically. Over on the triple screens, Jupiter continued to boil away.

If you’re going to steal a planet, he thought insanely, why settle for anything except the biggest? Smash and run, with the brightest bauble the solar system has to offer!

Jupiter!

A mere bagatelle, massing three times the rest of all the planets and moons in the solar system combined! A giant among worlds—eleven times the diameter of Earth and more than three hundred times its weight. A melon next to a grape! He supposed it was fortunate for the human race that the Cygnans thought big.

He patted the kitten absently. Under the soft fur it was all bones. The Cygnans were still watching him with their triangulated eyes. He flipped switches and pulled stops on the Moog. He was finally getting somewhere; every nuance had to be right.

“Why?” Jameson typed. “Why do you need the large planet?”

The two Cygnans hesitated. Their stumpy eye polyps twitched. They were facing a problem about vocabulary.

“Jameson eats the green food made from growing things,” Triad skirled. “The small animal from Earth eats the white liquid. Then Jameson has the power to move. Then the animal has the power to move. Does Jameson understand?”

“Jameson understands,” he tapped out on the keys.

“An engine must eat. Then this place may move.”

Fuel. They were talking about fuel. A couple of quick exchanges and he had the Cygnan word for it.

Tetrachord spoke up. “The fuel which our engines eat is the mother-of-matter.”

He got it right away. Hydrogen!

They were using Jupiter for fuel. To the Cygnans, that was all Jupiter was good for. They’d simply dropped in on a handy solar system to tank up.

Gas giants were common throughout the universe. They were a necessary consequence of planetary formation. Most of those that had been detected, like the superjovian companions of 61 Cygni and CIN 2347, were considerably more massive than Jupiter itself. Using them for refueling stops must be a convenient way to star-hop.

Mother-of-matter—that was as good a description as any for the most basic of the elements. Rather poetic, in fact.

Jupiter was composed almost entirely of hydrogen. The giant planets, with their tremendous gravitational strength, were able to hang on to the light gases that had given them birth. Oh, the atmosphere was placed with helium and with such impurities as water, methane, and ammonia. And somewhere at the center of that vast slush ball, like a cherry pit, was a small rocky core about the size of the planet Earth.