The Jupiter Theft

He was gulping the last few spoonfuls of the bland, glutinous mess when the kitten came over to rub against his leg and meow. He scratched its ears and crossed to the locker where he kept his dwindling supply of human foodstuffs. There was only one can of condensed milk left. With a sigh he opened it and poured some into a saucer.

The kitten lapped the milk up eagerly. It had filled out a little and its fur was no longer so ratty, but it was still pathetically thin. It was going to have to learn how to eat bits of hamster meat and the Cygnans’ synthetic concoctions. The animal at least had a name now: Mao—Chinese for “cat.”

He fished a fragment of pink flesh out of what was left of the gruel and extended it on a finger to Mao. The kitten took it into its mouth and chewed it ineffectually with needle teeth, then let it drop on the floor. Jameson massaged its nape, feeling the little fragile neck bones through the fur, then let it go back to its milk. He was washing up—he’d found that if he didn’t wash the pan himself, Augie gave him his next meal with food still caked to it—when he noticed a crack at one side of the door. Going over to inspect it, he found that Augie had been careless. The locking mechanism had failed to engage. Cautiously he rolled the door back a couple of inches and peered through.

The cluttered main chamber was silent. Augie was nowhere in sight.

Jameson didn’t even stop to think. He had been cooped up in his pen too long now. The Cygnans didn’t like him wandering around unsupervised. But that didn’t matter now. From watching his captors, he had some notion of how to tap the ship’s library through the computer console.

He rolled the door all the way back and stepped through. Mao hopped over the rim after him.

The place smelled musty. Little furry insect-creatures twittered in their cages. Jameson prowled to the far door and satisfied himself that it was shut tight. Out there, hundreds of Cygnans dashed about doing their obscure duties. Augie must be in one of the adjoining chambers, packing up. Lately Tetrachord and Triad had been moving equipment and cages elsewhere. The shelves of caged snacks were almost empty now.

He went over to the fretted console and studied the wires and studs, trying to remember what Tetrachord had done to activate it. This was the first time he had been this close to it. Usually if he approached to within ten feet the Cygnans hissed at him and made threatening gestures.

He pressed the pearly stud that turned it on, then strummed one of the fingerboards at random. The screens lit up, and he was looking at a vast silvery hall where thousands of six-legged aliens clung to a pipe-rack forest of perches, watching an egg-shaped niche where a lone Cygnan, mirrored on all sides by a reflecting surface, twirled round on its hind legs, holding up four objects that looked like dumbbells with skeletal pyramids for weights. A couple of Cygnans in the foreground started to twist around toward the screen. Jameson hastily shut the console off.

What had he tuned into? A classroom lecture? A religious service? A performance of some sort? Had there been a monitor pickup of any kind? Could anyone in the audience have seen him?

He waited until his heart stopped pounding, then cautiously tried strumming the metal strings with the console off. If he put his ear to the frets; he found he could hear a faint twang, like elfin tuning forks. The tuning system wasn’t anything so simple as a chromatic scale in quarter-tones. The triple strands of wires seemed to be arranged for Cygnan convenience, probably reflecting frequency of use, like a typewriter keyboard.

By trial and error he found the combination that he thought would get him into the children’s section of the library. It was a simple succession of Cygnan phonemes incorporating an interrogative and a sound meaning something like “young” or “new.” He’d heard Tetrachord vocalize it while trying to make some point clear to him. It had always got some nursery pictures or diagrams.

He practiced till he thought he had it right. Then, holding his breath, he turned on the machine and plucked the strings.

He was looking at a row of purple globes, glossy as eggplants, set in grooves along a floor littered with something that resembled green popcorn. The globes were plugged into the faces of an endless sawtooth partition that ran the length of a hall that dwindled to infinity.

He saw miniature Cygnans clinging to the enormous fruits, six or seven to a globe, their rasplike snouts buried in the skins, sucking out the juices. Adult Cygnans, aproned like Jameson’s own attendant, scurried up and down the aisle, rearranging the tiny creatures and occasionally pulling them free to tend to them. The adults gave Jameson the scale of what he was seeing. The miniature Cygnans were about the size of weasels. The purple things were as big as hippopotami.