The Jupiter Theft

Then the Cygnan twisted away like an eel, going after the prod. Jameson made a grab for the clubbed tail and yanked the creature back. Augie uttered a strangled klaxonlike squawk. It turned sinuously, bending double, and struck at him with its long head.

He felt a pain that burned like fire. The creature had managed to get the tip of its abrasive tongue into the meat of his upper arm. Jameson, still keeping a grip on the tail, grabbed with his free hand for one of the fleshy eyestalks and forced the Cygnan’s head back. Augie was thrashing around. Millions of gristly fingers were pawing indiscriminately at Jameson’s wrists and ankles, doing no harm. Jameson shifted position and knelt on the Cygnan’s thick tail. Augie gave a terrible squawk again and shuddered convulsively before going limp.

Jameson had it by two eyestalks now, with his weight on its tail. He seemed to have injured the creature or made it sick. The petals at the tip of the tail were parted slightly, and there was a thick yellow exudate oozing out.

Augie, was trembling. It was being careful not to move, to avoid damage to its eyes. Jameson gave a little tug to emphasize the point, then let go with one hand. He reached down, feeling for the poncho’s laces, and pulled a length off. Working quickly, he muzzled the Cygnan, winding the cord around its snout. It was harder than he expected. The Cygnan didn’t have a normal jaw that could be clamped shut, like a terrestrial animal. It could still peel back the edges of its mouth at any point past the encircling cord. Jameson had to do the whole snout up like a mummy, and even then the Cygnan was able to spread the tip apart like a rosebud and show a half inch of that rasplike tongue.

Jameson’s arm was bleeding. There was a little round pit in it about a quarter inch deep. He had a feeling that if he hadn’t jerked away so quickly, it would have gone all the way through to the bone.

With the Cygnan’s head trussed up, Jameson moved swiftly to immobilize the rest of it. Still keeping a grip on an eyestalk with one hand, he pulled the creature’s leathery poncho around backward, trapping its limbs. Then, two-handed, he laced it up in back like a straitjacket.

The Cygnan squirmed helplessly in its wrappings, making angry sounds. Jameson dragged the writhing bundle to a corner, out of the way. Even then it tried to strike at him with its half inch of protruding tongue, but Jameson was able to keep himself out of reach. He took a moment to rip the sleeve off his borrowed coveralls and bandage his arm.

The show was still going on in the trifolium viewer. How much had he missed? The part about the complicated eclipses might have told him something useful about the Cygnans’ abandoned home. Ruiz would have been able to do wonders with a few clues about the nature of the double-star system they had emerged from. But Jameson didn’t dare try to turn the sequence back. He was afraid he’d lose it altogether and never find it again.

He was looking at a vast panorama of industrial effort. On a barren plain lit by the baleful light of that sky-filling moon, hundreds of thousands of Cygnans were toiling like ants. Great mining machines like thousand-foot metallic earthworms burrowed into the soil. On the arched horizon there was the bright flare of a rocket taking off.

With a start, Jameson recognized what he had taken at first for a squat pyramid sticking up out of the soil. It was the peak of those three skyscrapers that leaned together. Cygnans with barrel-wheeled bulldozers and beetlelike backhoes were digging them out. Other Cygnans were cutting away the metal framework and bearing it off. Jameson caught his breath. How many thousands of years had it taken for that city to be buried?

Now, almost like an intercut in a human film, he saw the Cygnans’ tremendous fleet being assembled in space. In the foreground was the triangular base of one of the environmental pods, miles across, with a swarm of service vehicles hovering around it. Perhaps a hundred miles farther out was the half-folded frame of an uncompleted ship, looking like the clawprint of an immense bird stamped against the curve of the gas giant that had been the Cygnans’ moon.

The scene spun to let him see the paired suns. They overlapped. The red sun was moving across the face of the white sun, so he knew that what he saw was not a trick of perspective.

The white sun was bigger.

During the ages it had taken for the Cygnan city to be buried, that sun had grown to perhaps twice its former size. Or else the red giant had shrunk. Or both.

This time the white sun was giving the red giant a bad case of indigestion. At what would have been full eclipse, Jameson saw a blinding white halo around the dull red disk of the giant. Then they began to pull apart. The red sun extruded a nipple. It swelled toward its brilliant companion. Skeins of fire stretched between the two.