The Jupiter Theft

They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior spaces like a space-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying shiny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking glass tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.

A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little horny many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.

Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.

They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick glass cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.

The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.

Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales. Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.

Triad rapped on the glass with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.

The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the glass. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim. They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the glass.

With a shock, Jameson realized that the creature filling his field of view was wearing some kind of harness, shiny leathery straps that were as broad as a roadway. It had limbs of sorts, too, scalloped projections of its outer rim, like the billowing shroud points of a parachute. It had them curled around a barb-tipped bone spear that was a hundred feet long.

With a shudder, Jameson wondered about the size of the animal whose skeleton had provided a one-piece artifact that long. It had to be some kind of a floating island with a kite framework of flexible bone.

There was a bone dagger, too, a honed triangular blade the size of a whaleboat with squiggly symbols inscribed on its flat side. And some kind of a pouch dangling from the harness, a catchall the size of a small barn.

Whatever this looming colossus was, it was intelligent. Primitive, but intelligent.

A hunter. A hunter whose quarry was bigger than it was.

It pressed against the glass, obviously looking him over. Jameson saw no evidence of anything resembling sense organs. No eyes, no flaps or tendrils. Perhaps it sensed with the surface of its entire mountainous body. Chemical senses. But what was it seeing him through the glass with? It could scarcely be infrared under the circumstances. Radar waves? Jameson supposed that even at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum an organism could provide definition by rapid and continuous scanning. Hunters needed keen senses.

“Where in the universe…?” Jameson breathed.

The Cygnans could not have understood him, but perhaps they were thinking their own thoughts. At his elbow, Tetrachord said: “So near. And now the Jamesons will never meet them.”

This time Jameson whistled his response in his imitation Cygnan.

“Where?”

They turned abruptly toward him, as if surprised that their pet was talking again.

“This animal is from the planet you call Jupiter,” Tetrachord offered with careful enunciation.

Jameson stared at the undulating disk of flesh. So there was life in Jupiter’s planetwide ocean after all. The speculations had been correct. Under that crushing atmosphere, in a sea that was twelve thousand miles deep before it turned to something else, there was plenty of room for life to develop. A sea of hydrogen laced with organic molecules, with a volume at least 300,000 times the volume of all Earth’s oceans! For an instant Jameson’s imagination ran riot. He saw vast herds of dirigiblelike grazers browsing at the rich nitrile pastures that welled up to become the Great Red Spot and the lesser spots, while these leviathans of the hydrogen deeps stalked them with hundred-foot bone spears.

Then he felt a dawning horror. The Cygnans must have scooped up their Jovian specimens before their Einsteinian siphon had churned Jupiter’s atmosphere into a homogenized maelstrom. They’d known there was intelligent life there. Yet they’d gone on to make all life on Jupiter extinct.

The thought was all the more horrifying because there was no malice involved. Just selfishness. Thoughtlessness. Lack of empathy. In that respect they were no different from humans, in the mad century that had forever wiped out the humpbacks and the great blue whales.