The Jupiter Theft

He found Ruiz squatting on his heels at the base of one of the iron trees. He was contriving some sort of little square frame by lashing together four plastic strips that might have been braces ripped off a hamster cage. Beside him, Maybury was threading dried beans on cotton unraveled from her shirt.

“Ah, Commander Jameson, Mizz Macinnes. Sit down, both of you. We’re just making an abacus. We’ve got a pen, too, and some precious scraps of paper we’re hoarding. Begged shamelessly for the contents of people’s pockets. Por Dios, what I wouldn’t give for a lightpad!”

Jameson squatted down beside him. “I wish you had one too, Doctor. I’ve got some orbits for you to compute.”

Ruiz put down the frame. “You managed to find out a few things, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find out where the Cygnans came from?”

“I got some information that might help you figure it out. I also think I found out how they keep from getting fried by their own X-rays while they’re traveling. I’d like you to verify my theory.”

“All right. Let’s get to it.”

“I’ve got something more important to tell you first.”

“More important than that?”

“Do you have any idea how much time has elapsed since the Cygnans picked us up?”

“A very good idea. Some of our people managed to keep their watches.”

“Do you know where Earth is in its orbit in relation to Jupiter right now?”

Ruiz gave him a penetrating look. “I don’t keep planetary tables in my head. But yes, I can give you a rough notion.”

“Tod, what’s this all about?” Maggie said.

Jameson spoke without taking his eyes off Ruiz. “I want Dr. Ruiz to figure out how long we’ve got before the Cygnans leave this system and take us with them.”

Ruiz raised his eyebrows. “They’re leaving, then?” he said.

“That’s what they told me. If you’ll let me have one of those scraps of paper, I can draw you a diagram of the relative positions of all the inner planets as they’ll be when the Cygnans cross Earth’s orbit.”

Ruiz was excited. “Including Mercury?”

“Yes.”

Ruiz handed him a pen and a page torn from a book. It was from a pocket Bible—the first page of Genesis. “Go ahead, Commander. Try to be as accurate as possible.”

Jameson contrived a crude compass by tying a piece of Maybury’s thread to the pen. He drew the orbits as he remembered them from the Cygnan’s animated diagram, translating the triangular format to circles. When he finished, Ruiz and Maybury went into a huddle. They bisected and quadrisected angles with thread and a straight edge made from the cover of the Bible. They scratched figures in the cementlike surface of the terrace. Ruiz finally raised his head.

“I can pin it down fairly close, Commander,” he said. “I’ll assume an error of no more than four degrees in your planetary positions. But Mercury’s our second hand. That’s only about one day’s travel for Mercury. I’m also assuming that the Cygnans will stay true to form and accelerate at a constant one gravity. That’s less than a day till they intersect Earth’s orbit.”

“So how long till they leave?” Jameson asked.

“About nine days. Give or take a couple of days.”

Maggie drew her breath in sharply. Jameson didn’t look at her. He turned to Maybury. The girl’s face was pale and drained under a dark cap of hacked-off hair. Her eyes were huge. He could see her narrow shoulders trembling.

“Is that right?” he demanded.

She bit her lip. “That’s right. If your diagram’s anywhere near right, the Cygnans expect to begin to move Jupiter out of orbit in about nine days.”

“Tod!” Maggie said urgently. “We’d better tell Captain Boyle right away! That leaves practically no time at all for his escape plans!”

“We’re not going to tell the captain.”

“What?” Maggie sat suddenly erect.

“We’re not telling the captain. Or anybody. Maggie, I want you to keep quiet about this.”

“But, Tod—”

“Nine days isn’t time enough to do anything. A lot of people would just get hurt. Even if we got loose in the ship for a while, we couldn’t go anywhere. We’d just get the Cygnans stirred up, get in their way.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing!” she said. There was an edge of contempt in her voice. “Maybe it is hopeless. But Captain Boyle says it’s our duty to try to escape.”

“Under ordinary circumstances, sure. But our duty now is to the entire human race. And we’re all they’ve got.”

Maggie shook her mop of red hair. “Tod, what are you talking about?”

Ruiz shifted on his haunches. With his starved bony body and the rags around his loins, he looked like some Indian sadhu. “He means that we’ve got to be sacrificial lambs.”

“Maggie,” Jameson said urgently, “in nine days a Jupiter-sized mass is going to sail across Earth’s orbit and past the Sun on its way out again. What’s left of Jupiter plus the virtual mass of the probe they’re using to move it. Most of the mass will still be there—they won’t have used up all that much at a speed of only…” He floundered.

“Less than four hundred kilometers a second,” Ruiz supplied.