Even the deadly probe, with its radiation backlash, was never at the crossroads of the moon’s orbit at the two points where their paths intersected. Everything ticked along beautifully.
“I see,” Jameson said. “Your ships are safe.”
The two Cygnans whistled their approval. Tetrachord wiped the screens and dropped down on four legs. One of his upper limbs twined around Triad in an almost-human gesture of affection.
Jameson blared the sharp fanfare for attention. Startled, the Cygnans jerked their heads in his direction.
“What about Earth? My planet. Will it be safe when you leave this system?”
Consternation. Much twittering back and forth. Jameson had the impression that they had never thought about it, that it hadn’t occurred to them to care.
Finally Tetrachord punched in an inquiry to the ship’s computer, or whatever passed for one aboard the Cygnan vessel. There were flashing images that made no sense to Jameson. They hadn’t bothered to adjust the screen for human vision this time.
Tetrachord twisted around. His eyestalks stretched like taffy in Jameson’s direction.
“Jameson,” the creature said. “We will cross the orbit of your planet when we leave. We will pass close to your sun and swing around it to change direction.”
Jameson got a crawly sensation down his spine. The Cygnan caravan would cross the Earth’s orbit twice.
“Just how close to Earth will you pass?” he asked.
There was no answer for a while. Jameson found he was holding his breath.
The Cygnans wouldn’t have reached anything near light-speed by the time they crossed Earth’s path, of course, so the deadly shower of X-rays that had announced their approach to the solar system would be no danger. But the probe’s deadly drive would be on. That in itself might be enough to sterilize a hemisphere if it got too close and was pointed in the wrong direction. Then, too, there was Jupiter’s own radiation belt, extending millions of miles into space. The Cygnans themselves would be safe from charged particles in the zone swept clean by their moon, but Earth might not be so fortunate.
And there certainly would be tidal effects.
Jameson trembled at the thought of what might happen if a Jupiter-sized mass passed too close to Earth. Earthquakes, floods, perhaps even the breakup of the Earth’s crust.
What if the Earth’s orbit were changed, moved a couple of million miles closer to the sun? Or pulled farther away? Or changed, like Pluto’s, to a more elliptical orbit? Earth’s climate could be permanently altered—an eternal ice age, with much of terrestrial life obliterated, or a water world, steaming under the melted polar caps!
Earth might even be plucked out of orbit to fall into the Sun.
“How close?” he repeated urgently.
“Jameson will be safe,” Triad hummed soothingly. “We will take Jameson with us.”
“Dammit!” he exploded. “That’s not what I asked! What about the Earth?”
He stopped. He’d unthinkingly used human speech.
They didn’t understand the words, but the violence of his outburst had startled them.
Triad pressed herself against her larger companion. The soft, rat-sized thing plastered to her abdomen reacted to her distress by digging in more firmly with its insectlike legs.
Tetrachord hissed reflexively at Jameson. His upper body stretched to become a foot taller.
Jameson stood facing the alien pair, fists clenched. The kitten had dropped off his lap and scurried away. After a moment, Jameson’s fists fell to his sides. The tension in the bodies of the two Cygnans gradually relaxed.
Jameson stooped over the keyboard of the Moog again and played out his question. “Where will the Earth be when you pass?”
There was a pause while they digested his query. Finally Tetrachord said, “We do not know.”
“Find out,” Jameson said. There was no Cygnan word for “please.”
They exchanged some running cadenzas, too fast for Jameson to follow. Then Tetrachord, still with a couple of arms around Triad, turned to his electronic zither and twisted some frets. A rapid chirping came out of the console. Tetrachord chirped back at it. For some reason the Cygnan had not encoded the question to the ship’s computer. He’d asked someone.
Jameson couldn’t understand the reply. Colloquial Cygnan would always be beyond him.
After a delay, a picture formed on the tripartite screen—another nursery diagram, like the one he’d been shown of the Cygnan travel arrangements. This one showed a series of concentric triangles with a glowing yellow triangle in the center. The Sun and the orbits of the planets! Jameson gulped. Was that how the Cygnans saw circles? It hadn’t been so in the previous projection, but perhaps this was someone’s shorthand sketch or working diagram.
An irritated shrilling came from the console. A small green triangle appeared at the third place from the sun and moved back and forth along its track until it found a place and settled down. The orange triangle representing Jupiter jumped out of its orbit and moved jerkily Sunward. It dragged the yellow line of its orbit with it, opening the triangle into a four-sided evolute of ellipse. The evolute stretched as Jupiter intersected the inner solar system, traced a sharp V around the Sun, and headed out into the depths of space again.
Mercury and Venus jumped in their orbits. The white triangle representing Venus had been set spinning. But Earth had been spared.
“Your planet will be on the other side of the Sun,” Tetrachord said, unnecessarily.
Jameson eased himself down on the Moog’s stool. His knees were trembling. He became aware that he was drenched with sweat.
If he could believe the Cygnans—and if they didn’t decide, from some incomprehensible alien motive, to recompute their line of flight—Earth would be allowed to live.
As long as nothing delayed the Cygnan’s departure.
Chapter 20
The attendant was old. If it had been a human being, Jameson would have said it shuffled. By this time he was familiar enough with Cygnans to know that this one’s characteristic darting body movements were stiffer and slower than Tetrachord’s or Triad’s. Its mottled hide was duller, drier, less glossy. Did older Cygnans outlive their parasites, as terrestrial animals sometimes did? At any rate, there was no sluglike pest hanging from its belly, though Jameson thought he detected an old cicatrix where a tiny bloodsucking head might once have been embedded.
Its name—or at least the sound by which the other Cygnans addressed it—was a buzzing alteration of augmented fourths, so Jameson thought of the creature as Augie.
Augie was sidling warily into the room now on three legs, carrying a pan of greenish gruel in its forward pair of limbs and clutching a two-pronged electric prod in its free middle claw. Augie had never gotten over being afraid of Jameson.
Jameson backed off a little so as not to frighten the little creature. Augie set the pan down on the floor, back arched stiffly and eyestalks scanning in ragged circles. Retreating, the Cygnan got a foot tangled in the leathery double-ended poncho it wore for an apron. It hastily disentangled itself and skittered backward through the rolling disk that served as a door. The crescent opening closed with a thud.
Jameson could almost feel sympathy for the attendant. The poor creature had been saddled with responsibility for the monster from Earth for several days now. Triad and Tetrachord were off on one of their incomprehensible errands. Whenever they were gone, Jameson was kept locked up in a small adjoining chamber.
He looked sourly around at his surroundings. His cell was a narrow wedge crammed with Cygnan junk: dusty oddly shaped containers emptied of their original contents, heaps of pretzel-shaped transparent tubing, a broken three-armed perch. He’d dragged in as much of the looted human stores as was usefuclass="underline" clothing, packaged food, bedding, some miscellaneous furniture and utensils. He was dressed in clean coveralls that were too small for him; the name stitched over the breast pocket said Gifford. He had improvised a shower and sanitary facilities in the narrow corner, and when he was able to get into the main chamber he refilled his perforated jerrycans with water and emptied his makeshift chamber pots into the waste-disposal system. Augie wasn’t much on cleaning up.