Now Jameson slumped, exhausted, in a contour seat on the ship’s bridge. Mike had promised boron fission within a couple of hours. The last missile rocket engine had been expended.
“What if they come back?” Kay asked, looking at him with red-rimmed eyes through a strand of straggling hair. “Even when we get going, we can only accelerate at a hundredth of a g. They can catch up to us in a few hours, any time they feel like it.”
Jameson looked out through the big bubble at Jupiter’s bright sphere. Io, or the sodium glow that surrounded it, was visible as a fuzzy yellow golfball that from this angle seemed to be poised just above Jupiter’s eastern edge. The Cygnan ships were invisible, but they could be seen through a telescope as a glowing pentad hovering close to Io, keeping its bulk between them and the giant planet. They had transferred their orbit from their own moon, the one they had brought with them, to Io with its closer position, a bit over a quarter of a million miles from Jupiter. The pentacle of laser light was evidently a calibrating device as the five ships fine-tuned their new joint orbit.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Jameson said. “They’re ready to move, all right. Those ships started changing their orbit about three seconds after the boarding party got back to them. What worries me is being this close to Jupiter. If we’re still in orbit around it when they start moving, we’ll go right along with them. And we don’t have Io to shield us from radiation once they start moving through interstellar hydrogen at close to light speed.”
“We be dead long before that time,” Yeh grunted from his console. His lumpy face was lined with fatigue. He had worked without rest since reaching the ship.
Jameson nodded. “If we didn’t get torn loose by the sun and fry to death, it would be hunger, decompression, or systems failure. Take your pick. We’ll be lucky to nurse this wreck back to Earth in one piece.”
“Bye dzwe na-yang!” Yeh suddenly bellowed. “Don’t touch that!”
The feathery humanoid snatched its hand away from the control board, its teddy-bear face looking somehow hurt. It rewarded Yeh with a bad smell, something like rotten eggs, and pranced off to join its friend over at one of the scattered monitor screens on the floor.
“Mischievous little devils, aren’t they,” said Kay.
Jameson watched the rosy-furred creatures fiddle with the console. They had somehow managed to conjure up a star chart. Now one of them was making peeping field-mouse noises, rolling the display, while the other one danced around in front of the view window, pointing at constellations.
“These two aren’t the simple hunters they seemed to be, any more than we still are,” Jameson said. “They come from a technologically advanced civilization. They were trying to show Mike something about how the Cygnan broomstick worked until he threw them out of the engine room. I think that before we get back home they’ll be helping us man this ship.”
The pink bipeds had been an invaluable help with the Cygnan prisoner, keeping it tranquilized and getting it settled in a cage—a cage, Jameson reflected, that was probably less comfortable than the one he’d been confined in aboard the Cygnan vessel. The Cygnan was in Kiernan’s care now. It would have a lot of hamsters for company if Kiernan could get a few of the frozen ova in his files to start dividing. The humanoids had painstakingly sniffed every food and biological sample that Kiernan had shown them to try to improvise a diet that would keep the Cygnan alive until they got back to Earth. One of the things it could eat, surprisingly, was turkey, so it was going to get everybody’s portion of frozen Christmas dinner—if everybody lived that long. The humanoids themselves had rejected all terrestrial animal protein, and were putting together a combination of spun vegetable protein that evidently added up to the right balance of amino acids. With the superb analytical laboratories in their noses, they were in no danger of starving.
The Cygnan prisoner, the humanoids had given Jameson to understand, was not just some run-of-the-mill technician, but was an important person they had taken some pains to select. They seemed desperately to want to keep it alive.
The humanoid looking at the stars suddenly bounced into the air and tumbled weightlessly toward Jameson like a giant ball of pink milkweed. Its fluffy tail whipped around the guardrail to anchor it, and it plucked at Jameson’s sleeve, making urgent piping sounds. When it finally had Jameson’s attention, it struck itself on its little chest and flung a slender arm toward the constellation Cygnus.
“What in the world,” Kay said.
“He’s telling us where his home is,” Jameson said.
“Of course. It would have to be somewhere in the volume of space between here and Cygnus, along the Cygnans’ line of flight. But which star? It might not even be visible to the naked eye.”
“It’s not Deneb or Albireo. They’re too far away from the line of sight toward Cyg X-l, and we know the Cygnans came in more or less under its X-ray umbrella. Wait a minute! I think it’s trying to tell me that it’s 61 Cygni! But if that’s so, then—”
Jameson didn’t get a chance to finish. Yeh had risen from his seat so abruptly that he had to grasp an armrest to keep from floating off.
“K’an, k’an!” he said excitedly. “Look! It happens!”
In a moment the three of them were crowding the observation rail, looking out into the dark. An awesome event was taking place out there.
Against the burning stars, Jupiter moved!
Jameson could only gape. The scale of what he was witnessing was almost beyond human grasp.
Slowly, ponderously, the colossal bulk of the planet stirred.
It sloshed.
Across its seething face, a great sluggish tidal wave of thickened hydrogen brimmed over hundreds of miles of atmosphere and lapped in an advancing wall that would have tumbled Earth like a cork.
It stretched.
It no longer was the oblate sphere that man had known since he started looking at it through telescopes. The thing spinning around its waist had given it a flying-saucer shape, a hatbrim of raging hydrogen fighting to pour itself into the circling maw of a gnat.
The gnat had strained and swallowed an elephant. By now, zipping around the captive giant at very nearly the speed of light, the robot probe had converted enough of the stolen hydrogen into Einsteinian mass to tug at the remainder of that tremendous corpse.
Just how much of Jupiter was left? To Jameson, it looked no smaller than before. Perhaps it had lost a few thousand miles of diameter, perhaps not. As its outer layers were stripped away, the rest of that compressed hydrogen, relieved of pressure, would tend to boil and swell. And even with half its bulk gone, Jupiter would still be the most massive object in the solar system other than the Sun itself.
“It won’t be there!” Kay said suddenly. “I just realized that from now on when we look up in the sky at night to find Jupiter, it won’t be there!”
Jameson looked around and was amazed to see tears running down her cheeks. “Sorry,” Kay said. “I’m just tired.”
“It’ll be our turn someday, Kay,” he said. “When we’ve used up everything else, we’ll start using up the planets.”
With trembling hands he swung one, of the stubby ship’s telescopes around in its gimbals and turned on the magnetic lens. The computer-controlled fields flexed transparent plastic, shaped a pool of mercury into a reflecting curve. A picture stirred itself into being on the photoplastic plate behind the eyepiece, held steady by the electronic image compensator.