Donald Moffitt -Jupiter Theft

The Jupiter Theft

Donald Moffitt

An [e - reads ] Book

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage

retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First e-reads publication 1999

www.e-reads.com

ISBN 0-7592-0234-6

Author Biography

Donald Moffitt was born in Boston and now lives in rural Maine with his wife, Anne, a native of

Connecticut. A former public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter, he has been

writing fiction on and off for more than twenty years under an assortment of pen names, including his

own. His first full-length science-fiction novel and the first book of any genre to be published under his

own name was THE JUPITER THEFT (Del Rey, 1977).

For Ann, whose energy is greater than her mass

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

The Jupiter Theft

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Chapter 1

The Swan was rising.

Deneb popped up on schedule, a bright spark above the crater rim. The giant X-ray telescope anchored

in the dust of the Korolev Basin revolved in its heavy turret to take an optical bearing on it. The

telescope's rudimentary brain made a minor adjustment in alignment, plugged itself into the Farside

computer's cesium clock, and waited patiently for the object it had been told to track.

A sizzle of X-rays bounced off the nest of paraboloid reflectors and hit the scanning focus. The

telescope became mildly attentive. It was several seconds too early for the appearance of Cygnus X-1.

Then Cygnus X-1 itself rose above the bleak lunar horizon, right where it was supposed to be.

Something was very wrong.

The telescope called for help. It took the Farside computer about twelve nanoseconds to check all the

possibilities against the star charts stored in its memory. None of them fit. It took another fraction of a

second to rule out instrumentation errors. Then the computer followed its standing instructions and alerted

the people.

The alarm went off with a ping, and the new duty tech, startled, dropped her stylus and lightpad. Anyone

could tell she hadn't been on the Moon long. She bent to catch them much too quickly, and the abrupt

motion lifted her bare feet right off the floor. Then she lost track, of her center of mass, toppled over all

the way, and went sprawling face downward in slow motion.

The junior astronomy resident grabbed a handful of her smock and set her on her feet again before her

eighteen pounds could hit bottom. "Relax," he said with an irritating grin. "You'll get used to it."

He was a six-month veteran of Farside Station himself, a brash, freckled young man who affected faded

reg shorts and a shaved chest with his ident disk pasted on it. His name was Kerry, and he fancied

himself irresistible. He handed the lightpad back to her with an unnecessary flourish.

Flustered, the duty tech turned to the monitor wall and located the flashing amber light among the banks

of glowing buttons and display screens. She began logging the data flickering on the LED panel below it.

Suddenly, her eyes widened.

"A new X-ray source in Cygnus," she said. "A strong one."

He leaned over to see. "It must be Cyg X-l."

"No. There's a definite separation. Besides, this one isn't pulsing."

"It's Cyg X-3 then."

"It isn't, I tell you. The computer's already checked for position and emission characteristics."

She wiped the lightpad, thumbing her notes into the computer's temporary memory register, and turned

to face him. She was a small, sturdy young woman with a tight, pretty face and a cap of dark hair. Her

ident disk said maybury.

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"We're famous then." He grinned. "It happened during our shift. How about celebrating with me when

we go off duty? I've got a ten-pack in my coop. Genuine bonded joints—gold label, no synthetics."

He leered. Like most of the station's female staffers, she'd elected to go braless in the Moon's

less-demanding gravity, and there was an exaggerated tidal motion under her smock.

Before she could squelch him, another ping came from the board.

"The computer wants to divert Polyphemus," she said, frowning.

"Why is it bothering to ask?"

"Dr. Shevchenko's using Polyphemus this month. He's touchy."

"It's your decision."

The duty tech bit her lip and after a moment's hesitation punched in the authorization. The computer

thanked her, and pinpricks of colored light began to ripple across the huge circular grid mounted

overhead. Dotted lines streamed from the pinpricks, forming a holo image that seemed to converge in

infinity. The tech and the resident turned instinctively toward the south observation window. There was a

rustle of movement across the floor of the dome as more people turned to stare. Polyphemus in action

was an impressive sight.

Out there on the pockmarked landscape a field of enormous metal flowers stretched as far as the eye

could see, disappearing over the sharp curve of the lunar horizon, only a couple of miles distant, without

diminishing in scale the way Earth-bred eyes said they ought to. Each of those tremendous bowls was as

big across as a football field, and there were more than two thousand of them, covering thirty square

miles of the Korolev Basin. Now, as the observatory staff fell silent, the whole vast array swiveled in

unison until all of them faced the same starry patch of sky.

They were aimed at the constellation of the Swan, still low on the horizon. The duty tech turned her face

in the same direction and located Cygnus: a glittering cross with Deneb blazing at its tip. No one could

see Cygnus X-1, of course, but Maybury knew it was there, near the place where the arms of the cross

intersected. She was very glad it was ten thousand light-years away.

She shuddered, trying to imagine it. The thing called Cyg X-1 was an X-ray inferno, shedding an

invisible glare equal to the total energy output of ten thousand suns. If it had any planets, it had fried them

long ago.

Vampire stars—that was what X-ray sources like Cyg X-l generally turned out to be: black holes or

neutron stars that circled a blue supergiant companion, relentlessly sucking away its gases. As the gas fell

into that terrible gravitational field, it was squeezed, bruised, heated to temperatures of up to 100 million

degrees Kelvin. In the process it gave off that raging hellfire of X-rays.

The odds were that the new source in Cygnus would turn out to be something similar. The evolution of

such X-ray binaries had been well understood since the late twentieth century: A massive star swelled as

it burned up its hydrogen fuel, overflowing its Roche lobe and contributing mass to its companion. A

supernova explosion in the burnt-out star left a black hole behind. And then, for a brief period of thirty or

forty thousand years, a reversal of the mass exchange as the companion star in turn burned up its

hydrogen and bloated to a blue supergiant, while the relentless hole devoured its substance. The Farside

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computer would be comparing its X-ray and radio images now, trying to fit its accumulating data into

such a picture.

Another ping brought her attention back to the board. The junior resident peered over her shoulder.

"The computer's found something it can't handle," he murmured. "It's just plugged itself in to the data

center at Mare Imbrium."

The two computers, on opposite sides of the Moon, began exchanging data. After a couple of seconds

the console buzzed to catch the humans' attention, and a new request flowed across the screen.

"Now it wants the use of the five-hundred-inch reflector," the resident said.

The tech bit her lip again. "I'd better get Dr. Ruiz," she said.

"He won't like it. He was up all night."

But the duty tech already had spoken into her lapel communicator and asked the desk to wake up

Farside's director.

By the time Dr. Ruiz arrived, green-smocked technicians and off-duty personnel were milling around the

area. Word had spread quickly that something was going on, and curious faces peered into the

glass-walled monitor booth.

Ruiz pushed through the crowd and closed the door of the booth behind him. He was a tall, gaunt man,

slightly stooped, with hollow cheeks and a leathery complexion. His knobby legs showed the effects of

childhood malnourishment. His eyes were bleary with lack of sleep, and he was still tucking his singlet

into his baggy shorts.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Ruiz, but—"

He waved her apology aside. "What's this about the computer asking to divert the Sagan reflector?"

"It's true, Doctor. It's already diverted the Polyphemus array. Now it apparently wants to try for a

counterpart image at the visible wavelengths. But with optical-viewing time booked three months in

advance, I thought I'd better—"

"Yes, yes. You did the right thing to call me." The director's eyes already were roving restlessly over the

winking lights and flickering data screens of the big board. "What have you got so far?"

The tech turned on her lightpad. Her handwriting and underlinings, in scratches of blue lightning on the

pad's polycrystalline surface, crowded the computer-generated script she had dialed in from the board.

"Well, for one thing it doesn't pulse. It just gives off a steady X-ray emission consistent with a point

source."

"Hmmm. How about the possibility of sinusoidal variation with a period of several hours, like Cyg X-3?"

She shook her head firmly. "The computer's been tracking it long enough to have detected a curve. It's a

radio source, too. We have a fix on it with Polyphemus."

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Ruiz raised a shaggy eyebrow. "You diverted Polyphemus?

She stood her ground. "Yes, Doctor. I'm authorized to—"

"Don't worry about it." He laughed. "I'll deal with Dr. Shevchenko. You're doing fine so far. Go on."

The junior resident butted in, trying to get himself noticed. "Excuse me, Dr. Ruiz, but the X-ray source is

only a couple of seconds of arc from Cyg X-1. It confused the telescope at first. Doesn't that suggest that

it's been occulted by X-1 until now?"

"And what doyou say"—Ruiz squinted at the duty tech's ident disk—"Mizz Maybury?"

The tech blushed. "It's only twenty-eight days since the last sighting. Cyg X-1 is over ten thousand

light-years away. The new sourcecouldn't have been hiding behind it. For the apparent separation to

increase that much, it would have to be moving laterally at several hundred times the speed of light."

"And what doesthat suggest?"

Maybury gave the junior resident an apologetic glance. "That it's the other way around. The new source

may have been masked by Cyg X-l, but it's closer to the solar system."

"My thought exactly."

Ruiz walked over to the observation window, an imposing and dignified figure despite his baggy shorts,

his knobby joints, the legs twisted by rickets that were his legacy from his childhood in New Manhattan.

He looked out at the starry sky and located the Swan. He stared at it a long time, as if he were making

up his mind about something.

With a casualness that made the other two gasp, Ruiz turned back to the board and punched in an

authorization for the immediate use of the 500-inch Sagan mirror in the Tsiolkovsky crater. Diverting the

giant telescope from high-priority projects wasn't something you did lightly, even if you were the director

of Farside Station.

Instantly, a stunning image sprang into life on the photoplastic viewplate. It was truer and richer than the

images that had been possible on the obsolete photographic emulsions of the twentieth century. There

was no graininess with enlargement. They were seeing, in real time, exactly what the big eye was seeing

halfway across the Moon.

There was an illusion of stars swimming across the plate, as electrical potentials changed on the plastic's

surface. The stars halted as the Farside computer locked the telescope into the Polyphemus radio array.

The blue supergiant known as HDE 226868 was plainly visible as a bloated disk, thanks to computer

enhancement of thousands of separate millisecond-long exposures. You could even see the pronounced

bulge at one side, where its substance was being sucked away by its invisible companion—invisible

because black holes swallow their own light, as they swallow everything else.

Ruiz made the computer generate a phantom image derived from radio waves and X-ray scatter. A

fuzzy speck of cotton appeared opposite the tip of the bulge. He shifted focus and found another cotton

ball halfway between Cyg X-1 and Deneb. Whatever the new source was, it wasn't part of a binary. He

frowned.

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Maybury had been busy comparing her first entries on the lightpad with the updated figures on the

board. "Dr. Ruiz," she said in a puzzled tone, "there's no proper motion that the computer can detect. I

know the observational sample is still very small, but the new object seems to have stopped its lateral

movement. She hesitated. "That would mean that it's changed direction twice in the last twenty-eight

days."

The junior astronomy resident snorted. "That's impossible!"

Nobody paid any attention. Ruiz looked thoughtful. "Mizz Maybury…"

She was way ahead of him. She scribbled a question on her lightpad and read off the answer that

appeared a moment later.

"The computer says that both the radio waves and X-ray emissions are blue-shifted," she said. "It's been

compensating for our benefit."

"That means that the object is moving toward us," the resident said brightly.

Ruiz switched off the ghost image and stared intently at the place where it had been. There was nothing

visible.

But Deneb jiggled.

The others saw it too. All of a sudden the room was very quiet.

"Mizz, Maybury," Ruiz said, "will you ask the computer to generate a star chart on this screen? Just the

main reference points will do."

"I'll do it," the junior resident offered.

A scattering of white crosses appeared on the screen, canceling out the stars. But Deneb was still there,

displaced inward toward the cotton ball.

"It's bending light, whatever it is," Ruiz said. "And it's between us and—"

Angry squawking from the wall communicator interrupted him. He looked up and saw the apoplectic

face of Dr. Mackie, the chief astronomer at the Sagan dome.

"Dr. Ruiz!" Mackie sputtered. "I must protest the highhanded manner in which you preempted the

schedule of the five-hundred-inch mirror. There are such things as review boards, and I can assure you

that—"

"Calm down, Horace," Ruiz said. "I think you'd better get over here right away."

Mackie's truculence faded suddenly. "What have you got?" he said carefully.

"I'm not sure, but I want you in on it. Requisition the courier rocket. If you leave right away, you can be

here in an hour."

As soon as Mackie switched off, Ruiz called Central Communications. "Put this through to the Mars

station. Personal, direct to Dr. Larrabee at the Syrtis Major radio observatory. Wake him up if he's

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asleep."

"You're on, Doctor," Communications said.

Ruiz spoke rapidly and precisely into the communicator, giving coordinates, explaining the situation in as

few words as possible. "… And, Larry," he finished, "don't waste time calling me back for a

confirmation. Just do it."

He switched off and settled back in one of the swivel chairs. "How about some coffee while we're

waiting?" he said.

The wait was over an hour. There could be no such thing as a conversation with Mars, particularly when

Mars was on the other side of the Sun, as it was now. As the crow flies, it would take radio waves a bit

more than twenty minutes to travel one way. But the crow would not fly through the sun. The message

had to be bounced off the relay satellite orbiting Venus, currently a quarter orbit ahead of Earth, and in

line of sight with both Earth and Mars. The round trip for an exchange of messages, with the detour,

would take about an hour, even if Larrabee answered immediately.

He answered almost immediately. Ruiz was into his third cup of lukewarm coffee when Larrabee's voice

came out of the wall, clear as a bell, with all the interplanetary static edited out by the computer. Voice

transmissions from Mars were sent in pulse-code modulation with triple redundancy, and in the unlikely

event that any particular pulse was wiped out all three times, the gap was too infinitesimal for the human

ear to detect.

"I don't know what this is all about, Hernando," a cheerful baritone said, "but I'll take your word for it

that it's important. We're zeroing in on your Cygnus source now. Just sit tight a couple more minutes. I'll

keep the beam open. You owe me a drink when I get back."

Ruiz sipped another cup while the resident, Kerry, hovered around him and Maybury punched setups

into the board. The new shift had arrived, and they were tiptoeing around, trying not to look curious. Ten

minutes later, lights started blinking all over the board as the Mars computer fed data via radio into the

Farside computer's memory buffer register. The computer, consulting its hydrogen maser clock,

corrected for transmission delay.

Before astronomers had set up shop on Mars, they had had to wait six months to measure parallax. You

took a picture of your target star, and when the Earth had traveled halfway around the sun you took

another picture on the same plate and measured the apparent shift. Now you could triangulate by taking

sightings from the Moon and Mars simultaneously.

Ruiz watched the figures unreeling on the LED displays, his coffee forgotten. In his mind he translated

them into a triangle with a base line that was 234 million miles wide. If the X-ray source was anywhere

within a hundred light-years, he'd get reliable results.

Two glowing dots appeared on the viewplate against a background of stars; the computer had enough

data now to attempt a preliminary visualization. Who had asked it to do that? He looked up—that

technician, Maybury. She was efficient. That fool with the shaved chest was doing nothing except stand

around looking important.

Ruiz looked back at the screen and blinked. The dots had stopped jiggling. They were impossibly far

apart. The parallactic shift was… huge!

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The damned thing was less than a light-year away!

He snatched the lightpad from a startled Mizz Maybury and made his own rough calculation. His answer

approximated the computer's average figure: a distance of about half a light-year. The Cygnus source

wasclose —closer than any stellar object had a right to be. And it wa blue-shifting. And there was no

proper motion. All the motion was head-on.

Something soft nudged his arm: Mizz Maybury's breast. She was leaning across him, thrusting a piece of

paper in front of him, trying to get his attention.

"Dr. Ruiz!" she said urgently. "I thought you might want—that is—I asked the computer to pull out the

most recent planetary data. The positions of the outer planets—I mean, there's a discrepancy of several

seconds in the longitude and declination of both Neptune and Pluto. It might turn out to be simple

observational error, but—-"

He waved her aside. "In a moment, Mizz Maybury." He was staring intently at the screen that showed

the values for the base angles. The computer was constantly updating them as it refined and reaveraged

its data. They held steady up to the eighth decimal point, then jumped back and forth a good deal, but the

trend of the figures was definitely higher.

The thing had to be movingfast to show any noticeable change in that short a time. Ruiz was almost

afraid to ask how fast. But he wiped the lightpad and scribbled an order for the computer to pin a

tentative value on the blue shift and try to correlate it with the changing parallax. There was a pause of

several seconds while the computer searched its peripheral memories for an appropriate program; then

figures began to flow across the lightpad, while a duplicate column of numbers marched across one of the

display screens.

He heard a gasp behind him. Maybury was looking over his shoulder.

"That's right," he said. "It appears to be moving toward us at something more than ninety-eight percent of

the speed of light."

Over at the data screen the junior resident cleared his throat. He was perspiring, and the green ident disk

on his chest was coming unstuck. "That means it'll be in the vicinity of the solar system in about six

months," he said.

"At its present speed, yes," Ruiz said.

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. Finally he said, "I don't suppose we'll really have enough

data till we've observed it for a few more days, but why don't you have the computer generate a

projection of the path of the Cygnus source through the solar system."

Maybury and the young man got busy over at one of the consoles. Ruiz could hear them whispering

together, having some kind of dispute, but he wasn't paying attention. He was thinking about the trip to

Earth he'd probably be making some time in the next twelve hours, dreading it. He glanced up and saw

the junior resident, an angry flush on his face and chest, step away from the console and stare sulkily out

the observation window. Maybury was hunched over, shoulders tense, her fingers flying over the

lightboard, her bare toes twiddling in unconscious rhythm. At last she straightened up and turned in her

chair.

A flat disk grew in the square darkness of the holo well. It looked something like a target, with the sun

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and the orbits of the inner planet crowded together to make a bull's-eye. In the computer's stylized

representation, Pluto's orbit was a tilted hoop intersecting the orbit of Neptune, which had briefly

replaced it as the outermost planet beginning in 1987.

A yellow dotted line with an arrowhead represented the probable course of the Cygnus source. It

wiggled back and forth a bit as the computer changed its mind, but it always intersected the plane of the

ecliptic somewhere near the edge of the bull's-eye.

Ruiz canted the image for better perspective and zoomed in so that Jupiter's orbit was outermost. Now

he could see the positions of the inner planets—colored beads strung on those glowing tracks, and

necessarily out of scale. Six months hence, Mars would just have overtaken Jupiter, and Earth would be

rounding the Sun to catch up.

That X-ray holocaust from Cygnus was going to penetrate the plane of the solar system somewhere

between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. It would pass within 4 A.U.s of Earth.

Ruiz rose out of his chair very carefully, like an old man, and walked over to the observation window.

He took another long look at Cygnus, knowing it was futile. If the 500-inch telescope couldn't see

anything, he certainly wasn't going to see anything with the naked eye. The duty tech made no attempt to

follow him with her piece of paper. Even the junior resident had sense enough not to say anything.

Dr. Mackie arrived a few minutes later, still wearing his pressure suit, his helmet tucked under his arm

and his turkey neck sticking out of the collar ring. He saw the look on Ruiz's face. "What's wrong?" he

said.

Ruiz was a tough old bird. He had grown up in the squalor of a refugee camp on Long Island in the

years after most of Manhattan had been rendered uninhabitable by the bomb, made of stolen reactor

wastes, set off by the New England Separatists in 1998. He had clawed his way to the top on his own

merits, despite the twin handicaps of poverty and a provisional ident. There wasn't much that could

unnerve him.

But now his face was gray as he turned to Mackie.

"I'm putting you in charge, Horace," he said. "I'm going down to Earth to tell them that the human race

has just been sentenced to death."

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Chapter 2

Tod Jameson flung up a gauntleted hand to protect his faceplate and yelled: "Wei hsien!"

He grabbed a startled Li Chen-yung by an air hose and spun him around. There was just enough time to

plant both boots against Li's quilted blue spacesuit and give him a mighty shove; then the flat, perforated

pad of the landing leg went sailing past his head like a gigantic flyswatter. Its stately slow motion was

deceptive. There was enough mass behind the pad to grind him into the hull like a bug. His spine

crawling, Jameson saw it crunch its way through several honeycomb layers of the Callisto lander's skin

and embed itself there, trailing springs and broken struts.

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Donald Moffitt -Jupiter Theft

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