Michael’s Reviews > The Jupiter Theft > Status Update

There was a vast churning within the cloudy liquid and one of the enormous pancake shapes came hurtling toward them to flatten its quarter acre of surface against the glass. The floor beneath their feet shook with the impact.
"One crack in the glass and it would all be over - for them and us," Ruiz said. "If the liquid hydrogen didn't instantly freeze us solid, the explosion when a creature that size depressurized

"There are too many crazies in the command structure. Did you hear what Yao asked me about the nukes? My God, what if they got it into their heads to try to take some kind of action against the Cygnans? They couldn't succeed, of course, but they might get the Cygnans annoyed with Homo Sapiens. One little fly-by with that drive of theirs on, and they could cook the whole Earth down to the bottom of the lithosphere."

Only those rare freaks like Jameson, who happened to be blessed with absolute pitch, could ever hope to communicate with Cygnans, even in a rudimentary fashion. To Cygnans, most humans would be dumb as animals.

A walnut-sized pellet of boron dropped into a vat. It was hollow on the inside, and beautifully machined, with twelve precise pinholes slanting through its jacket. It was immediately stuffed with a tiny snowball made of frozen deuterium and tritium.

By the time the intruder from Cygnus crossed the orbit of Neptune, its mass had shrunk to approximately that of the planet Earth.