by Carol
He wiped an open palm across the control boards, snapping all the toggles “Off” with a sound like the fall of a double-handful of marbles on a pane of glass. “Like that, Charity! And I work four hours a day, every day, on the Bridge.,One of these days, Jupiter is going to destroy the Bridge. It’ll go flying away in little flinders into the storms. My mind will be there, supervising some puny job, and my mind will go flying away along with my mechanical eyes and ears—still trying to adapt to the unthinkable, tumbling away into the winds and the flames and the rains and the darkness and the pressure and the cold.”
“Bob, you’re deliberately running away with yourself. Cut it out. Cut it out, I say!”
Helmuth shrugged, putting a trembling hand on the edge of the board to steady himself. “All right. I’m all right, Charity. I’m here, aren’t I? Right here on Jupiter V, in no danger, in no danger at all. The bridge is one hundred and twelve thousand and six hundred miles away from here. But when the day comes that the Bridge is swept away—
“Charity, sometimes I imagine you ferrying my body back to the cosy nook it came from, while my soul goes tumbling and tumbling through millions of cubic miles of poison. All right, Charity, I’ll be good. I won’t think about it out loud; but you can’t expect me to forget it. It’s on my mind; I can’t help it, and you should know that.”
“I do,” Dillon said, with a kind of eagerness. “I do, Bob. I’m only trying to help, to make you see the problem as it is. The Bridge isn’t really that awful, it isn’t worth a single nightmare.”
“Oh, it isn’t the Bridge that makes me yell out when “I’m sleeping,” Helmuth said, smiling bitterly. “I’m not that ridden by it yet. It’s while I’m awake that I’m afraid the Bridge will be swept away. What I sleep with is a fear of myself.”
“That’s a sane fear. You’re as sane as any of us,” Dillon insisted, fiercely solemn. “Look, Bob. The Bridge isn’t a monster. It’s a way we’ve developed for studying the behavior of materials under specific conditions of temperament, pressure, and gravity. Jupiter isn’t Hell, either; it’s a set of conditions. The Bridge is the laboratory we set up to work with those conditions.”
“It isn’t going anywhere. It’s a bridge to no place.”
“There aren’t many places on Jupiter,” Dillon said, missing Helmuth’s meaning entirely. “We put the bridge on an island in the local sea because we needed solid ice we could sink the caissons in. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered where we put it. We could have floated it on the sea itself, if we hadn’t wanted to fix it in order to measure storm velocities and such things.”
“I know that,” Helmuth said.
“But, Bob, you don’t show any signs of understanding it Why, for instance, should the Bridge go any place?
It isn’t even, property speaking, a bridge at all. We only call it that because we used some bridge engineering principles in building it. Actually, it’s much more like a travelling crane—an extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn’t going anywhere because it hasn’t any place interesting to go, that’s all. We’re extending it to cover as much territory as possible, and to increase its stability, not to span the distance between places. There’s no point to reproaching it because it doesn’t span a real gap—between, say, Dover and Calais. It’s a bridge to knowledge, and that’s far more important. Why can’t you see that?”
“I can see that; that’s what I was talking about,” Helmuth said, trying to control his impatience. “I have as much common sense as the average child. What I was trying to point out is that meeting colossalness with colossalness—out here—is a mug’s game. It’s a game Jupiter will always win, without the slightest effort. What if the engineers who built the Dover-Calais bridge had been limited to broomstraws for their structural members? They could have got the bridge up somehow, sure, and made it strong enough to carry light traffic on a fair day. But what would you have had left of it after the first winter storm came down the Channel from the North Sea? The whole approach is idiotic!”
“All right,” Dillon said reasonably. “You have a point. Now you’re being reasonable. What better approach have you to suggest? Should we abandon Jupiter entirely because it’s too big for us?”
“No,” Helmuth said. “Or maybe, yes. I don’t know. I don’t have any easy answer. I just know that this one is no answer at all—it’s just a cumbersome evasion.”
Dillon smiled. “You’re depressed, and no wonder. Sleep it off, Bob, if you can—you might even come up with that answer. In the meantime—well, when you stop to think about it, the surface of Jupiter isn’t any more hostile, inherently, than the surface of Jupiter V, except in degree. If you stepped out of this building naked, you’d die just as fast as you would on Jupiter. Try to look at it that way.”
Helmuth, looking forward into another night of dreams, said: “That’s the way I look at it now.”
III
There were three yellow “Critical” signals lit on the long gang board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrated on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin name—such once-valid tickets no longer meant anything among Earth’s uniformly mixed-race population—was a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at the moments when cold analysis and split-second decisions were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit except as an observer, and donned the cooperator’s helmet. The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet up along its slanted sides—breakers that never subsided, but simply were tom away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north face of the caisson, crawling slowly towards the pediment of the nearest truss. Catalysis—
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even the tiny specks of calcium carbide were deadly. At these wind velocities, such specks imbedded themselves in everything; and at fifteen million pounds per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed by sodium took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building protein-like compounds in a rapid, deadly chain of decay:
For a second, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all, one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all, might have grown porous, bony, and quite strong. Here, under nearly eight times the gravity, the molecules were forced to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their arrangement was hexagonal, as if the stuff would become an aromatic compound if it only could. Even here it was moderately strong in cross section—but along the long axis it smeared like graphite, the calcium atoms readily surrendering their valence hold on one carbon atom to grab hopefully for the next one in line—
No stuff to hold up the piers of humanity’s greatest engineering project. Perhaps it was suitable for the ribs of some Jovian jellyfish, but in a Bridge-caisson, it was cancer.
There was a scraper mechanism working on the edge of the lesion, flaking away the shearing aminos and laying down new ice. In the meantime, the decay of the caisson-face was working deeper. The scraper could not possibly get at the core of the trouble—which was not the calcium carbide dust, with which the atmosphere was charged beyond redemption, but was instead one imbedded sodium speck which was taking no part in the reaction—fast enough to extirpate it. It could barely keep pace with the surface spread of the disease.
And laying new ice over the surface of the wound was worthless. At this rate, the whole caisson would slough away and melt like butter, within an hour, under the weight of the Bridge above it.
Helmuth sent the futile scraper aloft. Drill for it? No—too deep already, and location unknown.
Quickly he called two borers up from the shoals below, where constant blasting was tak
ing the foundation of the caisson deeper and deeper into Jupiter’s dubious “soil”. He drove both blind, fire-snouted machines down into the lesion.
The bottom of that sore turned out to be forty-five metres within the immense block. Helmuth pushed the red button all the same.
The borers blew up, with a heavy, quite invisible blast, as they had been designed to do. A pit appeared on the face of the caisson.
The nearest truss bent upward in the wind. It fluttered for a moment, trying to resist. It bent farther.
Deprived of its major attachment, it tore free suddenly, and went whirling away into the blackness. A sudden flash of lightning picked it out for a moment, and Helmuth saw it dwindling like a bat with torn wings being borne away by a cyclone.
The scraper scuttled down into the pit and began to fill it with ice from the bottom. Helmuth ordered down a new truss and a squad of scaffolders. Damage of this order took time to repair. He watched the tornado tearing ragged chunks from the edges of the pit until he was sure that the catalysis had stopped. Then, suddenly, prematurely, dismally tired, he took off the helmet He was astounded by the white fury that masked Eva’s big-boned, mildly pretty face.
“You’ll blow the Bridge up yet, won’t you?” she said, evenly, without preamble. “Any pretext will do!”
Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly through the picture-port, just as it did on the foreman’s desk.
He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of satellite V were falling forward towards Jupiter; their uneventful cooped-up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on Jupiter’s ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that gaudy inferno.
There was no other way for a man—or a woman—on Jupiter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience, shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four-fifths of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there in that planet’s sky, falling, falling faster and faster—
“I have no intention,” he said tiredly, “of blowing up the Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want the Bridge to stay up—even though I’m not starry-eyed to the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think that rotten spot was going to go away by itself when you’d painted it over? Didn’t you know that—”
Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly towards the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distracting conversation or activity was taboo, down here in the gang room. He motioned Eva back to duty.
The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was plain from the way her normally full lips were thinned that she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order to have the last word.
Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the central axis of the shack, and mounted the spiraling cleats towards his own foreman’s cubicle. Already he felt in anticipation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.
Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet; he was sitting in Helmuth’s chair.
Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth’s entrance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly unconscious of anything happening around his body except the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those senses which report something going on thousands of miles away.
Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he watched Dillon’s white, blade-like fingers roving with blind sureness over the controls.
Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge—not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The tally board showed that he had already activated nearly two-thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been up all night at the job; had begun it immediately after last talking to Helmuth*
Why?
With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked at the foreman’s jack, which allowed the operator here in the cubicle to communicate with the gang when necessary, and which kept him aware of anything said or done at gang boards.
It was plugged in.
Dillon sighed suddenly, took the helmet off, and turned.
“Hello, Bob,” he said. “Funny about this job. You can’t see, you can’t hear, but when somebody’s watching you, you feel a sort of pressure on the back of your neck. ESP, maybe. Ever felt it?”
“Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?”
“There’s to be an inspection,” Dillon said. His eyes met Helmuth’s. They were frank and transparent. UA mob of Western officials, coming to see that their eight billion dollars isn’t being wasted. Naturally, I’m a little anxious to see that they find everything in order.”
“I see,” Helmuth said. “First time in five years, isn’t it?”
“Just about What was that dust-up down below just now? Somebody—you, I’m sure, from the drastic handiwork involved—bailed Eva out of a mess, and then I heard her talk about your wanting to blow up the Bridge. I checked the area when I heard the fracas start, and it did seem as if she had let things go rather far, but—What was it all about?”
Dillon ordinarily hadn’t the guile for cat-and-mouse games, and he had never looked less guileful than now. Helmuth said carefully, “Eva was upset, I suppose. On the subject of Jupiter we’re all of us cracked by now, in our different ways. The way she was dealing with the catalysis didn’t look to me to be suitable—a difference of opinion, resolved in my favor because I had the authority, Eva didn’t. That’s all.”
“Kind of an expensive difference, Bob. I’m not niggling by nature, you know that. But an incident like that while the commission is here—”
“The point is,” Helmuth said, “are we to spend an extra ten thousand, or whatever it costs to replace a truss and reinforce a caisson, or are we to lose the whole caisson—and as much as a third of the whole Bridge along with it?”
“Yes, you’re right there, of course. That could be explained, even to a pack of senators. But—it would be difficult to have to explain it very often. Well, the board’s yours, Bob. You could continue my spot-check, if you’ve time.”
Dillon got up. Then he added suddenly, as if it were forced out of him:
“Bob, I’m trying to understand your state of mind.
From what Eva said, I gather that you’ve made it fairly public. I…I don’t think it’s a good idea to infect your fellow workers with your own pessimism. It leads to sloppy work. I know that regardless of your own feelings you won’t countenance sloppy work, but one foreman can do only so much. And you’re making extra work for yourself—not for me, but for yourself—by being openly gloomy about the Bridge.
“You’re the best man on the Bridge, Bob, for all your grousing about the job, and your assorted misgivings. I’d hate to see you replaced.”
“A threat, Charity?” Helmuth said softly.
“No. I wouldn’t replace you unless you actually went nuts, and I firmly believe that your fears in that respect are groundless. It’s a commonplace that only sane men suspect their own sanity, isn’t it?”
“It’s a common misconception. Most psychopathic obsessions begin with a mild worry.”
Dillon made as if to brush that subject away. “Anyhow, I’m not threatening; I’d fight to keep you here. But my say-so only covers Jupiter V; there are people higher up on Ganymede, and people higher yet back in Washington—and in this inspecting commission.
“Why don’t you try to look on the bright side for a change? Obviously the Bridge isn’t ever going to inspire you. But you might at least try thinking about all those dollars piling up in your account every hour you’re on this job, and about the bridges and ships and who knows what-all that you’ll be building, at any fee you ask, when you get back down to Earth. All under the magic words, ’One of the men who built the Bridge on Jupiter’!”
Charity was bright red with embarrassment and enthusiasm. Helmuth smiled.
“I’ll try to bear it in mind, Charity,” he said. “When is this gaggle of senators due to arrive?”
“They’re on Ganymede now, taking a breather. They came directly from Washington without any routing. I suppose they’ll make a stop at Callisto before they come here. They’ve something new on their ship, I’m told, that lets them flit about more freely than the usual uphill transport can.”
An icy lizard suddenly was nesting in Helmuth’s stomach, coiling and coiling but never settling itself. The room blurred. The persistent nightmare was suddenly almost upon him—already.
“Something…new?” he echoed, his voice as flat and noncommittal as he could make it. “Do you know what it is?”
“Well, yes. But I think I’d better keep quiet about it until—”
“Charity, nobody on this deserted rock-heap could possibly be a Soviet spy. The whole habit of ‘security’ is idiotic out here. Tell me now and save me the trouble of dealing with senators; or tell me at least that you know I know. They have antigravity! Isn’t that it?”
One word from Dillon, and the nightmare would be real.
“Yes,” Dillon said. “How did you know? Of course, it couldn’t be a complete gravity screen by any means. But it seems to be a good long step towards it. We’ve waited a long time to see that dream come true—But you’re the last man in the world to take pride in the achievement, so there’s no sense exulting about it to you. I’ll let you know when I get a definite arrival date. In the meantime, will you think about what I said before?”
“Yes, I will.” Helmuth took the seat before the board.
“Good. With you, I have to be grateful for small victories. Good trick, Bob.”
“Good trick, Charity.”
IV
Instead of sleeping—for now he knew that he was really afraid—he sat up in the reading chair in his cabin. The illuminated microfilm pages of a book flipped by across the surface of the wall opposite him, timed precisely to the reading rate most comfortable for him, and he had several weeks’ worry-conserved alcohol and smoke rations for ready consumption.
