by James Blish
The girl broke off abruptly and delved into her pocketbook, producing a fiat compact which she opened and inspected intently. Since she wore almost no makeup, it was hard to imagine the reason for the sudden examination; but after a brief, odd smile at one corner of her mouth, she tucked the compact away again.
"The other reason," she said, "is even simpler, now that you have the background. We've just found what we think may be a major key to the whole problem."
"Wow," Paige said, inelegantly but aft etuoso.
"Or zowie, or biffbamkrunk," Anne agreed calmly, "or maybe Godhelpuseveryone. But so far the thing's held up. It's passed, every test. If it keeps up that performance, Pfitzner will get the whole of the new appropriation and if it doesn't, there may not be any appropriation at all, not only for Pfitzner, but for the other firms that have been helping on the project.
"The whole question of whether or not we lick the degenerative diseases hangs on those two things: the validity of the solution we've found and the money. If one goes, the other goes. And we'll have to tell Horsefleld and MacHinery and the others what we've found some time this month, because the old appropriation lapses after that."
The girl leaned back and seemed to notice for the first time that she hail finished her dinner. "And that," she said, pushing regretfully at the sprig of parsley with her fork, "isn't exactly public knowledge yet! I think I'd better shut up."
"Thank you," Paige said gravely "It's obviously more than I deserve to know"
"Well," Anne said, "you can tell me something, if you will. It's about this Bridge that's being built on Jupiter. Is it worth all the money that they're pouring into it? Nobody seems to be able to explain what it's good for. And now there's talk that another Bridge'll be started on Saturn, when this one's finished!"
"You needn't worry," Paige said. "Understand, I've no connection with the Bridge, though I do know some people on the Bridge gang, so I haven't any inside information. I do have some public knowledge, just like yours meaning knowledge that anyone can have, if he has the training to know where to look for it. As 1 understand it, the Bridge on Jupiter is a research project, designed to answer some questions just what questions, nobody's bothered to tell me, and I've been careful not to ask; you can see Francis X. MacHinery's face in the constellations if you look carefully enough. But this much I know: the conditions of the research demand the use of the largest planet in the system. That's Jupiter, so it would be senseless to build another Bridge on a smaller planet, like Saturn. The Bridge gang will keep the present structure going until they've found out what they want to know. Then the project. will almost surely be discontinued not because the bridge is 'finished,' but because it will have served its purpose."
"I suppose I'm showing my ignorance," Anne said, "but it sounds idiotic to me. All those millions and millions of dollars that we could be saving lives with!" "If the choice were mine," Paige agreed, "I'd award the money to you, not to Charity Dillon and his crew. But then, I know almost as little about the Bridge as you do, so perhaps it's just as well that Fm not allowed to route the check. Is it my turn to ask a question? I still have a small one."
"Your witness," Anne said, smiling her altogether lovely smile.
"This afternoon, while I was in the labs, I twice heard a baby crying and I think it was actually two different babies. I asked your Mr. Gunn about it, and he told me an obvious fairy story." He paused. Anne's eyes had already begun to glitter.
"You're on dangerous ground, Colonel Russell," she said. "I can tell. But I mean to ask my question anyhow.
When I pulled my absurd vivisection threat on you later, I was out-and-out flabbergasted that it worked, but it set me to thinking. Can you explain and if so, would you?"
Anne got out her compact again and seemed to consult it warily. At last she said: "I suppose I've forgiven you, more or less. Anyhow, I'll answer. It's very simple: the babies are being used as experimental animals. We have a pipeline to a local foundling home. It's all only technically legal, and had you actually brought charges of human vivisection against us, you probably could have made them stick."
His coffee cup clattered into its saucer. "Great God, Anne. Isn't it dangerous to make such a joke these days especially with a man you've known only half a day? Or are you trying to startle me into admitting I'm a stoolie?"
"I'm not joking and I don't think you're a stoolie," she said calmly. "What I said was perfectly true -oh, I souped up the way I put it just a little, maybe because I haven't entirely forgiven you for that bit of successful blackmail, and I wanted to see you jump. And for other reasons. But it's true."
"But Anne why?"
"Look, Paige," she said. "It was fifty years ago that we found that if we. added minute amounts of certain antibiotics, really just traces, to animal feeds, the addition brought the critters to market months ahead of normally fed animals. For that matter, it even provokes growth spurts in plants under special conditions; and it works for poultry, baby pigs, calves, mink cubs, a whole spectrum of animals. It was logical to suspect that it might work in newborn humans too."
"And you're trying that?" Paige leaned back and poured himself another glass of Chilean Rhine. "I'd say you souped up your revelation quite a bit, all right."
"Don't be so ready to accept the obvious, and listen to me. We are nor doing that. It was done decades ago, regularly and above the board, by students of Paul Gyorgy and half a hundred other nutrition experts. Those people used only very widely known and tested antibiotics, drugs that had already been used n literally millions of farm animals, dosages worked out to the milligram of drug per kilogram of body weight, and so on. But this particular growth stimulating effect of antibiotics happens to be a major clue to whether or not a given drug has the kind of biological activity we wantand we have to know whether or not it shows that activity jn human beings'. S we screen new drugs on the kids, as fast as they're found and pass certain other tests. We have to."
"I see," Paige said. "I see."
"The children are 'volunteered' by the foundling home, and we could make a show of legality if it came to a court fight," Anne said. "The precedent was established in 1952, when Pearl River Labs used children of its own workers to test its live virus polio vaccine which worked, by the way. But it isn't the legality of it that's important. It's the question of how soon and how thoroughly we're going to. lick the degenerative diseases."
"You seem to be defending it to me," Paige said slowly, "as though you cared what I thought about it. So I'll tell you what I think; it seems mighty damned cold-blooded to me. It's the kind of thing of which ugly myths are made. If ten years from now there's a pogrom against biologists because people think they eat babies, I'll know why."
"Nonsense," Anne said. "It takes centuries to build up that kind of myth. You're overreacting."
"On the contrary. I'm being as honest with you as you were with me. I'm astonished and somewhat repelled by what you've told me. That's all."
The girl, her lips slightly thinned, dipped and dried her fingertips and began to draw on her gloves. "Then we'll say no more about it," she said. "I think we'd better leave now.,'
"Certainly, as soon as I pay the check. Which reminds me: do you have any interest in Pfitzner, Annea personal interest, I mean?"
"No. No more interest than any human being with a moment's understanding of the implications would have. And I think that's a rather ugly sort of question."
"I thought you might take it that way, but I really wasn't accusing you of being a profiteer. I just wondered whether or not you were related to the Dr. Abbott that Gunn and the rest were waiting for this afternoon."
She got out the compact again and looked carefully into it. "Abbott's a common enough name."
"Sure. Still, some Abbotts are related. And it seems to make sense."
"Let's hear you do that. I'd be interested."
"All right," he said, beginning to become angry himself. "The receptionist at Pfitzner, ideally, should know exactly what i
s going on in the plant at all times, so as to be able to assess accurately the intentions of every visitor just as you did with me. But at the same time, she has to be an absolutely flawless security risk, or otherwise she couldn't be trusted with enough knowledge to be that kind of a receptionist. The best way to make sure of the security angle is to hire someone with a blood tie to another person on the project. That adds up to two people who are being careful. A classical Soviet form of blackmail, as I recall.
"That much is theory. There's fact, too. You certainly explained the Pfitzner project to me this evening from a broad base of knowledge that nobody could expect to find in an ordinary receptionist. On top of that, you took policy risks that, properly, only an officer of Pfitzner should be empowered to take. I conclude that you're not only a receptionist; your name is Abbott; and.., there we have it, it seems to me."
"Do we?" the girl said, standing abruptly in a white fury. "Not quite! Also, I'm not pretty, and a receptionist for a firm as big as Pfitzner is usually pretty striking. Striking enough to resist being pumped by the first man to notice her, at least. Go ahead, complete the list! Tell the whole truth!"
"How can I?" Paige said, rising also and looking squarely at her, his fingers closing slowly, "If I told you honestly just what I think of your looks and by God I will, I think the most beautiful woman in the world would bathe every day in fuming nitric acid just to duplicate your smile you'd hate me more than ever. You'd think I was mocking you. Now you tell me the rest of the truth. You are related to Dr. Abbott."
"Partly enough," the girl said, each word cut out of smoking dry ice, "Dr. Abbott is my father. And I insist upon being allowed to go home now, Colonel Russell. Not ten seconds from now, but now."
CHAPTER FOUR: Jupiter V
The firm determination to submit to experiment is not enough; there are still dangerous hypotheses; first, and above all, those which are tacit and unconscious. Since we make them without knowing it, we are powerless to abandon them.
HEN1U PoiNcAlui
THE BRIDGE vanished as the connection was broken. The continuous ultromc pulses from the Jovian satellites to the selsyns and servos of the Bridge never stopped, of course; and the Bridge sent back information ceaselessly on the same subetheric channels to the ever vigilant eyes and ears and hands of the Bridge gang on Jupiter V. But for the moment, the vast structure's guiding intelligence, the Bridge gang foreman, had quitted it.
Helmuth set the heavy helmet carefully in its niche and felt of his temples, feeling the blood passing under his fingertips. Then he turned.
Dillon was looking at him,
"Well?" the civil engineer said. "What's the matter, Bob? Is it bad?"
Helmuth did not reply for a moment. The abrupt transition from the storm ravaged deck of the Bridge to the quiet, placid air of the operations shack on Jupiter's fifth moon was always a shock. He had never been able to anticipate it, let alone become accustomed to it; it was worse each time, not better.
He pulled the jacks from the foreman's board and let them flick back into the desk on their alive, elastic cables, and then got up from the bucket seat, moving carefully upon shaky legs, feeling implicit in his own body the enormous weights. and pressures his guiding intelligence had just quitted. The fact that the gravity on the foreman's deck was as weak as that of most of the habitable asteroids only made the contrast greater, and his need for caution in walking more extreme.
He went to the big porthole and looked out. The unworn, tumbled, monotonous surface of airless Jupiter V looked almost homey after the perpetual holocaust of Jupiter itself. But there was an overpowering reminder of that holocaust for through the thick quartz of the porthole, the face of the giant planet stared at. Helmuth across only 112,600 miles, less than half the distance between Earth's moon and Earth; a sphere section occupying almost all of the sky, except the near horizon, where one could see a few first magnitude stars. The rest of the sky was crawling with color, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of Jupiter's atmosphere, spotted with the deep black, planet sized shadows of moons closer to the sun than Jupiter V.
Somewhere down there, six thousand miles below the clouds that boiled in Helmuth's face, was the Bridge. The Bridge was thirty miles high and eleven miles wide and fifty-four miles long but it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile arrangement of ice crystals beneath the bulging big, racing tornadoes.
On Earth, even in the West, the Bridge would have been the mightiest engineering achievement of all history, could the Earth have borne its weight at all. But on Jupiter, the Bridge was as precarious and perishable as a snowflake.
"Bob?" Dillon's voice asked. "What is it? You seem more upset than usual. Is it serious?"
Helmuth looked up. His superior's worn, young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already beginning to gray t the temples, was alight both with love for the Bridge and with the consuming ardor of the responsibility he had to bear. As always, it touched Helmuth and reminded him that the implacable universe had, after all, provided one warm corner in which human beings might huddle together.
"Serious enough," he said, forming the words with difficulty against the frozen inarticulateness Jupiter had forced upon him. "But not fatal, as far as I could see. There's a lot of hydrogen vulcanism on the surface, especially at the northwest end, and it looks like there must have been a big blast under the cliffs. I saw what looked like the last of a series of firefalls."
Dillon's face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly, line by engraved line. "Oh. It was just a flying chunk then."
"I'm almost sure that was what it was. The cross draughts are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each other some time next month, aren't they? I haven't checked, but I can feel the difference in the storms."
"So the chunk got picked up and thrown through the end of the Bridge. A big piece?"
Helmuth shrugged. "That end is all twisted away to the left, and the deck is burst into matchwood. The scaffolding is all gone, too, of course. A pretty big piece, all right, Charity two miles through at a minimum."
Dillon sighed. He, too, went to the window, and looked out. Helmuth did not need to be a mind reader to know what he was looking at. Out there, across the stony waste of Jupiter V plus 112,600 miles of space, the South Tropical Disturbance was streaming toward the great Red Spot, and would soon overtake it. When the whirling funnel of the STD more than big enough to suck three Earths into deepfreeze, passed the planetary island of sodium tainted ice which was the Red Spot, the Spot would follow it for a few thousand miles, at the same time rising closer to the surface of the atmosphere.
Then the Spot would sink again, drifting back toward the incredible jet of stress fluid which kept it in being a jet fed by no one knew what forces at Jupiter's hot, rocky, 22,000mile core, compacted down there under 16,000 miles of eternal ice. During the entire passage, the storms all over Jupiter became especially violent; and the Bridge had been forced to locate in anything but the calmest spot on the planet, thanks to the uneven distribution of the few "permanent" landmasses.
But "permanent"? The quotemarks Helmuth's thinking always put around that word were there for a very good reason, he knew, but. he could not quite remember the reason. It was the damned conditioning showing itself again, creating another of the thousand small irreconcilables which contributed to the tension.
Helmuth watched Dillon with a certain compassion, tempered with mild envy. Charity Dillon's unfortunate given name betrayed him as the son of a hangover, the only male child of a Believer family which dated back long before the current resurgence of the Believers. He was one of the hundreds of government drafted experts who had planned the Bridge, and he was as obsessed by the Bridge as Helmuth was but for different reasons. It was widely believed among the Bridge gang that Dillon, alone, among them, had not been given the conditiomng, but there was no way to test that.
Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gently on Dillon's shoulders. Together
they looked at the. screaming straw yellows, brick reds, pinks, oranges, browns, even blues and greens that Jupiter threw across the ruined stone of its innermost satellite. On Jupiter V, even the shadows had color.
Dillon did not move. He said at last: "Are you pleased, Bob?"
"Pleased?" Helmuth said in astonishment. "No. It scares me white; you know that. I'm just glad that the whole Bridge didn't go."
"You're quite sure?" Dillon said quietly.
Helmuth took his hand from Dillon's shoulder and returned to his seat at the central desk. "You've no right to needle me for something I can't help," he said, his voice' even lower than Dillon's. "I work on Jupiter four hours a day not actually, because we can't keep a man alive for more than a split second down there but my eyes and ears and my mind are there on the Bridge, four hours a day. Jupiter is not a nice place. I don't like it. I won't pretend I do.
"Spending four hours a day in an environment like that over a period of years well, the human mind instinctively tries to adapt, even to the unthinkable. Sometimes I wonder how I'll behave when I'm put back in Chicago again. Sometimes I can't remember anything about Chicago except vague .generalities, sometimes I can't even believe there is such a place as Earth how could there be when the rest of the universe is like Jupiter or worse?"
"I know," Dillon said. "I've tried several times to show you that isn't a very reasonable frame of mind."
"I know it isn't. But I can't help how I feel. For all I know it isn't even my own frame of mind though the part of my mind that keeps saying 'The Bridge must stand' is more likely to be the conditioned part. No, I don't think the bridge will last. It can't last; it's all wrong. But I don't want to see it go. I've just got sense enough to know that one of these days Jupiter is going to sweep it away."
