by James Blish
He wiped an open palm across the control boards, snapping all the toggles to "Off" with a sound like the fall of a doublehandful 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 finders, 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 and hands 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 six hundred miles away from here, and I'll never be an inch closer to it. But when the day comes that the Bridge is swept away "Charity, sometimes I imagine you ferrying my body back to the cozy 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 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 pressure, temperature' 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 foundation in. Otherwise, it wouldn't have mattered where we put it. We could have floated the caissons on the sea itself, if we hadn't wanted a fixed point from which 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, properly 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 traveling cranean extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn't going anywhere because it hasn't any place interesting to go to, 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 at present as much common sense as the average child. What I am 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."
BOOK TWO
INTERMEZZO: Washington
Finally, in semantic aphasia, the full significance of words and phrases is lost. Separately, each word or each detail of a drawing can be understood, but the general significance escapes; an act is executed on command, though the purpose of it is not understood. ... A general conception cannot be formulated, but details can be enumerated.
HENRI PULRON
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two" is 'one and one.' We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and.'
A. S. EDDINGTON
THE REPORT of the investigating subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee on the Jupiter Project was a massive document, especially so in the mimeographed, uncorrected form in which it had been rushed to Wagoner's desk. In its printed form not due for another two weeks the report would be considerably less bulky, but it would probably be more unreadable. In addition, it would be tempered in spots by the cautious second thoughts of its seven authors; Wagoner needed to see their opinions in the raw "for colleagues only" version.
Not that the printed version would get a much wider circulation. Even the mimeographed document was stamped "Top Secret." It had been years since anything about the government's security system had amused Wagoner in the slightest, but he could not repress a wry grin now. Of course the Bridge itself was Top Secret; but had the subcommittee's report been ready only a little over a year ago, everybody in the country would have heard about it, and selected passages would have been printed in the newspapers. He could think offhand of at least ten opposition senators, and two or three more inside his own party, who had been determined to use the report to prevent his re-election or any parts of the report that might have been turned to that purpose. Unhappily for them, the report had been still only a third finished when election day had come, and Alaska had sent Wagoner back to Washington by a very comfortable plurality.
And, as he turned the stiff legal length pages slowly, with the pleasant, smoky odor of duplicator ink rising from them as he turned, it became clear that the report would have made pretty poor campaign material anyhow. Much of it was highly technical and had obviously been written by staff advisers, not by the investigating senators themselves. The public might be impressed by, but it could. not read and would not read, such a show of erudition. Besides, it was only a show; nearly all the technical discussions of the Bridge's problems petered out into meaningless generalities. In most such instances Wagoner was able to put a mental finger on the missing fact, the ignorance or the withholding of which had left the chain of reasoning suspended in midair.
Against the actual operation of the Bridge the senators had been able to find nothing of substance to say. Given in advance the fact that the taxpayers had wanted to spend so much money to build a Bridge on Jupiter which is to say, somebody (Wagoner himself) had decided that for them, without confusing them by bringing the proposition to their attention then even the opposition senators had had to agree that it had been built as economically as p05sible and was stll being built that way.
Of course, there had been small grafts waiting to be discovered, and the investigators had discovered them. One of the supply ship captains had been selling cakes of
soap to the crew on Ganymede at incredible prices with the cooperation of the store clerk there. But that was nothing more than a bookkeeper's crime on a project the size of the Bridge. Wagoner a little admired the supply captain's ingenuity or had it been the store clerk's in discovering an item wanted badly enough on Ganymede, and small enough and light enough to be worth smuggling. The men on the Bridge gang banked most of their salaries automatically on Earth without ever seeing them; there was very little worth buying or selling on the moons of Jupiter.
Of major graft, however, there had been no trace. No steel company had sold the Bridge any substandard castings, because there was no steel in the Bridge. A Jovian might have made a good thing of selling the Bridge substandard Ice IV but as far as anyone could know there were no Jovians, so the Bridge got its Ice IV for nothing but the cost of cutting it. Wagoner's office had been very strict about the handling of the lesser contracts for prefabricated moon huts, for supply ferry fuel, for equipment and had policed not only its own deals, but all the Army Space Service subcontracts connected with the Bridge.
As for Charity Dillon and his foreman, they were rigidly efficient partly because it was in their natures to work that way, and partly because of the intensive conditioning they had all been given before being shipped to the Jovian system. There was no waste to be found in anything that they supervised, and if they had occasionally been guilty of bad engineering judgment, no outside engineer would be likely to detect it. The engineering principles by which the Bridge operated did not hold true anywhere but on Jupiter.
The hugest loss of money the whole Jupiter Project had yet sustained had been accompanied by such carnage that it fell in the senators' minds in the category of warfare. When a soldier is killed by enemy action, nobody asks how much money his death cost the government through the loss of his gear. The part of the report which described the placing of the Bridge's foundation mentioned reverently the heroism of the lost two hundred and thirty-one crewmen; it said nothing about the cost of the nine specially designed space tugs which now floated in silhouette, as fiat as so many tin cutouts under six million pounds per square inch of pressure, somewhere at the bottom of Jupiter's atmosphere floated with eight thousand vertical miles of eternally roaring poisons between them and the eyes of the living.
Had those crewmen been heroes? They had been enlisted men and officers of the Army Space Service, acting under orders. While doing what they had been ordered to do, they bad been killed. Wagoner could not remember whether or not the survivors of that operation had also been called heroes. Oh, they had certainly been decorated the Army liked its men to wear as much fruit salad on their chests as it could possibly spoon out to them, because it was good public relations but they were not mentioned in the report.
This much was certain: the dead men had died because of Wagoner. He had known, generally at least, that many of them would die, but he had gone ahead anyhow. He knew that there might be worse to come. Nevertheless, he would proceed, because he thought that in the long run it would be worth it. He knew well enough that the end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary....
But from time to time he thought of Dostoevsky and the Grand Inquisitor. Would the Millennium be worth having, if it could be ushered in only by the torturing to death of a single child? What Wagoner foresaw and planned for was by no means the Millennium; and while the children at Jno. Pfitzner & Sons were certainly not being tortured or even harmed, their experiences there were at least not normal for children. And there were two hundred and thirtyone men frozen solid somewhere in the bottomless hell of Jupiter, men who had had to obey their orders even more helplessly than children.
Wagoner had not been cut out to be a general.
The report praised the lost men's heroism. Wagoner lifted the heavy pages one after another, looking for a word from the investigating senators about the cause those deaths had served. There was nothing but the convention al phrases, "for their country," "for the cause of peace," "for the future." High order abstractions blabs. The senators had no notion of what the Bridge was for. They had looked, but they hadn't seen. Even with a total of four years to think back on the experience, they hadn't seen. The very size of the Bridge evidently had convinced them that it was a form of weapons research so much "for the cause of peace and that it would be better for them not to know the nature of the weapon until an official announcement was circulated to them.
They were right. The Bridge was assuredly a weapon. But in neglecting to wonder what kind of a weapon it might be, the senators had also neglected to wonder at whom it was pointed. Wagoner was glad that they had.
The report did not even touch upon those two years of exploration, of search for some project which might be worth attacking, which had preceded even the notion of the Bridge. Wagoner had had a special staff of four devoted men at work during every minute of those two years, checking patents that had been granted but not sequestered, published scientific papers containing suggestions other scientists had decided not to explore, articles in the lay press about incipient miracles which hadn't come off, science fiction stories by practicing scientists, anything and everything that might lead somewhere. The four men had worked under orders to avoid telling anybody what they were looking for, and to stay strictly away from the main currents of modern scientific thought on the subject; but no secret is ever truly safe; no face in nature is ever truly a secret. ,
Somewhere, for instance, in the files of the FBI, was a tape recording of the conversation he had had with the chief of the four man team, in his office, the day the break came. The man had said, not only to Wagoner, but to the attentive FBI microphones no senator dared to seek out and muffle: "This looks like a real line, Bliss. On Subject G." (Something on gravity, chief.)
"Keep it to the point." (A reminder: Keep it too technical to interest a casual eavesdropper if you have to talk about it here, with all these bugs to pick it up.)
"Sure. It's a thing called the Blackett equation. Deals with a possible relationship between electron spin and magnetic moment. I understand Dirac did some work on that, too. There's a G in the equation, and with one simple algebraic manipulation you can isolate the G on one side of the equals sign, and all ,the other elements On the other." (Not a crackpot notion this time. Real scientists have been interested in it. There's math to go with it.)
"Status?" (Why was it never followed, then?)
"The original equation is about status seven, but there's no way anybody knows that it could be subjected to an operational test. The manipulated equation is called the Locke Derivation, and our boys say that a little dimensional analysis will show that it's wrong; but they're not entirely sure. However, it is subject to an operational test if we want to pay for it, where the original Blackest formula isn't." (Nobody's sure what it means yet. It may mean nothing. It would cost a hell of a lot to find out.)
"Do we have the facilities?" (Just how much?)
"Only the beginnings." (About four billion dollars, Bliss.)
"Conservatively?" (Why so much?)
"Yes. Field strength again."
(That was shorthand for the only problem that mattered, in the long run, if you wanted to work with gravity. Whether you thought of it, like Newton, as a force, or like Faraday as a field, or like Einstein as a condition in space, gravity was incredibly weak. It was so weak that, although theoretically it was a property of every bit of matter in the universe no matter how small, it could not be worked with in the laboratory. Two magnetized needles will rush toward each other over a distance as great as an inch; so will two balls of pith as small as peas if they bear opposite electrical charges. Two ceramet magnets no bigger than doughnuts can be so strongly charged that it is impossible to push them together by hand when their like poles are opposed, and impossible for a strong man to hold them apart when their unlike poles approach each other. Two spheres of metal of any size, if they bear opposite electrical charges, will mate in a fat spark across the ins
ulating air, if there is no other way that they can neutralize each other.
(But gravity theoretically one in kind with electricity: and magnetism cannot be charged on to any object. It produces no sparks. There is no such thing as an insulation against it a digravitic. It remains beyond detection as a force, between bodies as small as peas or doughnuts. Two objects as huge as skyscrapers and as massive as lead will take centuries, to crawl into the same bed over a foot of distance, if nothing but their mutual gravitational attraction is drawing them together; even love is faster than that. Even a ball of rock eight thousand miles in diameter the Earth has a gravitational field too weak to prevent one single man from pole-vaulting away from it to more than four times his own height, driven by no opposing force but that of his spasming muscles.)
"Well, give me a report when you can. If necessary, we can expand." (Is it worth it?)
"I'll give you the report this week." (Yes!)
And that was how the Bridge had been born, though nobody had known it then, not even Wagoner. The senators who had investigated the Bridge still didn't know it. MacHinery's staff at the FBI evidently had been unable to penetrate the jargon on their recording of that conversation far enough to connect the conversation with the ridge otherwise MacHinery would have given the transcript to the investigators. MacHinery did not exactly love Wagoner; he had been unable thus far to find any handle by which he might grasp and use the Alaskan senator.
All well and good. .
And yet the investigators had come perilously close, just once. They had subpoenaed Guiseppi Corsi for the preliminary questioning.
