by James Blish
"But he'll already know the production method by that time. Identifying the drug is a routine job for any team of chemists your Dr. Agnew taught me that much."
"I suppose that's so," Gunn said. "Well, I'll think it over, Colonel. Don't worry about it, we'll deal with it when the time seems ripe."
And that was every bit of satisfaction that Paige could extract from Gunn. It was small recompense for his lost sleep, his lost dates, the care he had taken to inform Pfitzner first, or the soul-searching it had cost him to put the interests of the project ahead of his officer's oath and of his own safety. That evening he said as much to Anne Abbott and with considerable force.
"Calm down," Anne said. "If you're going to mix into the politics of this work, Paige, you're going to get burned right up to the armpits. When we do find what we're looking for, it's going to create the biggest political explosion in history. I'd advise you to stand well back."
"I've been burned already," Paige said hotly. "How the hell can I stand back now? And tolerating a spy isn't just politics. It's treason not only by rumor, but in fact. Are you deliberately putting everyone's head in the noose?"
"Quite deliberately. Paige, this project is for everyone every man, woman and child on the Earth and in space. The fact that the West is putting up the money is incidental. What we're doing, here is in every respect just as anti-West as it is anti-Soviet. We're out to lick death for human beings, not just for the armed forces of some one military coalition. What do we care who gets it first? We want everyone to have it."
"Does Gunn agree with that?"
"It's company policy. It may even have been Hal's own idea, though he has different reasons, different justifications. Have you any idea what will happen when a death curing drug hits a totalitarian society a drug available in limited quantities only? It won't prove fatal to the Soviets, of course, but it ought to make the struggle for succession over there considerably bloodier than it is already. That's essentially the way Hal seems to look at it."
"And you don't," Paige said grimly.
"No, Paige, I don't. I can see well enough what's going to happen right here at home when this thing gets out. Think for a moment of what it will do to the religious people alone. What happens to the afterlife if you never need to leave this one? Look at the Believers. They believe in the literal truth of everything in the Biblet hat's why they revise the book every year. And this story is going to break before their Jubilee year is over. Did you know that their motto is: 'Millions now living will never die'? They mean themselves, but what if it turns out to be everybody?
"And that's only the beginning. Think of what the insurance companies are going to say. And what's going to happen to the whole structure of compound interest Wells's old yarn about the man who lived so long that his savings came to dominate the world's whole financial structure. When the Sleeper Wakes, wasn't it? Well, that's going to be theoretically possible for everybody with the patience and the capital to let his money sit still. Or think of the whole corpus of the inheritance laws. It's going to be the biggest, blackest social explosion the West ever had to take. We'll be much too busy digging in to care about what's happening to the Central Committee in Moscow."
"You seem to care enough to be protecting the Central Committee's interests, or at least that they probably think of as their interests," Paige said slowly. "After all, there is a possibility of keeping the secret, instead of letting it leak."
"There is no such possibility," Anne said. "Natural laws can't be kept secret. Once you give a scientist the idea that a certain goal can be reached, you've given him more than half of the information he needs. Once he gets the idea that the conquest of death is possible, no power on Earth can stop him from finding out how it's done the 'knowhow' we make so many fatuous noises about is the most minor part of research; it's even a matter of total indifference to the essence of the question."
"I don't see that."
"Then let's go back to the fission bomb again for a moment. The only way we could have kept that a secret was to have failed to drop it at all, or even test fire it. Once the secret was out that the bomb existed and you'll remember that we announced that before hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima we had no secrets in that field worth protecting. The biggest mystery in the Smyth report was the specific method by which uranium slugs were 'canned' in a protective jacket; it was one of the toughest problems the project had to lick, but at the same time it's exactly the kind of problem you'd assign to an engineer, and confidently expect a solution within a year.
"The fact of the matter, Paige, is that you can't keep scientific matters a secret from yourself. A scientific secret is something that some other scientist can't contribute to, any more than he can profit by it. Contrariwise, if you arm yourself through discoveries in natural law, you also arm the other guy. Either you give him the information, or you cut your own throat; there aren't any other courses possible.
"And let me ask you this, Paige: should we give the USSR the advantage temporary though it'll be of having to get along without the anti-agathics for a while? By their very nature, the drugs will do more damage to the West than they will to the USSR. After all, in the Soviet Union one isn't permitted to inherit money, or to exercise any real control over economic forces just because one's lived a long time. If both major powers are given control over death at the same time, the West will be at a natural disadvantage. If we give control over death to the West alone, we'll be sabotaging our own civilization without putting the USSR under any comparable handicap. Is that sensible?"
The picture was staggering, to say the least. It gave Paige an impression of Gunn decidedly at variance with the mask of salesman-turned-executive which the man himself wore. But it was otherwise self consistent; that, he knew, was supposed to be enough for him.
"How could I tell?" he said coldly. "All I can see is that every day I stick with you I get in deeper. First I pose for the FBI as something that I'm not. Next Fm given possession of information that it's unlawful for me to have. And now I'm helping you conceal the evidence of a high crime. It looks more and more to me as though I was supposed to be involved in this thing from the beginning. I don't see how you could have done so thorough a job on me without planning it."
"You needn't deny that you asked for it, Paige."
"I don't deny that," he said. "You don't deny deliberately involving me, either, I notice."
"No. It was deliberate, all right. I thought you'd have suspected it before. And if you're planning to ask me why, save your breath. I'm not permitted to tell you. You'll find out in due course."
"You two"
"No. Hal had nothing to do with involving you. That was my idea. He only agreed to it and he had to be convinced from considerably higher up."
"You two," Paige said through almost motionless lips, "don't hesitate to trample on the bystanders, do you? If I didn't know before that Pfitzner was run by a pack of idealists, I'd know it now. You've got the characteristic ruthlessness."
"That," Anne said in a level voice, "is what it takes."
CHAPTER EIGHT: Jupiter V
When new turns in behaviour cease to appear in the life of the individual its behaviour ceases to be intelligent.
C. E. COGHILL
INSTEAD OF sleeping after his trick for now Helmuth knew that he was really afraid he sat up in the reading chair in his cabin. The illuminated microfilmed pages of a book flicked 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.
But Helmuth let his mix go flat and did not notice the book, which had turned itself on, at the page where M had abandoned it last, when he had fitted himself into the chair. Instead, he listened to the radio.
There was always a great deal of ham radio activity in the Jovian system. The conditions were good for it, since there was plenty of power available, few impeding atmosphere layers and those
thin, no Heaviside layers, and few official and no commercial channels with which the hams could interfere.
And there were plenty of people scattered about the satellites who needed the sound of a voice anybody know whether or not the senators are coming here? Doc Barth put in a report a while back on a fossil plant he found here, at least he thinks it was a plant. Maybe they'd like a look at it."
"It's the Bridge team they're coming to see." A strong voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in and out to the currents of an atmosphere; that would be Sweeney, on Ganymede. "Sorry to throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don't think the senators'll be interested in our rockballs for their own lumpy selves. They're only scheduled to stay here three days."
Helmuth thought grayly: Then they'll stay on Callisto only one.
"Is that you, Sweeney? Where's the Bridge tonight?"
"Dillon's on duty," a very distant transmitter said. "Try to raise Helmuth, Sweeney."
"Helmuth, Helmuth, you gloomy beetlegooser! Come in, Helmuth1"
"Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us a little. We're feeling cheerful."
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, from where it lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But before he had completed the gesture, the door to his room swung open.
Eva came in.
She said: "Bob, I want to tell you something."
"His voice is changing!" the voice of the Callisto operator said. "Sweeney, ask him what he's drinking!"
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter V and Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this hour, halfway between her sleep period and her trick. Her hair was hazy against the light from the corridor, and she looked less mannish than usual. She reminded him a little of the way she had looked when they had been lovers, before the Bridge had come to bestride his bed instead. He put the memory aside.
"All right," he said. "I owe you a ruin, I guess. Citric, sugar and the other stuff are in the locker ... you know where it is. Shotcans are there, too."
The girl shut the door and sat down on the bunk, with a free litheness that was almost grace, but with a determination which, Helmuth knew, meant that she had just decided to do something silly for all the right reasons.
"I don't need a drink," she said. "As a matter-of-fact, I've been turning my luxR's back to the common pool. I suppose you did that for me by showing me what a mind looks like that's hiding from itself."
"Evita, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously you're advanced to a higher, more Jovian plane of existence, but won't you still need your metabolism? Or have you decided that vitamins are all-in-the-mind?"
"Now you're being superior. Anyhow, alcohol isn't a vitamin. And I didn't come to talk about that I came to tell you something I think you ought to know."
"Which is?"
She said: "Bob, I mean to have a child here."
A bark of laughter, part sheer hysteria and part exasperation, jackknifed Helmuth into a sitting position. A red arrow bloomed on the far wall, obediently marking the' paragraph which, supposedly, he had reached in his reading. Eva twisted to look at it, but the page was already dimming and vanishing.
"Women!" Helmuth said, when he could get his breath back. "Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environment can change a human being much, after all."
"Why should it?" she said suspiciously, looking back at him. "I don't see the joke. Shouldn't a woman want to have a child?"
"Of course she should," he said, settling back. The pages began to flip across the wall again. "It's quite ordinary. All women want to have children. All women dream of the day they can turn a child out to play in an airless rock garden like Jupiter V, to pluck fossils and make dustcastles and get quaintly starburned. How cozy to tuck the blue little body back into its corner that night, and give it its oxygen bottle, promptly as the sound of the trick change bell! Why it's as natural as Jupiter light, as Western as freeze-dried apple pie."
He turned his head casually away. "Congratulations. As for me, though, Eva, I'd much prefer that you take your ghostly little pretext out of here."
Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.
"You reedy male platitude!" she said, in a low grinding voice. "How you could see almost the whole point, and make so little of it. Women, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences in bed!"
He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. "What else?" he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge robots. "None of us need bother with games and excuses. We're here, we're isolated; we were all chosen because, among other things, we were quite incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments and capable of any alliances we liked without going unbalanced when the attraction died and the alliance came unstuck. None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to involve any Earth normal excuses."
She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently: "Isn't that so?"
"Of course it's not so," Eva said. She was frowning at him; he had the absurd impression that she was pitying him. "If we were really incapable of making any permanent attachment, we'd never have been chosen. A cast of mind like that is a mental disease, Bob; it's anti-survival from the ground up. It's the conditioning that made us this way. Didn't you know?"
Helmuth hadn't known; or if he had, he had been conditioned to forget it. He gripped the arms of the chair tighter.
"Anyhow," he said, "that's the way we are."
"Yes,, it is. Also it has nothing to do with the matter."
"It doesn't? How stupid do you think I am? I don't care whether or not you've decided to have a child here, if you really mean what you say."
She, too, seemed to be trembling. "You really don't, either. The decision means nothing to you."
"Well, if I liked children, I'd be sorry for the child. But as it happens, I can't stand children and if that's the conditioning, too, I can't do a thing about it. In short, Eva, as far as I'm concerned you can have as many kids as you want, and to me you'll still be the worst operator on the Bridge."
"I'll bear that in mind," she said. At this moment she seemed to have been cut from pressure ice. "I'll leave you something to charge your mind with, too, Robert Helmuth. I'll leave you sprawled here under your precious book what is Madame Bovary to you, anyhow, you unadventurous turtle? ... to think about a man who believes that children must always be born into warm cradles a man who thinks that men have to huddle on warm worlds, or they won't survive. A man with no ears, no eyes, scarcely any head. A man in terror, a man crying: Mamma! Mamma! all the stellar days and nights long!"
"Parlor diagnosis."
"Parlor labeling! Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm woolly blanket in tight around your brains, or some little sneeze of sense might creep in, and impair your efficiency!"
The door closed sharply after her.
A million pounds of fatigue crashed down without warning on the back of Helmuth's neck, and he fell back into the reading chair with a gasp. The root of his beard ached, and Jupiters bloomed and wavered away before his closed eyes.
He struggled once, and fell asleep.
Instantly he was in the grip of the dream.
It started, as always, with commonplaces, almost realistic enough to be a documentary filmstrip--except for the appalling sense of pressure, and the distorted emotional significance with which the least word, the smallest movement was invested.
It was the sinking of the first caisson of the Bridge. The actual event had been bad enough. The job demanded enough exactness of placement to require that manned ships enter Jupiter's atmosphere itself; a squadron of twenty of the most powerful ships ever built, with the five million ton asteroid, trimmed and shaped in space, slung beneath them in an immense cat's
cradle.
Four times that squadron had disappeared beneath the racing clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers had muttered in Helmuth's ears, and he had whispered back, trying to guide' them by what he could see of the conflicting tradeblasts from Jupiter V; four times there were shouts and futile orders and the snapping of cables and men screaming endlessly against the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.
It had cost, altogether, nine ships, and two hundred thirty-one men, to get one of five laboriously shaped asteroids planted in the shifting slush that was Jupiter's surface. Until that had been accomplished, the Bridge could never have been more than a dream. While the Great Red Spot had shown astronomers that some structures on Jupiter could last for long periods of time long enough, at least, to be seen by many generations of human beings it had been equally well known that nothing on Jupiter could be really permanent The planet did not even have a "surface" in the usual sense; instead, the bottom of the atmosphere 'merged more or less smoothly into a high-pressure sludge, which in turn thickened as it went deeper into solid pressure ice. At no point on the way down was there any interface between one layer and another, except in the rare areas where a part of the deeper, more "solid" medium had been thrust far up out of its normal level to form a continent which might last as long as two years or two hundred. It was on to one of these great ribs of bulging ice that the ships had tried to plant their asteroid and, after four tries, had succeeded.
Helmuth had helped to supervise all five operations, counting the successful one, from his desk on Jupiter V. But in the dream he was not in the control shack, but instead on shipboard, in one of the ships that was never to come back Then, without transition, but without any sense of discontinuity either, he was on the Bridge itself. Not in absentia, as the remote guiding intelligence of a beetle but in person, in an ovular, tanklike suit the details of which would never come clear. The high brass had discovered antigravity and had asked for volunteers to man the Bridge. Helmuth had volunteered.
