by James Blish
He waited until his breathing had quieted a little, scooped the helmet up on to his shoulders, and the Bridge
.. came falling into existence all around him, a Pandemonium beyond broaching and beyond hope, sealed on all sides. The drumfire of rain against his beetle's hull was so loud that it hurt his ears, even with the gain knob of his helmet backed all the way down to the thumbstop. It was impossible to cut the audio circuit out altogether; much of his assessment of how the Bridge was responding to stress
depended on sound; human eyesight on the Bridge was almost as useless as a snail's.
And the bridge was responding now, as always, with its medley of dissonance and cacophony: crang ... crang
spungg ... skreek ... crang ... ungg ... oingg
skreek ... skreek . ... These structural noises were the only ones that counted; they were the polyphony of the Bridge, everything else was decorative and to be ignored by the Bridge operator the fioritura shrieking of the winds, the battery of the rain, the pedal diapason of thunder, the distant grumbling roll of the stagehand volcanoes pushing continents back and forth on castors down below.
This time, however, at long last, it was impossible to ignore any part of this great orchestra. Its composite uproar was enormous, implacable, incredible even for Jupiter, overwhelming even in this season. The moment he heard it. Helmuth knew that he had waited too long.
The Bridge was not going to last much longer. Not unless every man and woman on Jupiter V fought without sleep to keep it up, throughout this passage of the Red Spot and the South Tropical Disturbance
if even that would serve. The great groans that were rising through the tornado-riven mists from the caissons were becoming steadily, spasmodically deeper; their hinges were already overloaded. Add the deck of the Bridge was beginning to rise and fall a little, as though slow, frozen waves were passing along it from one unfinished end to the other. The queasy, lazy tidal swell made the beetle tip first its nose into the winds, then its tail, then back again, so that it took almost all of the current Helmuth could feed into the magnet windings to keep the craft stuck to the rails on the deck at all. Cruising the deck seemed to be out of the question; there was not enough power left over for the engines almost every available erg had to be devoted to staying put
But there was still the rest of the Grand Tour to be made. And still one direction which Helmuth had yet to explore:
Straight down.
Down to the ice; down to the Ninth Circle, where everything stops, and never starts again.
There was a set of tracks leading down one of the Bridge's great buttresses, on to which Helmuth could switch the beetle in nearby sector 94. It took him only a few moments to set the small craft to creeping; head downward, toward the surface.
The meters on the ghost board had already told him that the wind velocity fell off abruptly at twenty-one miles that is, eleven miles down from the deck in this sector, which was in the lee of The Glacier, a long rib of. mountain range which terminated nearby. He was unprepared, however, for the nearcalm itself. There was some wind, of course, as there was everywhere on Jupiter, especially at this season; but the worst gusts were little more than a few hundred miles per hour, and occasionally the meter fell as low as seventy-five.
The lull was dreamlike. The beetle crawled downward through it, like a skin-diver who has already passed the safety knot on his line, but is too drugged by the ecstasy of the depths to care. At fifteen miles, something white flashed in the fanlights, and was gone. Then another; three more. And then, suddenly, a whole stream of them.
Belatedly, Helmuth stopped the beetle and peered ahead, but the white things were gone now. No, there were more of them, drifting quite slowly through the lights. As the wind died momentarily, they almost seemed to hover, pulsating slowly
Helmuth heard himself grunt with astonishment. Once, in a moment of fancy, he had thought of Jovian jellyfish. That was what these looked like jellyfish, not of the sea, but of the air. They were ten-ribbed, translucent, ranging in size from that of a closed fist to one as big as a football. They were beautiful and looked incredibly delicate for this furious planet.
Helmuth reached forward to turn up the lights, but the wind rose just as his hand closed on the knob, and the creatures were gone. In the increased glare, Helmuth saw instead that there was a large platform jutting out from the buttress not far below him, just to one side of the rails. It was enclosed and roofed, but the material was transparent. And there was motion inside it.
He had no idea what the structure could be; evidently it was recent. Although he had never been below the deck in this sector before, he knew the plans well enough to recall that they had specified no such excresence.
For a wild instant he had thought that there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was of course a robot: a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it. The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope.
The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles. At first Helmuth failed to understand; then be saw that the machine was pointing to the fanlights, and obediently turned them almost all the way down. In the resulting Jovian gloom he could see that the laboratory--for that was obviously what it was had plenty of artificial light of its own.
There was, of course, no way that he could talk to the robot, nor it to him, If he wanted to, he could talk to the person operating it; but he knew the assignment of every man and woman on Jupiter V, and running this thing was no part of any of their duties. There was not even any provision for it on the boards A white light began to wink on the ghost board. That would be the incoming line for Europa. Was somebody on that snowball in charge of this many-tentacled experimenter, using Jupiter V's booster station to amplify the signals that guided it? Curiously, he plugged the jack in.
"Hello, the Bridge! Who's on duty there?"
"Hello, Europa. This is Bob Helmuth. Is this your robot I'm looking at, in sector ninety-four?"
"That's me," the voice said. It was impossible to avoid thinking of it as coming from the robot itself. "This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?"
"Very cozy," Helmuth said. "I didn't even know it existed. What do you do in it?"
"We just got it installed this year. It's to study the Jovian lifeforms. You've seen them?"
"You mean the jellyfish? Are they really alive?"
"Yes," the robot said. "We are keeping it under our hats until we had more data, but we knew that sooner or later one of you beetlegoosers would see them. They're alive, all right. They've got a colloidal continuum/discontinuum exactly like protoplasm except that it uses liquid ammonia as a sol substrate, instead of water."
"But what do they live on?" Helmuth said.
"Ah, that's the question. Some form of aerial plankton that's certain; we've found the digested remnants inside them, but haven't captured any live specimens of it yet The digested fragments don't offer us much to go on. And what does the plankton live on? I only, wish I knew."
Helmuth thought about it. Life on Jupiter. It did not matter that it was simple in structure, and virtually helpless in the winds. It was life all the same, even down here in the frozen pits of a hell no living man would ever visit. And who could know, if jellyfish rode the Jovian air, what Leviathans might not swim the Jovian seas?
"You don't seem to be much impressed," the robot said. "Jellyfish and plankton probably aren't very exciting to a layman. But the implications are tremendous. It's going to cause quite a stir among biologists, let me tell you."
"I can believe that," Helmuth said. "I was just taken aback, that's all. We've always thought of Jupiter as lifeless"
"That's right. But now we know better. Well, back to work: I'll be
talking to you." The robot flourished its tentacles and bent over a workbench.
Abstractedly, Helmuth hacked the beetle off and turned it upward again. Barth, he remembered, was the man who had found a fossil on Europa. Earlier, there had been an officer doing a tour of duty in the Jovian system who had spent some of his spare time cutting soil samples, in search of bacteria. Probably he had found some; scientists of the before spaceflight had even found them in meteors.
The Earth and Mars were not the only places in the universe that would harbor life, after all; perhaps it was everywhere. If it could exist in a place like Jupiter. there was no logical reason to rule it out even on the Sun some animated flame no one would recognize as life. .
He regained the deck and sent the beetle rumbling for the switchyard: he would need to transfer to another track before he could return the car to its garage. It had occurred to him during the ghostly proxy conversation that he had never met Doc Barth, or many of the other men with whom he had talked so often by ham radio. Except for the Bridge operators themselves, the Jovian system was a community of disembodied voices to him. And now, he would never meet them.
"Wake up. Helmuth," a voice from the gang deck snapped abruptly. "If it hadn't been for me, you'd have run yourself off the end of the Bridge. You had all the automatic stops on that beetle cut out."
Helmuth reached guiltily and more than a little too late for the controls. Eva had already run his beetle back beyond the danger line.
"Sorry," he mumbled, taking the helmet off. "Thanks, Eva."
"Don't thank me. If you'd actually been in it, I'd have let it go. Less reading and more sleep is what I recommend for you, Helmuth,"
"Keep your recommendations to yourself," he growled. The incident started a new and even more disturbing chain of thought. If he were to resign now, it would be nearly a year before he could get hack to Chicago. Antigravity or no antigravity, the senators' ship would have no room for unexpected extra passengers. Shipping a man hack home had to he arranged far in advance. Living space had to be provided, and a cargo equivalent of the weight and space requirements he would take up on the return trip had to he deadheaded out to Jupiter V.
A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any function as a man whose drain on the station's supplies no longer could be justified in terms of what he did A year of living under the eyes of Eva Chavez and Charity Dillon and the other men and women who still remained Bridge operators, men and women who would not hesitate to let him know what they thought of his quitting.
A year of living as a bystander in the feverish excitement Of direct, personal exploration of Jupiter. A year of watching and hearing the inevitable deaths while he alone stood aloof, privileged and useless. A year during which Robert Helmuth would become the most hated living entity in the Jovian system.
And,. when he got back to Chicago and went looking for a job for his resignation from the Bridge gang would automatically take him out of government service he would be asked why he had left the Bridge at the moment when work on the Bridge was just reaching its culmination.
He began to understand why the man in the dream had volunteered.
When the trick change bell rang, he was still determined to resign, but he had already concluded bitterly that there were, after all, other kinds of hells besides the one on Jupiter.
He was returning the board to neutral as Charity came up the cleats. Charity's eyes were snapping like a skyful of comets. Helmuth had known that they would be.
"Senator Wagoner wants to speak to you if you're not too tired, Bob," he said. "Go ahead; I'll finish up there."
"He does?" Helmuth frowned. The dream surged back upon him. No. They would not rush him any faster than he wanted to go. "What about, Charity? Am I suspected of unwestern activities? I suppose you've told them how I feel."
"I have," Dillon said, unruffled. 'But we've agreed that you may not feel the same way after you've talked to Wagoner. He's in the ship, of course. I've put out a suit for you at the lock."
Charity put the helmet over his head, effectively cutting himself off from further conversation or from any further consciousness of Helmuth at all.
Helmuth stood looking at the blind, featureless bubble on Charity's shoulders for a moment. Then, with a convulsive shrug, he went down the cleats.
Three minutes later, he was plodding in a spacesuit across the surface of Jupiter V with the vivid bulk of the mother planet splashing his shoulders with color.
A courteous marine let him through the ship's airlock and deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determination to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possible consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was conducted up toward the bow.
But the ship on the inside was like the ones that had brought him from Chicago to Jupiter V, it was like any spaceship: there was nothing in it to see but corridor walls and cleatwalls, until you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.
Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no more than sixty at most, not at all portly, and he had the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen. The cabin in which he received Helmuth was obviously his own, a comfortable cabin as spaceship accommodations go, but neither roomy nor luxurious. The senator was hard to match up with the stories Helmuth had been hearing about the current Senate, which had been involved in scandal after scandal of more than Roman proportions.
There were only two people with him: a rather plain girl who was possibly his secretary, and a tall man wearing the uniform of the Army Space Corps and the eagles of a colonel. Helmuth realized, with a second shock of surprise, that he knew the officer: he was Paige Russell, a ballistics expert who had been stationed in the Jovian system not too long ago, an incurable collector. She smiled rather wryly as Helmuth's eyebrows went up.
Helmuth looked back at the senator. "I thought there was a whole subcommittee here," he said.
"There is, but we left them where we found them, on Ganymede. I didn't want to give' you the idea that you were facing a grand jury," Wagoner said, smiling. "I've been forced to sit in On most of these endless loyalty investigations back home, but I can't see any point in exporting such religious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Helmuth. There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about."
Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.
"You know Colonel Russell, of course," Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably hi his own chair. "This young lady is Anne Abbott, about whom you'll hear more short ly. Now then: Dillon tells me that your usefulness to the Bridge is about at an end. in a way, I'm sorry to hear that, for you've been one of the best men we've had on any of our planetary projects. But, in another way, I'm glad. It makes you available for something much bigger, where we need you much more."
"What do you mean by that?"
"You'll have to let me explain it in my own way. First, I'd like to talk a little about the Bridge. Please don't feel that I'm quizzing you, by the way. You're at perfect liberty to say that any given question is none of my business, and I'll take no offense and hold no grudge. Also, 'I hereby disavow the authenticity of any tape or other tapping of which this statement may be a part.' In short, our conversation is unofficial, highly so."
"Thunk you."
"It's to my interest; I'm hoping that you'll talk freely to me. Of course, my disavowal means nothing, since such formal statements can always be excised from a tape; but later on I'n going to tell you some things you're not supposed to know, and you'll be able to judge by what I say that anything you say to me is privileged. Paige and Anne are your witnesses. Okay?"
A steward came in silently with the drinks and left again. Helmuth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack from standard space rations. The only difference was that it was cold, which Helmuth found startling but not unpleasant after the first sip. He tried to relax. "I'll do my best," he said.
"Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you rega
rd the Bridge as a monster. I've examined your dossier pretty closely as a matter of fact I've been studying both you and Paige far more intensively than you can imagine and I think perhaps Dillon hasn't quite the gist of your meaning. I'd like to hear it straight from you."
"I don't think the Bridge is a monster," Helmuth said slowly. "You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse conditions will ever stop man for long, and there I'm in agreement with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personified. He. can't admit you asked me to speak my mind, Senator he can't admit that the West is a decadent and dying culture. All the other evidence that's available shows that it is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence."
"The West hasn't many more years," Wagoner agreed, astonishingly.
Paige Russell mopped his forehead. "I still can't hear you say that," the spaceman said, "without wanting to duck under the rug. After all, MacHinery's with that pack on Ganymede"
"MacHinery," Wagoner said calmly, "is probably going to die of apoplexy when we spring this thing on him, and I for one won't miss him. Anyhow, it's perfectly true; the dominoes have been falling for some time now, and the explosion Anne's outfit has cooked up is going to be the final blow. Still and all, Mr. Helmuth, the West has been responsible for some really towering achievements in time. Perhaps the Bridge could be considered as the last and mightiest of them all."
"Not by me," Helmuth said. "The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposes doing a thing for the sake of doing it is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or at an even more enormous and more idiotic example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet the laying out of the 'Diagram of Power' over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they'd probably be alive yet."
