The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  1

  A SCREECHING TORNADO was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; it was making the whole structure shudder and sway. This was normal and Robert Helmuth barely noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes, and worse.

  The scanner on the foreman’s board had given 114 as the sector of the trouble. That was at the northwestern end of the Bridge, where it broke off leaving nothing but the raging clouds of ammonia crystals and methane, and a sheer drop thirty miles to the invisible surface. There were no ultraphone “eyes” at that end which gave a general view of the area – in so far as any general view was possible – because both ends of the Bridge were incomplete.

  With a sigh Helmuth put the beetle into motion. The little car, as flat-bottomed and thin through as a bedbug, got slowly under way on its ball-bearing races, guided and held firmly to the surface of the Bridge by ten close-set flanged rails. Even so, the hydrogen gales made a terrific siren-like shrieking between the edge of the vehicle and the deck, and the impact of the falling drops of ammonia upon the curved roof was as heavy and deafening as a rain of cannon balls. As a matter of fact they weighed almost as much as cannon balls here, though they were not much bigger than ordinary raindrops. Every so often, too, there was a blast, accompanied by a dull orange glare, which made the car, the deck, and the Bridge itself buck savagely.

  These blasts were below, however, on the surface. While they shook the structure of the Bridge heavily, they almost never interfered with its functioning, and could not, in the very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm.

  Had any real damage ever been done, it would never have been repaired. There was no one on Jupiter to repair it.

  The Bridge, actually, was building itself. Massive, alone, and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.

  The Bridge had been well planned. From Halmuth’s point of view almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The width of the Bridge was eleven miles; its height, thirty miles; its length, deliberately unspecified in the plans, fifty-four miles at the moment – a squat, colossal structure, built with engineering principles, methods, materials, and tools never touched before —

  For the very good reason that they would have been impossible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was made of ice: a marvellous structural material under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of –94 C. Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a friable, talc-like powder, and aluminium becomes a peculiar, transparent substance that splits at a tap.

  Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps still later, on Uranus, too. But that had been politicians’ talk. The Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and its mechanisms were just barely manageable. The bottom of Saturn’s atmosphere had been sounded at 16,878 miles, and the temperature there was below –150 C. There even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be worked with anything except itself. And as for Uranus . . .

  As far as Helmuth was concerned, Jupiter was quite bad enough.

  The beetle crept within sight of the end of the Bridge and stopped automatically. Helmut set the vehicle’s eyes for highest penetration, and examined the nearby beams.

  The great bars were as close-set as screening. They had to be, in order to support even their own weight, let alone the weight of the components of the Bridge. The whole web-work was flexing and fluctuating to the harpist-fingered gale, but it had been designed to do that. Helmuth could never help being alarmed by the movement, but habit assured him that he had nothing to fear from it.

  He took the automatics out of the circuit and inched the beetle forward manually. This was only Sector 113, and the Bridge’s own Wheatstone-bridge scanning system – there was no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupiter – said that the trouble was in Sector 114. The boundary of Sector 114 was still fully fifty feet away.

  It was a bad sign. Helmuth scratched nervously in his red beard. Evidently there was really cause for alarm – real alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he always felt while working on the Bridge. Any damage serious enough to halt the beetle a full sector short of the trouble area was bound to be major.

  It might even turn out to be the disaster which he had felt lurking ahead of him ever since he had been made foreman of the Bridge – that disaster which the Bridge itself could not repair, sending man reeling home from Jupiter in defeat.

  The secondaries cut in and the beetle stopped again. Grimly, Helmuth opened the switch and set the beetle creeping across the invisible danger line. Almost at once, the car tilted just perceptibly to the left, and the screaming of the winds between its edges and the deck shot up the scale, sirening in and out of the soundless-dogwhistle range with an eeriness that set Helmuth’s teeth on edge. The beetle itself fluttered and chattered like an alarm-clock hammer between the surface of the deck and the flanges of the tracks.

  Ahead there was still nothing to be seen but the horizontal driving of the clouds and the hail, roaring along the length of the Bridge, out of the blackness into the beetle’s fanlight, and onward into blackness again towards the horizon no eye would ever see.

  Thirty miles below, the fusillade of hydrogen explosions continued. Evidently something really wild was going on on the surface. Helmuth could not remember having heard so much activity in years.

  There was a flat, especially heavy crash, and a long line of fuming orange fire came pouring down the seething atmosphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the mane of a Lipizzan horse, directly in front of Helmuth. Instinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, although that stream of flame actually was only a little less cold than the rest of the streaming gases, far too cold to injure the Bridge.

  In the momentary glare, however, he saw something – an upward twisting of shadows, patterned but obviously unfinished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cataract’s lurid light.

  The end of the Bridge.

  Wrecked.

  Helmuth grunted involuntarily and backed the beetle away. The flare dimmed; the light poured down the sky and fell away into the raging sea below. The scanner clucked with satisfaction as the beetle recrossed the line into Zone 113.

  He turned the body of the vehicle 180°, presenting its back to the dying torrent. There was nothing further that he could do at the moment on the Bridge. He scanned his control board – a ghost image of which was cast across the scene on the Bridge – for the blue button marked Garage, punched it savagely, and tore off his helmet.

  Obediently, the Bridge vanished.

  2

  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 control shack on Jupiter V 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 put the helmet down carefully in front of him and got up, moving carefully upon shaky legs; feeling implicit in his own body the enormous pressures and weights 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 the face of the giant planet stared at him, across only 112,600 miles: a sphere-section
occupying almost all of the sky except the near horizon. It was crawling with colour, striped and blotched with the eternal, frigid, poisonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the deep planet-sized shadows of farther moons.

  Somewhere down there, 6,000 miles below the clouds that boiled in his 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, 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. “You seem more upset than usual. Is it serious?” Helmuth turned. His superior’s worn young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already beginning to grey at the temples, was alight both with love for the Bridge and the consuming ardour 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 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 fireballs.”

  Dillon’s face relaxed while Helmuth was talking, slowly, line by engraved line. “Oh. Just a flying chunk, then.”

  “I’m almost sure that’s what it was. The cross-draughts are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each other some time next week, 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 to flinders. 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 towards 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 deep-freeze – 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 towards 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, 22,000-mile core, 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.

  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 Witness family which dated back to the great Witness Revival of 2003. 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.

  Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gently upon Dillon’s shoulder. 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 colour.

  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 my 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. 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.”

  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 band 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 112,600 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 aloud; 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 behaviour 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, 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 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.”