BRIDGE
by James Blish

A SCREECHING tomado 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 possiblebecause 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 bed-bug, got slow-
ly under way on its ball-bearing races, guided and held firm-
ly 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 it-
self 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 Helmuth'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; it's height, thirty miles;
its length, deliberately unspecifled in the plans, fifty-four miles
at the momenta squat, colossal structure, built with engi-
neering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched
before
For the very good reason that they would have been im-
possible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was
made of ice: a marvellous structural material under a pres-
sure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94C.
Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a fria-
ble, talc-like  powder,  and  aluminum  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 sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight
miles, and the temperature there was below 150C. 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. Helmuth set the vehicle's eyes for high-
est 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 systemthere was
no electronic device anywhere on the Bridge, since it was
impossible to maintain a vacuum on Jupitersaid 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 alarmreal
alarm, not just the deep, grinding depression which he al-
ways 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 fore-
man of the Bridgethat 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. Grim-
ly, Helmuth opened the switch and sent 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 sur-
face 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 fanlights,
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 at-
mosphere into the depths, feathering horizontally like the
mane of a Lipizzan horse, directly in front of Helmuth. In-
stinctively, he winced and drew back from the board, al-
though 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 un-
finished, fluttering in silhouette against the hydrogen cata-
ract's lurid light.
The end of the Bridge.
Wrecked.
Helmuth grunted mvoluntarily 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
boarda ghost image of which was cast across the scene
on the Bridgefor the blue button marked Garage, punched
it  savagely,  and  tore  off  his  helmet.
Obediently, the Bridge vanished.

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, plac-
id 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 al-
most 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 one hundred and twelve thousand
and six hundred 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, poi-
sonous storming of its atmosphere, spotted with the deep
planet-sized shadows of farther moons.
Somewhere down there, six thousand 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
longbut it was only a sliver, an intricate and fragile ar-
rangement of ice-crystals beneath the bulging, racing torna-
does.
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 re-
minded him that the implacable universe bed, after all,
provided one warm corner in which human beings might hud-
dle together.
"Serious enough," he said, forming the words with dif-
ficulty 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 north-
west 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, Charitytwo
miles through at a minimum."
DiUon 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 Jupi-
ter V plus one hundred and twelve thousand and six hundred
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 STDmore than big enough
to suck three Earths into deep-freezepassed the planetary is-
land 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 beinga jet fed
by no one knew what forces at Jupiter's hot, rocky, twenty-
two-thousand-mile core, under sixteen thousand miles of eter-
nal 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 land-
masses.
Helmuth watched Dillon with a certain compassion, tem-
pered 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 Wit-
ness Revival of 2003. He was one of the hundreds of govern-
ment-drafted experts who had planned the Bridge, and he
was as obsessed by the Bridge as Helmuth wasbut for dif-
ferent reasons.
Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gen-
tly upon Dillon's shoulder. Together they looked at the scream-
ing 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 low-
er than Dillon's. "I work on Jupiter four hours a daynot
actually, because we can't keep a man alive for more than
a split second down therebut 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 yearswell, 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. Some-
times I can't remember anything about Chicago except vague
generalities, sometimes I can't even believe there is such
a place as Earthhow 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. Char-
ity! 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 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 and six hundred 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 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, 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 mon-
ster. It's a way we've developed for studying the behaviour
of materials under specific conditions of temperament, pres-
sure, and gravity. Jupiter isn't Hell, either; it's a set of condi-
tions. 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 veloci-
ties 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 build-
ing it. Actually, it's much more like a travelling cranean
extremely heavy-duty overhead rail line. It isn't going any-
where 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 stablility, not to span the distance between
places. There's no point to reproaching it because it doesn't
span a real gapbetween, 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," Hel-
muth said, trying to control his impatience. "I have as
much common sense as the average child. What I was try-
ing to point out is that meeting colossalness with colossal-
nessout hereis 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 broom-
straws 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 allit's just a cumbersome evasion."
Dillon smiled. "You're depressed, and no wonder. Sleep
it off, Bob, if you canyou might even come up with that an-
swer. In the meantimewell, 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."
m
There were three yellow "Critical" signals lit on the long
gang board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on
the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrat-
ed on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin namesuch once-valid tickets no
longer meant anything among Earth's uniformly mixed-race
populationwas a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished
a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to be-
come enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at
the moments when cold analysis and split-second decisions
were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit
except as an observer, and donned the co-operator's helmet.
The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around
him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet
up along its slanted sidesbreakers that never subsided, but
simply were torn away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north
face of the caisson, crawling slowly towards the pediment of
the nearest truss. Catalysis
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On
this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even the tiny specks of
calcium carbide were deadly. At these wind velocities, such
specks imbedded themselves in everything; and at fifteen
million pounds per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed by so-
dium took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building pro-
tein-like compounds in a rapid, deadly chain of decay:
H~NCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN....
Ca0   Ca   Ca
I                           I
HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN... .
I                                  I                                  I
Ca0   Ca    Ca
I                           I
HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN... .
For a second, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all,
one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to
study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all,
might have grown porous, bony, and quite strong. Here, un-
der nearly eight times the gravity, the molecules were forced
to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their
arrangement was hexagonal, as if the stuff would become an
aromatic compound if it only could. Even here it was mod-
erately strong in cross sectionbut along the long axis it
smeared like graphite, the calcium atoms readily surrender-
ing their valence hold on one carbon atom to grab hope-
fully for the next one in line
No stuff to hold up the piers of humanity's greatest en-
gineering project. Perhaps it was suitable for the ribs of some
Jovian jellyfish, but in a Bridge-caisson, it was cancer.
There was a scraper mechanism working on the edge of
the lesion, flaking away the shearing aminos and laying down
new ice. In the meantime, the decay of the caisson-face was
working deeper. The scraper could not possibly get at the
core of the troublewhich was not the calcium carbide dust,
with which the atmosphere was charged beyond redemption,
but was instead one imbedded sodium speck which was
taking no part in the reactionfast enough to extirpate it. It
could barely keep pace with the surface spread of the di-
sease.
And laying new ice over the surface of the wound was
worthless. At this rate, the whole caisson would slough away
and melt like butter, within an hour, under the weight of the
Bridge above it.
Helmuth sent the futile scraper aloft. Drill for it? Notoo
deep already, and location unknown.
Quickly he called two borers up from the shoals below,
where constant blasting was taking the foundation of the cais-
son deeper and deeper into Jupiter's dubious "soil". He drove
both blind, fire-snouted machines down into the lesion.
The bottom of that sore turned out to be forty-five metres
within the immense block. Helmuth pushed the red button
all the same.
The borers blew up, with a heavy, quite invisible blast, as
they had been designed to do. A pit appeared on the face of
the caisson.
The nearest truss bent upward in the wind. It fluttered for
a moment, trying to resist. It bent farther.
Deprived of its major attachment, it tore free suddenly, and
went whirling away into the blackness. A sudden flash of
lightning picked it out for a moment, and Helmuth saw it
dwindling like a bat with torn wings being borne away by
a cyclone.
The scraper scuttled down into the pit and began to fill
it with ice  from  the  bottom.  Helmuth  ordered  down  a  new
truss and a squad of scaffolders. Damage of this order took
time to repair. He watched the tornado tearing ragged
chunks from the edges of the pit until he was sure that the
catalysis had stopped. Then, suddenly, prematurely, dismally
tired, he took off the helmet.
He was astounded by the white fury that masked Eva's
big-boned, mildly pretty face.
"You'll blow the Bridge up yet, won't you?" she said,
evenly, without preamble. "Any pretext will do!"
Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that
was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly
through the picture-port, just as it did on the foreman's desk.
He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of
satellite V were falling forward towards Jupiter; their unevent-
ful cooped-up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal com-
pared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on
Jupiter's everchanging surface. Every new day brought their
minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that
gaudy inferno.
There was no other way for a manor a womanon
Jupiter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience,
shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four-fifths
of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there m
that planet's sky, falling, falling faster and faster
"I have no intention," he said tiredly, "of blowing up the
Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I
want the Bridge to stay upeven though I'm not starry-eyed
to the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think
that rotten spot was going to go away by itself when you'd
painted it over? Didn't you know that"
Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly to-
wards the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distract-
ing conversation or activity was taboo, down here in the
gang room. He motioned Eva back to duty.
The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was
plain from the way her normally full lips were thinned that
she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order to
have the last word.
Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the
central axis of the shack, and mounted the spiralling cleats
towards his own foreman's cubicle. Already he felt in antici-
pation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.
Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet;
he was sitting in Helmuth's chair.
Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth's en-
trance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly
unconscious of anything happening around his body except the
inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those
senses which report something going on thousands of miles
away.
Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he
watched Dillon's white, blade-like fingers roving with blind
sureness over the controls.
Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge
not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The tally
board showed that he had already activated nearly two-thirds
of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been up all
night at the job; had begun it immediately after last talking
to Helmuth.
Why?
With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked
at the foreman's jack, which allowed the operator here in the
cubicle to communicate with the gang when necessary, and
which kept him aware of anything said or done at gang
boards.
It  was  plugged  in.
Dillon sighed "suddenly, took the helmet off, and turned.
"Hello, Bob," he said. "Funny about this job. You can't
see, you can't hear, but when somebody's watching you, you
feel a sort of pressure on the back of your neck.  ESP,
maybe. Ever felt it?"
"Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?"
"There's to be an inspection," Dillon said. His eyes met
Helmuth's. They were frank and transparent. "A mob of
Western officials, coming to see that their eight billion dollars
isn't being wasted. Naturally, I'm a little anxious to see that
they find everything in order."
"I see," Helmuth said. "First time in five years, isn't it?"
"Just about. What was that dust-up down below just now?
Somebodyyou. I'm sure, from the drastic handiwork in-
volvedbailed Eva out of a mess, and then I heard her talk
about your wanting to blow up the Bridge. I checked the area
when I heard the fracas start, and it did seem as if she had let
things go rather far, but What was it all about?"
Dillon ordinarily hadn't the guile for cat-and-mouse games,
and he had never looked less guileful now. Helmuth said care-
fully, "Eva was upset, I suppose. On the subject of Jupiter
we're all of us cracked by now, in our different ways. The
way she was dealing with the catalysis didn't look to me
to be suitablea difference of opinion, resolved in my favour
because I had the authority, Eva didn't. That's all."
"Kind of an expensive difference, Bob. I'm not niggling
by nature, you know that. But an incident like that while
the commission is here"
"The point is," Helmuth said, "are we to spend an extra
ten thousand, or whatever it costs to replace a truss and
reinforce a caisson, or are we to lose the whole caisson
and as much as a third of the whole Bridge along with it?"
"Yes, you're right there, of course. That could be ex-
plained, even to a pack of senators. Butit would be diffi-
cult to have to explain it very often. Well, the board's yours,
Bob. You could continue my spot-check, if you've time."
Dillon got up. Then he added suddenly, as if it were
forced out of him:
"Bob, I'm trying to understand your state of mind. From
what Eva said, I gather that you've made it fairly public.
I. . . I don't think it's a good idea to infect your fellow work-
ers with your own pessimism. It leads to sloppy work. I know
that regardless of your own feelings you won't countenance
sloppy work, but one foreman can do only so much. And
you're making extra work for yourselfnot for me, but for
yourselfby being openly gloomy about the Bridge.
"You're the best man on the Bridge, Bob, for all your grous-
ing about the job, and your assorted misgivings. I'd hate to
see you replaced."
"A threat, Charity?" Helmuth said softly.
'Wo. I wouldn't replace you unless you actually went
nuts, and I firmly believe that your fears in that respect are
groundless. It's a commonplace that only sane men suspect
their own sanity, isn't it?"
"It's  a  common  misconception.  Most  psychopathic  ob-
sessions begin with a mild worry."
Dillon made as if to brush that subject away. "Anyhow,
I'm not threatening; I'd fight to keep you here. But my say-
so only covers Jupiter V; there are people higher up on
Ganymede, and people higher yet back in Washingtonand
in this inspecting commission.
"Why don't you try to look on the bright side for a
change? Obviously the Bridge isn't ever going to inspire you.
But you might at least try thinking about all those dollars
piling up in your account every hour you're on this job, and
about the bridges  and ships  and who knows what-all
that you'll be building, at any fee you ask, when you get
back down to Earth. All under the magic words, 'One of the
men who built the Bridge on Jupiter!' "
Charity was bright red with embarrassment and enthusi-
asm. Helmuth smiled.
"I'll try to bear it in mind,  Charity," he said. "When is
this gaggle of senators due to arrive?"
"They're on Ganymede now, taking a breather. They came
directly from Washington without any routing. I suppose they'll
make a stop at Callisto before they come here. They've
something new on their ship, I'm told, that lets them flit
about more freely than the usual uphill transport can."
An icy lizard suddenly was nesting in Helmuth's stomach,
coiling and coiling but never settling itself. The room blurred.
The persistent nightmare was suddenly almost upon him
already.
"Something. . . new?" he echoed, his voice as flat and non-
committal as he could make it. "Do you know what it is?"
"Well, yes. But I think I'd better keep quiet about it un-
til"
"Charity, nobody on this deserted rock-heap could possibly
be a Soviet spy. The whole habit of 'security' is idiotic out
here. Tell me now and save me the trouble of dealing with
senators; or tell me at least that you know I know. They
have antigravityl Isn't that it?"
One word from DiUon, and the nightmare would be real.
"Yes," Dillon said. "How did you know? Of course, it
couldn't be a complete gravity screen by any means. But it
seems to be a good long step towards it. We've waited a
long time to see that dream come true But you're the
last man  in the  world  to take pride  in the  achievement,
so there's no sense exulting about it to you. I'll let you know
when I get a definite arrival date. In the meantime, will you
think about what I said before?"
"Yes, I will." Helmuth took the seat before the board.
"Good. With you, I have to be grateful for small victories.
Good trick, Bob."
"Good trick, Charity."
iv
Instead of sleepingfor now he knew that he was really
afraidhe sat up in the reading chair in his cabin. The illu-
minated microfilm pages of a book flipped by across the sur-
face 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 con-
sumption.
But Helmuth let his mix go flat, and did not notice the
book, which had turned itself on, at the page where he 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 lay-
ers,  and those  thin,  no Heaviside layers,  and  few official
and no commercial channels with which the hams could in-
terfere.
And there were plenty of people scattered about the satel-
lites who needed the  sound of a voice.
". . . anybody know whether 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."
"They're supposed to hit the Bridge team next." A strong
voice, and the impression of a strong transmitter wavering in
and out; that would be Sweeney, on Ganymede. "Sorry to
throw the wet blanket, boys, but I don't think the senators are
interested in our rock-balls for their own lumpy selves. We
could only hold them here three days."
Helmuth thought greyly: Then they've already left Callisto.
"It 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 beetle-gooser! Come in,
Helmuth!"
"Sure, Bob, come in and dampen us."
Sluggishly, Helmuth reached out to take the mike, where it
lay clipped to one arm of the chair. But the door to his room
opened before he had completed the gesture.
Eva came in.
She said, "Bob, I want to tell you something."
"His voice is changing!" the voice of the Callisto operator
said. "Ask him what he's drinking, Sweeney!"
Helmuth cut the radio out. The girl was freshly dressed
in so far as anybody dressed in anything on Jupiter Vand
Helmuth wondered why she was prowling the decks at this
hour, half-way 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 first met.
"All right," he said. "I owe you a mix, I guess. Citric, su-
gar and the other stuff is in the locker. . . you know where it
is.  Shot-cans  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, late-
ly I've been turning my lux-R's back to the common pool. I
suppose you did that for meby showing me what a mind
looked like that is hiding from itself."
"Eva, stop sounding like a tract. Obviously, you've ad-
vanced 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 vita-
min. 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 exaspera-
tion, jack-knifed 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, and the
page vanished.
"Women!" he said, when he could get his breath back.
"Really, Evita, you make me feel much better. No environ-
ment can change a human being much, after all."
"Why should it?" she said suspiciously. "I don't see the
joke. Shouldn't a woman want to have a child?"
"Of course she should," he said, settling back. The flipping
pages began 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, to pluck fossils
and get quaintly star-burned. How cosy to tuck the little blue
body back into its corner that night, promptly at the sound
of the trick-change bell! Why, it's as natural as Jupiter-light
as Earthian as vacuum-frozen apple pie."
He turned his head casually away. "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 itWomen, is it? So you think I came
creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical
differences."
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 judged incapable of forming
permanent emotional attachments, and capable of such alli-
ances as we found attractive without going unbalanced when
the attraction diminished 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 in-
volve any Earth-normal excuses."
She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently, "Isn't
that so?"
"Of course it's so. Also it has nothing to do with the matter."
"It doesn't? How stupid do you think I am? / don't care
whether or not you've decided to have a child here, if you
really mean what you say."
She was trembling with rage. "You really don't, too. 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. In short, Eva, as
far as I'm concerned you can have as many as you want,
and to me you'll stilt 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 cradlesa 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! Mammal all the stellar
days and nights long!"
"Parlour diagnosis!"
"Parlour labelling. Good trick, Bob. Draw your warm wooly
blanket in tight about your brains, or some little sneeze of
sense might creep in, and impair yourefficiency!"
The door closed sharply after her.
A million pounds of fatigue crashed down without warning
on Helmuth's brain, and he fell back into the reading chair
with a gasp. The roots 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 film-stripexcept for the ap-
palling sense of pressure, and the distorted emotional signifi-
cance 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
clouds; four times the tense voices of pilots and engineers
had muttered in Helmuth's ears; four times there were shouts
and futile orders and the snapping of cables and someone
screaming endlessly against the eternal howl of the Jovian sky.
It had cost, altogether, nine ships and two hundred and
thirty-one men, to get one of five laboriously shaped asteroids
planted in the shifting slush that was Jupiter's surface. Hel-
muth 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 ship-
board, in one of the ships that was never to come back
Then, without transition, but without any sense of dis-
continuity either, he was on the Bridge itself. Not in absentia,
as the remote guiding intelligence of a beetle, but in person,
in an ovular, tank-like 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.
Looking back on it in the dream, he did not understand
why he had volunteered. It had simply seemed expected of
him, and he had not been able to help it, even though he
had known what it would be like. He belonged on the
Bridge, though he hated ithe had been doomed to go
there, from the first.
And there was. . . something wrong. . . with the antigrav-
ity. The high brass had asked for its volunteers before the
scientific work had been completed. The present antigravity
fields were weak, and there was some basic flaw in the theory.
Generators broke down after only short periods of use, burned
out, unpredictably, sometimes only moments after testing up
without a flawlike vacuum tubes in waking life.
That was what Helmuth's set was about to do. He crouched
inside his personal womb, above the boiling sea, the clouds
raging about him, lit by a plume of hydrogen flame, and wait-
ed to feel his weight suddenly become eight times greater than
normal. He knew what would happen to him then.
It happened.
Helmuth greeted morning on Jupiter V with his customary
scream.
V
The ship that landed as he was going on duty did nothing
to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not dis-
tinguishable from any of the long-range cruisers which ran the
legs of the Moon-Mars-Belt-Ganymede trip. But it grounded its
huge bulk with less visible expenditures of power than one
of the little intersatellary boats.
That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its
way to coming true. If the high brass had had a real anti-
gravity, there would have been no reason why the main jets
should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been
discovered was some sort of partial screen, which allowed
a ship to operate with far less jet action than was normal,
but which still left it subject to a sizeable fraction of the uni-
versal stress of space.
Nothing less than complete and completely controllable
antigravity would do on Jupiter.
He worked mechanically, noting that Charity was not in
evidence. Probably he was conferring with the senators, re-
ceiving what would be for him the glad news.
Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left
for him to do now but to cut and run.
There could certainly be no reason why he should have
to re-enact the entire dream, helplessly, event for event, like
an actor committed to a play. He was awake now, in full
control of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The
man in the dream had volunteeredbut that man would not be
Robert Helmuth. Not any longer.
While the senators were here, he would turn in his resigna-
tion. Direct, over Charity's head.
"Wake up, Helmuth," a voice from the gang deck snapped
suddenly. "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. "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 snapped.
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 back to Chicago. Antigravity or no
antigravity, the senators' ship would have no room for unex-
pected passengers. Shipping a man back home had to be ar-
ranged far in advance. 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 be deadheaded out to
Jupiter.
A year of living in the station on Jupiter V without any
functionas 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 opera-
tors, 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 deathswhile he alone stood aloof, priv-
ileged 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
jobfor his resignation from the Bridge gang would auto-
matically take him out of government servicehe would be
asked why he 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 com-
ets. 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 un-
Westem activities? I suppose you've told them how I feel."
"I have," Dillon said, unruffled. "But we're agreed that you
may not feel the same 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 him 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 Jupiter
splashing his shoulders with colour.
A courteous Marine let him through the ship's air lock and
deftly peeled him out of the suit. Despite a grim determina-
tion to be uninterested in the new antigravity and any possi-
ble consequence of it, he looked curiously about as he was
conducted up towards the bow.
But the ship was like the ones that had brought him from
Chicago to Jupiter Vit was like any spaceship: there was
nothing in it to see but corridor walls and stairwells, until
you arrived at the cabin where you were needed.
Senator Wagoner was a surprise. He was a young man, no
more than sixty-five at most, not at all portly, and he had
the keenest pair of blue eyes that Helmuth had ever seen.
He received Helmuth alone, in his own cabina comfort-
able cabin as spaceship  accommodations  go, but neither
roomy nor luxurious. He 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.
Helmuth looked around. "I thought there were several of
you," he said.
"There are, but I didn't want to give you the idea that
you were facing a panel," Wagoner said, smiling. "I've been
forced to sit in on most of these endless loyalty investiga-
tions back home, but I can't see any point in exporting such
religious ceremonies to deep space. Do sit down, Mr. Hel-
muth. There are drinks coming. We have a lot to talk about."
Stiffly, Helmuth sat down.
"Dillon tells me," Wagoner said, leaning back comfortably
in his own chair, "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?"
"I'll explain in  a moment.  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 offence and
hold no grudge. Also, 1 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."
"Thank you."
"It's to my interest; I'm hoping that youTI talk freely to
me. Of course my disavowal means nothing, since such for-
mal statements can always be excised from a tape; but later
on I'm going to tell you some things you're not supposed
to know, and you'll be able to judge by what I say then
that anything you say to me is privileged. 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 con-
trol 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 regard the
Bridge as a monster. I've examined your dossier pretty
closely, 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 slow-
ly. "You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge
to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse
conditions ever will stop man for long, and there I'm in agree-
ment with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personi-
fied.  He  can't  admityou  asked  me  to  speak  my  mind,
senatorthat 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. "Still and all, the West has been responsible for
some really towering achievements in its time. Perhaps the
Bridge could be considered as the last and the mightiest of
them all."
"Not by me," Helmuth said. "The building of gigantic proj-
ects for ritual purposesdoing a thing for the sake of doing
itis the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the
pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or an even more idiotic
and more enormous 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."
"Agreed," Wagoner said.
"All right. Then maybe you'll also agree that the essence
of a vital culture is its ability to defend itself. The West has
beaten off the Soviets for a century nowbut as far as I can
see, the Bridge is the West's 'Diagram of Power', its pyra-
mids, or what have you. All the money and the resources that
went into the Bridge are going to be badly needed, and won't
be there, when the next Soviet attack comes."
"Which will be very shortly, I'm told," Wagoner said, with
complete calm. "Furthermore, it will be successful, and in part
it  will  be  successful  for  the  very  reasons  you've  outlined.
For a man who's been cut off from the Earth for years,
Helmuth, you seem to know more about what's going on
down there than most of the general populace does."
"Nothing promotes an interest in Earth like being off it,"
Helmuth said. "And there's plenty of time to read out here."
Either the drink was stronger than he had expected, or the
senator's calm concurrence in the collapse of Helmuth's entire
world had given him another shove towards nothingness; his
head was spinning.
Wagoner saw it. He leaned forward suddenly, catching Hel-
muth flat-footed. "However," he said, "it's difficult for me to
agree that the Bridge serves, or ever did serve,.a ritual purpose.
The Bridge served a huge practical purpose which is now ful-
filleddie Bridge, as such, is now a defunct project."
"Defunct?" Helmuth repeated faintly.
"Quite. Of course we'll continue to operate it for a while,
simply because you can't stop a process of that size on a
dime, and that's just as well for people like Dillon who are
emotionally tied up in it. You're the one person with any au-
thority in the whole station who has already lost enough
interest in the Bridge to make it safe for me to tell you
that it's being abandoned."
"But why?"
"Because," Wagoner went on quietly, "the Bridge has now
given us confirmation of a theory of stupendous importance
so important, in my opinion, that the imminent fall of the
West seems like a puny event in comparison. A confirma-
tion, incidentally, which contains in it the seeds of ultimate
destruction for the Soviets, whatever they may win for
themselves in the next fifty years or so."
"I suppose," Helmuth said, puzzled, "that you mean anti-
gravity?"
For the first time, it was Wagoner's turn to be taken aback.
"Man," he said at last, "do you know everything I want to tell
you? I hope not, or my conclusions will be mighty suspicious.
Surely Charity didn't tell you we had antigravity; I strictly
enjoined him not to mention it."
"No, the subject's been on my mind," Helmuth said. "But
I certainly don't see why it should be so world-shaking,
any more than I see how the Bridge helped to bring it about.
I thought it had been developed independently, for the further
exploitation of the Bridge, and would step up Bridge opera-
tion, not discontinue it."
"Not at all. Of course, the Bridge has given us information
in thousands of different categories, much of it very valuable
indeed. But the one job that only the Bridge could do was
that of confirming, or throwing out, the Blackett-Dirac equa-
tions."
"Which are?"
"A relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a
massive bodythat much is the Dirac part of it. The Blackett
Equation seemed to show that the same formula also applied
to gravity. If the figures we collected on the magnetic field
strength of Jupiter forced us to retire the Dirac equations,
then none of the rest of the information we've gotten from
the Bridge would have been worth the money we spent to
get it. On the other hand, Jupiter was the only body in the
solar system available to us which was big enough in all
relevant respects to make it possible for us to test those
equations at all. They involve quantities of enormous orders
of magnitudes.
"And the figures show that Dirac was right. They also
show that Blackett was right. Both magnetism and gravity
are phenomena of rotation.
"I won't bother to trace the succeeding steps, because I
think you can work them out for yourself. It's enough to say
that there's a drive-generator on board this ship which is
the complete and final justification of all the hell you people
on the Bridge gang have been put through. The gadget has
a long technical name, but the technics who tend it have
already nicknamed it the spindizzy, because of what it
does to the magnetic moment of any atomany atomwithin
its  field.
"While it's in operation, it absolutely refuses to notice any
atom outside its own influence. Furthermore, it will notice no
other strain or influence which holds good beyond the borders
of that field. It's so snooty that it has to be stopped down to
almost nothing when it's brought close to a planet, or it won't
let you land. But in deep space... well, it's impervious to
meteors and such trash, of course; it's impervious to gravity;
andit hasn't the faintest interest in any legislation about top
speed limits."
"You're kidding," Helmuth said.
"Am I, now? This ship came to Ganymede directly from
Earth. It did it in a little under two hours, counting ma-
nceuvering time."
Helmuth took a defiant pull at his drink. "This thing really
has no top speed at all?" he said. "How can you be sure of
that?"
"Well, we can't," Wagoner admitted. "After all, one of the
unfortunate things about general mathematical formulas is that
they don't contain cut-off points to warn you of areas where
they don't apply. Even quantum mechanics is somewhat subject
to that criticism. However, we expect to know pretty soon just
how fast the spindizzy can drive an object, if there is any
limit. We expect you to tell us."
"I?"
"Yes, Helmuth, you. The coming debUcle on Earth makes it
absolutely imperative for usthe Westto get interstellar ex-
peditions started at once. Richardson Observatory, on the
Moon, has two likely-looking systems picked out alreadyone
at Wolf 359, another at 61 Cygniand there are sure to be
hundreds of others where Earth-like planets are highly prob-
able. We want to scatter adventurous people, people with a
thoroughly indoctrinated love of being free, all over this part
of the galaxy, if it can be done.
"Once they're out there, they'll be free to flourish, with no
interference from Earth. The Soviets haven't the spindizzy yet,
and even after they steal it from us, they won't dare allow it
to be used. It's too good and too final an escape route.
"What we want you to do. . . now I'm getting to the point,
you see... is to direct this exodus. You've the intelligence
and the cast of mind for it. Your analysis of the situation
on Earth confirms that, if any more confirmation were need-
ed. Andthere's no future for you on Earth now."
"You'll have to excuse me," Helmuth said, firmly. "I'm
in no condition to be reasonable now; it's been more than I
could digest in a few moments. And the decision doesn't en-
tirely rest with me, either. If I could give you an answer in
.. . let  me  see. . . about  three  hours.  Will  that  be  soon
enough?"
"That'll be fine," the senator said.
"And so, that's the story," Helmuth said.
Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time.
"One thing I don't understand," she said at last. "Why
did you come to me? I'd have thought that you'd find the
whole thing terrifying."
"Oh, it's terrifying, all right," Helmuth said, with quiet
exultation. "But terror and fright are two different things, as
I've just  discovered.  We  were  both  wrong,  Evita.  I  was
wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You
were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself."
"I don't understand you."
"All right, let's put it this way: The work the Bridge was
doing was worth-while, as I know nowso I was wrong in
being frightened of it, in calling it a bridge to nowhere.
"But you no more saw where it was going than I, and you
made the Bridge the be-all and end-all of your existence.
"Now, there's a place to go to; in fact there are places
hundreds of places. They'll be Earth-like places. Since the
Soviets are about to win Earth, those places will be more
Earth-like than Earth itself, for the next century or so at
least!"
She said, "Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace
between us?"
"I'm going to take on this job, Evita, if you'll go along?"
She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvellous
fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells
in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with
a jangle of pure horror.
"Posts!" the speaker above Eva's bed roared, in a distort-
ed, gigantic version of Charity Dillon's voice. "Peak storm
overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has
already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass
has begun to settle. This is an A-l overload emergency."
Behind Charity's bellow, the winds of Jupiter made a
spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was re-
sponding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another
sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive
tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through
a forest of huge steel tuning-forks. Helmuth had never heard
that sound before, but he knew what it was.
The deck of the Bridge was splitting up the middle.
After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker
said, in Charity's normal voice, "Eva, you too, please. Ac-
knowledge, please. This is itunless everybody comes on duty
at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour."
"Let it," Eva responded quietly.
There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a
human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner's, and the
sound just might have been a chuckle.
Charity's circuit clicked out.
The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in
the little room.
After a while, the man and the woman went to the win-
dow, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the
near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars,