James Blish - Cities in Flight

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. “What is it? You seem more upset than usual. Is it serious?”

Helmuth looked up. His superior’s worn, young face, lantern-jawed and crowned by black hair already beginning to gray at the temples, was alight both with love for the Bridge and with the consuming ardor 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 had 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 fire-falls.”

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

“I’m almost sure that was what it was. The cross-draughts are heavy now. The Spot and the STD are due to pass each other some time next month, 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 into matchwood. 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 toward 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 toward 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, compacted down there 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” land-masses.

But—”permanent”? The quote-marks Helmuth’s thinking always put around that word were there for a very good reason, he knew, but he could not quite remember the reason. It was the damned conditioning showing itself again, creating another of the thousand small irreconcilables which contributed to the tension.

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 Believer family which dated back long before the current resurgence of the Believers. 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. It was widely believed among the Bridge gang that Dillon, alone among them, had not been given the conditioning, but there was no way to test that.

Helmuth moved back to the port, dropping his hand gently on Dillon’s shoulders. 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 color.

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 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. For all I know it isn’t even my own frame of mind—though the part of my mind that keeps saying ‘The Bridge must stand’ is more likely to be the conditioned part. 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 to “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 and hands—still trying to adapt to the unthinkable, tumbling away into the winds and the flames and the rains and the darkness and the pressure and the cold—”

“Bob, you’re deliberately running away with yourself. Cut it out. Cut it out, I say!”

Helmuth shrugged, putting a trembling hand on the edge of the board to steady himself. “All right, I’m all right, Charity. I’m here, aren’t I? Right here on Jupiter V, in no danger, in no danger at all. The Bridge is one hundred and twelve thousand six hundred miles away from here, and I’ll never be an inch closer to it. But when the day comes that the Bridge is swept away—

“Charity, sometimes I imagine you ferrying my body back to the 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 make you see the problem as it is. The Bridge isn’t really that awful, it isn’t worth a single nightmare.”

“Oh, it isn’t the Bridge that makes me yell out when I’m sleeping,” Helmuth said, smiling bitterly. “I’m not that ridden by it yet. It’s while I’m awake that I’m afraid the Bridge will be swept away. What I sleep with is a fear of myself.”

“That’s a sane fear. You’re as sane as any of us,” Dillon insisted, fiercely solemn. “Look, Bob. The Bridge isn’t a monster. It’s a way we’ve developed for studying the behavior of materials under specific conditions of pressure, temperature and gravity. Jupiter isn’t Hell, either; it’s a set of conditions. The Bridge is the laboratory we set up to work with those conditions.”